And the December 2003 award for Best Creative Comic-Book Excoriation goes to...

Paul O'Brien, for his righteous take-down of the latest Chuck Austen turkey over in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. Ouch. Best part: pointing out a storytelling flaw that makes Jeph Loeb look like Bill Shakespeare.

Here's a rule of thumb for Chuck Austen (call it Collins's Law): If he can't show boobs and disembowelments, don't read it. Seriously, U.S. War Machine was terrific, The Eternal has been a lot of fun, and I even loved his art on the Brian Bendis-scripted Elektra miniseries (the sole good story told centering around that character by anyone who isn't Frank Miller). But aside from that... yikes.

Okay, so I'm starting to freak out just a little bit. The world premiere of The Return of the King has happened, and it won't be long now before the movie comes out around here. As such, it's time for my annual re-reading of The Lord of the Rings, a tradition that began in the summer of 2000, when Amy and I read the book aloud together. (Prior to that I think I'd read the book four times--once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school, once in college--give or take one reading; it's just such a part of me I kinda forgot.)

This time around, however, I'll be blogging my response to whatever I read during the course of a particular day. Nothing elaborate, I don't think; certainly nothing approaching the effort that went into the October horror-blogging marathon. Just my observations and emotions about passages that strike my fancy.

Would it be too cheesy to say I hope it's a journey worth taking? Maybe. But I do. First installment coming soon!

I've been thinking a lot about scenesterism and hipsterism lately. Partially this is due to my entree into High Society at the X-Men 2 DVD release party at Jay-Z's club last week. The whole affair was a little disappointing. The fellow who invited us was a delight, don't get me wrong, and if I said it wasn't a little interesting to have Rebecca Romijn-Stamos's ass wiggling against mine at one point, I'd probably be lying. But mainly, I didn't see the point of going to something like that unless you were a famous person. If you weren't a famous person, you were just someone standing around looking at/for the famous people, and what kind of fun is that? You're a hanger-on, a wannabe, a scenester. It's boring and silly.

Also boring and silly are hipsters. This is a particularly tough pill to swallow for me, as a twentysomething media worker in NYC who likes weird music and films and reads comic books. But the fact of the matter is that now matter how weird or cool you dress, there are at least 200 other people in this city (I reiterate, at least) who dress in exactly the same way. Most of them spend their nights at deliberately trashy bars drinking deliberately bad beer trying to pick up any one of a cadre of identically-dressed girls or boys. They all read the same hipster publications, take the same out-of-focus photos of one another, do the same drugs, have a friend who takes her top off a lot, blah blah blah. God, it's so tedious.

And what's depressing about both these things is how magnetic they seem to be to the artist. Being seen at the right place, or with the right people, or wearing the right outfit--it's just an incredibly tempting shortcut to Worthwhileville, particularly when compared to the struggle to create something of value, art-wise. It's also a tremendously easy way to augment the creating you do perform in such a way as to make it seem a lot more impressive. I'm kind of horrified at how soul-destroying and peripheral this enterprise seems to be, since it's so prevalent, and since there's a real sense that you're not living up to your potential if you're not participating in it in some way.

I've long said I'm glad I live on Long Island instead of in NYC. I live there out of necessity due to my marriage to a wonderful woman who happens to teach there, but I'm happy this decision was made for me. If I weren't married, I'd be living in some awful place on the Lower East Side or Williamsburg or Astoria, paying too much, doing bumps in the bathroom and acquiring sexually transmitted diseases, and God knows how much writing I'd actually be doing, and whether it'd be any good or just something dopey like every other artsy boy in the five boroughs. Which is not to say that what I'm doing now is works of brilliant genius, just that I'm reasonably sure it's MY work, and not the product of some cookie-cutter scene I've found myself involved in.

(And let's not forget how arbitrarily spacio-temporally biased "scenes" are, by the way. I spend the 1990s getting angry at writers telling me that my enjoyment of, say, Soundgarden was invalid because I didn't have the good fortune to be born ten years earlier in Seattle.)

This is not to say that I think all aspects of scenesterism are invalid. Certainly if you can find a group of people with compatible artistic drives with whom to work or collaborate, even simply on a moral-support level, go for it. Hey, it worked for the Fort Thunder kids! And just because the comics-crit world is starstruck by them don't mean they acted like the kind of scenester idiots people are usually starstruck by. Also, I do happen to think fashion and style are important, insofar as they are some sort of expression of your insides made manifest on your outsides. Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols put it to me in those kinds of terms, and suddenly I found myself thinking, "A-ha! I get it now!" In a way this only makes it more depressing when you walk around Avenue A and see 40,000 people who might as well be sharing your closet. But still, dressing up in a way that makes you feel vital and creative is a self-reinforcing thing, or at least it can be--like an athlete or a soldier putting on your uniform, you're transforming yourself into the person you want to be. Just make sure that person's you, and not Julian Casablancas.

The only important place is inside your head. That's the only thing that defines you and your worthwhileness. When you're an artist, the window to that is what you put on the page. To the extent that you can make your surroundings and your appearance and your circle of friends reflect this in some way, hey, great. But ultimately none of that matters in the slightest. The inside of your head can't be reproduced, sold in thrift stores, and worn ironically. It's yours!

Look high and low, far and wide, for months on end, and it will still be tough to find a comics-related quote that beats the following bit from the Pulse's interview with Grant Morrison:

I must admit I have no time for the '80s style "serious superheroes" books riding the retro wave; never resisting any chance to gratuitously stick the boot in, I thought Watchmen was self-conscious, derivative, and heavy-handed when it first appeared and time hasn't mellowed my opinion of this vastly overrated series - so the comics I dislike most of all at the moment are filled with unsexy '80s retro "superheroes-in-the-real-world" type stories. All these soldiers-in-tights comics seem miserly and lacking in wonder, surrealism or novelty. Even Alan Moore himself ran screaming from this kind of story and began an ungainly, 15-year long attempt to reinvent himself as me. So why anyone would look to the awkward pomposity of mid-'80s comics for inspiration is baffling.

Holy shit.

Hope your Thanksgiving weekend was delightful!

If you're interested in playing catch-up with the wacky world of comics, Dirk Deppey has it all, as usual. He truly is the Instapundit of the comicsphere.

It bears repeating: Grant Morrison gives good interview. This would also seem to be the apotheosis of the recent trend of comics creators having some fun at the expense of the inane questions they're occasionally asked.

Bill Sherman lays the smack down on Marvel's Trouble, the Mark Millar-scripted launch title for the ill-fated Epic imprint (indeed, the only Epic title to reach its intended conclusion, it would seem). Two little points: 1) Continuity-wise, this would work in the Ultimate universe, where Captain America's sidekick Bucky did indeed survive WWII; 2) Characterization-wise, this kinda sorta might work in the Ultimate universe, where Aunt May is a lot more "on" than her regular-continuity counterpart. Of course, she still looks way to old for the Trouble-established timeline to make any sense. Then again, the Kingpin is way too old for the timeline established in his recent solo title; the argument in both cases was that a good story warrants screwing with established character points if necessary. To which I say, well, yeah--so when are we going to see those good stories, anyway?

Alan David Doane has the answer to the question of whether comics cost too much: The really good ones sure don't. Actually, this tends to be the answer to every binary qualitative comics question. "Do comics suck?" "Do superhero comics suck?" "Do altcomix suck?" "Does manga suck?" "Do comics retailers suck?" "Is it a waste of time/money to read/buy comics?" The answer is always "not the good ones!" (The exception to this rule is "Do pamphlets suck?"--the answer there is always yes.) Mick Martin is the latest person to state that winnowing down your purchases to stuff that's actually quite good does wonders for clearing up a lot of these questions. (I've got to disagree with him about Bruce Jones's Hulk run, though; aside from the obviously grafted-in Absorbing Man storyline (notice how he didn't include a single mention of any of his usual cast of conspirators?) it's been riveting.)

A separate question related to the cost issue might be "is it wrong to seek out discounted copies of good comics, if they're available, potentially at the expense of a good retailer near you?" Well, there you have to weigh the pros (saving money) vs. the cons (stiffing a worthwhile shop in favor of, say, Amazon.com, or one of those manga/anime stores). I've got to conclude that retailers are fighting a losing battle if they're trying to convince purchasers as a class to make decisions that adversely affect their wallets. You'd have to be a hell of a good comics shop to convince someone that despite the fact that they can get the exact same material elsewhere for less money, they should go to you for, like, the ambiance or whatnot. Still, this can be done--Instapundit calls it "the comfy chair revolution" (registration required, so just use "laexaminer" as both user ID and password). It's just going to require a lot more effort (and cash) on the part of retailers who probably can't afford it.

No trade paperback of The Filth? Or any of the Vertigo Pop books? How does that make sense? Then again, DC usually takes forever to collect things that aren't Hush, so hope springs eternal.

Finally, Franklin Harris comes up with more anecdotal evidence that--say it with me now--manga is the future. Rich Johnston pitches in as well. But hey, if we keep repeating "it's just a trend" to ourselves (or perhaps "kids don't buy comics anymore--they're only buying video games"), maybe it'll all go away....

Monday, Dec. 1st-Tuesday, Dec. 2nd

read: Note on the Text; Foreword; Prologue; A Long-expected Party; The Shadow of the Past; about a third of Three Is Company

Despite having already read this book about seven times, it's occuring to me that blogging The Lord of the Rings isn't going to be as easy as I anticipated. For starters, I didn't give myself a whole lot of time to actually read the book, much less write about it, if I want to stick to my plan of having it finished by the release of the third film. (This is the way I've done it during the past two years.) Finishing off Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar, an epic undertaking in its own right, pushed my projected start date from Thanksgiving to yesterday; and only now did I realize that the film comes out on the 17th, not the 19th as I'd had myself convinced. And this is to say nothing of an unusually busy period at work, a ton of new albums I'd like to give a solid listen to if not for the amount of time it'd take, several other writing projects I'm embroiled in (not the least of which is the rest of this blog)... Oh, confusticate and bebother the constraints of modern life!

That being said, these first sections of the book are like coming home again, aren't they? I think I'm going to write about the book bullet-point style, just to save myself the effort of organizing comprehensible essay-style posts, unlike what I did to myself back in October. So away we go:

* Even things like the indescribably anal-rententive "Note on the Text," which traces the publishing history of the book from edition to error-laden edition until its ultimate more-or-less perfection, mirrors the zealous complexity with which Tolkien detailed his world. I'm sure it's no more necessary for me to read this every time than it would be for me to read the table of contents word by word, but what the hey?

* I always enjoy Tolkien's foreword. I like how he says not that he dislikes allegory, but that he distrusts it--an altogether admirable trait, I think, particularly if one happens to be concerned with telling a good solid story. (Admittedly I only read the Narnia books as an adult, so maybe I missed out on its enchantments in some way, but particularly in the last installment the need to cleave to the Christian mythos seems to scupper the needs of the narrative almost entirely.) And his diss of his critics is a gem:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

Prof. T. 1, Critics 0!

* The prologue contains the first of the many, many intriguing throw-away mentions of some thing or event that give my imagination hours and hours of things to chew over, quite possibly one of the book's most endearing qualities. In this case it's a brief discussion of the hobbits' relations with the once-mighty Northern Kingdom of Men: "To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it." Boy, but do I ever wish some tale did! The idea of little hobbits of ancient times fighting against the Witch-King centuries and centuries before Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin started out on their own adventures is a delightful mental Easter Egg. What did the Men make of these strange little people? Did they fight well? (One imagines they did.) Might the Witch-King have noticed them, and tucked the knowledge of these creatures away for future use? Ah, the joys of being a Tolkien nerd!

* "A Long-expected Party" is, if you'll pardon the phrase, where the party really gets started. I was surprised to feel an almost physical sense of joy and pleasure when I read that first line: "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End..." Hooray! We're off! I know this chapter is often ragged on by pop-culture critics handicapping the books for film fans, but fiddlesticks to them. I love the little jokes, which all read like the japes of a mischievous old man, which I suppose they are. My favorite is the bit about Lobelia Sackville-Baggins being given a set of silver spoons by the departed Bilbo, who suspected her of having stolen several of them in the past: "she took the point at once, but she also took the spoons."

* "The Shadow of the Past": Another Easter Egg here--Sam's ostensibly tall tale of a tree-creature walking around outside the Shire, which, we might surmise from later events, may not be so tall at all. Actually, when Treebeard the Ent tells Merry & Pippin that the long-lost Entwives might like a place like the Shire, neither they nor Tolkien makes the connection with Sam's friend's sighting. Are we supposed to? Well, that's the fun of reading the books, isn't it? This swell chapter also includes Gandalf's tale of his years as a glorified private dick on the trail of both Gollum and the Ring's real history. Images of Gandalf and Aragorn hunting for, capturing, and spending at least as much time with him as Frodo and Sam do later on are intriguing indeed.

* about one-third of "Three Is Company": A nice creepy just-missed moment when the hissing stranger questions the Gaffer about Frodo's whereabouts, and a charming little bit with a fox who wonders what the heck three hobbits are doing sleeping outside. Coming soon: the Ringwraiths' grand entrance!

So, there you have it--I'd imagine that's how these things will read. Nothing special, just some favorite bits, and some thoughts on what's making the book tick at that particular moment. Glad you're walking through it with me!

Wednesday, Dec. 3

read: the remainder of Three Is Company; A Short Cut to Mushrooms; A Conspiracy Unmasked

First, hello to all you Eve Tushnet fans, and thanks for dropping by! Hope you enjoyed this series' first installment. New Comics Day almost got in the way of today's, but I made sure to make up for the lost reading time!

Looking over what I read today, it's more than a little astonishing to me to see how much even the names of chapters have seeped into my subconscious. Obviously I am far from the only person in the world who got disproportionately excited when, in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, Sam asked "A short cut to what?" and Pippin replied, "Mushrooms!" And I don't even like mushrooms myself (except the special kind I ate that one time, but that's a whole other fantasy world).

* "Three Is Company"--ah, those fabulously eerie first two appearances of the Black Riders. Adding to the ominous overtones of the "Shadow of the Past" chapter, these are our first signs that Tolkien knows a thing or two about horror. The snuffling is a particularly wrong touch. Also worth noting in this chapter is the meeting with Gildor the Elf. Most people focus on the ellision of Tom Bombadil in the films, leaving this magical/majestic meeting forgotten even by die-hards in many cases. Our first glimpse of the Fair Folk, it is in many ways also the first thing that indicates we're in loftier territory than the humorous whimsicality of The Hobbit.

* "A Shortcut to Mushrooms"--Another unjustly forgotten cameo, this time around by the wiser-than-he-looks Farmer Maggott and his three angry dogs. I tend to enjoy seeing hobbits act smarter or braver than the stereotype. (Well, surely there's a stereotype within Middle-Earth, right?) Maggott's description of his exchange with the Black Rider is quietly alarming, as is his dog's reaction to the visitor. And is that a monumental horror-image I spy, with the Black Rider standing up on the ridge?

* "A Conspiracy Unmasked"--Fatty Bolger puts in his appearance here, and I remember really getting a kick out of the idea that there were more than just the four central hobbits who knew enough about the Ring to help out. I used to imagine Fatty becoming something of a hero around the Shire in his own right for his role in helping Frodo get out of town. That's what friends named Fatty are for, I suppose. Speaking of friends, this chapter contains one of my favorite passages in the whole book, one I used to toast my housemates of three years upon graduation from college:

'But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,' said Frodo.

Sam looked at him unhappily. 'It all depends on what you want,' put in Merry. 'You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin--to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours--closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.'

Of course, friends aren't above giving friends a hard time when they're acting dopey, and Pippin's imitation of Frodo's tendency to wax poetic over everything on Middle-Earth--'We have constantly heard you muttering: "Shall I ever look down into that valley again, I wonder", and things like that'--is both funny and familiar.

Tomorrow: Dropping the Bomb!

Rebuttals and follow-ups are the order of the day in the comicsphere.

As Grant Morrison's interview is the most entertaining thing to hit the online comics world in quite some time, it's garnering a lot of attention. Matt O'Rama thinks Grant's the bees knees for having the balls to put his most outlandish ideas on display; Johnny Bacardi is less than happy with Grant's Moore-bashing, and offers a cogent explanation as to how the "heavy-handed" tone Morrison dislikes in Watchmen is a feature, not a bug; Graeme McMillan puts together a "can't we all just get along?" roundup from the messboards; Dirk Deppey takes a "physician, heal thyself" approach; and The Intermittent says we've been down this road before with pop provacateurs from John Lennon on. Is it safe to say that if Grant's goal was to get people talking about himself and his ideas about comics, then mission most definitely accomplished?

(My attitude, unsurprisingly, is that we need more comics creators willing to give interviews like Morrison. I don't mean we need more idiots like Rall who go around saying how everyone from Crumb to Spiegelman to Herriman to Ware sucks dick, or even more Warren Ellises, who to me reads more or less like a high school sophomore's idea of what rebels sound like, but people with fascinating, pretension-deflating ideas, packaged in fascinating ways, flexible enough to change them when the dictates of their own passions call for it. In snappy outfits. We need more comic-book Bowies, basically. That being said, Grant's definitely wrong about Watchmen, though he may well be right about Alan Moore's career over the last 15 years....)

Mick Martin explains to me why he holds Bruce Jones's Hulk in the same kind of contempt usually reserved for the Collected Works of Jeph Loeb. Sorry, Mick, but I'm unconvinced. (Why? Off the top of my head, Pratt is shown to be both a rogue agent and insane, so the supposed plot hole in his kidnapping of Banner is no hole at all; ditto for not using the irradiated blood of the Abomination or Doc Samson, since the Hulk has been shown for decades to be the strongest one there is, and presumably unique in the annals of irradiated-blood-dom; etc., etc., etc. At any rate nothing you point out comes close to the gigantic black hole in the plot of that Austen Uncanny X-Men issue we were talking about; moreover, unlike Uncanny, Hulk is a good read above and beyond its plot inconsistencies or lack thereof. But diff'rent strokes, etc., right?)

Franklin Harris shores up his anti-floppy argument against the various counterarguments the blogosphere has offered up. Listen, like Franklin, I still read the things myself, but my sentimental attachment slash insatiable need for a weekly fix doesn't prevent me from seeing that this format is as attractive to the world at large as a plastic baggie filled with dog poo that someone lobbed at a garbage can but didn't quite make it in and is now sitting on the sidewalk with a footprint embedded in it. Is it me, or is this inarguably holding the industry back?

In other news, Kevin Melrose wonders who hit the rewind button at the House of Ideas lately. Hey, Kevin, you forgot Marc Silvestri on New X-Men! (I suppose I lose retro-bashing street cred for having enjoyed the first issue of the Millar/Rob Liefeld Youngblood knockoff of Battle Royale, but I never liked Liefeld when he wasn't retro, so does that even count? [Okay, but you enjoyed those issues G.I. Joe you read... Ed.] Shut up!)

Finally, Jim Henley crunches some numbers and finds out a weird thing about the page and ad counts in Marvel & DC comics. Is there a story here? Paging Dirk Deppey....

I don't tend to be wild about the online pronouncements of Warren Ellis. Take this column about pop music, for example: There's something about a grown man working himself into a rage-filled later over Britney Spears and Pop Idol that smacks of adolescent desperation. The piece is also laden with the kind of passages that sound like they're saying something about the music being discussed but are really not that much more than distracting pyrotechnics--like the make-up and explosions at a Kiss show, used to cover up the fact that there isn't a thing Kiss does that Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the New York Dolls, AC/DC, Van Halen, and even Alice Cooper didn't do better. For example:

And, God, look at the "alternative" choices the machine offers up. Travis and Coldplay. Stubbly weaklings who wear socks as hats and would die of fright if someone played them something as rude and vulgar as a melody. Formless, sensitive strumming, riff-free and invisible to memory, and a belief that their vaunted "songwriting" requires nought but muttering lots and lots of words without actually saying anything at all. These people would vaporise if subjected to an honest thought. When did we stop wanting our music and our bands to be vivid?

I think what he's saying is that he doesn't like Travis and Coldplay. Fine; I don't like Travis either, and though I do like Coldplay quite a bit, I think it's worth re-electing George W. Bush simply to irritate Chris Martin. But what did Ellis actually say about their music? That it doesn't have melody? Think what you will of Coldplay, but I will bet you twenty American dollars you've had the piano line from "Clocks" stuck in your head more than once this year. And all this business about "muttering" and "vaporizing" and "honest thoughts" and "vividness" makes me feel like we've wandered into a review column written by Tom Bombadil during a Sunday-morning come-down after a bad trip with Goldberry. You're welcome to deduce how any of the above passage applies to any of the actual work either band has done, but it's new comics day today and I don't have the time to try it myself. It's stylish nonsense, and to be honest, it's not even all that stylish.

But something Ellis in his recent column about how lame pop music is brought to mind a similar issue in comics. He quotes writer Kieron Gillen, who says:

"Some poor kid is going to buy into the Vines and end up laying down eighth-rate memories of how good pop music can be, and thus ending up dismissing it as inconsequential. By wasting their first rush on the Vines, they're going to be the ageing house-wife who doesn't think sex is a big deal because they've only ever experienced a premature gimp trying to reach their cervix with desperate, spasming thrusts.

"If the Vines are your first favourite band, you're fucked from the start. You're the pop-equivalent of a thalidomide baby."

More of the same purple prose you find in The Face, okay, sure; and I truly do feel that this kind of hyperbollically vicious attack on something as personal as music preference is best left behind with acne and algebra. But isn't this basically the same argument Alan David Doane made, probably correctly, about the work of what I (and Barton Fink) would call The "Merely Adequate" Comics Writers' Club? Transparently lousy, stupid art, like Britney's latest album, is too obviously silly to do any lasting harm. It's the quasi-acceptable, almost kinda good that ends up hurting, if it convinces us as readers to blur our boundaries and weaken our standards and spend our money on something that doesn't deserve it. And unlike with pop music, there's only about 250,000 of us consuming comics in this country. The business can't afford for us to have lousy taste.

If you look to the left you'll see I've added a tip jar, because why not?

Reader and generally thoughtful person Michael Suileabhain-Wilson writes (edited for excessive sauciness):

I was just reading your latest post on pamphlets, I had an insight into a reason why _I_ don't like them...

Not that I own many pamphlets to begin with, but I have a few, and I have a bunch of RPG books which are similarly poly-bagged.

Polybags totally suck.

They're sized, by and large, to perfectly fit whatever goes in them. So you have to fumble with them to get them back in, with a reasonably good chance of fucking up either the book or the bag. It's a pain in the ass. But the alternative is to keep them loose, which works for RPGs, but is inadvisable for pamphlets.

Thus, the mechanics of the polybag gives you an option between loose storage, which pretty much guarantees a short and ratty life for your overpriced pamphlet, or bags which are a pain in the ass and make you feel like an anal twit slavering over your precious collectibles.

It sucks and I don't like it.

Me neither.

(Caveat: Now would probably be a good time to link to Chris Allen, who argues that a lot of these binary arguments we have about different aspects of comics are silly. Of course he's right: Floppies vs. pamphlets are certainly not an either/or proposition. As I've said many times, floppies are still indispensable for the industry as a source of revenue; and as Chris points out, sometimes buying individual issues (Acme Novelty Library, for instance) is indeed preferrable in many ways to simply waiting for the trade. (I myself launched a fairly expensive Ebay odyssey to track down old Acme issues.) But Acme and its ilk are kind of the exception that proves the rule. Most floppies don't provide anywhere near that level of bang for your buck, let alone compare to the value of trades, graphic novels, manga-formatted books, let alone other forms of entertainment. And (I keep saying this again and again as well) only 250,000 or so people buy the dopey things at all. The format's not working, for a wide variety of reasons. It's time to start phasing in something different.)

Amanda has a lovely post about winter for you to read.

The award for Unintentionally Appropriate Headline Juxtaposition goes to two articles currently featured "Inside MSNBC.com":

Hugh Hefner on five decades of Playboy

Oldest male fossil bares all

Thursday, Dec. 4

read: The Old Forest; In the House of Tom Bombadil; Fog on the Barrow-Downs

First, a couple of things I forgot to mention before:

* Is Gandalf a war criminal? In "The Shadow of the Past," he tells Frodo he "put the fear of fire on" poor old Gollum in order to wring information out of him. Gollum is, of course, a special case in the world of Middle-Earth, where generally one can tell how to treat a particular person based on what kind of life-form he happens to be--be nice to Elves, but chop Orcs' heads off without benefit of a jury trial, that sort of thing. Gollum isn't so easy to judge. Though he's essentially a serial killer, he's far from wholly evil; even if he was, it's tough to imagine Gandalf torturing even an Orc for information. Most likely the whole thing was a ruse, and Gandalf had no intention of actually burning Gollum, but Gollum himself didn't need to know that.

* Frodo's dremes: The first appears at the end of "A Conspiracy Unmasked," the last chapter before today's reading, and like most of its successors it's eerie and quietly disturbing:

"...he seemed to be looking out of a high window over a dark sea of tangled trees. Down below among the roots there was the sound of creatures crawling and snuffling. He felt sure they would smell him out sooner or later.

Sounds like many of my own dreams, actually. Its ending, with the vain struggle to reach the Sea, sets up a recurring theme in the life of Frodo (one later echoed by Legolas); literarily, it reaches its apotheosis in Tolkien's haunting poem "The Sea Bell."

On to today's reading!

* "The Old Forest"--Outside the Shire, and right away things go to pot. I suppose that this chapter is in many ways akin to the troll incident in The Hobbit, though this time the balance between humorous and menacing is tipped slightly in the latter's favor--all the more so because, as is the case with the characters themselves, by the time you realize the gravity of the situation it's almost too late. Old Man Willow makes a memorable villain, and his methods (the cracks that swallow up Pippin and Merry, the root that holds Frodo under water) are treeishly malicious. And then, of course, comes Master Bombadil. Sometimes I find myself talking in his rhythm. It's hard not to do, once the chapter's over! (See?)

* "In the House of Tom Bombadil"--Like the Shire-bound tree-person Sam described earlier on, and like (say) the Watcher in the Water later on, Bombadil is one of Tolkien's memorable unclassifiables, people and creatures and incidents who are all the more fascinating for the fact that Tolkien's world is usually so very classifiable. Tom's not a wizard, not an Elf, not a Man, not a Hobbit, not a Dwarf--"He is," as his common-law wife Goldberry puts it. That sounds like a reference to Yahweh's "I am who am" shpiel to many fans, who interpret it to mean that Bombadil is some sort of incarnation of Illuvatar (the God of the Tolkien cosmos), but a more likely explanation is that he and Goldberry are Maiar--demigod underlings to the Valar, Tolkien's gods, who in turn serve Illuvatar--who have (I've seen it put this way somewhere) gone native. Other Maiar include Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, Sauron, and the Balrog, and Bombadil seems comparable to these cats (keep in mind that the Wizards voluntarily limited their power, which might explain why the Ring clearly could best them while Sauron, Bombadil, and probably the Balrog had no such worries). I love seeing Tom make a mockery of the mighty Ring, and tell stories that go waaaaay back to "before the Dark Lord came from Outside." And I love the bit about Sam sleeping contentedly, "if logs are content." That kind of sounds like me, too!

* "Fog on the Barrow-Downs": It's a shame they couldn't work this chapter into the films somehow, because quite simply it's scary as hell. The sleep that overtakes them so quickly Tolkien doesn't even bother to describe it; the fog that rolls in out of nowhere; the two standing stones that suddenly loom out of the fog; the cries of "help! help!" in the fog that trail off into screams and then suddenly stop (I wonder if Stephen King had this chapter in mind when he wrote "The Mist")... I actually found myself on edge, and jumped a little bit when I read the following exchange, which I'd totally forgotten about:

'Where are you?' [Frodo] cried, both angry and afraid.

'Here!' said a voice, deep and cold, that seemed to come out of the ground. 'I am waiting for you!'

'No!' said Frodo; but he did not run away.

Whoa. Then there's the crawling arm inside the Barrow to consider--when Amanda and I read the book aloud, she told me that this was the first image that really got to her. What gets to me every time is what Merry says when he wakes up from his wight-induced coma, his mind still mired in the spectral past:

'What in the name of wonder?' began Merry, feeling the golden circlet that had slipped over one eye. Then he stopped, and a shadow came over his face, and he closed his eyes. 'Of course, I remember!' he said. 'The men of Carn Dum came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! the spear in my heart!' He clutched at his breast. 'No! No!' he said, opening his eyes.

That bizarre outburst sticks in my mind like the glimpse of a dead body in a highway accident. It shows the suffering caused by evil in Tolkien's world--how real it is, and how it can last even when the lives it ruined are long over. It's a weird, powerful passage, one of my favorites in the book. (Fortunately it's followed shortly thereafter by the image of all four hobbits frolicking naked--a Room with a View moment that lightens things up a bit, don't you think?)

Tomorrow: I feel Bree!

Friday, Dec 5

read: At the Sign of the Prancing Pony; Strider; A Knife in the Dark; a few pages of Flight to the Ford

It's occurring to me that unless I spend my weekends reading around the clock, I'm unlikely to finish all of LotR by the 17th. C'est la vie, I suppose, but I'll definitely have it done by New Year's. This annual re-reading streak will die very hard, I can promise you that!

* "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony": A very strong chapter, I think, simply because of how well Tolkien draws the Bree milieu. Though Peter Jackson did as good a job with this as he always does, this is one section where you could feel how truncated things were. I actually found myself thinking of Ralph Bakshi's animated version of these scenes more often than Jackson's live-action one, and not simply because Bakshi filmed more of them. Seeing old Barliman Butterbur cowering behind his front desk as the Ringwraiths glided into the Prancing Pony in Jackson's Fellowship was the one part that managed to awake the irritated purist in me. The innkeeper as Tolkien (and to an extent, Bakshi) depicted him is a funny, doughty, extremely endearing character, moreso even than Bombadil, perhaps. Also memorable here are the squinty Southerner--a very early glimpse of some bad things to come--and, of course, Frodo's sudden disappearance, a moment that elicits a healthy "oh, shit!" from the reader if ever there was one.

* "Strider": Tons of great lines in this chapter, mainly from or about Strider. He gets off a great zinger against old Barliman ("a fat inkeeper who only remembers his own name because people shout it at him all day"); has his own personal official poem ("all that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost"); and is a walking illustration of how evil seems fair and feels foul, while good can look foul and feel fair. Barliman, meanwhile, shows that he may be forgetful, but he's not about to let any of his customers come to harm if he can help it at all. Finally, we meet humans whose greed, or sadism, or both, enables them to quash the innate fear all living things seem to have of the Ringwraiths well enough to actually make deals with them. Would that such people only existed in fantastic fiction! Finally, the "G" rune Gandalf uses to sign his mislaid letter to Frodo is currently a high-ranking candidate for my next tattoo.

* "A Knife in the Dark": This chapter, particularly its conclusion, is something I've actually had nightmares about. I think that the image of the four hobbits and Strider circling their proverbial wagons around the fire while the evil, void-like Ringwraiths creep toward them is one of the most indelible images in the book; again, I found myself *just* a little disappointed with Jackson's version, mainly because the version my subconscious treated me to was a tough act to follow. It's interesting to note how human Aragorn appears in this chapter. Clearly he's not 100% certain of the route he should take; clearly he makes mistakes, and kicks himself for them; clearly he is afraid, and wishes that Gandalf were with them. That, coupled with his dawning respect for the innate toughness of the hobbits, makes his relationship with them a lot less one-sided leader-and-followers than it might seem. By the end of the books many people have this kind of appreciation for the hobbits--as well they should, since those four guys have done stuff that only a handful of beings have successfully pulled off since the dawn of time--which I think is part of what makes it so appealing to readers: Even the high and mighty in Tolkien's world are willing to acknowledge a bunch of nobodies who stepped up. But we're a long way from all that at the end of this chapter, that's for sure.

I'll talk about "Flight to the Ford" next time, if you don't mind. With all this snow I should have plenty of time to do so, right?

Friday, Dec. 5-Monday, Dec. 8

read: the remainder of Flight to the Ford, two-thirds of Many Meetings

It turns out that despite being snowbound all weekend I didn't get a lot of reading done. It was comics-organizing time instead. But the resumption of my daily commute brings with it a renewed dedication to reading about history's most dangerous piece of jewelry.

* "Flight to the Ford": One of the most suspenseful chapters in the book, it's noteworthy how Tolkien's chronicle of Frodo's journey from Weathertop to Rivendell is different that Peter Jackson's. (I know I keep talking about the films, but this is really the first opportunity I've had to get my thoughts about them down on paper computer-screen.) Frodo has a great deal more agency in his journey here than in the movie. For starters, he's not a gasping catatonic; for several days after the attack he's more or less fully functional, aside from the pain and numbness in his left arm. And ultimately it's Frodo himself who makes the mad dash on horseback away from the Riders and over the Ford of Bruinen. He's not being carried by Arwen (or by Glorfindel, the Elf who plays the equivalent role in the text), in other words. While it is fair to say that the speed, smarts, and courage of Asfaloth the horse had a lot to do with Frodo's successful escape, so too is it fair to say that Frodo's bravery, or more to the point his innate unwillingness to let himself be bullied by these bastards, helped save him. Tolkien refers to it as "hatred"--hatred of these evil creatures, hatred of the fear and pain they have caused him and his companions, and first and foremost, I believe, hatred of the power of will they exert over him. For a hobbit who has lived a comfortable life of his own making, the notion that his thoughts and actions are no longer his own must be anathema. It's inspiring to see Frodo make his stand--a stand for freedom against the "commanding wish" of totalitarian evil. Good for him!

(In fairness to P.J., though he did elide much of the bravery shown by Frodo in the journey from the Shire to Rivendell, so too did he cut many of the goof-ups: the shortcut through the Old Forest, getting separated from the group in the Barrow-Downs, dancing a jig on the table at the Prancing Pony. On the other hand, later on in the story the decision to enter the Mines of Moria--at first glance a disastrous one--is made by Frodo in defiance of Gandalf's wishes, not in agreement with them as is the case in the book....)

"The Flight to the Ford" also includes the appearance of the aforementioned Glorfindel, a High Elf who in fact has been reincarnated after having died in combat with a Balrog many thousands of years ago. This fact, which I don't believe is made clear in LotR proper, always kind of irks me--though the idea that dead Elves carry on a physical existence in the Halls of Mandos (in the Undying Lands of the West) while dead Men's souls go someplace unrevealed is a fascinating one, the idea that those post-dead Elves can take the trip back to Middle-Earth seems to negate the sacrifice made by other slain Elves in some way. This is particularly so because Glorfindel, aside from his admittedly key role in keeping Frodo and the Ring from the Ringwraiths here at the Ford, is a pretty minor character; it's not as if Tolkien had Elrond come back. (I feel a lot less gypped by the return of Gandalf--or for that matter that of Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion--for this reason, I think.)

The chapter also has a great weapon in the form of the Witch-King's blade, featuring a break-away section that worms its way in toward Frodo's heart; a fair amount of levity--centered around references to the trolls from The Hobbit, much to my lasting delight; and Frodo's chilling question upon coming to after the attack: "What has happened? Where is the pale king?" Finally, it's got another terrifically haunting dream from Frodo:

He lay down again and passed into an uneasy dream, in which he walked on the grass in his garden in the Shire, but it seemed faint and dim, less clear than the tall black shadows that stood looking over the hedge.

* "Many Meetings"--This chapter is something of an interlude, between the thriller that was "Flight to the Ford" and the long, totally awesome DefCon 4 meeting in "The Council of Elrond." As such it mainly gives both the characters and the readers some breathing room before plunging them back into the dire task at hand. Gandalf comes back, and notes that Frodo is already gaining something of an otherworldly quality to him, one that surprisingly sits well on him.

Gandalf also fills Frodo in on the nature of the Ringwraiths, picking up where Strider left off a couple chapters ago. I feel it's important to explain the technical aspects of the Ringwraiths to the reader. Why, if they're so badass, couldn't they bother to look over the side of the road to find Frodo when he was hiding back at the beginning of the book? Why did they cut up empty beds and then once they realized it give up on finding the hobbits in another room? Why do they attack at Weathertop, successfully injure their quarry, and then retreat? Why can they be faced down by one Elf, one Dunadan and four hobbits with torches now, but intimidate the entire Gondorian army later? The power of the Ringwraiths is determined by a great many variables (their proximity to Sauron, the degree to which Sauron is concentrating on them or not, their proximity to the Ring, whether it's nighttime or daytime out, whether anyone is using the ring, whether they're all together or not, the nature of the beings they're attacking, whether or not their physical means of carriage have been disrupted, etc.), so it's good to explain this stuff once in a while.

It's also wonderful to see old Bilbo back (I stopped about halfway through his and Frodo's reunions)--I obviously knew full well it was coming, but still got all excited like a big doofus when the revelation came. I enjoy the brief mention of the sons of Elrond as well, because of its emphasis on the implacability of good's drive to eradicate evil: "[Arwen's] brothers, Elladan and Elrohir, were out upon errantry: for they rode often far afield with the Rangers of the North, forgetting never their mother's torment in the dens of the orcs."

And the cameo appearance by Gloin ("the Gloin, one of the twelve companions of the great Thorin Oakenshield," as Frodo puts it!) is a treat as well, with its mentions of Hobbit characters like Beorn, Bard, and Dain Ironfoot. I think I need to start greeting people in the Dwarf style: "Sean T. Collins at your service and your family's."

Next up: The big meeting!

Well, lookit this! Within a few short days the comics blogosphere has found its first major unnecessarily heated feud and its first self-appointed, inaccurate parade-pisser-on'er! Color me impressed!

(Actually, regarding the comic that started the aforementioned tussle, the Coober Skeber Marvel Benefit Issue, let me just say that I'd kill to get my hands on one. Published by Highwater, I believe, it's out of print, and contains "tributes" (some sincere, some less so, I think) to the Marvel heroes by a pantheon of up-and-coming altcomix luminaries, including a bunch of Fort Thunder types, Ron Rege Jr., and James Kochalka. Kochalka's contribution, a short story featuring the Hulk's battle against rain (seriously), was reprinted in the last Incredible Hulk Annual, and for my money gets directly to the heart of what makes this rage-filled "hero" so compelling when he's done right. It's both the best Hulk story I've ever read, and the best thing Kochalka's ever done. Seek it out if you can.)

Dirk Deppey says "fanboy, heal thyself," laying the blame for the woes of the Direct Market not at the feet of the publishers, distributors, or even the retailers, but of the customers themselves. Yeah, basically. Remember when we all were talking about how no one should be buying comics they know are mediocre? Dirk explains why.

Brian Bendis talks about two of the three books he's writing on which he's conducted major overhauls, Powers and Daredevil. I don't know why Newsarama didn't conduct a separate interview about The Pulse (formerly Alias). Maybe Bendis was sleepy and had to get in his pajamas, I dunno.

If people with foreign-policy philosophies as different as Jim Henley and me can agree that the new issue of Captain America is pretty good, that pretty much settles it, right? Seriously, Bob Morales manages to both humanize Cap (in the "he's eats at a diner and flirts" sense, not in the "he gets the crap kicked out of him and we see he's vulnerable blah blah blah" sense) and inject him into a highly topical, politicized adventure that assumes neither "everyone knows Bush is Hitler" nor "everyone knows all the towelheads should be rounded up and shot," which surprisingly enough seems difficult for super-writers to manage these days. Add in the art of Chris Bachalo, which though occasionally hard to follow (I had to go back and reread the shoot-out on the bridge like everyone else) is some of the most dynamic and unusual art currently on the superhero scene, and you've got a promising start.

C'mon, Alan. You don't need to like only superhero covers with metaphorical quotes around them to prove to us that you're, like, an aesthete.

As for me, Make Mine Miller.

Monday, Dec. 8-Wednesday, Dec. 10th

read: the final portion of “Many Meetings,” “The Council of Elrond,” about half of “The Ring Goes South”

* “Many Meetings”--We pick up with the reunion between Bilbo and Frodo, including Biblo’s creepy Ring-driven freakout, which is as sad as it is scary if you’re as fond of the old hobbit as I am.

I found myself trying to figure out, as per Bilbo’s instructions, which sections of “Earendil Was a Mariner” were his and which were Aragorn’s, only to find out/remember after finishing the section that everything was Bilbo’s all along. (My guess was that the first and second-to-last verses were Strider’s.)

* “The Council of Elrond”--Super long, super awesome chapter, if you ask me. Getting the summaries of what’s been happening “off screen” from the lands we’ve been concerned with thus far is a little like peeking back at sections of the Haunted Mansion or the Pirates of the Carribean that your little moving car has passed by at Disney World--it’s a glimpse of things at work that don’t depend on your being there to see them. Gloin’s tale of Mordor’s emissary to the Lonely Mountain is perfectly ominous, injecting as it does some LotR menace into the lands of The Hobbit. Boromir, meanwhile, touts the prowess and valour in the face of near-certain collapse that is Gondor; here in the book, Aragorn is hardly the shrinking violet he’s portrayed as in the film version, and counters with boasts (justified) of the importance of the Rangers to the safety of the Free Peoples. And Gandalf’s long tale of his suspicions about the Ring and his relationship to Saruman is a fascinating account of treachery centuries in the making.

I also really dig the debate as to what to do with the Ring--a veritable motherlode of potential fan-fiction ideas. “What if they gave the ring to Tom Bombadil? Maybe Sauron would have to send the Balrog to take it back!” “What if they threw the Ring into the Sea? Maybe a salt-water Watcher would find it!” “What if they gave the Ring to Denethor to use as a weapon? Would anyone ultimately be able to take it back from him after he went bad?” The Tolkienloving mind boggles.

Finally, I appreciate the respect shown toward the hobbits. I always do, I suppose, but there’s something touching about how Bilbo’s matter-of-fact offer to take the Ring and “finish what he started” is greeted, and how Elrond tells Frodo that as Ring-Bearer he’s numbered among the all-time great heroes of history. I get a picture in my mind of the spirits of Beren, Hurin et al getting up from their table when Frodo walks into the room, saying, “So this is the guy we’ve heard so much about! It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Baggins!”

* “The Ring Goes South”--Here the walking begins. But first the poignant hand-over of Sting from Bilbo to Frodo. I get choked up when this happens; Bilbo is clearly coming to terms with the fact that his adventuring days are over. When the Fellowship finally sets out, it’s a whole lot less rousing than it’s portrayed in the movie. They’re unlikely to meet a happy ending, after all.

Next time: “They hold no quarter, they ask no quarter”

John Jakala, who may well be the best non-Deppey comicsblogger on the block, offers up a masterful five-part collection of negative reviews of various manga he's been reading. Substantive and thought-provoking, they ought to settle the question of whether good comics criticism can be found on the Internet. But his review of Battle Royale #3 raised more questions than it answered, for me at least.

Part of John's disappointment with the volume is the out-of-nowhere intrusion of some pretty heavy hentai scenes, which he worries could open up both Tokyopop and himself to child-pornography or obscenity charges. Now, I'm reasonably sure that a drawing of underage people engaged in sex acts does not constitute child pornography, at least not yet, or at least not as obscenity laws are enforced in most of the country. I know that a law was passed to the effect that "depictions" of such activities would be prosecutable, but as this would mean Barnes & Nobles nationwide could be shut down for selling Lolita, I'm not sure if these provisions have even been tested. And since I don't even remember the name of the law, for all I know it's already been struck down by the courts. (Tips as to what the hell I'm thinking of here would be appreciated.)

At any rate, the scenes in question are no more actual child pornography than, say, Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life (which WAS seized by Canadian authorities, however). Tastefulness--that's a different story, and one where we're getting into some questionable territory, but I think the sex is presented in a light that makes it comparable to, and congruent with, the incredibly graphic violence. For the character in question, sex is as much of a weapon as anything else, so it does make sense from a storytelling point of view.

On another front, I myself didn't really notice the dropoff in art quality between the volumes that John and others were bothered by. Actually, now that he mentions it I think I saw something different, but figured it was just because such a different kind of story was being told. Perhaps my inexperience with manga played a part here; it's tough for me to differentiate between art styles, and I'm certainly nowhere near the level of discernment I've achieved with American comics. (Recently, someone on the blogosphere made the analogy that we have the same kind of trouble noting differences in manga that might seem obvious to someone who's been reading it for years as a manga reader might have discerning between the humor found in a Keith Giffen Justice League versus Grant Morrison in one of his sillier moods. Again, tips as to what the hell I'm talking about would be appreciated.)

John and some of the people in his comment thread mention the other two versions of Battle Royale that exist, a prose novel and a film. I didn't like the BR movie at all; I thought it aped all of the worst aspects of American action movies, which coupled with the subject matter made it extremely tacky, distasteful, and (perhaps worst) cliched and boring. I'm continuing to enjoy the manga because it's been doing everything so much better. I've heard great things about the novel, and am looking forward to checking it out, particularly since I'm told it fills in a lot of plot holes (the true nature of the government, how this can be a TV show despite the fact that we don't see a single camera, etc.).

I really do suggest you go and read John's piece, even if you're not interested in manga generally or the manga he's talking about in particular; it's a real object lesson in how this kind of writing can and should be done.

I don't think Jim Henley and I could be further apart on foreign policy if the two of us sat down and thought up ways to be so, but I've found his recent coverage of some fog-of-war issues indispensible. Whether it's the mysterious firefight in Samarra or the seemingly less-than-reliable Iraqi military official who insists to this day on the veracity of the "45 minute WMD deployment" claim, Jim's been there to point out when the Emperor is finely shod and when he is, in fact, bare-ass naked. War supporters need good information same as war detractors; Jim's done a fine job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

That being said, every once in a while he says something that makes me thank God I'm about 180 degrees away from him on a lot of this stuff. Case in point: his post today about Kosovo. "Patently illegal" and a "cruel farce," Jim calls it, saying that "the Republican opponents [of the war] of 1999 were right." Right to oppose a noxious, racist fascist's grab for lebensraum--one in a seemingly endless series of such moves, one virtually guaranteed to end in the same sort of humanitarian disaster as his earlier ones? Jeez, Jim. Say what you will about Clinton's half-assed war plan, Wes Clark's woeful generalship, the intrasigence of the European community, and the unwillingness of the UN to actually solve any of the problems it's nominally in charge of--hell, I'll be right there bitching about them with you. That's because that's what's to blame for Kosovo's degeneration into its current criminal free-for-all, not our having fought there to begin with. The Kosovo War put an end to the territorial ambitions of the biggest murderer on European soil since the Stalinist puppet regimes, and eventually put an end to his reign, too--all too indirectly, but still.

Here, I suppose, is where I could do the whole "making the perfect the enemy of the good" routine, which is applicable, I think. But when you're talking to someone who's sufficiently... ambivalent, I suppose, about the government of Slobodan Milosevic to feel that the "illegality" of a war against it even merits mention, doesn't it go without saying? I deplore the way the war and its aftermath have been botched, but you'll never find me saying to myself that refusing to fight and defeat fascism was the right idea.

(UPDATE: Laura Gjovaag's reporting on Corner Comics may now be found at this page.)

When she and Alan David Doane aren't busy bringing out the absolute worst in each other, Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag is a fine comicsblogger, and she's broken what may turn out to be the story of the year. The IRS has issued an ultimatum to Washington state comics retailer Corner Comics: pay $14,000 on your backstock, or physically destroy it by December 31st. According to the shop's owner, this bizarre and vindictive order is based neither on applicable tax law (the law they're citing specifically does not apply to a business this size) nor on an even remotely accurate appraisal of the value of the store's backstock. As things stand now, the best-case scenario is that Corner Comics is put out of business by IRS agents who are either woefully uninformed or maliciously indifferent. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that this policy is applied to retailers nationwide, thus destroying the Direct Market in the proverbial one fell swoop.

Dirk Deppey has issued a call to arms on this story, asking everyone with a cyber-soapbox to get up on it and spread the word. Please, follow his advice and do so--on blogs, on messboards, on listservs, on news sites. And if you live in Washington, contact your local government representatives. This is some scary stuff going on here, and woe to the comics industry and medium if we can't put a stop to it.

You all checked out my posts on John Jakala's manga reviews, the chilling effects of overly broad child pornography laws, and Corner Comics vs. the IRS, right? Right.

Sometimes I forget that Eve Tushnet just started reading comics regularly this year, because she writes about them so passionately and so well. Then again, I myself gave up on reading comics regularly for my entire college career, and only started reading them again when New X-Men debuted, so I guess it's easy to lose yourself in the medium when what you're reading rewards your interest. As a fangirl of relatively recent coinage, Eve's thoughts on how she "got into comics" and good comics for new- or non-readers are must-reads. (My own recommendations for newbies may be found here. Great holiday gifts one and all.)

Look out--Shawn Fumo is back! The comicsphere's resident manga expert has returned to blogging with a vengeance, announcing that Radio Shack has begun selling manga, pointing out predicitons of a manga-driven comics Renaissance... from six years ago, and much more. Start here and scroll up.


Take it from me, Rich Johnston: Getting things banned is never a good idea. I'm not going to go in-depth on this, but please, trust me on this one. I know what I'm talking about.


NeilAlien responds to Dirk Deppey's comics-fan j'accuse by saying, basically, "nuh-uh!" (This tends to be how these things between Dirk and Neil go.) I think Neil might be right to say that it's too much to lay all the blame for the sorry state of the Direct Market at the feet of the customers. The DM's spectacular failure to capitalize on the manga explosion shows that the retailers and publishers should shoulder much of the blame. after all, this audience is out there, and the DM has completely neglected to attract them into the shops; the people buying JSA every month have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, most retailers who do attempt to stock non-superhero comics of any kind will tell you that such titles die a death on the racks. The DM as it stands has an audience that not only does not reward diversity, but seems intent on actively policing against it. You can see hints of this even in intelligent fans like Neil, whose occasional disses of altcomix are as sloppy as they are undeserved (Bill Sherman sums this angle up quite well).

Let's look at it this way: Imagine that the record-store industry had only 250,000 or so regular customers. Now imagine that around 90% of them only bought records by the artists formerly known as teeny-poppers: Britney, Justin, Christina, Beyonce. This pop genre totally dominates the industry, and the bulk of what it yields is, well, crap. When challenged, the consumers of these works will say, "Hey, it's not all crap: Somtimes they work with the Neptunes, or Timbaland, or the DFA, or Fischerspooner. That's an intelligent alternative to the usual pop fare." Of course, they'd be right--but only to a degree. There is indeed some variety to be found amongst these popsters: In my opinion, "Crazy in Love" and the original version of "Boys" are pretty great. But it's still the pop genre at heart. If that's as far afield as these hypothetical 250,000 consumers were willing to go, and they consistently shunned anything and everything else, what possible incentive would there be for the record-store Direct Market to diversify, aside from taking a longview that will almost surely soak them in the short term?

That's essentially what we're facing in the comics Direct Market. It's a very small set of consumers, and the vast majority of what they buy is superhero stuff. Occasionally they'll opt for superhero crime, or superhero sci-fi, or superhero noir, or superhero fantasy, or superhero satire, or superhero slapstick, or superhero teen drama; and occasionally (hell, even semi-often) the stuff'll be terrific; but it's still superhero stuff in the end, and it seems that nothing else will do. Now that it's apparent that the DM must diversify or die out, is it any wonder that the loyal audience can be seen not as a boon, but as an obstacle?

Finally, thanks to (cough) certain real-world events vaguely referenced above, it looks as though I'll be switching to buying only trade paperbacks whether I like it or not. I can't see this as being anything but difficult for me: Even though I'd weaned myself off of several titles I wasn't really enjoying in their monthly installments, there were still a ton of books I jonsed for on a week-to-week basis, and I'll miss them. But my bottom line will be a lot healthier, and as I truly do feel that collected editions are superior to floppies not just logistically but aesthetically and literarily, I'll be reading comics in their ideal format--the better to judge whether or not they deserve reading in the first place, perhaps?

Yesterday John Jakala and I had an exchange over the degree to which Battle Royale #3 does or does not constitute child pornography. Today John writes with information I'd been looking for--the pertinent law. It can be found here, and it's exactly as troubling as I remember it. To wit:

"child pornography" means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where -

(A)

the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct

(B)

such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct

Emphases mine.

What's wrong with this picture? First of all, totally fictional depictions of the acts in question--i.e. drawings, paintings, computer-generated images, and so forth--are legally identical to actual recordings of the actual acts--i.e. photographs, film, and video. Now, I think we can all understand why it's illegal not just to make child pornography, but to possess it: Unlike with visual documentation of other crimes (the Zapruder film, for instance), the audience is part and parcel of why the crime is committed in the first place. But when the visual documentation in question shows no actual crime being committed, how can that visual documentation itself constitute a crime? I'm just as grossed out by the notion of people whacking off to computer-generated pictures of little girls as the next guy, but being grossed out, or even outraged, cannot of itself be the basis for legal action. And as Battle Royale, the book in question, shows, this definition doesn't just apply to fake porno--it applies to works with genuine artistic intent and, dare we say it, redeeming social value. And hey, don't like Battle Royale? Fine! How about A Child's Life or Diary of a Teenage Girl or The Playboy or even A Contract with God or Blankets? All feature visual depictions of underage people engaged in sexual conduct. And under this law, you can go to prison for owning them.

Problem number two: All that's required for a given work of art to be considered "child pornography" is for there to appear to be underage people engaging in sexual conduct therein. Once again, no actual crime need be committed for the work in question to be illegal itself. The effect on visual arts here is so chilling it need hardly be enumerated, but just remember the next time you rent Kids or Amarcord or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or American Pie or Lolita that you are now a convictable kiddie-porn user.

If there's any good news about this, it's that I remember hearing about these regulations quite some time ago, and have yet to hear of anyone being prosecuted based on its fuzzier aspects. Though I'm not much of a court-watcher, it seems to me that laws in which definitions are this broad are routinely struck down when challenged. But until that happens, I guarantee you that someone will have to spend thousands of dollars and several years defending themselves against spurious accusations that do little to protect actual children and much to undermine First Amendment rights.

Troubling. Troubling indeed.


UPDATE: This is what I get for not following SCOTUS as closely as I should. Turns out that the Supreme Court struck down the ban on "virtual kiddie porn" in April of 2002, despite the best efforts of leading would-be theocrats John Ashcroft and Antonin Scalia. However, the House continues its attempts to reinstate the regulations. Remember this the next time you crack open Blankets.

It's been brought to my attention by multiple sources that even if "virtual kiddie porn" as "defined" by recent attempts at anti-porn legislation is no longer a concern due to the intervention of the Supreme Court, the less extreme but still serious charge of obscenity can be levelled. Tokyopop doesn't necessarily have to worry about ending up like Gary Glitter, but if an ambitious district attorney in a Southern state gets ahold of Battle Royale #3, they're still likely to be in trouble. And the penalties can be astoundingly severe: Let's all pause to remember Mike Diana, convicted of obscenity and ordered to be subject to random searches of his property to ensure that he's no longer drawing anything.

It's situations like this that make you wonder about the wisdom of allowing for "community standards" to decide important civil-liberties questions. The argument has been made, somewhat convincingly, that the ability for states and other, smaller jurisdictions to decide for themselves on issues such as gay marriage is ultimately good, because it permits for advancements in localized areas even if the country at large isn't ready for it. This way, we can avoid forcing the issue down unwilling communities' throats, which might only cause them to pass stringent measures against that advancement. On the other hand, look at the civil rights movement of the 1960s: The federal government took matters into its own hands because the "community standard" in Southern states was simply unacceptable, states' rights be damned. The unwilligness of SCOTUS to rule substantively on what constitutes obscene speech or art is probably a good thing if you live in New York or San Francisco, but not so great if you live in Smalltown U.S.A.; their decision would likely but a damper on some products available in liberal communities, but open up a great deal more freedom for conservative ones. It's a genuine quandary, and one which comics, already an interstitial, neither-here-nor-there medium in terms of publicly viewed artistic merit, will be tangled up with for some time to come.

(UPDATE: Laura Gjovaag's reporting on Corner Comics may now be found at this page.)

Dirk Deppey blogs the bloody bejesus out of the Corner Comics incident. Boldly going where few comics journalists have the patience to go, Dirk sorts through years of tax law to determine whether or not the shop's owner, Paige Gifford, was in fact doing something wrong by not having paid taxes on her backstock. The answer? No, probably not. It's a question of two different types of accounting, one of which the IRS, though it doesn't have any strict rules against it, is no fan of. This confusing, dispiriting dispute between a small business owner and the government is the result.

Dirk chronicles an even more troubling aspect of the situation, though: The reactions of some of Gifford's fellow retailers, which ranged from amused indifference to outright rooting for the IRS. Apparently some of this sentiment stems from the retailers' erroneous belief that Gifford was, in fact, breaking the law; but still, that members of a group purporting to represent the interests of Direct Market retailers as a whole were so ready to jump all over a colleague who was in a position to lose thousands and thousands of dollars in cash or in merchandise, if not her whole store, is deeply troubling. I couldn't help but feel that the retailers in question are happy with the little corner of the world they've carved out for themselves, and anything outside of it is greeted with suspicion if not contempt. Provides some context for the abject failure of the Direct Market (or at least the segment of it making these kinds of statements) to properly market and sell anything but supercomics, doesn't it?

Fortunately, the Comics Journal is around to be a tireless investigator and advocate when it comes to the big stories and issues facing comics today. Well, I mean, the Comics Journal's website is, that's for certain. But I'm sure the magazine itself covers the important news in its News Watch section with the same dilligence and brio that Dirk does it on Journalista. Let's see... bad-girl artists plagiarizing each other... Jim Warren's legal troubles... Stan Lee getting sued by a stripper... some stuff about the Spider-Man movie...

Hmmm, I don't see anything about the manga explosion in bookstores, the failure of the DM to cash in on same, the New Marvel Renaissance, the subsequent ouster of Bill Jemas, the coincident disintegration of the company's (presumably) final attempt at creator ownership with Epic Comics, the moves made by new Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, the degree to which those moves are a response to negative consequences of the high public profile previously maintained by Jemas & Joe Quesada (eg. the removal of Princess Diana from Milligan & Allred's X-Statix), editorial cartoonists regularly being prosecuted/persecuted in Muslim countries, the Michigan adult-publication censorship decision, the increasing presence of anti-Semitic imagery in Western editorial cartoons (or increasing amount of accusations of same, if you prefer), CrossGen's restructuring and layoffs, the rise of Dan DiDio at DC, altcomix graphic novels (like Blankets) being pushed out of the DM, superhero graphic novels being pushed out of the bookstores...

But I'm sure they're in there. Somewhere.

* Between this and a certain scene in the upcoming Return of the King, by the end of the week the term "spider-hole" will have entered into the parlance of our times with a vengeance, no?

* It's fascinating to see how while in hiding Saddam abadoned the Mustachioed Dictator's Club for the Beared Dictator's Club. Once in the company of Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Petain, Musharraf, and Franco, he's now hanging around (metaphorically) with the likes of Khoemeini, Lenin, Omar, Arafat, and Castro. And now that I look at it again, doesn't it seem like the hair on the top of his head is thinning a bit? Maybe he'll join the combover club with Mao and Mussolini soon!

* I'm certainly glad not to find myself in the position where I have to explain why I opposed the course of action that allowed this to happen.

Move over, Nigeria: There's a new center for scam spam in town! (Say, maybe this was what Saddam was importing from Africa all along!)

Date: 12/15/2003 15:53:38 GMT

From: abuahmedd@netscape.net

To: [me]

Subject: THANK YOU

Dear Friend

My name is ABU AHMED, a merchant and arm dealer in Baghdad Iraq.

I have urgent and very confidential business proposition for you. I got your contact from my private search for a reliable and trusted foreign partner.

That any action you take is geared towards rendering humanitarian assistance to a man who is in distress with his family

Before the war between the United States coalitions forces and our former stupid President (Stupid Captured President Saddam Hussein) who dose not have consciences for his country and any member of his family. Captured stupid president Hussein gave me $55,000.000.00 (fifty five million United States dollars) to import Ammunitions from other countries to fight war.

I realized that my entire life is in danger, even if I fulfill the promise or not; I decided to navigate the funds and forget my investment behind in Iraq to run with my family to seek asylum in Dubai (U.E.A).

I deposited the money contained in 2 trunk boxes in a security/finance company as artifacts to avoid prying eyes and I traveled back to Iraq to lie to Bastard Saddam Hussein that the Ammunitions will be delivered within 21 days. Then I move to Dubai with my family to start with our asylum process.

I am contacting you to assist me in getting this fund and also helping me investing this fund in your country. So that you will help my family and I in getting back our normal life's of standard of living and join you in your country. Due to my family and I do not have any travel documents, because of our asylum status in Dubai. And I can not go back to my country, because the stupid Saddam has a lot of loyalties that is looking for me.

All you need do is to fly down to claim the 2 Boxes from the Security Company and open a bank account through which the money will be lodged before transfer into your nominated Bank account.

I am willing to compensate you with 20% of the total sum for your assistance and

want to let you understand that the future of me and family depends solely on

this money. In this transaction confidentiality is very essential for us to achieve our goal. It is important that you maintain utmost good faith and trust. You must also not circumvent the transaction in any way. In conclusion, all the necessary documentation as regards to the deposit will be given to you to secure the deposit, and be rest assured that this transaction is 100% risk free.

Thanks while I await your urgent response.

Best Regards.

MR. ABU AHMED

What the hell is going on here? Amid the (well-deserved) attention being paid to the political future of Iraq, Afghanistan has busied itself with creating a thoroughly theocratic constitution. While nominally democratic, what good does that do anyone when religious (and given that the religion in question is Islam, sexual) discrimination is built right into the country's founding document? My hope is that U.S. involvement in the country, even if it's just in Kabul and wherever else the troops happen to be at the time, will prevent the kind of egregious abuse this has the potential for fomenting, but clearly it would be best to head this off at the (Khyber) pass. Actually, that's putting it mildly: It would be an affront to the Afghans and Americans who've sacrificed so much blood and treasure to topple the Taliban and oust their murdering cohorts in al Qaeda to do anything but prevent the return of theocratic intolerance.

It seems as though we've learned, at long last, that it's pointless to replace one autocrat with another. When will we learn that it's equally pointless to replace dictatorship with theocracy, particularly when, as is the case throughout the Muslim world, the relationship between the two is symbiotic?

Listen, all I want in this world is someone who's left of Bush on social issues and right of Bush on the war.

(Link courtesy of Josh Cohen.)

Buck up, genocidal dictators of the world! The heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church will always have your back!

Is politeness a sign of high-level civilization? Kennyb wonders.

One thing the Corner Comics fiasco has thrown into stark relief is how good a writer and journalist is Dirk Deppey. His reporting may be tempered with editorial content, sure, but so was Upton Sinclair's, and in terms of online comics journalism Deppey simply can't be touched. The sad thing is that the same can be said of print comics journalism.

My comments about the lackluster performance of Comics Journal's print news division have been seconded by Jim Henley and (strongly) Alan David Doane. Meanwhile, Bill Sherman has done the legwork on comparing today's News Watch to previous incarnations of the section. In other words, now is a good time to explore what's wrong with this ostensibly vital part of the preeminent English-language comics magazine. In broad strokes:

1) It doesn't cover the most important stories, the stories really worth covering--stories that are, in fact, ripe for the covering, as Journalista, Rich Johnston's Lying in the Gutters (yes, that's right--some of it may be gossip, but some if it is as close to investigative reporting as the comics industry gets), and other blogs and sites prove week in and week out. The neglect of the bookstore manga explosion--easily the biggest comics-related story of 2003--is indictment enough, but add to that the failure of News Watch to cover (as I listed yesterday) the failure of the Direct Market to capitalize on the huge manga audience, the New Marvel Renaissance, the subsequent ouster of Bill Jemas, the coincident disintegration of the company's (presumably) final attempt at creator ownership with Epic Comics, the moves made by new Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, the degree to which those moves are a response to negative consequences of the high public profile previously maintained by Jemas & Joe Quesada (eg. the removal of Princess Diana from Milligan & Allred's X-Statix), editorial cartoonists regularly being prosecuted/persecuted in Muslim countries, the Michigan adult-publication censorship legislation, the increasing presence of anti-Semitic imagery in Western editorial cartoons (or increasing amount of accusations of same, if you prefer), CrossGen's restructuring and layoffs, the falling out between Bulldog Comics and DC, the role that Bulldog may have played in DC's large number of sold-out comics, the rise of Dan DiDio at DC, altcomix graphic novels (like Blankets) being pushed out of the DM, superhero graphic novels being pushed out of the bookstores... and the list goes on, I'm sure. The fact that the Journal has in its employ a writer who chronicles these stories in-depth on a daily basis actually makes News Watch's deficiencies look worse, not better.

2) "Fine," you say. "So the Journal isn't CNN. It's not supposed to be! It's a rabble-rousing, muckraking, (dare I say it?) activist publication, designed to promote intelligent aesthetics and moral business practices in the comics industry. They can't cover everything, nor should they; they should report on stories that help illustrate and promote this noble agenda." Okay, let's pretend for a moment that I'll cede you the point that advocates needn't be reasonably comprehensive in terms of the stories they cover. As it stands now, News Watch doesn't cover everything, or even most things, but the point is that it doesn't compensate for this (let alone complement it) with a coherent position of advocacy, beyond uncontroversial common-sense stuff like "people should get paid on time for the work they do." Which is not to say that the industry isn't deficient in the uncontroversial common-sense stuff department--one need look no further than the financial records of most major creators to confirm that--just that the news wing of the only comics publication that matters should be setting the bar for coverage a little bit higher.

Not to keep using Dirk Deppey against his mother publication, but Dirk has been a passionate, tireless advocate on a variety of issues--from the need for intelligent retailership to the need for discerning consumers to defending small businesses against the depredations of overweening government agencies to calling the PR flacks of mainstream companies on their bullshit to raising awareness of the egregious abuse of cartoonists' civil liberties in countries across the globe. That he's been able to do so while covering nearly all the comics news that's fit to print should come as a surprise to no one; indeed, how could he be such a comprehensive, consistent, and convincing advocate without doing so?

3) Even when it does advance its ersatz "agenda," it's usually done in the context of thinly-veiled schadenfreude over the legal misfortunes of people that the writers and editors of the magazine didn't like to begin with--Jim Warren, Stan Lee, and so forth. Even if you feel that, say, Stan Lee’s (ahem) complex relationship with creators’ rights earns him the privilege of being given the business now and then, I’d love to see how you justify giving the stripper who’s suing him over Striperella column inches in the most prestigious comics publication in America. How is that news, but Shonen Jump selling over 500,000 copies is not?

And remember that it’s not just monetary malefactors that the Journal will go after with no eye as to whether the story is actually newsworthy. Michael Dean’s recent Bad Girls piece falls into this category as well: Though I'm sure no one had anything against these guys personally, the tone of "Isn't it funny how all this bad shit is happening between these awful, awful artists?" was inescapable. It was a reasonably entertaining piece in a Jerry Springer Show sort of way, but seriously, what's the point? Unless the point is producing Jerry Springer journalism, which is more troubling than the Journal must realize.

4) The meat of News Watch, then, is its obituaries and convention reports. The former are unobjectionable enough; indeed, it seems that they’re universally praised, and regarded as an important contribution to the documentation of this art form as its early generations of practitioners pass on into memory. But try to imagine the New York Times being challenged on the merits of its reporting and falling back on “hey, they write good obituaries!”--it just shows how lopsided the Journal’s news-gathering mechanism really is.

As for the convention reports, am I alone in thinking that for all the space they take up, they seem to miss the point far more often than not? Larry Rodman’s recap of SPX 2003, for example, buried the lede to an egregious degree. The story from SPX this year--as even I, someone who'd never been there before, could tell while I was there--was that it was a big-time bust, despite the addition of an extra day. Between the disastrous flirtation with the larger, more commercial comic-con in Baltimore, the exit of key Expo planners like Tom Devlin and Eric Reynolds, the severing of academia’s International Comics Arts Festival from the Expo, and the increasing likelihood that the NYC-based alt-con MOCCA ate SPX’s lunch, the “SPX bombed this year” angle should have been irresistible, in no small part because it was true.

Then there’s Greg Cwiklik’s foray into condescending cultural anthropology with his WizardWorld Chicago 2003 article. I will admit to having a personal aversion to “aren’t fanboys stupid?” type writing, mainly because this fact is painfully self-evident, continuing to write about it is wholly unnecessary, it too often leads to entire genres being inaccurately tarred with the “Simpsons Comic Book Guy” rubric, and for the love of pete, shouldn’t the Comics Journal be above this adolescent patronizing silliness by now? Cwiklik is a fine writer, but he’s already demonstrated a thoroughgoing ignorance of the “mainstream” he was ostensibly sent to cover; his “What’s Wrong with Superheroes Today?” piece in the Journal’s Winter 2002 special edition, which instead obliviously chronicled what was wrong with superheroes circa 1994, was one of the low points in the recent history of accurate reporting in the Journal. In his WizardWorld piece we once again see gems like “Marvel, for example, has a new line of comics with a ‘parental advisory/explicit material’ label,” a line he goes on to lambaste after sampling but one of its offerings. The point here is not necessarily to defend Marvel’s MAX line--it has produced several entertaining comics (Cage, U.S. War Machine, Born) and at least one quite good one (Alias), but it’s not exactly Drawn & Quarterly, and isn’t really even Vertigo either--but to point out the obvious fact that this “new” endeavor began when the freaking Twin Towers were still standing. Shouldn’t a location reporter be at least slightly conversant with the recent history of the area he’s covering? Similarly snide, disingenuous comments in Cwiklik’s piece (“Apparently [Jim] Lee has given up on independent comics-making because he recently ‘launched Batman to the top of the sales charts’”) appear to tout ignorance as some sort of reportorial virtue, at least as far as News Watch is concerned, when it comes to areas it feels do not merit serious coverage.

Beyond all that, what’s left is chronicling the ongoing mental deterioration of Dave Sim and Ted Rall; in essence, more Jerry Springerisms. Fun? Sure, the first dozen times or so. Newsworthy? No. News Watch worthy? C’mon.

-----

Like it or not, the Comics Journal is the journal of record for the English-speaking comics medium and industry. The problem is that its publishers and editors appear to fall squarely in the “not” category. For all its occasional brilliance, for all that it’s done to raise the bar of what we consider greatness in comic art and fairness in comic business, it’s still run like a glorified zine, overly subject to the whims of its (admittedly brilliant, but mercurial and far from infallible) founders. Little effort is made to engage the industry in its current state, to chronicle the cutting edge, to evaluate What’s Wrong (and Right) with Comics Today.

This is not just a News Watch problem, by the way: I’ve had many discussions with managing editor Milo George about what I see as the Journal’s failure, in not running timely criticism of major new works, to maintain a running conversation with what’s held up to be the best work the medium can produce, rightly or wrongly. My personal axe to grind here, as always, is the near-complete lack of coverage of important mainstream comics, as defined either by sales or by critical acclaim. I’m not saying that the Journal is obligated to laud Bendis & Maleev’s Daredevil to high heaven, but shouldn’t this and other mainstream works pointed to by the business as being worthy of praise at least be evaluated by the business’s foremost magazine, if only to determine the veracity of these claims? I’d be happy to see the Journal be as mean to the mainstream as I myself can be, as long as I felt this crucial part of the industry (and medium) was being seriously engaged to begin with. But it’s not just the current mainstream that’s being overlooked; major works in alt/indy/underground/literary/art comix often go months, even years, after their release without getting so much as a review in the Journal. I simply do not feel that the publication is doing an adequate job covering the art form if it’s not talking about the books when they are having their greatest, most immediate impact on readers, publishers, and other creators--that is to say when they are actively defining what comics means. I’m not calling on TCJ to suddenly become Entertainment Weekly, as Milo seemed to infer in the post linked above; I’m calling on it to do what I think it would be best served doing—to act as the source for intelligent criticism of those comics that define what comics as an art form are capable of in the here and now. (By the way, we’re still waiting on that piece about Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl.)

All of this, though, applies more urgently to News Watch. The Comics Journal subtitles itself “The Magazine of News and Criticism.” We can quibble about the latter portion of this self-definition all we want, but the former is undoubtedly in doubt. Major, industry-altering stories go completely unreported, even as new-media venues investigate, unearth, and explain their every aspect. No discernible agenda of aesthetic or business advocacy is advanced to compensate. Such activist statements as are made are used as little more than excuses to have some fun at the expense of perennial whipping boys or creators whose work is assumed to be aesthetically sub-par. Lengthy reports miss the angles that made the stories worth reporting on at length in the first place. Ignorance of the subject at hand is permitted, if not encouraged, so long as the snark factor provides for a reasonable degree of entertainment value. A perpetual bulwark of strong obituaries can stem the tide, but it can’t hold it back forever.

For too long, reading News Watch has been a little like tuning into 60 Minutes expecting a serious investigative piece on Saudi funding of hardline mosques in the U.S. or IBM covering up brain cancer deaths in its clean rooms, and finding instead an interview with Sting or hidden-camera expose on expired milk being sold at BJ's from Dateline NBC.

"It's too late to save Corner Comics, of course, but what about the next retailer to face a similar situation?"

--Dirk Deppey

"I don't know who's in the right here, the comics shop or the IRS, but when the government wins in their demand for books of any kind to be destroyed, members of a democracy ought to be goddamn alarmed."

--Alan David Doane

"Whoever's fault this latest mishap is, it really is a shame for all these comic books to be destroyed, and for the industry to most likely lose one more comic shop."

--Shawn Fumo

"...Corner Comics became another front in the IRS's never-ending war against cash-based accounting....Publications will be destroyed because of this. Stories shredded. Pleasure reduced. Accrue that, why don't you?"

--Jim Henley

"If you know of ANY shop (comic or not) that is using the cash-based method of accounting, warn them....Switch to accrued, or risk having the IRS go after you because they know you don't have enough money to fight back. And say one last farewell to the boxes of comics (over 100 boxes all told) about to go under the shredder. Curse the taxman for picking on those that can't fight back (may the spirits of the shredded superheroes haunt him forever... heh)."

--Tegan Gjovaag

"Good Lord, but it's dull on the world of comics today. Can't someone start a fight about comic covers or something?"

--Graeme McMillan

Good priorities there, Graeme.


(UPDATE: Laura Gjovaag's reporting on Corner Comics may now be found at this page.)

I've now seen a few commercials for Ben Affleck's new action movie directed by John Woo, Paycheck. In a post-Kill Bill world, isn't there something insulting, if not borderline offensive, about having Uma Thurman play the traditional semi-tough female second-banana role? Particularly when the first banana is The Asshole from Fashionable Male?

One of the near-countless great things about Kill Bill was/is how the fact that Thurman's character is a woman is not commented upon in the usual ways. No male character snickers about the idea of a woman thinking she could defeat him, then gets his comeuppance, and aren't we feminist, blah blah blah. It's taken for granted that the Bride, and her many female opponents, are brilliant warriors. Her femininity is an issue--she is called the Bride, after all, and she's attempting to avenge the death of her unborn child; in so doing she attempts to spare several young female characters (Vernita's daughter, Go-Go Yubari) any pain--but never is it set up as a potentially detrimental attribute to be overcome. As a matter of fact, during her conversation with Vernita, the Bride makes a point of saying that her former mentor and current would-be murderer, Bill, would never qualify a description of her prowess by saying she was the best of her gender. Even the baddest of the bad guys in the film's world sees her for her abilities first, and for her gender as an afterthought.

Meanwhile, you can just tell from the commercials that in Paycheck, we're all supposed to sit around and be impressed when Uma does something macho, as though this compensates for her womanhood, not flows from it naturally. Boo. Hiss.

THE RETURN OF THE KING COMES OUT TODAY

HOLY CRAP

Yes, they are. Christopher Butcher lays it all out for us.

As I always say, if you think there aren't a ton of good comics coming out all the time, you're not paying attention. (Butcher lists some of them, as does Alan David Doane (twice!), as have I.) For all the kvetching and complaining and raging against the dying of the light that I do, I never lose sight of the fact that there's a lot of truly amazing work out there, and I've been fortunate enough to read it. It may be tempting to give up on the industry, but never, ever let that make you want to give up on the art form.

In responding to my piece on the Comics Journal's News Watch section, Dirk Deppey notes that despite what I had alleged, News Watch had in fact covered the CrossGen and Bill Jemas meltdowns. I must have over-relied on simply looking at the tables of contents for recent issues as listed on TCJ.com to jog my memory of News Watch's coverage, because I didn't remember reading anything about Jemas's ouster (still don't, actually--can anyone point that issue out? Perhaps I missed it), and I thought the magazine's CrossGen piece was written before the big changes in the company's business model had been made. But my apologies for the inaccuracies--hardly a good example to be setting when you're taking a news organization to task for similar offenses!

He may have had an illegitimate child, but clearly it was Strom Thurmond who was the bastard. Andrew Sullivan ponders a man who fought tooth and nail to keep racial discrimination as the law of the land, yet clearly had no problem exploiting underage employees of his for sexual pleasure regardless of their race. The revelation of Thurmond's fathering a child with a black woman makes him even more loathsome in my eyes, if that's possible; to him, black people may not have been good enough to go to the same schools or eat at the same counters or drink from the same water fountains and probably even to vote, if that were possible, but they were good enough to fuck and then discard.

Strom Thurmond was scum, and it's to this country's everlasting shame that he remained in its highest legislative body until the 21st Century. And I feel much the same when I hear the noxious Klansman Robert Byrd's latest pronouncements against our efforts to defeat fascism, particularly odious considering he spent his formative years espousing the American brand.

I've started to realize that as much as I've been enjoying both my Tolkienblogging and the responses I've gotten to it, it's become an obstacle to my Tolkienreading, which obviously remains my top priority. I've begun thinking things like, "oh, I'd like to read some more tonight, but I've got to write about what I've read since last time first. And I don't have the energy to write." So I end up neither reading nor writing, and that's no fun for anybody.

I'll probably be talking about the new film, and may even be occasionally submitting thoughts about the books (mostly musings on why this or that was or was not included in the movie versions, I think; there's a lot of non-movie stuff that deserves some exposure!). But I don't think I'll be going chapter by chapter anymore. Look, I love you guys, but I sure do love reading these books as well.

Jim Henley on the problem with democracy. Seriously.

Democracy as a concept is useless if, the second a given populace is given the vote, they use it to strip away the inalienable rights of others. As Jim points out, hawks tend to forget to point this out when espousing democracy to the Muslim world; "liberals," such as they are today, tend to mention it only by way of saying things like "fuck you, Shrub, when the Iraqis elect ayatollahs you'll steal their election too, and where's freedom then? BUSH LIED!"

Tyranny of the majority is not democracy.

This Leftist critique of Leftist opposition to Gulf War II has been wending its way through the Internet for a while now. And for good reason: It's correct.

"Whatever other crimes it committed or covered up in the twentieth century, the Left could be relied upon to fight fascism. A regime that launched genocidal extermination campaigns against impure minorities would be recognised for what it was and denounced.

Not the least of the casualties of the Iraq war is the death of anti-fascism. Patriots could oppose Bush and Blair by saying that it wasn't in Britain's interests to follow America. Liberals could put the UN first and insist that the United States proved its claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the court of world opinion. Adherents to both perspectives were free to tell fascism's victims, 'We're sorry to leave you under a tyranny and realise that many more of you will die, but that's your problem.'

The Left, which has been formally committed to the Enlightenment ideal of universal freedom for two centuries, couldn't bring itself to be as honest. Instead millions abandoned their comrades in Iraq and engaged in mass evasion....For the first time in its history the Left has nothing to say to the victims of fascism."

Traditionally I was more of a "liberal" than a "Leftist," because even at my wildest I always recognized Marxism and Communism for the dehumanizing shams that they are; and even as a liberal I always believed international institutions to be means to a just and free world, not ends in themselves; but basically, there you have it.

How can I be a part of any movement that mobilizes to defend fascism? How can anybody?

The mystery of the Comics Journal's phantom coverage of Bill Jemas's ouster and CrossGen's near-collapse has been solved for me by various correspondents: the Jemas story received a four-graf treatment in the Journal's recent Fort Thunder-centric issue (also known as the one with the ad for "THE FIRST EXPLOSIVE ISSUES OF RAKAN AND AYA" on the back). CrossGen's situation, meanwhile, got a paragraph (necessarily truncated, it would seem, since little of the real blockbuster information was available when the issue in question went to press) in that same issue, with a reference to earlier reporting on the company in issue #255. Both appear under the catch-all title "Breaking News."

(News editor Mike Dean has since written a longer article on the current status of the CrossGen affair, which you can find excerpted here. It includes a clever bit pointing out that CrossGen is attempting to have it both ways by touting their comic-book line to comic-book readers by saying it's not superheroes, while touting the potential of their comic-book line to be made into lucrative movie properties to non-comic-book readers in the movie biz by pointing to the grosses of superhero films; this is offset a bit, unfortunately, by Dean repeating the silly "we don't publish superheroes" party line unchallenged. Listen, they're in crazy outfits and have extraordinary powers. You do the math. That these books can be referred to with a straight face as non-superhero says a lot more about the narrowness of the "mainstream" than the broadness of CrossGen.)

I apologize once again for having overlooked these articles--well, mentions--when putting together my list of major stories on which News Watch appears to have dropped the ball. But I'm not going to back down from asserting that the ball has, in fact, been dropped. These stories were huge, but together they took up half a page: to give you an idea of context, the upper half was dedicated to a Doonesbury strip about Howard Dean flash mobs. And this was after fully 28 pages of con reports, obituaries, and bad-girl shenanigans. The priorities this suggests are, well, interesting.

And while we're on the subject, the Jemas coverage characterized his reign at Marvel by focusing almost exclusively on the bravado and publicity stunts--in other words, the most easily noticed aspects of Jemas/Quesada "New Marvel"--and steered completely clear of meatier changes made by the pair: the new emphasis on hiring highly-regarded writers rather than relying on flashy art; the relative creative freedom (for the big-name creators, anyway) that lasted until Jemas's last months at the company, at which point he seems to have decided he could write every book in the line himself through a heavy editorial hand; and the long, strange trip of Jemas's abortive Epic line from anything-goes bastion of creator ownership for tyros and superstars alike to a single rigorously edited, intentionally stillborn Marvel superhero anthology. News Watch's speculation on reasons for Jemas's departure is just that--speculation; no mention is made of Jemas's rivalry with Marvel West Coast honcho Avi Arad, his mutual antipathy society with retailers, or the pre-ouster dressing-down he received at the hands of Ike Perlmutter (ostensibly spurred by fan outrage at the firing of Fantastic Four creative team Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo, and/or a well-timed letter of complaint by retailer Matt Hawes that mentioned everything from Marvel's controversial no-overprint policy to what's seen amongst fanboys as a New Marvel-wide disdain for superheroes).

My point: Covered properly, this wouldn't be a story one would have to rack one's brain to remember.


(Still no word on the whereabouts of manga, by the way.)

Bruce Baugh has written the finest review of Frank Miller & Lynn Varley's wildly controversial Batman miniseries The Dark Knight Strikes Again I've ever read. And he loves the book--but maybe not in the way you're thinking.

I've begun to notice that this graphic novel's defenders, in the process of explaining why it's a great book, may be doing more harm than good. DKSA proponents tend to emphasize Miller & Varley's iconoclasm toward the realist-superhero trend, a trendw which began with the "grim 'n' gritty" "revisionist" superhero tales of the mid-80s (notably Watchmen and Miller & Varley's own The Dark Knight Returns) before transmogrifying into the retro-tinged reverence of works by Kurt Busiek, Mark Waid, and Alex Ross. DKSA, these proponents say, is basically the anti-realist manifesto, pegging superheroes as over-the-top and even ridiculous, and revelling in it. It is to the superhero comics of the post-Marvels industry what the Ramones were to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and anyone who doesn't like the book (here comes the dreaded phrase) Doesn't Get The Joke.

The thing is, it's not that these proponents are wrong--I think they've latched on to an important aspect of DKSA, and I myself have made statements supporting these interpretations (probably not the "ridiculous" bit, but, y'know, most of the rest) from time to time, because I think that stuff is indeed present in the text. But this is not the only important aspect of the book. Moreover, saying of a book's detractors that they don't get the joke leads too easily to a retort of "I get it; it's just not funny." Take a look at Christopher Butcher's review of the book:

"I gotta say, I really enjoyed THE DARK NIGHT STRIKES AGAIN...but that’s mostly because I got the joke...You see, Frank Miller recognizes that Superheroes are generally stupid, and that currently superheroes aren’t stupid enough....Fanboys just found having the mirror held up to their hobby distasteful is all, and it certainly is garish; a bitter pill to swallow. Unless of course, you’re in on the joke."

Butcher makes it sound as though, in order to enjoy this book, you must possess a closet contempt for the superhero genre, and anyone who doesn't understand that this is what Miller's up to is the Simpsons Comic Book Guy. No wonder the book, contextualized this way as it so often is, can coax even intelligent superhero fans like the estimable Johnny Bacardi to go absolutely nuclear against it:

"I hated it. Thought it was a spiteful, offputting big fat "fuck you" right in the face of the very people who want to admire Miller's work the most: comic book fans. Garish, ugly, often dumb and crude, with absoultely none of the style and wit he brought to its predecessor. Miller was simply taking the money and saying to his readers "You want super-heroes from me instead of Elmore Leonard or Greek warriors? OK, fine. Here you go. Enjoy!" ...[it's] Frank's wet fart in the face of the fanboy."

And believe me, the results are even worse when Butcher-style defenses of DKSA fall into the hands of less-temperate detractors, who gleefully take the opportunity to use the book and its defenders as a personification of absolutely everything they don't like about comics, tossing in ad hominems about everything from manga to Internet critics to the original Dark Knight Returns to the dreaded spectre of "elitism" and "reverse snobbery." I've got news for you, folks: I've walked amongst the real elitists and reverse-snobs of comics, and they wouldn't touch DKSA with the proverbial ten-meter cattle prod.

That's why a review of this book like Bruce's is so important: You simply cannot poke holes in it with "I get it; it's just not funny." Bruce doesn't think Miller's joking at all, and explains why--he contextualizes the art with larger illustrative traditions, he delineates how DKSA is an attempt to reclaim the now-ignored variations in tone and approach present in DKR from its imitators, and in an extremely thoughtful passage shows how Miller appreciates and revitalizes the rich and varied legacy of the superhero itself, as opposed to those who think there's only One Way to Do Superheroes, regardless of what way it happens to be. In other words, Baugh comes not to bury superheroes, but to praise them; does so, moreover, because that's what Miller was doing in the first place. (This fact is quite obvious both from my own conversations with the man about the book and from all the interviews he's given on the topic, but it clearly bears repeating, loudly and often.)

I was happy to see that it was my own praise of DKSA that spurred Bruce to revisit the book, but Bruce says everything I wish I could have said myself. Go, read, and reevaluate.

That tends to be how it works, generally speaking. Anyway, some lengthy Hitch-related items to be found these days.

The first is a debate between Hitchens and anti-war writer Tariq Ali, hosted by Democracy Now! (home of an article entitled "Resisting occupation from Northern Ireland to Iraq"--yeah, if there's one thing the IRA and Fedayeen are all about, it's democracy!). Ali is too deeply invested in making people who set off bombs that kill their countrymen a dozen at a time into junior George Washingtons to acknowledge that Hitch is kicking the shit out of him, but it's still a trouncing worth reading. When Ali implies that the "resistance" will eventually be pushing for elections, it seems that Hitchens can barely stop himself from laughing.

Also worth reading is a long two-part interview with Hitch at FrontPage Magazine. The first part focuses on the Iraq War and Hitch's falling-out with his former fellow travelers on the Left. I like how he sticks it to his traditional-conservative interlouctor for supporting all sorts of heinous shit in the name of anti-Communism during the Cold War, while still finding time to decimate the usual bromides that ersatz liberals and Leftists have been offering up in support of the most retrograde, openly fascist forces on Earth.

The second part focuses on the Israel/Palestine situation. Hitchens puts a worthwhile emphasis on the Sharon administration's intransigence, but though he's quick to lambaste the "Islamic nihilists" who blow themselves up and are excused by the Left with the ridiculous claim that they're trying to bring about a two-state solution, he fails to address that this plague of Islamic nihilism now infects a sizeable majority of the Palestinian populace. In other words, I could have used a little less emphasis on what a bad idea the founding of Israel was and more on what a bad idea Palestinian society as it stands now is. Still, Hitchens's ability to condemn theocratic hardliners on both sides of the divide is refreshing, and indeed nearly singular among all the voices currently embroiled in this debate. (Both halves of the interview are full of fabulous quotes, and since I don't want to abuse my blockquote tags, you'll just have to go and discover them yourselves.)

Hitchens's writing is characterized with an intolerance for injustice so palpable you can practically wear it as body armor. Go and read. (Links courtesy of The Christopher Hitchens Web.)

Worried that the overwhelming level of critical praise being flung at The Return of the King means that you won't be able to find a review that will make you want to chew your own foot off? Fear not! Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat is reading the most wrong-minded, idiotic critiques of the film he can find, so you don't have to!

First up is this New York Times piece by writer Caryn James. James, a woman who does not like The Lord of the Rings, has extrapolated that women do not like The Lord of the Rings. To support this notion, she relies on data collected about the books' readership before the films were even released; polls that show that women are "less enthusiastic" about the film than men (polls so convincing, apparently, that their numbers need not be cited); and the fact that she doesn't women don't like Star Wars either.

Nevermind that in order to make the kind of Titanic-level money LOTR is making, you need repeat business from women. Nevermind that wherever you look, women critics and women moviegoers are among the film's most vocal admirers. Nevermind that nearly every week for the past two years I've seen women reading the books on the subway. She's got her own anecdotal evidence: Some women at her office went to see it just because Viggo Mortensen is hot, and she herself was, like, bored. She is women, hear her yawn!


UPDATE: Jim Henley is also on the Caryn James beat, pointing out whole new ways in which this article stunk.

(CAUTION: YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENTER A SPOILER-RICH ENVIRONMENT)

The Return of the King was astounding.

And these types of movies usually have disappointment built in. For example, I haven't even bothered to see Matrix Revolutions yet. And I wasn't even one of the people who hated Reloaded. It's just that it can't possibly be as good as it should be. Return of the King was every bit as good as it should have been and more.

Oddly, despite its even-longer-than-usual running time, it still felt like the most heavily edited installment. There's just so much that goes on in ROTK that I guess Jackson could only fit so much into a theatrical release. But Minas Tirith/Gondor isn't nearly as fleshed out, in terms of getting a feel for the people and their plight, as was Edoras/Rohan; the battle plan on the Pelennor isn't as clear as the one at Helm's Deep; Theoden's death didn't get followed up on even as much as his dialogueless son's did in The Two Towers; no Mouth of Sauron to taunt the army at the Black Gates; the journey through Mordor was really truncated; the Orc armor that Frodo & Sam was never used; the Easterlings that marched through the Black Gate in TTT didn't show up here; no Two Watchers scene; no Woses (which, incidentally, would have been a good way for Jackson to deflect the idiotic accusation that Tolkien is racist, not to mention employ Maori actors); Gothmog, the lead Orc, doesn't get his comeuppance on screen despite having been built up as a personalized menace for the whole film; no confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King at the gates of Minas Tirith, despite the WK's Dolph Lundgrenesque declaration that he would break the wizard; Eowyn's absence from the Last Battle isn't explained (if Merry made it, why couldn't she?); Eomer's grief at the loss of his uncle and near-death of his sister, and his subsequent need to put it aside and lead his men to almost certain death, aren't depicted at all; obviously Denethor could have used a little humanizing; and there was no Houses of Healing romance between Eowyn and Faramir, which I think was needed for their respective character arcs.

But these are all mere quibbles, really--I think much of this will find its way into the Extended Edition, which in spite of Peter Jackson's express wishes is going to be considered the definitive version just like its two predecessors. We've still been given the most human, most moving, most frightening, most awe-inspiring epic action film ever. After that it's just icing.

Some favorite moments:

* The charge of the Mumakil, obviously. It's the part everyone talks about (that and the lighting of the beacons, which was also gorgeous, something I never would have thought of doing that way), and for good reason. At some point during this sequence my jaw literally dropped. This is not something that happens to me, you know. It dropped and stayed open for the duration of the scene. I simply could not get over how incredible what I was seeing was. It was as though someone had cracked open my head and poured the contents of my mind onto the screen. It's not that I couldn't have filmed it better myself--it's that I could barely have imagined it better myself.

* The Smeagol & Deagol flashback. ROTK is likely to become the highest-grossing motion picture in history, and it begins with one of the most viscerally disturbing murders you're likely to see on screen. It reminded me of nothing so much as a similar killing in Jackson's brilliant drama Heavenly Creatures--the awkwardness, the brutality, the intimacy. Perfectly chilling and tragic, it makes you feel that loss of life, that senseless, purposeless evil.

* Grond, the battering ram. This was when my Tolkien-obsessive genes kicked into overdrive. When I started hearing the Morgul-army chant "GROND... GROND... GROND...", I just giggled. I couldn't believe I was seeing Grond on screen, at long last. Because that's what I was seeing, no doubt about it.

* Eomer. Even though, as I said, his emotional arc goes unexplored, he has maybe the best war face in cinematic history. I got those giggles again every time I saw him charging.

* Shelob's Lair. Did I expect a live-action version of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece to include a fairly explicit homage to the bone-room scene in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? No, no I did not. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised!

* The Olog-Hai. I was really, really pulling for the big, mean, smart, well-trained trolls to show up. I was not disappointed. No sir.

* The cries of the Nazgul. Up until this point I had been a little underwhelmed by the Ringwraiths' cries. The filmmakers have said how proud of them they are--Fran Walsh, co-writer and wife of Peter Jackson, contributed them--but I didn't feel they had the overwhelming power that is described in the book. This time around, however, I just thought, "Holy shit." Watching the soliders grab their ears and scream in fear--yeah, I could understand that.

* Minas Morgul & the Winding Stair. A perfect nightmare. Well done.

* The Orcs. I was unsure how Jackson & Co. could top the Uruk-Hai, who after all were pretty much perfect, and were much bigger than your average Orc to boot. But they managed, essentially by making them look like something out of a Heironymous Bosch painting. The hardcore S&M tinge to their armor was a welcome touch, too. And was that a Goonies homage in the design of the lead Orc?

* Faramir's charge. Since seeing it, I've been listening to "When the Tigers Broke Free" by Pink Floyd a lot. Same basic idea.

* The absence of "The Scouring of the Shire." Don't get me wrong--it's one of my favorite parts of the original book. But I didn't miss it here. Jackson didn't need it, ultimately; he was still able to drive home the fact that you can't go home again, simply and effectively, in that silent scene at the Green Dragon. Moreover, leaving this out (and Bombadil, and the Barrow-Wights, and Butterbur, and Glorfindel, and the extra stories at the Council, and the spectral wolf attack, and the slime Balrog, and the march of the Huorns, and the voice of Saruman, and Aragorns palantir showdown with Saruman, and Denethor’s palantir abuse, and the sons of Elrond, and the Two Watchers, and the Woses, and on and on and on) allows people who come to the books only after seeing the movies to be pleasantly surprised, time and again, by Tolkien’s inventions.

* The cello music at the end. The second I heard it, I thought to myself, “oh, that’s perfect. Just perfect.”

And it was.

Hey, we’re already up to the third installment in the larger “Stupid Rings Critics” saga! I guess that means that, as fans of writing about movies, we should say it’s gone on too long and dismiss the whole enterprise.

At least that’s how the Newark Star-Ledger’s Stephen Whitty might feel about it. His big complaint about movies these days, you see, is that there’s too damn much of them. And who can blame him? There’s really nothing a person who watches and writes about movies for a living should hate more than watching more movie.

Whitty offers up this piercing insight into this terrible problem:

Well, it's the new way of story-telling, and we only have the success of Peter Jackson's trilogy to blame for it.

The three parts of "The Matrix," the two "volumes" of "Kill Bill" -- directors no longer seem capable of telling an adventure without stretching it out over several parts and many years. What might be told in three hours is now told in four -- and then split in half, to stoke the filmmaker's ego and further fuel the merchandising.

Oh, so that’s why The Lord of the Rings was divided into three parts—to sell lunchboxes and make Peter Jackson feel good about himself! It all makes sense now! But gee, you’d think Hollywood could have come up with better names for their three arbitrarily selected individual installments. I mean, what the hell is a fellowship, anyway? And I’m sure I counted a lot more than just two towers! And hello--Return of the King? Spoiler alert, anyone?

Despite this hugely insightful view of the merchandising/ego axis (which explains the runaway success of those Kill Bill plush toys the kids are crazy about this Christmas, by the way—“Mommy, I want O-Ren Ishii, with removable scalp!”), Whitty feels a reporter’s need to dig deeper.

Of course, Tolkien set the stage himself as novelist, with his original triple-volume epic.

Gee, you think?

But even that was eventually issued in a one-volume edition.

So the answer here was to produce one giant ten-hour movie! I mean, duh!

Besides, books are different from screenplays. They work in different ways, and their very nature requires different rules.

For example, screenplays, unlike books, do not require a beginning, middle, and ending, so Jackson should obviously have skipped two of them. Which two? Hey, far be it from Stephen to second-guess the creative process!

That's because unlike movies, books -- the original random-access entertainment -- allow you to read at your own pace, and skip around at will. It's an infinitely flexible format, and it's why epics like "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Matrix" actually work best on DVD, which similarly allows viewers to recall a fact (or skip some padding) with a grab of the remote.

”Hey, Beelzebub!” “Yes, Lucifer?” “A professional movie critic has come out in favor of shortened attention spans! Pass out the ice skates!”

That, you see, is the worst thing about these durned epics—it’s so hard for poor Stephen to remember everything.

Jackson's new "The Return of the King," for example, opens with a flashback to a scene that occurs even before the series began.

And who needs that? So what if it depicts the central event in the history of the entire world the story is set in--Where are the Aristotelian unities? I’m so confused! Mommy!

It then flash-forwards to approximately where we left off a year ago. Don't remember precisely where that was? Tough. There's not a bit of narration, or a title card, or even so much as a "Previously on Middle Earth ... ."

C’mon, guys! Third Watch does this every week, and for that you only had to go seven days between installments! Well, longer if it got preempted by a special holiday editon of Dateline NBC (“Tinsel: What you don’t know could kill you!”), but still. I’m just a movie critic. What do you expect me to do, pay attention?

For audiences coming right from a replay of "The Two Towers" DVD this may be just fine,

Even though the lack of a remote control will be sorely missed—hey, I need a pause button! It takes time to read those subtitles!

but other moviegoers can expect to be a little perplexed. How did Sam and Frodo get separated from Gandalf and Aragorn again? Where's Saruman? And why exactly is everyone fighting so hard to preserve a land of hereditary rulers and cranky old guys in dresses?

Listen, I’ve forgotten every single thing that happened in the first three films! Why isn’t the third one laden with pointless exposition? How else can I understand what’s going on with the fighting and the yelling and the killing and the flying and the mmmglaven?

How else indeed. But Steve-O’s got the answer: Interpret everything like a trust-fund revolutionary trying his damndest to piss off his English 118 professor!

If the answer isn't immediately clear, it may be because you don't share Tolkien's reverence for the ruling class and implicit belief in the superiority of Northern Europe. Always lurking on the page, it becomes more explicit in this installment, where you can't help but notice the abundance of blue-eyed, fair-skinned heroes fighting off hordes of swarthy brutes.

Ah, just so, Whitty, just so. When Tolkien wasn’t busy attending rallies hosted by Sir Oswald Moseley, he poured all his intellectual energy into explaining why Merrie Olde had the right—nay, the duty—to purge God’s Earth of the hirsute Mohammedan and the coal-skinned Pygmy. All this business about trying to create a mythos for England? Racist boondoggle, much like the inexcusable absence of Asian-Americans from The Iliad.

That's not necessarily an offensive choice in and of itself, or even inappropriate. Tolkien's Middle Earth was always a stand-in for an ancient, homogeneous, pre-Norman England;

No. Really?

its whiteness can be a little startling but it's still preferable to those Hollywood movies that, trying to make the Middle Ages relevant, would drag in Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman as "the Moor."

See, I’m not a goodthinkful P.C. dumbass! I’m taking a bold stand against Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves! (This despite the fact that that movie was a comfortable 143 minutes long—a mark of filmic greatness if ever there was one!)

But Jackson's movie doesn't ignore other races, or patronize them. It casts them as villains.

Indeed, which is why the Council on American-Uruk Relations is mounting a boycott.

Why is it, otherwise, that our heroes' latest enemies are said, ominously, to come "from the South," and enter riding elephants and wearing burnooses? Why, then, would Aragorn gives a rousing speech before the climactic battle, telling his troops that they fight for "the West" and all they hold dear?

Could it have something, maybe, to do with the incredibly elaborate, detailed, and planned-out geography and history of a fictional universe Tolkien spent the better part of seven decades creating? I say thee nay!

Ladies and gentlemen, Stephen Whitty is an idiot. Why is it, otherwise, that he says, ominously, that epic, multi-part filmmaking is inherently bad, even when taken from an epic, multi-part source? Why, then, would he give a rousing speech telling his readers that he doesn’t have the brainpower to watch movies without pausing to ask his exasperated friends and family questions like, “Now, wait—who was Rosebud again?” Why, when all else failed, would he attempt to tar with the nationalist-bigot brush a work written in part as a response to the two most horrific nationalist-bigot-inspired conflagrations the world has ever seen?

Yes, he’s an idiot. I feel confident saying this, because I’m saying it at the end of the piece, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have it in him to read this far.

Newsday's John Anderson can't be faulted for his judgement about the quality of The Return of the King. His review is, for the most part, both astute and eloquent in its praise of the film. No, it's his attempt to parse the political implications of the film that made me want to punch myself repeatedly in the face. Quoth Anderson:

The dangers of empire. The evil of unchecked power. The importance of unity among diverse peoples. Tolkien's half-million-word message has become as fresh as it ever was.

Am I the only one surprised he didn't break down and include "The refusal of Gandalf to consult his European allies" or "The need to negotiate with Mordor for a more stringent weapons-inspection regime" in there for good measure? Holy jeez, but this is the lamest attempt to shoehorn a mealy-mouthed "anti-war" message into The Lord of the Rings this side of Viggo Mortensen.

Listen. There's plenty of warnings in both Tolkien and Jackson's interpretation thereof against the abuse of power: the abyss-gazes-also corruption of Saruman, the deadly allure of the Ring and its effect on Boromir, Gollum, and Frodo, and so forth. And I'll even grant Anderson the "diversity" angle: Tolkien and his filmic interpreters both stress the need for different societies to put aside their distrust and join together to fight a common enemy.

But the key word there isn't "different," it's "fight." The diverse societies that needed to unite did not include the goddamn Orcs. Saruman and Sauron did not have veto power at the Council of Elrond. Rohan and Gondor did not issue joint statements condemning the attack on Osgiliath or the suicide bombing at Helm's Deep and urging both sides to head back to the negotiating table. Denethor and Wormtongue-addled Theoden were seen as a bad leaders because they refused to do what needed to be done, i.e. rise up and slaughter every Orc they could get their swords on, not because of excessive cowboyism (this despite the fact that Theoden did, in essence, live on a ranch). Not once did Aragorn ask Legolas and Gimli, "Why do they hate us?"

This was a movie about the dangers of empire, all right--the danger faced by free peoples when an empire loudly announces its desire to see them all dead, then rapidly begins pursuing this end. It was about the danger of not waking up and kicking such an empire's ass.

And this was a movie about the evil of unchecked power, but only insofar as it was much, much more about the power of unchecked evil.

Doofus.

Which is a roundabout way of saying "Here's my Top 25 Comics Released in 2003 That I Read."

1. Epileptic Volume 1, by David B.

2. Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, by Marc Bell

3. Ultimate Spider-Man, by Brian Bendis & Mark Bagley

4. Alias, by Brian Bendis & Michael Gaydos

5. Ultimate Six, by Brian Bendis & Trevor Hairsine

6. Daredevil, by Brian Bendis & Alex Maleev

7. Powers, by Brian Bendis & Michael Oeming

8. Rubber Necker, by Nick Bertozzi

9. Teratoid Heights, by Mat Brinkman

10. Unlikely, by Jeffrey Brown

11. Black Hole, by Charles Burns

12. Ripple, by Dave Cooper

13. Squadron Supreme, by Mark Gruenwald & various artists

14. Kramers Ergot #4, by Sammy Harkham et al.

15. Palomar, by Gilbert Hernandez

16. The Ultimates, by Mark Millar & Brian Hitch

17. The Dark Knight Strikes Again, by Frank Miller & Lynn Varley

18. New X-Men, by Grant Morrison & various artists

19. The Filth, by Grant Morrison & Chris Weston

20. 100%, by Paul Pope

21. Supreme Power, by J. Michael Straczynski & Gary Frank

22. Blankets, by Craig Thompson

23. The Acme Novelty Date Book, by Chris Ware

24. Quimby the Mouse, by Chris Ware

25. The Frank Book, by Jim Woodring

For whatever reason, these were the books that got me really excited about comics this year. They were the pamphlets I could hardly wait to read, the graphic novels that floored me with the depth of their invention and enthusiasm, the hidden treasures from years past or countries abroad or scenes undiscovered. As you can see, if a meteor were to strike Fantagraphics headquarters tomorrow while Brian Michael Bendis was visiting for some reason (maybe to use the bathroom?), I'd have a lot fewer comics to read.

Again, this is just a list of great comics I actually read this year, which may explain the absence of several fan favorites (Louis Riel, The Fixer, Sleeper, Catwoman, Wanted). I decided to arbitrarily stop at Number 25, so my apologies to Ultimate X-Men, Arrowsmith, The Iron Wagon, Forlorn Funnies, Chrome Fetus, AEIOU, Maybe We Could Just Lie Here Holding Each Other Naked And Not Have Sex, Incredible Hulk, and so forth, some of which didn't make the cut, others of which I just forgot until I'd already written out the list and don't feel much like tinkering with it.

Other fine, more in-depth Best-Ofs are being brought to you by Johnny Bacardi, Jim Henley, Andrew Arnold, Chris Allen, Alan David Doane, Alan David Doane, and (you guessed it) Alan David Doane. Ninth Art has a bunch of year-end goodies, including Paul O'Brien's Year In Review, a sort of group anti-hug in the form of part one of the 2003 Brickbat Awards, and (not a year-end thing per se, but as this is the year I joined the comics blogosphere in earnest, it's useful to have a lexicon on hand) Andrew Wheeler's comics dictionary.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, Happy Festivus, and happy reading!

(Also known as "The most depressing semi-regular feature ever." Sorry to return on such a down note, but whaddyagonnado.)

Today's subject: Aaron McGruder, the popular purveyor of that collection of undergradical boilerplate and talking-head shots known as The Boondocks. Is it just me, or does today's installment include a "Jewish interloper" joke?

This has been your casually anti-Semitic cartoon watch link of the day.

Oh, and Happy New Year.