Please stop saying how good the new Britney Spears song is. Just... stop.

Also, has last night's Super Bowl Half-Time Titty Fiesta finally proven to everyone's satisfaction that the MTV Pseudo-Controversy Machine has well and truly jumped the shark?

Those new anti-pot ads are even stupider than I thought.

Egon reports that volume 2 of David B.'s excellent Epileptic will not be individually published, as was volume 1; instead, the two will be released as a complete one-volume hardcover, by Pantheon Books. Good news for David B., this--being published in this format by this publisher may mean that the book will at long last get the recognition it deserves. I'm not wild about hardcovers, myself, and hope a one-volume softcover will eventually be produced, but overall I'm more happy for David B. (and the general movement of people who want to see good comics get widedpread recognition) than I am upset that I won't be able to simply buy Volume 2 by itself.

Garth Ennis discusses the darker tone his series Punisher has taken on now that it's moved to the adult-audiences MAX imprint, over at Newsarama. Personally, I'm quite happy about this. I always thought Ennis's Road-Runner schtick bore rapidly diminishing returns, and the garish goofiness he employed on his old Punisher series (parapalegics, bear attacks, dwarf gangs, giant transsexual Russian cyborgs, etc.) was incredibly stupid and off-putting. It was always the serious moments--Vietnam flashbacks, the silent issue, the one-shot about Frank Castle hunting down and killing an old buddy from the Marines who'd gone insane, the Born miniseries--that stuck with me, and it's great to see that that's what Ennis is aiming for with the revamped series.

Also at Newsarama, Mike San Giacomo gives a rave review to Craig Thompson's Blankets. Insert "I thought cartoony art was bad" joke here.

More Thompsony goodness can be found at Suicide Girls, where Daniel Robert Epstein interviews the Blankets author. Included is some upsetting information about how Thompson's fundamentalist parents reacted to the book. (Link courtesy of the comment thread at the Newsarama article linked above.)

David Fiore gets on the Watchmen beat, arguing that by applying realistic psychological disorders to his super-characters, Alan Moore unwittingly undid the liberatory mechanisms of the superhero genre. I definitely see David's point--after two decades of gloomy, unimaginative "realistic" takes on superheroes, how could you not?--but all things considered I'd prefer the genre remain open to multiple approaches, with both David's prefered Silver Age personal-mythmaking and Moore's psychopolitical metaphors available to creators and readers.

Bruce Baugh pines for the anything-goes superhero genre of yesterday--you know, the one that wasn't too preoccupied with its own minutiae and therefore could exploit the gonzo energy of other genres and the pop-culture zeitgeist.

Dave Intermittent argues that baiting fanboys merely reinforces their self-aggrandizing sense of aggreivement, and also points out that to a specialist, minor variants and experiments really are majorly rewarding.

Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, is interviewed at Comic Book Resources. I'm not sure what's more refreshing: His lack of pretension about his creation, or his excellent taste in other comics. (I know I saw this someplace else first, but since I don't remember where, link courtesy of Tegan Gjovaag.)

Finally, expect a big Craig Thompson-related development on this very blog (hopefully) by the end of the week....

I spent part of Super Bowl Sunday reading Micah Harris & Michael Gaydos' excellent graphic novel Heaven's War, from the increasingly indie-feeling Image Comics. The book concerns the race between legendary occultist Aleister Crowley and legendary fantasy authors the Inklings (Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien) to unravel the secrets of the Priory of Sion as encrypted in the church at Rennes-Le-Chateau.

At this point you probably fall into one of two camps: You are either saying "Holy Moses, I've got to get that!" or "Huh?" And if there's a problem with this fascinating little book, it's that it doesn't go far enough to draw members of the latter group into the former. I've spent the last decade drenching myself in fantasy and occult esoterica, to the point where simply enumerating the names of the real-life figures who are characters in the book and the places and groups involved in the story is enough to tell me exactly what's involved and what's at stake. According to the notes offered by Harris at the back of the book, the published version of the graphic novel is much shorter than what he'd originally planned to produce. I can't help but wonder if additional pages build-up, place-setting, and character development wouldn't have been helpful to those readers who weren't already familiar with the players and their milieux. In other words, to crib a criticism Tolkien levvied at his own novel, "the book is too short."

That being said, I think the book still holds up: for its charming and involving depiction of the personalities of its four eccentric protagonists; for its deft and appropriately mystical exploration of conspiracy-theory metaphysics; for its gorgeous black-and-white art by Alias cartoonist Michael Gaydos, whose sensibilities in both action and portraiture are subtle yet perfectly clear; and for its ambition, tackling in relatively short order the type of mysteries of faith and history that were previously the exclusive comics territory of Moore & Campbell's From Hell. If you enjoyed, for example, William Gull's guided tour of London in that book, this will rivet you to your seat.

If the work of any of its characters appeals to you, please do pick up Heaven's War. I continue to find myself thinking over the issues it tackles, and the images it offers.

...to everyone who donated or linked to my Pledge Drive. Your generosity meant a great deal to me, and was very helpful to me during this little bad-luck streak.

As a reward, one more bit of blog beautification!

-----

Drive boy dog boy

Dirty numb angel boy

In the doorway boy

She was a lipstick boy

She was a beautiful boy

And tears boy

And all in your innerspace boy

You had

hands girl boy

and steel boy

You had chemicals boy

I've grown so close to you

Boy and you just groan boy

She said comeover comeover

She smiled at you boy.

Drive boy dog boy

Dirty numb angel boy

In the doorway boy

She was a lipstick boy

She was a beautiful boy

And tears boy

And all in your innerspace boy

You had

hands girl boy

and steel boy

You had chemicals boy

I've grown so close to you

Boy and you just groan boy

She said comeover comeover

She smiled at you boy.

Let your feelings slip boy

But never your mask boy

Random blonde bio high density rhythm

Blonde boy blonde country blonde high density

You are my drug boy

You're real boy

Speak to me and boy dog

Dirty numb cracking boy

You get wet boy

Big big time boy

Acid bear boy

Babes and babes and babes and babes and babes

And remembering nothing boy

You like my tin horn boy and get

Wet like an angel

Derail

You got a velvet mouth

You're so succulent and beautiful

Shimmering and dirty

Wonderful and hot times

On your telephone line

And god and everything

On your telephone

And in walk an angel

And look at me your mom

Squatting pissed in a tube-

hole at Tottenham Court Road

I just come out of the ship

Talking to the most

Blonde I ever met

Shouting

Lager lager lager lager

Shouting

Lager lager lager lager

Shouting...

Lager lager lager

Shouting

Mega mega white thing

Mega mega white thing

Mega mega white thing

Mega mega

Shouting lager lager lager lager

Mega mega white thing

Mega mega white thing

So many things to see and do

In the tube hole true

Blonde going back to Romford

Mega mega mega going back to Romford

Hi mom are you having fun

And now are you on your way

To a new tension

headache

--Underworld, "Born Slippy.NUXX"

I'm watching a commercial for OrthoTriCyclen and wondering: If you're making an ad for a birth control pill, isn't it bad to use women who are too thin to menstruate?

First up is Alan David Doane's interview with the comicsblogger, Dirk Deppey. Dirk's thoughts on the comics artform, the comics industry, and the blogging phenomenon are invaulable. Here's a sample:

If you follow comics as compulsively as I do, weblogs have become essential reading, a fact due in large part to the democratic, almost Darwinian opportunity they provide. Anyone can start a weblog, after all, but nobody's forcing people to read them. It's only by having something significant, informative and entertaining to say that one can attract a readership these days; those that do it well earn their success accordingly -- write well and write often, and other weblogs (and their readers) will notice, which in turn will get others to notice, and so on. Because of this, there's an enormous range of opinions and perspective available out there, and the conversations produced in the blogosphere have often been quite valuable.

Sharp stuff, and part of Alan's terrific series of five-question interviews. I hope he keeps them coming.

Next up is David Fiore's second installment of Watchmen analysis. Obviously Watchmen has been a hot topic around the comicsphere for the last couple of weeks, but here Dave comes up with some of the sharpest insights into Moore's characters I've ever read. Here's a couple:

[The Comedian] blows up every single time he appears--and this is very good characterization, as far as I'm concerned: like every person I've ever met who poses as a nihilist--the Comedian can't take a joke...

and

Now, [Dr.] Manhattan is a nihilist through most of this story, in that he places no more value on one thing than another.... [but] One thing is certain--every once in a while, he remembers how miraculous it can be for someone else to buy you a beer. "Someone" can buy themselves a beer, but it's nothing without that "else". And you'd better believe in that--or else.

Gorgeous, and he's promising more. I'm looking forward to it.

Mickey Kaus nails the real problem with the Justin-Janet faux controversy: "It's the feigned sexual assault, stupid!"

The issue isn't nudity but the implicit endorsement of--searching for the right words here--acting out male fantasies of violent and invasive non-consensual sexual behavior.

(Emphasis Kaus's.) In many ways this is of a piece with MTV's other recent manufactured shock moments, the Tatu teen-girl underwear make-out party at the 2003 Movie Awards and the Britney-Madonna-Christina three-way at the 2003 VMAs. Both these phony lesbian displays and Justin's stripping of Janet's clothes (invariably and inexplicably referred to by the media as "Janet's stunt") involve women tortuously convoluting their sexuality in order to please the male audience. In all cases MTV's plan was to feed the events into their endless hype autofellatio machine: running the clips on MTV News, showing the clips to guests on TRL, repackaging the clips into the invariable "MTV's Most Shocking Moments" specials, and so forth, until they become an indelible part of the network's identity. (Perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon is how MTV and VH1 run specials touting the breaking of racial boundaries in the early '80s by Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" video--despite the fact that these very channels erected those very boundaries!)

The good thing about the controversy is that it involves CBS, which probably means Mel Karmazin is going to be directly involved with the in-house response. Hopefully the people at MTV who should have lost their jobs for this calculated, self-indulgent, misogynist horseshit long ago will finally get their comeuppance.

Whoa. Now this is what I call high praise.

Well, it is a really good movie.


(Link courtesy of the awesome OneRing.net.)

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm really happy about Alan David Doane's new series of five-question interviews--and clearly I'm not the only one. When I lamented the lack of high-quality interviews a while back, this was the type of antidote I had in mind.

But one person wasn't so thrilled with yesterday's interview with Journalista weblogger Dirk Deppey: comics blogosphere godfather NeilAlien. Neil feels--and rightly so, I think--that Dirk woefully mischaracterized the 'Alien's opinion on superhero hegemony in the Direct Market. Here's his response, laying out his case to the contrary. In fairness to Dirk, I don't think he was "maliciously mischaracterizing" Neil, but he did get Neil's opinion wrong by almost 180 degrees.

David Fiore continues his immensely interesting Watchmenblogging with an analysis of Rorschach. "[A]t a certain point, Kovacs the man became indistinguishable from his moral judgements of the world"--naturally, sez Dave, this would eventually put him at odds with Dr. Manhattan, who refuses to pass judgement on anything. I'd never thought of the contrast between the two characters in those terms before.

I'd also never thought of Spider-Man/Peter Parker the way Dave breaks it down in that same post:

When we first meet him he's an ostracized nerd--a nonentity. In more realistic fiction, this type of character only has two options open to him: either he continues to endure social oppression, or he becomes a "somebody" by "standing up for himself", thus altering the power dynamic in his community. In the actual event--he does neither, thanks to the spider bite. Throughout Ditko's run, at least, Parker remains the same bookish nerd he's always been....Web-swinging is more like meditation, or an exorcism--it's not Peter's "true self" unleashed.

I think Dave's hitting upon a unique feature of fantastic fiction--the fantasy, or the spectacle if you prefer, can be used formally to stand in for, transform, or replace traditional/realist psychological motivations and development. Why this unique and liberatory aspect is seen by anti-genre snobs as a bug and not a feature is something I'll never understand! (However, I wonder if Spider-Man's creative team--if not Lee & Ditko, then certainly some of their successors--see things quite this way. Watching the film, for example, do you not think we're meant to believe that Spider-Man is Peter Parker's true self, or at least the "true self" he wants to have? Spider-Man is clever, physically fit, creative, brave, a babe magnet, a protector of the innocent, and a seeker of justice. It's worth noting that over the years (witness the current J. Michael Straczynski Amazing Spider-Man, for example), Peter Parker himself has become all these things as well....

Amy wrote a poem about our cat Lucy. It's awesome.

I've already made my opinion on the Janet-Justin Halftime Boobtacular clear: The problem is not the nudity (which in itself is hardly worse than the Coors Light commercials that run about a bajillion times per football game, or than the cheerleaders the NFL parades around, or the boobs-for-food bartering on the Tiffany Network's Survivor a season or two back), but the simulated non-consensual sex act that caused the nudity in the first place. In that regard the fiasco is at least as much Justin Timberlake's doing as Janet Jackson's.

So why doesn't it surprise me at all that in this memo from "the bipartisan [Congressional] Sex and Violence in the Media Caucus" (oh, it's bipartisan! I guess that means the First Amendment says it's okay for these elected officials to begin spending our money to investigate fake gunfights and blowjobs on TV!) that the Congressmorons in question describe the unfortunate event thusly:

Viewers watched as the star of the show, performer Janet Jackson, had her costume ripped away to reveal her bare breast. Her on-camera sexual gyrations and exposure were broadcast by CBS via 200 free, over-the-air television stations around the country.

Note the awkward use of the passive voice in order to place the blame squarely on Janet, and not her male counterpart (who I imagine is a bigger star than she is these days, saleswise). Note that mere "sexual gyrations" are viewed as just as bad as actual nudity. Note that the violent and misogynistic overtones of the act are not even mentioned.

Listen: We all like breasts. And nipples. The obviously fake breasts of a plastic-surgeried freakshow, complete with ninja throwing star ornamentation--well, these we're not so sure about. Generally, however, I'd just as soon see the American TV industry go European, where nudity has been shown on broadcast for decades (I've got the Monty Python DVDs to prove it.) Of course, the Super Bowl, despite the best efforts of the NFL and its sponsors, is family programming, and not the appropriate venue for this sort of thing, but ultimately a split-second nip slip should not be the stuff of federal investigations.

What is disturbing is that the forcibly enforced second-class sexual citizen status of women is so ingrained into our culture that not even self-appointed First-Amendment violating bluenoses don't even think to comment upon it. They've missed the point, and over on the other side of the argument, everyone saying "hey, no big deal" is missing the point as well.

Four topic roundup.

First things first: The second installment in the ADDTF Interview series has been posted! This time around, I'm happy to offer my conversation with Blankets creator Craig Thompson.

To celebrate, I've also reformatted my Phoebe Gloeckner interview to make it a whole lot more readable. If it hurt your head to read it the first time around, give it a shot now. After you finish the Thompson one, that is.

David Fiore is still watching the Watchmen more effectively than, well, anyone this side of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons themselves, I think. Today's near-comically insightful quote stems from David's comparison of the work of Jack Kirby (morality constructed through action upon the outside world) to Steve Ditko (morality constructed through, if I'm getting this right, the choice to continue existing in one's own space and on one's own terms):

one of the reasons I'm down on the series (as an influence upon the tradition) is the fact that Moore bascially expels the Ditko elements (Dr. Manhattan, Rorschach) from the field, leaving the Kirby elements in the ascendant. I haven't said much in this space about Nite-Owl and the Silk Spectre, but clearly, they're very important to the design of the series. They're likeable characters and they serve as stand-ins for the reader (Moore's idea of the superhero reader--who enjoys the genre primarily as a power/escape fantasy). Neither Dan nor Laurie is able to function very well in the "real world", and both seem to view adventuring as a "radical choice" (i.e. if you embrace it, it becomes your life--and, really, why wouldn't you, if your real lives are as vapid as theirs seem to be)... They can't even have sex unless they go through a good deal of costume-clad foreplay, and, you know, that's just not too healthy!

Damn, he's good. Please, go read the whole thing!

In a funny little bit of synchronicity (are the angels warring in Heaven as we speak?), Jim Henley revises his harsh criticism of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier on the very same day that I finally read the book. I'm glad Jim retracted some of his condemnation of Cooke's depiction of erstaz pacifist-cum-ace pilot Hal Jordan. It seemed to me that the story framed this issue so that it was clear the military brass was not aware of Hal's demurral to kill until after the Korean War had ended. I think it's conceivable (more so given the flexibility we customarily accord to the "reality" of morality plays, as this superhero comic surely is)that Hal hid his pseudo-pacifism throughout his training, and that by the time it became obvious to his fellow pilots, he'd so won them over with both his personality and his skill as a flyer that they helped cover it up. It appeared to me that the brass began their investigation into Jordan and his refusal to kill only after the harrowing post-armistice incident depicted in the comic made doing so necessary from a diplomatic standpoint. Moreover, I don't think Jordan was being lionized for this position: It's clear that his actions, though "moral" on the surface, were simply a dodge that forced his brother airmen to make the difficult decisions he himself couldn't handle.

Much of this appears to be borne out by Darwyn Cooke himself on DC's message board. (I don't know if the link will get you to the right posts, because DC has a bass-ackwards board that puts the oldest post at the end of the thread; just go to the bottom of the last page.) Cooke's moral equivalency about the Korean War is troubling given the well-known nature of the North Korean Communist regime, and to the extent which this influenced his storytelling, it's right to criticize his depiction of Hal Jordan. (Certainly the suggestion that the average American, let alone ace pilots, were indifferent to the Red Menace in the 1950s is a bit of a stretch. And if refusing to stand against North Korea makes you "a forward thinker," as Cooke suggests, let us hope that the future has passed us by.) (UPDATE: Wait a second--An email exchange with the illustrious Jim Henley reminds me that the Korean War was unpopular (duh). Not Vietnam-unpopular, which is sort of what I was talking about, but unpopular. So it's certainly fine to have characters wonder what the hell the point of it was. It's just a little less fine for Cooke himself wonder that, as he apparently does if his messboard comments are any indication. That's all's I'm sayin'.) But most of what Cooke says makes sense for the character, the situation, and the story. Long story short: I gun for lousy storytelling in the guise of moralism with all the gusto of that helicopter in Atlantic City in The Godfather Part III, but I don't see it here. (And the art is top-drawer.)

Finally, the battle between the Comics Blogosphere's Preeminent Curmudgeons continues. Yesterday, NeilAlien responded to criticism levelled at him by Dirk Deppey by saying "that's not what I said"; today Dirk responds by saying "Yes it was."

No, it wasn't. I think this is all a misunderstanding based on the following sentence: "Markets for non-superhero comics need to be rebuilt from outside the happy and fully-serviced superhero comic market."

Dirk has taken this sentence (written by NeilAlien here) to mean that Neil feels the Direct Market is getting along fine as a superhero-only vendor, thankyouverymuch, and that efforts to change this are a waste of time. This is how Dirk responds (partially to assert that he's not attributing maliciousness to Neil's position):

[T]he attitude represented in [Neil's] quote would eventually lead to the downfall of the Direct Market, but I don't think Neil holds it becuase he wants to see retailers on the unemployment line. I just don't think he'd thought things through when he wrote the statement quoted above....I believe that the "happy and fully-serviced superhero comic market," which to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability to estimate is roughly 70-80% of the Direct Market, is headed for a slow but steady decline, for reasons enumerated in the disputed interview.

But Neil isn't disputing that--in fact, putting it that way helps make his case! And his case is that browbeating superhero fans for not buying non-superhero comics is not a recipe for the successful salvation of the Direct Market. This is doubly true if those superhero fans are dying off! What Neil has advocated, consistently, is that the D.M. scratch that, the industry at large should forget about trying to convert this dwindling Superman audience to Jimmy Corrigan and Queen & Country and Iron Wok Jan, and instead focus on outreach efforts directed at people who aren't part of the Direct Market at all! Manga fans (young and old, female and male), people who buy altcomix and non-fiction graphic novels when the New York Times or the Guardian reviews them, goths at Hot Topic or Tower Recrods, genre-fiction fans picking up stuff for the beach or the airplane or the commute--these are the avenues of expansion for the Direct Market and the larger industry, NeilAlien argues, and not superhero fans, who are already DM customers, and who have never shown any signs of willingness to buy non-superhero stuff. This is understandable, Neil says: After all, this is their micro-hobby. Using the analogy of henpecking at stamp collectors to collect coins as well, Neil asks, why should we even expect superhero collectors to change now, let alone ever?

Dirk, on the other hand, has made his opinion on this matter quite clear: The plight of the Direct Market is in large part the fault of the superhero fanboy. (For the record, you can find my take on the matter here, starting at the fifth paragraph.)

Dirk, Neil: You both recognize the dire straits the industry finds itself in. You both advocate the need for the Direct Market to grow into new audiences. Your only difference of opinion, it seems to me, is whether the industry should, in addition to wooing those new audiences, hold superhero fans accountable for their role in creating a mono-genre marketplace--indeed, often reacting angrily against the very introduction of alternatives into that marketplace--and exhort them to change in order for that marketplace to surive; or view them as reliable customers whose needs are being met, and therefore ignore them and spend prosetylization, marketing, and outreach efforts elsewhere, where the profit margin is potentially exponentially greater. That's a reasonable difference of opinion, right? It's also one that's relatively easy to grasp, right?

Now, put aside your differences and work together for truth, justice, and the American Way, just like Batman and Superman!

Welcome back to what I hope will be an ongoing series of interviews with great cartoonists here at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat. Once again I have the privilege of being able to publish an interview with a gifted writer/artist for the first time anywhere: This time around, the subject is Craig Thompson. As was the case with my interview with Phoebe Gloeckner, this piece was originally intended for publication (after much editing for space) in the now-defunct Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly. It was conducted on July 18, 2003, over lunch at the San Diego Comic-Con.

My introduction to Craig’s work came in the form of his debut graphic novel Goodbye, Chunky Rice, a funny-animal parable about friendship and loss. I was impressed both by the confident skill of Craig’s art and his willingness to harness this talent to a nakedly emotional and touching story.

These storytelling strains reached something of an apotheosis in his follow-up, the massive autobiographical novel Blankets. Though I was initially off-put by the potentially maudlin and self-indulgent subject matter--a sensitive teenager finds and loses both love and faith in the snowy fields of the rural Midwest--I was rapidly won over by the book’s rapturously involving pace, sensitive and non-judgmental characterizations, and truly breathtaking art. Blankets has weathered something of an “Emperor-has-no-clothes” backlash to become one of the most popular, acclaimed, and beloved comics of the past year, and for good reason: It’s an intelligent and personal work that actualizes the potential of the comics page to a moving degree. Its ability to win over an audience outside of the traditional comics-fan circles is just one indicator of its artistic success.

As was the case with the Gloeckner interview, production difficulties at the A&F Quarterly kept this piece from being published in its intended forum, and when that forum was cancelled altogether, that was that. Craig has graciously given me permission to publish the full interview here. (The transcription was provided by Amanda.)

I’d also like to reiterate some notes about my interviewing style: A&F Quarterly pieces were much bigger than blurbs, but also much shorter than Comics Journal-–style 40-page behemoths. In cases like Craig’s, they were also intended for an audience that probably never had heard of the interview subject before. My interviews, therefore, were always a weird amalgam of entry-level questions that I knew would make it into the truncated, edited version, and specialist questions asked for the benefit and enjoyment of myself (and, hopefully, the subject). They also tended to be quite conversational, although since Craig and I were pressed for time, we managed to keep chit-chat and digression to a minimum. Finally, since in many cases I was encouraged to seek out interview subjects of my own choosing, there’s an fannish overtone to many of my pieces. My interview with Craig was no exception.

-----

Craig Thompson

interviewed by Sean T. Collins

18 July 2003

Sean T. Collins: Let’s start by talking about the ballsiness of doing an autobiography. It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like that. How did you make the decision to do a relatively straightforward autobiography about such intensely personal subjects?

Craig Thompson: Reluctantly. I didn’t want to do an autobio. I was reluctant about it. I had my theme first, and my theme was what it’s like to sleep next to someone for the first time. I didn’t have a plot, I didn’t have a story: I didn’t want to focus on a plot or story. I wanted to focus on an emotional experience, and just have it be very believable. And when I started thinking about that in my own life--the first girl that I slept in the same bed with--it started to unravel, this sort of coming-of-age story. Instantly, I was like “Oh, that’s not bad.” And then once I realized that I’d slept with my brother since early childhood, and it’s a totally different thread--the romantic relationship versus the sibling relationship with my brother...Suddenly, there was a story, and I couldn’t resist it.

When you discovered that there was a story there, did you first think “…and it’s going to take me 570 pages to tell it”? At what point did you realize what a massive undertaking it was?

I thought it would be about 250 pages. Then it doubled--same as with Goodbye, Chunky Rice. But, right away, I wanted it to be a big book. All these crappy, mainstream comics that are like, 24 pages, and entire epics unfold in a handful of pages…worlds are created and destroyed…all these explosions, and action, and drama…I just wanted to make a big, huge-ass book where barely anything happens. It’s an emotional experience rather than action.

How long did it end up taking you? What kind of hours were you putting in on it? Because I just think that, when people look at this book (particularly people who don’t read comics), one of the first things that will strike them about it is that it’s the size of the last Harry Potter book. It’s real big! How long did it take to achieve that?

More than three years. But I wasn’t doing it full time. I had to pay the bills doing lots of illustration and comics for mainstream publishers. But when I was working on the Blankets, I was drawing two pages a day, and finishing them, but there’d be three-month stretches where I wouldn’t touch the book. So, it was pretty chaotic.

At the graphic novel panel here at Comic-Con, you were talking about how a lot of comics are claustrophobic. And your art is really open in this book: There are a lot of splash pages, there are a lot of pages with just two or three images on them, etc. Did you decide on that very early on?

Yes. I agree with non-comics readers that comics are claustrophobic. If different people write and draw the book, it’s really hard for me to get comfortable with it and get into it, because I can feel the two different people almost conflicting. And then--just comics in general--they have this claustrophobia. It’s not aesthetically pleasing on the eyes to look at a page of comics. Most often, there are too many images squeezed into one space. Except for the fact that putting one panel per page would be really expensive for both the publisher and the consumer, I do like that experience of having less. Less is more in comics.

Do you think that that applies not just to layout, but the style of art that you use as well? A&F’s audience probably doesn’t read a whole lot of comics. They’re going to see it and say “oh, it’s cartoony.” Does your style--just the way you draw people and things--try to break through that claustrophobia too? Have you ever encountered people who have trouble taking it seriously because it doesn’t look “real”? Or is that just a bias of superhero fans?

I think it’s a bias of superhero people. You tell me, but I don’t think it exists as much outside of comics. I think regular people like “cartoony.” I think cartoons have a real broad appeal, whereas comic book art is a more sheltered form. While working on the book, I really got caught up in a lot of older American cartoonists like Milton Caniff and Alex Toth. Even those guys were simplistic in their day. I think it’s the most accessible form.

That’s a perfect jumping-off point, because what’s striking about this book is how accessible it is to people who aren’t into comics. My wife, for example, had read comics that I’d handed her before, but rarely (if ever) would she seek out a book that she saw sitting around. She wouldn’t just grab something and say, “Oh, this looks interesting.” And that’s what happened with Blankets. She saw it sitting on the kitchen table, opened it up, and she was hooked. She practically snuggles it to sleep at this point, she loves it so much. Do you get the sense that it is something that people who don’t normally read comics are attracted to in some way?

Yes. I think the size is almost a gimmick. It is big, and people are curious, like “what is that thing?” And then, if they flip through it (since most people won’t even bother to flip through a comic) because of the size, they see that it’s not about the traditional things they associate with comics. I think it’s different from what those people have ever seen before. Chris Ware, I’m sure, has the same experience. Not that I’m saying I’m on the same level as him, but that he has the same experience that once people get a hold of an Acme Novelty Library or a Jimmy Corrigan, they’re pretty intrigued because it’s unique and because the haven’t seen anything like that before. And the story is pretty universal.

Was it painful for you to revisit the whole “first love” issue?

No. It wasn’t painful to look at the past--it’s painful to look at the present, and that this story was still continuing. Not the romance-- but a lot of the religious issues were still continuing in my life and in my relationship with my parents. That was the painful part.

There really is a twin narrative in Blankets with the romance and the religion, but the religious aspect was the more difficult of the two for you to tackle?

Yes. The romantic aspect was fueled by things that were happening in the present-day too--I was involved in a relationship that helped me deal with those issues related to the relationship [in Blankets]. That part was therapeutic. The other part was a struggle up until the end.

When you put the pen down for the last time, did it feel like you had gotten a 570 pound weight off of your shoulders? Was it cathartic just to do it?

I think that, upon initially finishing it, I was just terrified that it wouldn’t work once I sat down and read it. It wasn’t instant relief. But I went back and I read it, and I liked it, which is rare. I have problems with it at certain points, but I like the end. It comes together for me.

You’ve talked about how people were bugging you to serialize the book, and how, instead, you waited to release it until the whole thing was done. I know quite a few people--myself included--who would read a sample of it online and think that it seemed kind of inconsequential when taken out of context. Then when I read the whole thing, I realized that it worked once I saw the whole progression. Did you realize that going in?

Yeah. I knew that it wouldn’t work in twenty-, even forty-page installments. And as a comics buyer, I never buy serialized comics, because I don’t like them. I have no place for them. They’re kind of crumpled up in the closet in paper bags, whereas graphic novels can go on the bookshelf. I just thought it would turn people off if they were only able to read one chapter here and there versus sitting down and reading the story. That’s how it was meant to be read. I guess other cartoonists have a point that they have to make a living, but they’re artists, goddammit. They have to make some sacrifices for their art.

I think a good example is Dave Cooper’s Ripple. I think a lot of people were disappointed when the fifth issue came out, because they felt that nothing happened and that it didn’t end. It really ended in the fourth issue, and this is sort of the postscript to it. But, because it was serialized, there were a lot of people who were disappointed with that last installment. Now that it’s in one collection, and you can read the whole thing, you’re not sitting around waiting for “the fifth and final chapter.” It’s there, and you’re able to process it all as a whole. That’s what I thought was remarkable about Blankets--it really does draw you in, and you want to complete it. You want to get to the end of the book.

I want to talk about some of the consequences of doing this sort of material in your life and in the lives of the people who are in the book. How did your family react to this tale of how you came to reject the fundamentalist upbringing that you had?

I don’t have a very communicative family. I called them after I had sent them Blankets, and we had talked for about fifteen minutes before I said “You should be getting the book any day now--I mailed it about a week ago.” My parents said “Yeah, we got it.” There was quiet on the line. So I said “Oh, did you get a chance to read it?” And my mom was like “Well, I read half of it, and your father has read the whole thing already.” More quiet. So I had to really probe them. I’m like “well, there’s a lot to talk about, huh?” And they still kind of avoided it. There’s this big avoidance thing in my family--I don’t have an intimate relationship with them in terms of conversation. It’s never been a thing in my family--to discuss things. It’s very midwestern, very stoic…you can talk about things, but only on the most surface of levels. There’s not a lot of exploration of anything, which accounts for the really conservative religious views. People aren’t allowed to question or discuss that stuff.

So was Blankets, in a way, your one-sided conversation with them?

Yeah, in a way. I like to think of it as an initiation, as something to kick things off. I didn’t know any other way to do it. I cut my sister out of the book entirely. There are more elements than not that are edited out. Nothing was fictionalized to make it more exciting--it was fictionalized to make it more boring. There’s just too much stuff. But my sister thought that it did a really good job of capturing how angry and controlling our father was when we were kids. She is just now learning how to have self-confidence and how to interact with people because, in our family environment, there was never opportunity to speak your own opinion. So this is my way of establishing my view, my opinion, and they can do with it as they please. I hope that doesn’t sound mean!

What about your brother? I have a brother who is three years younger, too, and the end left me feeling that things may or may not be resolved with your brother. I have a lot of those same sort of guilt issues. How did your brother react to it?

He hasn’t seen it yet, but I’m pretty confident that he’ll like it. We have a closer relationship now.

He’s a cartoonist too, right?

Yeah--He’s a cartoonist and a graphic designer in Minneapolis.

I loved the “Eyebrow Fairy” strip that you reprinted in Blankets. That is funny!

Then you’d like his stuff! His website is www.urbansub.com.

One of the other things that I think made the book work, in terms of the way that you tackled the religious aspects, was that you weren’t judgemental about it. I rejected a lot of my Catholic upbringing, but now I’m married to a woman who doesn’t ascribe to a particular denomination, but she’s still a Christian, and it’s a very important part of her life. Jesus is an important part of her life, but not in the Pat Robertson sense that people associate with Christianity. I think that cartoonists in particular tend to be an iconoclastic bunch--or, at least, that’s how they try to portray themselves. There’s a lot of baseless nastiness towards Christians amongst alt-cartoonists, and I really didn’t see that in the book. I thought that you must be remarkably well-adjusted not to be more bitter than you are. How do you see your take on Christianity in that light?

(laughs) Well, I’m not a Christian. I’m very spiritual, I believe in God, and I still totally agree with the teachings of Jesus. I’m interested in biblical history, and I think that the basic teachings of Jesus are that God is within everybody and that you shouldn’t be judgmental. Those are the two biggest things he’s trying to communicate. I think there’s probably a handful of believers that focus on that---that’s what they’ve studied and grabbed onto.

I think my wife said in that letter to you that she and I and, from our perception of the book, you, all pretty much believe the same thing, when you take away the nomenclature. When you try to “name” what you are, that’s where the trouble starts. I really appreciated that aspect of the book because you said what needed to be said without malice or becoming judgmental yourself in reaction.

I read in another interview that you did that you hadn’t spoken with Raina.

That part is literal. I cut off contact with her. Maybe she’ll see the book, though. I wouldn’t mind be back in contact--the main reason I cut off contact is that I was an immature high schooler, and I didn’t know how to handle being friends with somebody that I had dated. And now, that’s not a big deal. One of my closest friends is an ex-girlfriend.

How does your current girlfriend feel about the giant paean to an ex-girlfriend?

Well, there’s so much of our relationship projected onto this relationship, especially because at the time I started the book we weren’t together, and I was focusing all that longing for her into the production of the book. Especially for her, there are so many obvious elements that have to do with our relationship, so she’s not jealous. And she shouldn’t be anyway, because, at the end of this book, the boy doesn’t stay with the girl. It’s not an “eternal love,” “happily every after” sort of thing.

What kind of stuff were you reading or watching or listening to while you were writing Blankets? What were the touchstones that you had in mind as you were working on it?

My big comics inspiration was Piero by the French cartoonist Baudoin. I can barely read French, but can stumble along with a dictionary's help. That book was tremendously inspirational. Everything that he has done has an expressionist sexiness to it.

I’ve been listening to music that is all over the board. When the book was being finished, Sea Change by Beck had just come out, and that was good fuel. That’s probably the best Beck album ever…I was getting into world music, too, at the time--Rokia Traoré--and reading books on world religions.

So you’re not someone who tries to shut down and avoid influences when you’re working on something?

Not at all.

I think another interesting aspect of the book, for someone who has read Chunky Rice, is that this book is sort of the “extended remix” or it. There are elements that recur literally (such as the blanket) and figuratively. You can just feel that you are commenting on the same things.

They are--they touch on very similar subjects -- making friends, losing them, life changes, connections, loss... It’s like I didn’t do a thorough job with Chunky Rice, so I revisited the themes. I might be doing that for a while--repeating myself. I know there’s stuff with the next book I’m starting that elaborates on those same themes, too. Hopefully it won’t get redundant, but it’ll just get more in-depth.

I think it’s rewarding for an audience of a particular artist’s work to watch that kind of progression when they’re dealing with similar material or similar themes. This may seem like an odd example, but just watching the different things that Frank Miller did with Daredevil and Batman throughout his career gives you an easy way to compare things he’s done at different stages in his life, and you can see the development of his ideas and of his work as an artist/writer. I thought that was really neat about Blankets--it is almost like The Lord of the Rings is to The Hobbit--

I like The Hobbit!

No, I love The Hobbit too, but it is much simpler, obviously. And all of a sudden it blossoms. Tolkien is talking about the same basic things, but he’s saying it in a new way. I just thought that was a neat aspect of the book.

I also wanted to talk about the rural midwest, which is almost a character in the book. Having never really been there--except for one speech and debate tournament in Oshkosh, Wisconsin…

But that’s like “the big city” compared to where I grew up. I remember visiting Oshkosh when I was little, and I thought it was the biggest city ever. In high school, too. Sad, huh?

I don’t think so… (laughs) But how did where you raised affect you…

It affected everything. I feel really blessed at this point in my life to have had that kind of upbringing, because it creates so many nice stories, and it’s made the rest of my life so easy. Everything just gets progressively easier because I came from such a pit of human existence. There are so many beautiful things about where I grew up in terms of nature--I think I always had this intimate connection with nature. But in terms of culture, it was the most deprived environment you could grow up with--yet very American. I didn't grow up in Texas, and yet I witnessed distinct All-American culture: the cowboy hats and the cowboy boots, the pickup trucks, being chased through the woods by guys in pickup trucks, and getting beat up all the time. I think that’s part of the American experience. (laughs)

A French publisher picked up Blankets before the American edition was released -- Casterman, and they're known for 48-page, full color, French albums. I was really surprised--why would some French publisher publish a 600-page black and white comic by an American cartoonist? But, apparently they find it really fascinating, and maybe this will help them understand where we’re coming from with our ridiculous, sheltered, fundamentalist views of the world.

So it’s cultural anthropology in a way?

In a way!

I’m glad you brought up nature, because the way you draw it is so evocative. The winter scenes are tremendously involving, and, at the risk of sounding cheesy, spiritual. It’s interesting to me that that is sort of an integral part of the book: It being wintertime, and being cold, or--in that one scene--when you were really hot in the summer.

Like Chunky Rice has the ocean…Yeah, nature is as much a character as the people are, or even more so. On the cover, the characters are kind of small in relation to the rest of the image--that’s kind of how I feel about the world in general. We’re just tiny specks and…I don’t know…I’ve always been “nature boy.” (laughs)

As you said earlier, your next book will be a further elaboration on the things that you were talking about in Chunky Rice and Blankets. What is your next book going to be like?

It’s fantastical. At a certain point, after drawing all these midwestern buildings, and cars and trucks and boring interiors of midwestern ranch homes, I really wanted to make up a world and make it really fun and visually lavish. In comics, there is no reason not to work in some sort of fantastical genres, because that just makes it more visually appealing. It’s not going to affect “special effects” costs.

It’s not going to be “fantasy”--because, obviously, the stories that I want to tell aren’t about adventures or epics or fantastical elves and sorcerers, but it’ll be fun to draw. It’s about drought. Chunky has the ocean, Blankets has snow, and the third one has drought. The next big crisis in the universe will be lack of water in the earth, so that’s the big nature element in the next book. The two main characters are child slaves--so there’s child slavery and drought. In a fantastical world.

Blankets is an autobiography, but it’s also about the other people other people involved--in particular, Raina’s father. His story was very moving to me. How did you decide that you needed to tell his side of the tale, and how did you do it?

I didn’t decide to--it just happened. It was the same with Chunky Rice. It wasn’t like the other characters were necessarily equally important to me, especially when I created them. But by the end of the story, their personal stories emerged. They force it on me. I can’t just focus on one character for so many pages--not because I get bored, but because everything is connected. This sounds kind of preachy, but it’s there no matter what. The nature, the other people…it’s all one thing.

I just got a spam message with the subject heading "Use HGH to lose weight while you sleep . .. .. mhucyqhish468353959951423". Okay, fine, nothing unusual there. But the sender? "Saruman 1726."

If Saruman actually existed in 21st-century America, do you have any doubt he'd be spamming like there was no tomorrow?

Big announcement for ADDTF today--my brand-new RSS feed is up and running! I don't have an RSS reader myself, but I'm supposed to give you high-tech types this link, and I guess you can do the rest. (The link is now in the blogroll over to your left, too.)

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat: Now in syndication!

I don't handle stressing out my cat very well. When we first brought her home from the shelter she brought a nasty case of both the sniffles and conjunctivitis home with her, and when we had to grab her and stick her in the closet so we'd have easy access to her when applying her medicine in the future, she ran all around the apartment letting out the most pathetic yowl. Remember how Luke Skywalker sounded after Darth Vader cut his hand off and then told him he was his father? She sounded like that. So as my wife and father-in-law continued to give chase, I screamed "YOU'RE KILLING HER!" Yes, I am still embarrassed, and thanks for asking. I try to fob it off by saying that I was paraphrasing Walter Sobczak from Lebowksi--"You're killing your father, Larry"--but no one ever believes me.

Anyway, today I had to bring miss Lucy to the vet to get her claws trimmed. It's easier to bring her there and have them do it than for us to try and do it ourselves at this point--she really hates being held, so rather than have her squirm and scratch and probably get injured while we try to do it, we let the pros handle it, and they've said she's super well-behaved during the process so we don't even feel all that bad about it. Well, today was the first time I had to rustle her up and stick her in the carry crate by myself, and I felt like an abusive father. Once she caught on to what was happening, she started with that heartbreaking "raaooohhhhwwww" again. Oh Lord, I don't have the stomach for that! And when I finally got ahold of her, she just held onto the sheets of our bed for dear life (easy to do for her, considering her claws needed clipping), then sort of gave up and went limp. Poor baby.

The story has a happy ending, at least--the trimming itself took no time at all, and the vet tech said (once again) that Lucy was so good, so pretty, and so soft. That's my girl!

(Hey, the Missus isn't the only one who can write about our cat!)

Can someone please tell these penguins that when they made the choice to become homosexuals, they helped to undermine the sacred committed relationships between men penguins and women penguins that have been a cornerstone of penguin civilization for centuries?

I just wish the headline had run "Gay Penguins Make Homophobes Look Even Stupider Than Usual."

David Fiore finishes up his Watchmen blogging in the ridiculously high style to which we have become accustomed:

I prefer to think of Rorschach as Peter Parker, frozen in one of those lonely tableaux that conclude many of the Ditko ASM's[...] imagine if no new "surprises" awaited that character, just an endless stroll through that same moody panel... that's Rorschach!

and

The Nite Owl/Silk Spectre aspect of this book is an "empowerment fantasy" (and I'm really not a fan of those), but the point is that it's a good empowerment fantasy--Moore is saying: "look, these people are doing wonderful things for their community and they're gonna fuck each other as soon as they're done. They aren't even gonna wait for the owl-plane to land."[...]Dan and Laurie just get off on "making a difference", and this is made crystal clear in the wonderful bk 7 fire-rescue, which actually does give us something like that "lost innocence of the silver age" that we hear tell of...

Wow. I really can't begin to describe how impressed I am with David's work on this book over the last week or so. Every day he showed something about these characters that was completely unexpected, yet there all along, if we'd known where (or how) to look. Kudos, David! (BTW, David has now begun blogging Grant Morrison's Animal Man. I haven't read the series, so I'll probably stay away for fear of spoilers, but if you're familiar with it, my guess is this series of posts will be a goldmine for you.)

But just when you thought it was safe to go on the Internet without reading involved and fascinating analyses of seminal superhero graphic novels from the 1980s, Steven Berg at Peiratikos has started blogging the other side of the coin, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns! His first post, besides providing a terrific one-stop shopping list of all the Watchmenblogging done since Eve Tushnet started it all a few weeks ago, focuses on politics and psychology, and the impotence of both against Batman. The gist, I think, is that by the end of the book Batman has been freed from both--his secret identity "dead," his superhero-warrior persona completely dominant, the outside world no longer has any hold over him whatsoever--he is at long last no longer conflicted but "at peace with himself." (Interesting, then, that so many pointed to the lack of character reversals in The Dark Knight Strikes Again as a fault of that sequel, when it really is perfectly in line with the trajectory established in DKR. By the end of DKR Batman is freed from all external concerns--why should he be conflicted anymore?) Steven pays particular attention to the way that Batman's detractors asssume Batman is completely accountable for his own actions, while utilizing pop psychology to explain and excuse the actions of even his most murderous enemies:

Dr. Bartholomew Wolper gives us Batman as “social disease” (p. 66). The Joker and Two-Face aren’t responsible for their crimes, Batman is--his superhero persona is like a black hole of ego, devouring otherwise innocent, but weak-willed and mentally unstable, people who try to validate their pathetic lives by opposing Batman. (All of the psychoanalyses of the “hero"/"villain” relationship offered by characters in DKR assume that Batman is responsible for his actions while his rogues gallery is not responsible.)

Who knew Dr. Wolper was such a Noam Chomsky fan! And speaking of geopolitics, Steven's second post on the book argues that the seemingly dated Cold War elements of the novel actually work in the book's favor even now, simply by reinforcing how powerless the tides of temporal politics are against the eternal, "apolitical" justice meted out by Batman.

Mmm, mmm, good stuff. Keep it coming!

David Fiore (official "Man of the Hour" here at ADDTF) really liked my interview with Craig Thompson, to the point where he's now interested in picking up Thompson's book Blankets. Both of these reactions make me very happy. So I feel I owe it to Dave to clarify my thoughts on serialization in general and the mooted serialization of Blankets in particular. David said

My only quibble with the interview Sean--I know you agree with Craig that "self-contained" is usually better than seriality (endless or otherwise), but it would have been interesting to see how the man would've responded to a little devil's advocacy on that issue!

I think what Dave's got in mind here is my reaction to his claim that the best art works like ongoing Big Two superhero titles--as I put it then, "never-ending, closure-free, static characters, obsessively concerned with minute variations on a very limited number of themes, and without an author to speak of." It seemed to me then, and still does now, that asserting that such works are superior to traditional (or, really, even most non-traditional) narratives relies on a good many faulty premises and leads inevitably to a faulty conclusion. But what I was talking about in my interview with Thompson was, quite simply, specific to Thompson's work on Blankets.

Thompson told me that many of his fellow cartoonists advised him to release this 570-page work in multiple installments. Having read such smaller chunks of the book in the various online previews that had been made available in the run-up to the book's release and being extremely underwhelmed by them, I felt that this would have been a disastrous strategy. Not because of any inherent problem with serialization--as long as there's a completed structure to be arrived at somewhere, I don't really care how you publish a given work, most of the time; my famous problems with "floppies" stem mainly from logistical and public-image concerns, not from a belief that the serialization of a graphic novel is Always Bad. No, I felt this way because of a problem with the material--i.e. it simply read much better as a whole than as discreet subsections. Individual passages that at first seemed twee or self-involved subsequently blossomed, when taken in all together, into a compelling narrative of the loss of a young man's ability to idealize. When I cited Dave Cooper's Ripple to support my argument, again, my problem wasn't with serialization per se, but with how serializing his book led to unfulfillable audience expectations and undermined a narrative strategy that would have worked well had the book been presented in its complete form all at once.

In the end this, like so many other questions of sequential-art aesthetics and mechanics, falls under Collins's Law. Question: Do serialized comics suck? Answer: Not the ones where the serialization works!

On both Imus this morning and his own show this evening, I listened to Chris Matthews hold forth on how The American People want an actual soldier for a wartime president.

In other news, I am currently reading about four-term president and wheelchair jockey Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who I believe may have won a couple of re-elections during a large conflict of some kind.

(or: Light of my life, clogger of my inbox.)

Today I got spam from one "Dolores Hays." Okay, so they misspelled the last name, but still, what is up with all this literary-themed junk email lately?

Look out, ol' Johnny is back! Johnny Bacardi has declared an end to his self-imposed exile from the blogosphere and returns to form with a series of posts on the Justin-Janet fiasco, the Beatles, some movies he's seen recently, and oh yeah, comics galore. Start at the link above and scroll up. Welcome back, Johnny--you're one of my favorites!

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Brown conquers the comics blogosphere! (I'm fond of exclamation points today!) His self-parody minicomic Be a Man gets rave reviews from Bill Sherman, Big Sunny D, and even J.B. neophyte Dirk Deppey. Having had more than my fill of minimalist autobio cartoonists, it took me a good long time to give Brown's work a shot. But boy, was I ever glad I finally did. Brown comes across as a sensitive artist type who'll be the best boyfriend ever if you let him--but, get this, he actually seems genuine! It's not just a pose he's adopted to pull birds, which is the sense I get from other cartoonists working in this genre. Moreover, he doesn't have that cloying, cutesy self-involvement that mars the work of some of his compatriots. Though I haven't yet read the book, I imagine that Be a Man, like his other gag-strip minis, is evidence of that. Brown enthusiastically mocks his own sad-sack schtick, something that those who take their Sensitive Artiste personae way too seriously are unable to do.

(I also think that the enthusiasm with which Be a Man has been greeted should serve as an example to altcomix publishers that yes, it is worth releasing your Serious Artists' goofy stuff. Fantagraphics in particular may want to rethink their publishing strategy for not-so-funny-animal artist Jason, whose hilarious gag comics may offset the tragedy fatigue his serious comics might engender in their readers....)

Speaking of hilarious, check out David Fiore's simulated interview with Craig Thompson. Hysterical, Dave, but shouldn't you have thrown the word "antinomian" in there somewhere?

And speaking of Fiore, Eve Tushnet cops to a DFCR (David Fiore Comprehension Rate) of about 50%. She also links to more Watchmenblogging, this time a piece focusing on the formal rigorousness of the novel, by Commonplace Book.

Kevin Melrose reports (courtesy of subscription site Variety) that X-Men director Bryan Singer will be co-writing Ultimate X-Men at some point soon. I'm glad. Singer is good people, and my experience with him and other people on the X-film production team has me convinced that they really do care about the characters and the concept. They ought to be a good fit with Ultimate, the most high-octane of the X-books.

Finally, I just want to say that my handy new copy of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's newsletter, Busted! (the Fall 2003 issue, out just in time for Valetine's Day), has all sorts of valuable information on the fight for the First Amendment. The Child Online Protection Act, the Jesus Castillo case, Tony Twist v. Todd McFarlane, Fox News v. Al Franken, the Winters Brothers v. DC Comics, John Ashcroft v. fucking--it's all there. Wait. What's that you say? You're not already a member? Well, why not?

(They publish a list of members, you know. So I know which of you aren't on there. Punks.)

I realize we're all incredibly busy pursuing the important issues--for example, the shocking news that a certain National Guardsman may not have been so enthusiastic during his Vietnam-era term of service--but I thought I might want to take a moment and point out this whole pesky nuclear proliferation thing.

You see, when we invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein--which of course we shouldn't have done; after all, there are a lot of "bad guys" in the world, and where are the weapons?--we convinced Moammar Gaddafi that pursuing nuclear weapons wasn't in his best interest. So he announced to the world he had been doing so and invited us to inspect the dismantling of his programs. Which led us to discover that Pakistan had been conducting a nuclear arms bazaar for several years now. They sold nuclear technology and plans to Libya, North Korea, and Iran, and attempted to do so with Iraq (whaddya know!), Syria, and probably other countries. Companies from Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, South Africa, Japan, Germany, and Italy were involved at one stage or another. Pakistani President Musharraf has denied that any terrorist groups were similarly approached or involved, even while he pardoned Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who did all the peddling. Reports suggest that U.S. forces have secretly secured all Pakistani nuclear technology and sites--that is, the ones that are still in Pakistan.

Anyway, I know it's really, really important to make fun of the blundering neocons, and to hold the administration personally responsible for believing the outlandish notion that maybe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, so carry on with that, but I thought the fact that an international nuclear-weapon proliferation conspiracy has been discovered because of our intervention in Iraq might bear mentioning.

I know, I know. Where are my priorities?

Why have so many people who might reasonably have been expected to support President Bush in the next election suddenly wavered, and even turned against him altogether?

Partially, this is because the Democrats have rejected their rejectionists and selected John Kerry as Bush's opponent. Kerry, whatever his faults, gives the appearance of being a candidate you can take seriously on national security and foreign policy issues (Bush's big strong points), which is more than you could say for Howard Dean. (Whether or not Kerry actually can be taken seriously may well be a whole 'nother story, but still.) Another factor is the relentless "where are the WMDs?" questioning, which of course ignores the forest for the trees, but still (rightly) puts a big chink in the President's foreign-policy armor.

But the real culprit, I think, was the disastrous State of the Union address. The amazing thing about the upcoming election is that I think it would have been relatively easy for Bush to actually secure the vote of myself and others like me, and he blew it in a big way. The SOTU was a tipping point for liberal hawks--the point at which we realized that for all our hawkishness, we're still liberals, and the President is not. Ditto for libertarian hawks. Ditto for fiscally conservative hawks. The SOTU essentially caused a lot of Bush's ersatz supporters to pit one aspect of their political personality against the other, which was the LAST thing he should have wanted to do with it. Because the fact is, we've all spent a lifetime being the first half of our respective "_____ hawk" equations, and for the most part have only been the second half since Sept. 11, 2001. The first half has a big advantage in that regard.

But does the second half outweigh everything else? That's the question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now.

The Dark Knight Returns continues its turn in the blogosphere spotlight. Here's Dave Intermittent arguing that in DKR (and in the Sin City books), Frank Miller boils his characters down to their essence and then blows that essence up to gigantic proportions. (Sounds about right; and it's always nice to find another unabashed Miller fan.)

And here's Steven Berg (again), talking about how only those characters who refuse to judge Batman are allowed to judge Batman, and how Batman's rogues gallery serve as catalysts for narrative crises in the novel. I'd like to see him flesh these ideas out a bit more (what are the differences between the crises that Two-Face, the Mutant Leader, the Joker, and Superman engender?), but I'm intrigued thus far.

Remember how I just said that the Bush Administration is pitting liberal hawks' liberalism against their hawkishness?

"BUSH TO DEFINE MARRIAGE: President to endorse constitutional amendment banning gay marriage."

"Lawmakers who want to appear to be tough on broadcast smut aired on TV and radio also are likely to push for amendments to Upton's bill. There is talk of amendments that would bring cable programming into the broadcast indecency rubric..." (talk which FCC chairman Michael Powell just echoed during his address to the Senate hearing committee.)

Had enough yet?

My computer melted down the other day. It's okay now. I'll be back shortly.

Do Josh Marshall and his big-media counterparts have any idea what a bunch of petty buffoons they look like pecking away at the "Bush in the National Guard" story day after day after tedious day? Hint: As much of a bunch of petty buffoons as the people now going after John Kerry for being "inconsistent" about Vietnam, or for being in a photograph with Jane Fonda, or whatever.

There are several offensive things about the way both sides are now gleefully rehashing Vietnam, the most offensive being that we are currently at war, for Christ's sake. That's an order of magnitude more important than endlessly battling over the fact that--shock! horror!--two guys may have behaved in a way that would indicate they were less than enthusiastic about the Vietnam War 35 years ago.

It's also offensive that people are still behaving as though there was a right and a wrong side to that war and the culture war it engendered. Look, it was a difficult time. I wasn't even there and I could tell you that. Provided you weren't giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or conversely deliberately mowing down civilians, I pass no judgements on your conduct way back then. Everyone did what they felt they had to do. If in your heart you felt it was your duty to go and to fight, good. If in your heart you felt it was your duty to protest, good. If in your heart you felt you didn't really want to do either, good. If you used your connections to get you out of the issue entirely, good. If you told the draft board you were physically unfit and spent the next few years skiing, good. If you went to fight and won a ton of medals and then came home and told people the whole thing was a disaster, good. If you went to college in England and thanked your local government in writing for getting you out of the draft, good. If you went and fought and came home and thought you were doing something good for America and the world, good.

Obviously, in a perfect world, the people and armed forces of the United States would have enthusiastically supported a popular democratic resistance to a Communist invasion and guerilla insurgency, and defeated it, and Vietnam wouldn't have to have suffered under Communism for decades. But neither the people nor the military were supporting the war, and the regime we were fighting on behalf of was not democratic, and the Vietnamese people (in the main) supported the Communists, and in response we blew the hell not just out of North and South Vietnam but every other country on that peninsula. In the present time, ignoring the horrible fate of that country following the Communist victory is a mistake. But so is recharacterizing the War as some sort of noble struggle for truth, justice, and the American way, all of which were in incredibly short supply during the length of the conflict. The war was not fought in such a way that it was a clear-cut battle between totalitarianism (them) and freedom (us)--it was more like a battle between improbably popular but self-evidently murderous and eventually disastrous totalitarianism (them) and well-intentioned but mendacious and horribly executed and eventually deliberately destructive rule by force (us). The fact is that as far as everyday people are concerned, I can understand nearly any viewpoint espoused or tactic taken by American citizens during that time, with only a very few exceptions. It was complex, extremely complex. And more importantly, it's now over. Let it be over.

And what makes this even more offensive is that the Left has suddenly "discovered" its admiration for military service and begun making hay out of draft-dodging accusations. The hypocrisy is simply breathtaking, considering how they (rightly) defended former President Clinton and former fruntrunner Dean by saying that such accusations were stupid, pointless, divisive, and wrong. (For evidence, look at how stupid the Republicans look for calling Kerry a pinko due to his anti-war activities pre- and post- his tour of duty.) In fact, this is the kind of thing that has led me to refer to the Left as "they" rather than "we," which not three years ago I would have said, and proudly.

I'm just sick of schadenfreude trumping integrity and ethics in politics. Any kind of attack is unfair, until attacking the other side in that manner will score you some points, at which point anything goes. Whether it's Vietnam, or affairs, or the way opponents of the Drug War fell all over themselves saying Rush Limbaugh should have the book thrown at him, we're embarrassing ourselves, and we've got bigger things to worry about.

Enough, enough, enough.

Whoa.

If you've followed the comics blogosphere at all (and presumably you have, or you wouldn't be here), you've seen first-hand how influential, invigorating and inspiring the work of Dirk Deppey has been to those of us following in his footsteps. (Or toiling in his shadow. Or picking at his leftovers. Hey, whatever works.) I've said repeatedly that it took Dirk's relentless and comprehensive blogging to give the comicsphere a focal point, and enable it to reach the level it's at today. I've got no idea what things will be like without a daily visit to Journalista to tie the whole enterprise together, but I'm sure we'll be the poorer for his absence. Free speech issues here and abroad; editorial cartoon kerfuffles; mainstream-media successes and disasters; manga and its discontents; the bookstores and the direct market; legends and up-and-comers; the Big Five and the SPX set; brilliant and thought-provoking reporting and op-ed pieces; the desire, and the talent, to give comics the journalism it deserves--such was the beat of Dirk Deppey, blogger. He'll be missed.

The only consolation is that now the most prestigious comics magazine in the country will be in his eminently capable hands.

But for that to happen, Milo George had to be fired, and that's a bad thing. Milo and I have had our differences over the past few years: As a young upstart making my bones on the Journal's message board, I found his rhetoric unnecessarily confrontational, occasionally dismissive, and sometimes downright abusive--which was a shame, since it reflected public perception of the magazine all too well. But in time I got to know Milo pretty well. As he explained his decisions and policies to me, I grew to like and respect him and his work more and more. I should have known this might be the case, though, considering I enjoyed the hell out of every issue I bought during his reign. Even where I still disagreed with his approach or vision for the magazine, I appreciated his passion for the medium and his desire to produce the best magazine possible despite an array of uncontrollable and adverse conditions. He tended to be on the right side of Comics Journal conflicts, and I think that the issues produced during his tenure will serve as a testament to this for a long time to come.

I hope that Dirk will be able to build on Milo's successes, and that he'll be given the freedom to change what needs changing (and there's still quite a bit of that). I've got a lot of confidence that he will, of course--he's one of us.

Good luck, fellas!

Now that Dirk is gone, who's around to respond to articles like this?

In Brian Hibbs's latest column, the reknowned and respected retailer attempts to debunk the optimistic appraisal of comics' success in bookstores, and of the power and potential of manga. Without even going in-depth into Hibbs's numbers, I found quite a few points that simply don't stand up to scrutiny.

1) The Bookscan sales-stat list from which Hibbs derives much of his argument doesn't have a single book from Pantheon on it. Not even Persepolis, for pete's sake, which I can't imagine did worse than, say, Death of Superman that week. To me this throws the entire number-crunching enterprise into question, not to mention Hibbs's specific point about artcomix not doing well in bookstores--a point which most artcomix publishers would be happy to refute.

2) I have never, ever, ever before heard a businessman say "the secret to success is ignoring the desires of teenage consumers," yet this is what Hibbs is telling us. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I suppose teenagers are "fickle," but tweenagers and teenagers are also the people responsible for rock and roll, hip hop, blockbuster movies, and the Harry Potter publishing phenomenon. And we're supposed to say "Hey, let's not put all our eggs in this basket"? What basket are we supposed to put them in--the dwindling, ageing, insular, 20-30-40-50something superhero audience?

3) Hibbs haphazardly conflates manga format with manga stylistic tropes. For a while, he starts acting like the pro-manga people in the biz want to see big-eyed Superman comics, which simply isn't true--Marvel's ill-fated attempts to duplicate manga style seem to have put paid to that notion. Moreover, I don't think citing ElfQuest stats is an ironclad barometer of what manga-formatted American comics can sell. What if those really good, perenially strong-selling American books Hibbs touts as proof that manga/bookstores aren't where it's at--Sandman, Ultimate Spider-Man, Love & Rockets, Transmetropolitan, Bone, and so forth--were put in manga format and sold in bookstores? I doubt sales would decrease, that's for sure. And naturally Hibbs doesn't mention the true advantages of manga format--looks more like a book, you get more story for your buck, kids are already used to buying comics that way. This has nothing to do with Asian fetishism--it just makes good market sense. (This mish-mash argument also gave rise, I think, to Hibbs's dodge of the issue in saying "well, why don't we ape Calvin & Hobbes instead?")

4) Hibbs constructs everything as an either/or proposition, when no one is saying "we must abandon the DM for the bookstores right now!" or "we must abandon western-style comics for manga right now!" Even the late, great Dirk Deppey repeatedly said that he wants the DM to succeed, because if it crashes, the whole of the American medium crashes. I mean, duh. Bookstores and manga may be part of the salvation equation, but we're talking about methodical expansion into these markets, not abandonment of the existing model altogether. Hibbs is arguing with a straw man.

5) Speaking of straw men, who besides the PR people at DC and Marvel actually go around saying that movie successes increase comics sales?

6) Hibbs also ignores the biggest point, I think: Comics have been a sizeable sales phenomenon in bookstores for only three or four years, whereas the DM has been around for decades now. I think it's safe to say that in terms of non-superhero comics in the DM as it's currently run, we've hit the ceiling years ago. There is a potential for growth of other genres and types in the bookstores that the DM simply cannot match, and as evidence we can cite years and years and years of DM behavior towards artcomix, manga, eurocomics, and non-superhero genre comics. No one is saying bookstores are a sure thing, but it seems safe to say that as it stands now, the DM is an un-sure thing for anything but the spandex set. Also, no one is saying bookstore sales dwarf that of the DM in terms of American comics--quite the opposite in fact. Of course American comics sell better in the Direct Market right now--decades of existence have taught comics fans that this is the only place to go to find them. But that's right now, and most publishers and creators who aren't the Big Two aren't happy with their DM sales. Bookstores have only seriously been selling comics for a few years, and already they're on a comparable footing on many titles. The point is that there's room for expansion there, and there quite simply is none in the DM as it stands right now.

7) When Hibbs coyly starts doing the whole "is it a fad? too early to tell" thing, he ignores that unlike other comics-industry boom/busts, this one is content driven, not speculation driven. No alternate covers, no series that come out with one or two single issues and then disappear, no one scrambling to buy the first issue of the next Spawn or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--these are people (teenagers! kids! female teenagers and kids!!!) buying comics in order to read them. Yes, I suppose that could still be a fad--there's an unmistakeable element of Japanophilia that strikes me as being faddish--but when kids are actually reading the books, instead of just looking at them and filing them away, these "fads" tend to last. Look at the fantasy boom in young adult literature in recent years. His Dark Materials, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and of course Harry Potter have essentially reinvigorated the entire book industry and created a generation of readers. It's shocking to me that a leading retailer in comics is telling us that it may well be in our own interest to ignore a comparable surge in legitimate interest in this art form.

8) As for the anecdotal evidence Hibbs cites that says manga sales are akin to periodical sales, well, this hardly merits a response (beyond "oh yeah? Well, I have anecdotal evidence that says they're NOT! So there!"). But it strikes me as being an unmistakeable product of supeherocentricity. I suppose the logic is this: Since many manga series end at some point, after that ending no one's interested in buying the books anymore. On the other hand, superhero series go on and on and on forever, meaning that there's always a new audience getting into new issues of the series and tracking down old collections. But what real relationship is there between the ongoing Daredevil series, say, and the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkewicz collections focused on that character? Do current issues of Superman fuel purchases of John Byrne's Man of Steel? Moreover, Maus and From Hell and Watchmen have been "over" as series for years and years now, yet people are still buying them. Hell, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and The Lord of the Rings have been "over" for years, and people are still buying them. Ditto Cheers, Monty Python, The Family Guy, Buffy, etc., and yet people are still buying their DVD collections. The point is, manga is a periodical only in terms of its publishing schedule. The information contained in manga does not rely on timeliness for its impact--it's storytelling, like any other comic. As long as people are able to take a look at the book and say "hmm, that looks interesting," people will buy that book. I'm sure sales are better when the books first come out--for this we should stop the presses? This is true for nearly everything at this point in this front-loaded entertainment-industry world. Anecdotal evidence from comics retailers about their audience--not exactly indicative of the rest of the world, in case you hadn't gathered--is insufficent to write off an entire nation's comics output as, basically, a temporary sales blip, or a flash in the pan.

I spent my Valentine's Day alone. Actually, I'm spending the whole weekend alone. Amanda is visiting her family in Colorado and I stayed behind to work on things here on the homefront.

What I'm trying to say is that I miss my wife a lot!

Sorry to keep bothering you about this annoying nuclear-proliferation thing, but I thought it should be pointed out that China was involved at the most fundamental levels, too.

So that gives us a nuclear smuggling ring involving Axis of Evil members North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, AofE junior auxilliary members China, Pakistan, Libya, and Syria, "moderate Muslim nations" like Dubai and Malaysia, and amoral companies from Old Europe, created and successfully executed under the "watchful eye" of international institutions like the UN and IAEA. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but could those bumbling, tragically disaster-prone and wrong-about-everything neocons actually have been, y'know, on to something here? No, you're right, that's crazy talk. Back to talking about Vietnam, everyone.

You largely go through groups thinking, well this lot's alright but it only uses major seventh chords and I want to be in a group that uses ninths and then you get in another group and you're thinking ahead to a group that uses thirteenths, but this group uses everything that I know about music. That's great, but on the other hand there's no one left for me to work with after this one and the logical step is not to be a musician after this one, which is frightening. So hopefully it'll go for a long time.

There's a number of groups, fewish number, but a number of groups that are on the precipice in a way, beyond which there's a blackness, a kind of void, and they're peering into it hoping that it may go this way, but knowing that it may not go this way at all, it may be completely wrong.

I feel that King Crimson now is one of those groups.

--Bill Bruford, drummer, King Crimson, as quoted in the liner notes to KC's 1973 album Larks' Tongues in Aspic

This is not the kind of thing you hear from members of Good Charlotte.

This is awesome. Adults who love one another and are serious about their commitment to living a life together are getting married. Call me crazy, but somehow the threat this poses to Civlization As We Know It escapes me.

Here's a question: What does it say about our society that loving couples getting married is an act of civil disobedience? I don't think what it says is very good, that's for sure. But it speaks extremely well for the bravery and spirit of the couples themselves, who realize their love is important enough for them to seize their right to legally enshrine it.

I'm happy to report that the passing of Journalista hasn't stopped the blogosphere from cranking out some pretty damn strong material over the last few days.

Tim O'Neil gets a Purple Heart for Blogging Bravery: He's stepped into the void created by Dirk's absence and churned out a ton of newsworthy links. Tim, my only suggestion is to note the name of the publication you're linking to when you're writing up the link, but otherwise, terrific work.

Among the stories Tim links to is the good news that Michigan's Attorney General has opted to refrain from enforcing the state's censorious regulation regarding the display of "adult" publications in stores until the case wends its way through the courts. On the bad-news front, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft continues his quest to make sure that no one ever gets randy in this country ever again by bringing an outspoken anti-porn activist into the Justice Department. (And y'know, I was just thinking that what this cash-strapped, militarily engaged, angrily divided country really needs right now is a good old-fashioned culture war!)

Tim (yes, the guy's on fire) also weighs in with a substantial critique of Milligan & Allred's X-Statix. I think the series' high-quality days lasted longer than Tim does--for my money it was great up through and including the point when Guy came to terms with his feelings for and grief over Edie and finally got together with Venus; that's kind of the end of the story, though, I think--but it's still worth considering what Tim's got to say about the book, and whether the aborted Princess Diana storyline would have been any better had Diana actually been in it.

Kevin Melrose also seems intent on working the link-fu. Just click on the fella's name above and scroll up.

Steven Berg continues his compelling Dark Knight Returns blogging. His two most recent posts focus on Batman's relationship to his ubervillains--especially the Joker and the ersatz nemesis the Mutant Leader--and how they enable Batman/Bruce Wayne to operate on a transcendental plane of pure justice. Oh, it's much smarter than I'm making it sound--go check it out.

Steven's coblogger Rose, meanwhile, goes after the editing, or lack thereof, of Craig Thompson's Blankets. Personally, I neither noticed nor (therefore) minded any typos or grammatical errors in Thompson's book, but there is a point to be made here: James Joyce had an editor, but many alternative cartoonists do not.

J.W. Hastings, aka The Forager, looks back on a year of blogging, and tosses in a promise to finally post the essay on Squadron Supreme he promised ages ago. I'm still waiting, J.W.!

J.W. also hands in a slew of tight little comics reviews, including one of the new Marvel Knights Fantastic Four series 4. I haven't read the book, so I don't know if this is an accurate assessment, but it's tough to argue with this Forager quote:

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has bought into the myth that what makes the FF special is that they are a family. No: what makes them special is that they are a family who have been granted super powers by cosmic rays and spend their time travelling to other dimensions and defending the world from nasty, God-like aliens.

Testify!

Speaking of killer quotes, submitted for your approval is Chris Puzak's lengthy critique of how much sense it makes that, in the Marvel Universe, superpowered mutants are hated and feared, whereas everyone else who can fly or light on fire or throw cars around is a-okay:

But let’s just say for a second there was a large group of homosexuals who wore brightly colored costumes and saved peoples lives in a very public manner. Sort of like if the Village People took the disco inferno raging inside them and used it to fight crime instead of getting people to shake their moneymakers. Now imagine if they were doing this on a regular basis. Don’t you think it would be a little hard for bigots to continue hating people who keep doing lots of wonderful things for humanity? Or at the very least, wouldn’t it increasingly difficult for them to keep finding recruits for their cause? Bigots don’t hate without a reason. They usually have twisted rationales for their prejudices. What kind of rationale could you come up with for hating people who constantly save the world?

Awesome. (Though I don't think we should underestimate mankind's ability to put a negative spin on something inherently good....)

But wait, there's more on the quote front! Alan David Doane's 5Q features Tony Isabella, whose juicy quotes range from the sublime...

How many Spider-Man/Doctor Octopus mini-series and specials can we reasonable expect to sell in the couple months the second Spidey movie will be in general release? Why do we think successful movies based on comics will sell those comics when they’ve almost never done so in the past?

(I say again: Testify!) ...to the, well...

Earth-2 died for nothing.

Tony also offers some interesting anecdotal evidence as to the origins of his ongoing feud with former employers DC Comics. But blogger David Fiore and his commenters are, shall we say, less than impressed with Isabella's claims. Check them both out and see what you think. We report, you decide....

Fantagraphics, as evidence by the firing of Milo George and the promotion of Dirk Deppey, has a tendency to do both stupid things and great things in tandem. Take a look at their page describing upcoming projects, for example, and you'll see plugs for a 700-page Jaime Hernandez collection, a new issue of Dan Clowes's Eightball... and an anthology book called The Bush Junta, touted as "a no-holds-barred look at the Bush administration." Two of these projects made me say "awesome!"; one of them made me say "oh, for the love of Christ, weren't Comics Journal's 9/11 issue and Special Edition on Patriotism punishment enough?" You have three seconds to guess which was which: ready, set, go! (Links courtesy of Egon.)

Hey, I've been doing some work myself! Here's a Dirk Deppey tribute roundup; here's a response to Brian Hibbs's recent essay on bookstores and manga.

Finally, Jim Henley handicaps the potential replacements for The Deppey Formerly Known As a Blogger. He rates me as "excellent," to which I can only say, oh, you. Seriously, I don't think I've got it in me. I don't have Dirk's patience or talent for crunching numbers (take a look at my Brian Hibbs piece above for evidence of that); I don't share his linktastic abilities as do Graeme McMillan, Kevin Melrose, Billy the K, and NeilAlien; I don't have his knack for the vagaries of the legal system, as does Dave Intermittent; I don't have his depth of knowledge of Comics Eras Past, as do Dave Fiore and Bill Sherman; I don't have his lethal cobination of ferocious tenacity, heterodox taste, and a killer rolodex, as does Alan David Doane; and on and on and on. This makes me think that maybe a group blog would be the best replacement for the one-man army that was Dirk Deppey. It'd be special because they'd be a family, but also a family with complementary and kick-ass superpowers...

The comics blogosphere says goodbye and godspeed to its father:

Bill Sherman

Johnny Bacardi

Big Sunny D

Alan David Doane

Franklin Harris

Jim Henley

Eve Tushnet

John Jakala


David Fiore

Graeme McMillan

Kevin Melrose

Tim O'Neil

Tegan Gjovaag

The Comics Treadmill


Sean T. Collins


Now all we've got left is Our Mother. Our nation turns its lonely eyes to NeilAlien....

A lot of things floating around Ye Olde Comics Internet today just made me kind of sigh, quietly, to myself.

First, we got a look at the cover for the upcoming Joss Whedon/John Cassaday X-Men book, Astonishing X-Men, and whaddya know, but everything New is old again. Yes, it's revival production of The Pajama Game for Scott, Hank, Emma, Logan, and Jean. (And yes, I said "Jean." Looks like they'll be hitting that big red RESET button on Grant Morrison's run after all.) To paraphrase Yoda, I guess Marvel must unlearn what it has learned. (Caveat: It's still a lovely cover, and I'm sure it'll be a fun book, etc etc etc, but this couldn't feel more like a step backwards if they'd called the book Stepping-Backwards X-Men.)

Second, there's this Stuart Moore column, which says among other things that people aren't in showbiz for the money (I'll just say he must know of a different class of Harvard Lampoon alums than I did), and the following:

If you like Sleeper or Spider-Girl, the best thing to do is to tell people how great it is and why -- not to try and trick the company into thinking it can make a fortune off the book if only it would publish the thing in manga-size paperbacks. The company knows whether it’s making money or not, and in this changing market, any book with buzz is a good candidate for a trade paperback or an experimental format anyway.

Where do you start? Well, first of all, what a genuinely weird thing to say about fans of a particular book--that they're "try[ing] to trick the company" into doing anything. Yes, these poor, defenseless, naive companies with hearts as big as the all outdoors are in danger of falling victim to these cruel, malicious, duplicitous fans who are out to bankrupt by yelling "manga" over and over--just like senior citizens duped into paying $5,000 for twenty minutes of work by the "chimney repairmen" who pulled up in an unmarked van without an appointment. Suffice it to say, I think that fans who advocate such a publishing venture may actually prefer that format, and maybe even think that a sufficient number of other people feel the same to warrant a switchover to this format. (Which, and I don't know if you've heard about this, is having a little bit of success for some other companies. Y'know, FYI.) Secondly, someone really has to explain to me why we should suddenly trust the big publishers who are the stewards of the American comics industry to suddenly start making smart decisions about publishing. I keep hearing these pesky rumors, you see, that maybe comics aren't quite as popular as they used to be, and aren't even as popular as certain comics from other countries are becoming. So I'm a little skeptical that Father Knows Best, you know what I mean? Then again, Moore also wants us to trust that superheroes-plus-genre stories will bring in new readers, and that things really ain't so bad, sales-wise, honest, so I guess he's one of those "cock-eyed optimists" I keep hearing so much about. But mainly, I just wonder why so many pros have such a hard time believing that those of us who say we prefer waiting for the trade or think that a manga-sized trade would be even better for all concerned aren't, and I hope you're sitting down for this, telling the simple truth. (Link courtesy of AK, courtesy of ADD.)

Finally, writer A. Dave Lewis (scroll down for his post) claims, well, a bunch of very silly things.

1. The superhero field is not a genre; it's a maxi- or hybrid-genre. That is, considering both its breadth and how easily it absorbs other genres into its domain (superhero westerns, superhero romance, superhero drama, etc.), I think relegating it to a simple genre status is misleading.

No, it really isn't. By this logic, since there are all sorts of science fiction stories--sci-fi "westerns," sci-fi romance, sci-fi detective stories, sci-fi war stories, sci-fi thrillers, sci-fi high-literature, sci-fi satire--sci-fi isn't a genre. Of course, sci-fi is a genre, and so are superheroes; in fact, one could argue that superheroes are themselves a sub-genre of sci-fi/fantasy/adventure, albeit one that can be harnessed to a variety of other genres. Moving on:

2. The I/SP field is almost (note: almost) as insular and imposing to a first time reader -- and exclusively I/SP fans are no more or less rabid and unforgiving than exclusively superhero fans. The two communities are much more like each other in practice (if not in content) than it may seem.

He's right about the fans (ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit A!), but he's wrong about I/SP comics in general. (For the uninitiated, we're not talking about Internet Service Providers, despite all indications to the contrary--we're talking about the latest and indisputably goofiest term people have come up with for indy/alternative comics (Independent/Small Press, you see).) It's self-evidently ludicrous to think that someone off the street handed a copy of, say, Maus or Persepolis or Ghost World, would have as hard a time understanding what the hell was happening in them as he or she would with, say, Kingdom Come or The Dark Knight Returns or Kraven's Last Hunt. (Those were all books I like, by the way.) For the vast majority of indy/alternative graphic novels, the knowledge of continuity, convention, and backstory necessary to fully understand and enjoy out of the book is zero. A person handed Blankets without knowing anything about Craig Thompson will get just as much out of it as someone who knows all about him; this is not the case if you hand someone who doesn't know anything about Hal Jordan a copy of The New Frontier.

So how does Lewis back this up? By conflating the riot of minutiae necessary to understand most superhero stories with the fact that there are, like, a lot of different indy comics:

during that time, I heard of the I/SP scene...and I consciously avoided it.

Why?

Because there was too much. I speak only for myself and not for any mass-group of readers -- but, just as figuring out Wolverine or the Spider-Clone's backstory is a formidable undertaking to anyone who is just picking up the storyline for the first time, so too is entering the I/SP audience a dizzying experience. I wouldn't have known a Fade From Blue from a Shades of Blue from a Strangers in Paradise from a Strange Kisses from a Finder from a Valentine.

Putting his unusual selections for what constitutes the breadth of indy comics publishing aside, how is this any different from walking into, you know, a bookstore or library? The fact is that every medium and art form and genre has a vast variety of output from which the consumer is expected to choose. Before they start reading books, most people wouldn't have known a Twain from a Grisham from a DeLillo from a Vonnegut from a Joyce from a Rowling, but you know what? Most people manage, eventually.

This, of course, is taking it as a given that the panoply of indistinguishable superhero titles is somehow easier for the untrained eye to parse, which is crazy-talk.

To me (and this is just me), superheroes were much, much easier -- that isn't to say their plots or art were more "simple" or "rudimentary", no sir! That is to say, there was always a familiar starting point -- be it a cross-over character or even just the familiar genre template -- that allowed me to sample a wider variety of tales while still remaining in the same basic genre.

So it is a genre! Well, who'd'a thunk it? But how did these "starting points" become familiar to Lewis in the first place? Naturally he doesn't say, and takes this "familiarity" as a given that's obvious to everyone. But I'd imagine it involved the same years-long childhood immersion in the stuff that the rest of us underwent--which should put us in mind of how baffled our dissimilarly-raised friends are when we expect them to know a Daredevil from a Watchmen from an Authority from an Astro City from a New X-Men from a Savage Dragon. (Again, all books that I like, but people, come on.) (Link courtesy of NeilAlien.)

I like comics, and I like superhero comics. I like them both an awful lot, actually. And the thing is, that's why this kind of stuff makes me sigh, quietly, to myself.

1) Rumor has it that the latest issue of the Comics Journal (#258--The Ditko Issue) features my letter about the trouble with News Watch and some other aspects of how the Journal works, as well as lengthy responses from (former, alas) managing editor Milo George, news editor Mike Dean, and other writers and staff members. I'm excited to read it and respond, but unfortunately I have no access to a copy, 'cause I have no access to the kind of comics shop that would have one to sell me. I'm working on rectifying this, but I thought I should note, since people have been asking, that I haven't seen the ish at all yet. I'll keep you posted.

2) Readers of Brian Hibbs's column about bookstores and manga, and of this blog's and Dave Intermittent's responses to same, should check out Hibbs's response to Dave's response. Brian had actually written a similar email to me about my own piece, but I wasn't quite sure if I had the O.K. to publicly post it (along with my retorts, apologies, etc., though you can find a couple of the latter here), so I didn't. His message to Dave covers many of the same bases. (Brian, if it is okay for me to reprint our exchange, just let me know...)

I ranted a bit today. Maybe it was something I ate, I dunno. Anyway, there's very little in terms of bad feelings about comics that new issues of Morrison's New X-Men and Bendis's Daredevil can't cure. And with said issues tucked neatly into little mylar sleeves and resting comfortably on the back of my bed, atop several collections of Love & Rockets and various Ultimate titles, it's once more into the funnybook breach for me!

It would appear that with Dirk Deppey gone, Tim O'Neil and Kevin Melrose are the linkblogs to watch. Consider that an official endorsement, just like the one Al Gore gave to Howard Dean! No, wait. Not like that one. Anyway, Tim points out this important Arkansas anti-censorship decision, and Kevin guides us to writer Robert Kirkman's thoughts on rising from the ashes of Epic.

The third member of the linkblog triumvirate, Graeme McMillan, may well be in a snarkier mood than I was today. His running chronicle of the fans' reaction to the big leaks coming out of Marvel over the past couple of days is priceless. Click on the above link and start scrolling up.

But wait, there's more! David Fiore, the comicsphere's preeminent thinkblogger, is doing the linkblogging bit as well! And doing it quite well, actually, pointing to a lovely tribute to Dirk Deppey's late Journalista blog by Steven Wintle, among other things. (David's linkblogging entry also has the bonus feature of taking a few well-deserved potshots at Rolling Stone's appallingly facile and glib "critic," Rob Sheffield. However, it loses points for referring to Courtney love without using the phrase "talentless starfucker." You win some, you lose some, David!)

At last, the dark underbelly of Reed Richards will be exposed! Which is hard to do, because he can, like, stretch it away from you, so it's tough to lift his shirt up.

J.W. Hastings finishes his long-delayed Moore vs. Miller critical grudge match by comparing the ABC line and Watchmen to Dark Knights 1&2, and believe me, the resulting fireworks were worth the wait. There are so many good quotes that if I were to start posting them I'd end up reprinting the whole damn piece. J.W.'s not going to settle this issue for anyone except himself--this is just one of those questions people will always be asking, akin to "Jaime or Beto?" or "Lennon/McCartney or Jagger/Richards?"--but for one side, at least, he nails it all down. If you like either creator you owe it to yourself to read this.

J.W. (aka the Forager) also puts together a solid syllabus for a course on "Comic Book Politics." (For the impetus behind this, click here.) Seems to me that you've got a couple of options here: You can go with comics that specifically and primarily tackle political crises--by your Spiegelmans and Satrapis and Saccos--or you can emphasize books that use comic-book conventions (primarily of the superhero type) as fuel for satire or cautionary tale--your Moores and Millers and Morrisons. A blend is probably your best bet, and that's what J.W. comes up with. I'd take his class.

Dave Intermittent submits his two cents about the Brian Hibbs manga/bookstores column which I wrote about the other day. Dave, too, is skeptical of Hibbs's analysis; he points out that Hibbs uses static information to assess a dynamic entity. Go take a look.

(I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that a few errors in my piece on Hibbs's article have been brought to my attention. For example, there are Pantheon-published books in the Bookscan list on which he based his argument--beats me how I missed 'em. Also, it was weak on my part to accuse Brian of superherocentricity, as visitors to his store could likely tell you. In my defense, I'll say I did it because he started talking about the impact of seriality on sales, and all of a sudden visions of David Fiore began dancing in my head, and superheroes were all I could think about.)

Shawn Fumo points out that manga is now successful enough in bookstores to warrant endcaps (those displays at the end of the shelf that really stand out). Anecdotally, I'll back this up--in fact, the Waldenbooks in the local mall has their manga endcap on display right at the entrance to the mall, next to the "bestsellers 20% off" one. Could the rumors be true? Is manga selling well in bookstores? (Link courtesy of the suddenly less intermittent Dave Intermittent, who also questions the oft-heard rumor that George Clooney scrapped a Nick Fury movie deal because he was offended by Garth Ennis's comic-book version of same. You know those Hollywood types--so controversy-averse!)

Last and most definitely not least, Jim Henley writes up a plethora of recent comics releases. Among the books up for review are Farel Dalrymple's gorgeous and weird Pop Gun War, blogosphere favorite Sleeper, and the frustratingly frustrating Morales & Bachalo Captain America. Cap is a character that continues to vex both Jim and myself--we're convinced that great things can be done with him, but we're just not sure how. (For my money, Millar's Cap is your best bet these days--no, scratch that: Bendis's version of Millar's Cap, as appearing now in Ultimate Six, is your best bet, since Bendis lacks Millar's desire to giggle to his friends, "See, what I did there is I made Captain America an asshole!" Of course, asshole is in the eye of the beholder, as is kickassitude, which I feel the Ultimate Captain America has in spades.) The interesting thing, though, is that while Jim, a dovish libertarian, and I, a bleeding-heart interventionist, are not nuts about the book, J.W. Hastings, who quite comfortably identifies himself as a conservative (I think), really likes the Morales Cap run so far. (Morales lost me in the second issue, when the boilerplate soldiers started talking, as well as when Captain America, who I might remind you is a human weapon who walks around wearing the American flag, expressed reticence about intimidating the enemy.) Diversity of opinion, folks. Ain't America grand?

In a film theory class I took my sophomore year at Yale, one of the films on the syllabus was Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. We watched it, we enjoyed it, and that's no surprise. And when we began to discuss it, we naturally focused on the famous "Vertigo Shot"--that weird camera effect produced by simultaneously tracking back and zooming in, used in Vertigo to convey Scottie's paralyzing fear of heights. (You've also seen it used in Jaws (Chief Brody sees the shark in the crowded water), The Fellowship of the Ring (Frodo senses the Ringwraith coming down the road), the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller (Michael gets zombie-fied), and a whole bunch Nexium commercials (some sap with acid reflux panics while being told about the effects a delicious meal will have on them).)

"What's going on in that shot?" our professor asked. We weren't really sure what she was after. I mean, there's the technical trickery behind it, but other than that, isn't it obvious? It's a point-of-view shot that shows how scared Scottie is. "Is anyone here scared of heights?" she then asked; I raised my hand, as did several others. "When you feel vertigo, is this what you see?" Uhh, well, no, not exactly... "Of course not. When you are scared, your eyes don't suddenly work differently. This image is impossible to see without a camera. It doesn't and can't represent anything in nature. And yet you all knew exactly what it was supposed to represent--the terror of vertigo." And what's more, she went on to argue, it represents the spiraling chaos of Scottie's life (connected as it is to the ever-present spiral motif of the film's mise-en-scene), and his fixation on a point (the zoom/Madeleine) and his inability to actually reach that point (the track-back), and indeed by its very impossibility suggests the fundamental wrongness of Scottie's life.

All that meaning, all that power, would have been lost if Hitchcock had eschewed spectacle for realism.

When Tim O'Neil argues that there is something inherently silly or stupid or not worth taking seriously about the superhero genre, he's committing the self-same sin that Hitchcock, thank God, refused to commit. Tim sets up a whole lot of problems with superheroes that are, indeed, problems, and are in fact problems I myself decry all the time--the business-motivated need for "trademark servicing" with characters who have outlived their usefulness and depth, the ossified conventions and continuity that have become impenetrable for the layman, the bizarre domination by the genre of the entire American comics industry, the way talented creators occasionally eschew more artistically rewarding and personal products for phoned-in cash-in runs on supercomics, and so forth. But quite obviously, none of these are inherent problems, as Jim Henley points out, and as such we needn't go into them here. And as far as those ossified conventions go, Dave Fiore reminds us that all fiction is conventional. No, the real "inherent" aspect of superhero stories that O'Neil identifies is that there aren't any superheroes in real life. People don't act that way, he says. And God help us if this is our barometer for whether a work of art is any good, I say.

I understand the root of O'Neil's critique. One can accept all manner of fantastical contrivances in fiction, provided the patterns of human behavior depicted in those fictions are recognizable to us. This is why, when talking about Star Wars (which I love), the fact that Princess Leia should be paralyzed with grief after the destruction of her entire planet is a much more cogent critique than the fact that you can't really hear explosions in space. We easily suspsend disbelief on technicalities. We don't on the fundamentals.

I happen to think that The Superhero (and The Supervillain) isn't as alien a behavioral pattern as O'Neil and other anti-superhero critics believe. Costume and pageantry have been a major part of human society forever and a day, and have often gone hand in hand with feats of strength and athletic prowess (football uniforms do a lot more than protect the players and enable the spectators to tell the two teams apart), public performance and "stardom" or "idol/hero" behaviors (look at the career of David Bowie and the entire glam movement, just for example), and even actual heroism/crime-fighting/battle against evil (aside from bright red firemen's uniforms and the shiny badges of the police, take a look at the history of military dress). On the flipside, it's impossible to produce a more theatrical and ambitious comic-book supervillain than actual, real-life supervillain Adolf Hitler; and as Jim once again reminds us, there currently lives (or lived) a man who dresses up in consciously evocative garb and heads a worldwide conspiracy dedicated to global conquest, and does so, moreover, because God had told him to. And if you want analogous aliases and code names, look at hip-hop. And if you want analagous secret identities, look at intelligence agents and narcs. Quite simply, superheroes aren't as far from reality as people think.

But again, all this is really just a dodge. Even if you readily accept the use outlandish "unrealistic" powers as standard sci-fi/fantasy devices, and even if you point out the countless similarities of superhero behavior to real-life human behavior, the fact remains, there is no real-life superhero. A character like Batman could exist in our world. There are certainly people with enough money, intelligence, and drive to build a vigilante empire from the ground up, as did Bruce Wayne. But no one has done so. And this, in the end, is supposed to deflate the entire genre.

I say, so what?

In opera, people act in the absolute broadest strokes and sing songs. People don't behave that way in real life. And yet from opera we receive profound illustrations of love, lust, jealousy, hatred, and despair, that affect us in ways that more realistic theatre cannot. In film, cameras do things that the human eye cannot possibly do. And yet in film we are sometimes able to "see" things that are pefectly true, even if the way we see them is false. In superhero stories, people costume themselves, and fly, and fight for their beliefs as presented in the starkest way possible. And yet in superhero stories, those costumes, those fights, those explosions, those battles, those impossibly high stakes, those impossibly fit and explosive and exploded bodies, those baroque plots of conquest and single-minded pursuits of justice free us from the bonds of quotidian reality and set us on a plane of pure imagination and morality--a theatre of self-sacrifice, vengeance, justice, self-definition, madness, megalomania, duty, honor, glory, loyalty, betrayal, power, impotence, bravery, cowardice, ethics, love of man, denial of self, love of self, denial of man, cruelty, kindness, villainy, heroism.

For those whose imaginations have not failed them, the spectacle can be more real than reality.

As Dave Fiore points out, those who characterize even the best superhero stories as "escapism" miss the point not just of those stories, but of fiction itself. "Real" and "true" are not synonymous, and to claim that a genre is "inherently uninteresting" because it refuses to conflate the two terms is itself inherently wrong. If the school of thought propagated by the Comics Journal, for whom Tim is a writer, will be remembered--and I think it will, mostly for the good--this enormous failure of imagination, given birth when a justifiable antipathy toward the industry's excesses took precedence over honest and ongoing critical inquiry, will be one of its legacies. And it's a legacy I am both duty-bound and proud to combat.

In his post on issue 258 of the Comics Journal, NeilAlien says a whole lot of stuff, most of which I can't really comment on because I still haven't seen the issue. (I have seen my letter and the responses to it; more on that later, except to say now that in a couple of cases, Neil's not far from the mark about them.) But one thing caught my eye:

There's a conversation of artcomics people comparing themselves to other artcomics people. Yeah, because that's not as much of an Outsiders Beware circle jerk as needing to know Hal Jordan's origin story to appreciate New Frontier.

Uh, no. No, it really isn't.

I think Neil's responding to this post of mine, in which I take writer A. David Lewis to task for conflating the overwhelming amount of information needed to understand most superhero stories themselves with the overwhelming number of alternative/indie comics titles. But Neil's doing a very similar thing here--he's comparing material present in a story to material compiled as backround on the story-tellers. Quite simply, that's apples an oranges. A proper comparison to the feature he's talking about, which I'm assuming is Craig Thompson's conversation with Gilbert Hernandez, is Frank Miller's upcoming book of conversations with Will Eisner. Will that book make The Dark Knight Returns and The Spirit any easier or harder to follow? Of course not. Nor will Thompson & Beto's dialogue make it tougher to understand Goodbye, Chunky Rice or Poison River.

(A fairer comparison would be to say that you need to know a lot about Luba's backstory to understand Poison River, just as you need to know a lot about Hal's to understand New Frontier. But Beto's Palomar opus, which by the way is nearly singular in the whole of altcomix, has the advantage of being written by one man and therefore subject to one man's vision and rules, rather than constantly being rewritten and contradicted by a rotating cast of characters. I'm sorry, but in terms of comprehensibility, the advantage lies with your average alt-comic over your average superhero tale. Which of course isn't to say that superhero stories don't have their own advantages...)

I think it's going to be a damn heavy blogging week for old Sean T. Consider that a heads-up.

UPDATE: Those looking for the scoop behind managing editor Milo George's ouster at the Comics Journal are advised to look at this TCJ.com messboard thread, which reposts an email sent by TCJ editor and publisher Gary Groth to the magazine's freelancers. Groth asserts that George's firing was not a policy decision, but a personal one: the two of them didn't get along. (What's that, you say? A personality conflict between Gary Groth and Milo George? I know, I know, I was shocked too.) It's probably worth keeping this in mind when trying to predict what changes, if any, will be made under Dirk Deppey's reign.


The big news of the last few days was that Erik Larsen has replaced Jim Valention as Publisher of Image Comics. This story seems to have more angles than a geodesic dome: The suspect nature of Newsarama's coverage of the story; Erik Larsen's subsequent debunking of some of the more lurid aspects of same; Rich Johnston's round-up of rumored reasons for the palace coup, rumors Johnston claims are likely bogus. The upshot seems to be that Valentino's ouster was less a matter of policy (i.e. not because of the exodus of independent studios and their lucrative retro tie-in titles, not because really good books are selling really poorly) than a matter of personality (I've heard tell that other, unpopular personnel at the company were also on the losing side of this corporate shuffle). Personally I know very little about the inner workings of the company or the personalities of those involved, but I will say that I think Erik Larsen is an extremely bright and forthright guy, whose tastes are more catholic and whose book is more intelligent than most people give him credit for. Now that he's in control of a company that publishes a stable of titles including Powers, Invincible, The Walking Dead, Rex Mundi, Age of Bronze, A Distant Soil, and Savage Dragon, I'm truly interested to see where the Big I goes from here.

Speaking of Rich Johnston, his column is a strong one today, featuring juicy bits about the future of Marvel under the watchful eye of Hollywood honcho Avi Arad, the lasting bad blood over the execution of the Epic line, stories involving creators like Brian Azzarello, Jim Lee, John Byrne, and more. If you can put aside Rich's plugs for his upcoming series (unless, of course, you're dying to read a comic about The American Family by a wise-arse whose research consisted of watching The Sopranos, The Simpsons, The Addams Family and The Waltons), it's an intriguing read.

Markisan Naso is on the gossip beat as well, chronicling an unseemly meltdown by New Frontier writer-artist Darwyn Cooke directed at Dark Knight Strikes Again writer-artist Frank Miller. My feelings about Frank are fairly well known, so it probably won't surprise you whose side I'd take in this particular kerfuffle; I will simply say that getting this worked up because Miller apparently didn't pay Superman and Robin (who, I might remind you, are not real people) the respect you feel they deserve does not bode well for people who are worried that a certain incredibly long homage to the Silver Age is going to end up being more than a little over-reverential. Also, claiming that the reaction to DK2 is going to make DC clamp down on risky creator-driven projects is silly for a variety of reasons, from the fact that DC has been notoriously risk-averse since time immemorial to the fact that, well, they're in the process of publishing an incredibly long creator-driven homage to forgotten Silver Age characters like the Suicide Squad by a guy whose track record, while strong in a cultish sort of way, certainly doesn't include things on the level of The Dark Knight Returns or Daredevil: Born Again or Sin City. But hey, you knew that already.

Typically strong Monday-morning action abounds at Alan David Doane's blog. First there's a 5 Questions inverview with Mother, Come Home creator Paul Hornschemeier. I finally got the trade paperback collection of that book this weekend, and it's even stronger than I remembered. The interview is as good as you'd expect, especially when Hornschemeier discusses his view of his audience. It's a very unique one in this day and age, I think.

Also at ADD's is a plethora of short reviews, including one of the Chris Ware parody in Batton Lash's Supernatural Law #39. Lash's humor book is an acquired taste, but his dead-on rendition of Ware's neurotically precise style is a real jaw-dropper, made even funnier by how it's used in the service of a story that's unmistakably un-Ware. Check it out if you get the chance.

UPDATE: If you're looking for more punchy reviews, Johnny Bacardi has a swell bunch, including one that's really making me eye Paul Grist's Jack Staff. Mission accomplished, Johnny! (But can you cut back on all those graphics in your blogroll? Those things just kill my dialin'-up browser time and time again!)


Bill Sherman continues his invaluable outsiders' exploration of manga, this time examining the bloggerly acclaimed title Planetes, another book I finally picked up this weekend. Sherman's chops as a writer seem equalled only by his ability to pick out good manga books for us tyros to read.

N.B.: The artist formerly known as Big Sunny D, David Allison, has taken his fanboy-derived writings to a new group comics blog called Insult to Injury, and it's a hoot so far. (It certainly contains more information about Grant Morrison & Cam Stewart's upcoming Seaguy than you ever thought you'd need.) The Sunny still rises.

There's another new comicsblog in town. called The Cultural Gutter, it focuses on the nerd-trash trifecta of video games, sci-fi, and comics. It's beautifully designed, akin in spirit to Franklin Harris's wonderful Pulp Culture columns, and features a swell introductory essay by comics correspondent Guy Leshinski. This one looks good. (Link courtesy of Chris Butcher.)

Kevin Melrose points to an interview with altcomix superstar Art Spiegelman by the San Jose Mercury News. I'm sure you've guessed I'm not looking forward to Spiegelman's book on 9/11 (gee, do you suppose he thinks What's Happened In America Since Then Is The Real Tragedy?), but his thoughts on the socio-critical acceptability of comics are vastly more optimistic than any I've ever seen from cartoonists in his position. I'm even more stunned to find myself thinking, "You know what? He's right!" Comics are taken for granted as being part of the art/entertainment tapestry by a whole lot of clued-in people these days. I also think that Spiegelman's fear about comics suddenly losing its Wild West flavor because of the attention of critics is ill-founded--unless, of course, you're Art freaking Spiegelman, whose Maus has got to be the biggest blessing-curse for any comics creator in history.

Tim O'Neil links to a story of comics being used for a good cause--i.e. to fight against the death penalty in Missouri. (Registration required for this Kansas City Star article; simply use laexaminer@laexaminer.com as your email address and laexaminer as your password.) I think I agree with the skeptical former inmate quoted therein--comics doesn't seem to be the best way to go about working on this. But then, I'm skeptical that political/editorial cartoons ever accomplish anything but preaching to the converted (Thomas Nast and Bill Maudlin excepted).

NeilAlien reviews the Comics Journal's Steve Ditko issue, with all the brio you'd expect from the mysterious palindrome. He also mentions my involvement in the issue; I'm working on my own response to that, rest assured.

Rose Curtin and Steven Berg of Peiratikos continue their terrific blogging on Batman and Animal Man--just click on the above link and start scrolling.

Catching up with Ninth Art: Paul O'Brien decries the overwhelming sameness of Marvel's pin-up covers. While I initially thought this policy was a good one, given how hideous Marvel's covers were for years and years (and in that sense how perfectly reflective they were of the stuff between those covers), personally I agree with Steven Grant: Any good idea goes bad when no deviation from it is allowed. (See also Bill Jemas's "No Flashbacks EVER" policy.) Alex Deuben says it's not superheroes per se but the insularity of the industry that produces them that's comics biggest concern--a worthwhile distinction given certain untenable opinions being advanced these days. Finally, Frank Smith recounts the career of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. This is a topic tackled with gusto by David Allison at Insult to Injury, too. (I just wish he'd commented on the underlying sense of Lovecraftian "cosmic horror"--that is to say, profound wrongness--that endures despite the comedy and the fisticuffs...)

Finally, Xaviar Xerexes of Comixpedia weighs in with an article about the comics blogosphere phenomenon. It's a considered and insightful look at the different types of sights and the differing aims of their proprietors, and yours truly is quoted a couple times. However, I'll admit that I was a little alarmed at the lockstep we all seem to be in regarding manga. What if the Newsarama posters are right, people? What if it is just a fad? Not since the political chattering classes universally predicted John Kerry's demise in Iowa will so many look so silly for being so wrong!

President Bush is lobbying to alter the Constitution to discriminate against gay people ("gay," incidentally, being a term he cannot even bring himself to utter).

Andrew Sullivan tears this shameful assault on equality and civil rights apart, as well he should. I, for one, can no longer in good conscience vote to reelect this man.

Which is a problem.

A cursory glance at the last few days of posts by Charles Johnson is ample evidence, in my view, that we are indeed at war for the future of human civilization. Those who insist that we are not--to say nothing of those who think we are, and that we deserve to lose--will see the defeat of President Bush as a vindication of their policies. And I firmly believe that a vindication of their policies will lead us down the road to unprecedented disaster. Even a candidate like the appealing John Edwards, who has refused to tap into the self-defeating head-in-the-sand rage that was Howard Dean's and is now John Kerry's stock in trade (honestly in the first case, opportunistically in the second), will be viewed as a savior by the Michael Moores and the Noam Chomskys and the Ted Ralls and the Eric Altermans and the Atrioses and everyone else who thinks that the real catastrophe was not what was done to America on 9/11, but what America has done since.

Our enemies are watching, and waiting, and hoping. What now will they see this November? And what choices do we have of what to show them?

The Return of the King has now grossed more than $1 billion. It's the second highest-grossing motion picture ever.

If, by this time next week, I'll be able to refer to "the Academy Award-winning director of Dead Alive," I think I can die happy.

Greetings, fight fans! For a complete round-up of the "superheroes are good" and "groupthink is bad" memes, I hereby toss this post into the ring.

Kevin Melrose points to a dense and readable interview with DC President and Publisher Paul Levitz, by the Pulse's Heidi MacDonald. Two things spring to mind upon reading it. One, isn't interesting how Levitz's lack of bravado and bluster, which once made him seem like yesterday's news, now makes him come across like the savvy and erudite voice of the future? Two, as Kevin picked up on in his link to the piece, Levitz breaks down the manga/bookstore debate in a novel and intriguing fashion, saying that in terms of buying patterns, comics that look like books (i.e. manga, trade paperbacks, and graphic novels) sell similarly in both the Direct Market and the bookstores. While that would tend to shore up my belief that book-formatted comics are the future of the industry, Levitz also says that he's seen little evidence to suggest that manga-formatted non-manga comics will sell to manga readers. That would naturally poke a hole in my "make tankubon versions Sandman, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Love & Rockets!" prescription. However, if book-formatted comics are doing well in the Direct Market but manga itself isn't, that suggests that there is a market to whom such formats appeal... great stuff to chew on, either way.

J.W. Hastings takes a look at three recent comics by ADDTF favorite Brian Michael Bendis, and contrasts the effectiveness of Bendis's trademark dialogue-heavy writing style in each. Of the three, I've only read Daredevil #57, and I must say that this is one case where I found the constant chit-chat as distracting as many other pundits seem to. Reporter Ben Urich's intrusive voice-over drained the enormous drugged-up Yakuza fight scene of much of its momentum and tension; going back and re-reading the passage without reading the captions made this clear as a bell. In fairness to Bendis, this isn't usually his style: When a big, important action sequence breaks out in Alias or Powers, he usually shuts up, giving these silent scenes new power by way of their contrast to the talky stuff that surrounds them. Strange that he'd make this misstep in Daredevil, a book he took several months off of to think through.

Will Eisner, still indomitable at nearly 90 years of age, is taking on world anti-Semitism with his new graphic novel The Plot by debunking The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The New York Times has the scoop. (Link courtesy of a friend who emailed it to me.)

Alan David Doane interivews more altcomix luminaries by Tuesday than most people interview all week. Today's special: Chester Brown, author of acclaimed bio-comic Louis Riel and seminal (literally, in some cases) autobio comics The Playboy and I Never Liked You.


Christopher Butcher and Scott Robins are back to the Previews Review front. This batch of capsule preview-reviews include raves for Ito's Gyo and Miyazaki's Nausicaa, high hopes for the new non-princess oriented arc of Milligan & Allred's X-Statix, and disappointment in the once-promising but strangely uncompelling Top Shelf work of altcomix fantasist Jennifer Daydreamer.

(Regarding Daydreamer, I wonder why T.S. has been publishing these pamphlety books of hers, which strike one as glorified minicomics, and not holding out for something more substantial--and, I'd imagine, more potentially successful.)

David Fiore didn't like The Dark Knight Returns, which is unfortunate, but in his opening salvo on the book he's compared Batman to Conrad's Mr. Kurtz, which has me salivating like Francis Ford Coppola after three months in the Phillipine jungle. If this is going to be a pan, methinks it'll be a whole fucking lot more worthwhile than your everday "Miller's a fascist, Batman is corporate, fanboys are stupid, rinse, repeat" critique. Hooray!

T-minus one issue and counting before the Age of Austenpocalypse, and David Allison is looking at the most recent Grant Morrison New X-Men story arc with an eye towards how, and if, he'll wrap it all up. It's going to be a deeply weird and emotional experience for old Sean T., reading the last Morrison X-Men ish when it comes out in a few weeks. This title is pretty much single-handedly responsible for getting me back into comics after several years away (reading only a friend's copies of Savage Dragon and Acme Novelty Library, and buying whatever Frank Miller produced). This magical mystery tour into funnybookland is why you're reading this right now, of course. When Morrison leaves, an era will end--and not just for me, as it seems that the New Marvel Renaissance I've so enjoyed is winding down, too. Sigh. Anyway, Paul O'Brien doesn't share David's enthusiasm about the present arc, while Antipopper (if you can plow your way through the Marxist gobbledygook) offers a reason not to share David's pessimism about future ones.

Finally, a note to Johnny B.: Deleting some of those sidebar graphics and promising an in-depth look at David Bowie? What, did I win the lotto?

It's a not-so-Secret War in the comics blogosphere! Tim O'Neil's Comics-Journal review of Grant Morrison's The Filth and his subsequent anti-superhero blog post have inspired an array of erudite and passionate responses. Yesterday, in the process of writing my own response, I pointed to Dave Fiore, Dave Fiore again, and Jim Henley. Today, we've been joined by Dave Intermittent, who refutes the argument that only a character's creators have interesting things to say about that character and that personal taste should not be confused with objective standards; J.W. Hastings, who looks at the role that superhero-scapegoating plays in the comics-culture heirarchy; and Rose Curtin, who points out that demands for allegory often cannot and perhaps should not be met, and emphasizes the strengths of metaphor instead. Tim himself is too busy doing his stellar replacement-Deppey job to respond at length, but is happy to have started a discussion. I'm happy, too: The blogosphere has emerged as a source of intelligent writing on comics that serves to balance the heretofore prevailing view that "intelligent writing on comics" and "open to taking superheroes seriously" are mutually exclusive propositions. (Sure enough, a thread on this topic started by blogger Dave Fiore in a bastion of that viewpoint has already been suicide-hijacked by the usual suspects suspect.)

Ironic, isn't it, that as the comics blogosphere rises as one to defend the validity of the much-maligned superhero genre, said blogosphere's most well-respected proponent of said genre accuses said blogosphere of groupthink!

And the thing is, NeilAlien's not wrong. Taking the time to carefully self-refute the most potentially incendiary and inaccurate aspects of this line of thought--that we're not diverse enough in our aesthetic and literary preferences (we are), that it's bad that we all link to the same things (it’s not, since those things do tend to be very important)--Neil pares the argument down to its inarguable essentials: In terms of potential recipes for the success of the comics industry, comics bloggers are pretty much thinking in unison. As Neil puts it:

Maybe "lack of diversity" isn't the right angle- more a "we don't know all the answers" thing. The industry meta-commentary is where the lockstep is most glaring. And it's the best topic we got!

No, we don’t, and yes, it is. That’s why I agree with Neil that even (hell, especially) when I disagree with them, I’m glad that retailers like Brian Hibbs and James Sime (and Dan Shahin, and Jim Crocker…) are talking about their businesses online. When the experience most of us have interacting with retailers is limited to cajoling them to stop playing Magic in the back of the shop and come to the front to ring up our purchases, the opportunity to read, discuss, and critique the thoughts of some of the more forward-looking and erudite people in the business is a boon like almost no other.

And yes, most people who blog about comics tend to disagree with the views and practices of most people who sell them for a living. Why is that? I submit that this is the wrong question to ask, because it leads to a dead end. And it’s this very dead end that academia is currently traipsing down, to use an analogous situation. Followers of the political blogosphere may have noticed a recent boomlet in posts chronicling the near-universal dominance of university humanities departments by left-liberal professors. (Just by way of a for instance, here’s a post on the topic by poli/comics blogger Jim Henley-- who, by the way, is one of the few comics bloggers who substantively agrees with Brian Hibbs’s latest essay!) When challenged on this fairly stunning lack of intellectual diversity amongst campus faculty, many liberal educators respond by essentially saying, "Well, liberals are smart and open-minded, and conservatives are stupid and bigoted; consequently the academy, which one would expect to attract smart and open-minded people, hires liberals. Isn’t that as it should be?" QED. (You may think I’m exaggerating this type of response—I assure you, I’m not.) The point is that when you ask people why they all think the same way about something, you’ll often get the answer of, "Well, we’re smart, and great minds think alike. In other words, we all think that answer is right because that’s the right answer!"

But besides being arrogant and presumptuous, this trap (into which comics bloggers as a group may well easily slide) causes us to miss the real points: 1) As NeilAlien says, we can’t possibly know for sure whether we’re wrong or right; 2) Even if we are right, "the right answer" still benefits from being challenged and subsequently refined and defended. If we didn’t encounter "the wrong answer," how would we determine what "the right answer" is, anyway? If we aren’t called to explain and explore our thinking, how will we notice when, through complacency and self-satisfaction, "the right answer" slowly becomes wrong?

The comics blogosphere has several advantages over entities like the academy in this regard. For starters, as Franklin Harris points out, the blogosphere does not have a monopoly on the discussion of comics, nor even on the online discussion of comics. Users of the Newsarama and Comicon and MillarWorld (and Comics Journal!) message boards, and writers for the official organs of opinion of those entities, are around to offset and counteract the prevailing blogosphere opinion about any given issue. (I’d guess that the desire to express contradictory opinions is what led many bloggers to abandon these different institutions and start their own blogs in the first place. I know that’s why I did it.)

Secondly, unlike the situation in your average humanities department, the blogosphere is not ideologically self-perpetuating. New bloggers do not rely on old ones (with their old set of standards and preferences and, yeah, biases) to be hired, or tenured, or promoted, or given an endowment, or anything else—all they need to do to enter the debate is start their own blog. The lockstep that I noticed and Neil decried could be broken tomorrow, simply by people who disagree with it creating their own blogs. That’s a development I think all of us would welcome and encourage. Let me be the first to do so: If you think I’m smoking crack nine times out of ten, start a blog and tell me so!

Meanwhile, I don’t think any of us need to suddenly reverse our opinions, absent a compelling evidentiary or rhetorical reason to do so. But I think the eye-opening process that began for me when I read Xaviar Xerexes’s piece on the blogosphere yesterday kicked into full gear when I read Neil’s piece today. And I know I’ll be keeping them open, and looking for signs that rather than thinking an issue through, I’m simply going with the flow.

Happy blogday to you

Happy blogday to you

Happy blogday, dear NeilAlien, pioneer, progenitor, Mother of All Comicsbloggers

Happy blogday to you

Issue #258 of the Comics Journal is apparently a pivotal one. I say "apparently" (and I'll say it again) because I still haven't seen it. But Christopher Butcher has, and his description of it indicates a magazine on the verge of… something. "Bitter defensiveness" is par for the course, natch, but the range of reviews (I've heard about manga, Oni, The Filth, and--get this--Planetary/Batman!) speaks well for a rediscovered willingness to engage all aspects of the medium, even ones its writers are critical or dismissive of. (It's too bad they're still saying certain genres are "beneath criticism," particularly because the genre they're talking about is, in fact, not, but at least they're saying more than that, too.) Add to this the fact that this is the final Journal to see print while Milo George was still at the helm, and it's clear that with this issue, change is in the offing.

So I was even more interested than I'd otherwise be in reading the responses to my long letter on the problems with the magazine's news department (and the magazine generally), contained in this very issue. (You can find the ADDTF blog posts that contributed to that letter here, here, and here.) News Watch editor Mike Dean, reporters Larry Rodman and Greg Cwiklik, and (former) managing editor Milo George all weighed in on my call for timelier, better-informed, and properly weighted coverage of the medium and industry. Disagreements aside, I'm grateful for the time they took to address my concerns. Knowing what we now know, it might also have been interesting to hear from new managing editor Dirk Deppey, editor emeritus in residence Tom Spurgeon, and editor in chief Gary Groth, but for now let's look at these responses (faxed to me by the very helpful Alan David Doane), and see what they suggest in terms of the magazine's future direction.

Mike Dean's response is the first and longest, as it probably should be; he and his department bore the brunt of the criticism in my letter. As an opener, he attempts to invalidate much of it. If you recall, one of my main critiques of News Watch was its failure to allot appropriate coverage to major industry news stories, and I cited the near-collapse of CrossGen as one of them. Dean's response begins by saying that, in noting that Dean briefly mentioned CrossGen in issue #256 and covered the non-payment of freelancers by the company in #255, I've refuted my own argument. Well, sorta: In the postscript where I made that note, my point was to give credit where it was due, and Dean deserved credit for covering that facet of the story. But then he does something weird: He claims confusion over my reference to how the CrossGen story and the story of Bill Jemas's ouster at Marvel take up but half a page in #256--which they do, quite clearly, on page 33--and then boasts about the CrossGen coverage in #257, "which [I] apparently haven't read at all." No, Mike, I hadn't read it--because when I wrote my letter it had not yet been released. I made sure to mention the excerpt of that coverage that was run on the Journal's website, but without access to the bluelines, or a time machine, that's all I could do. At any rate, I'm not sure that sitting on a story from September until December 19th is much to brag about, especially when at least one issue was published in the intervening time, containing just a paragraph on the story. Believe it or not, I'm not as "blissfully ignorant" of the vagaries of print journalism as Dean so charmingly speculates; the fact that Dean had both the time and the information to include a passing mention of the CrossGen situation in issue #256 (I'm guessing the paragraph in question was written in the first or second week of the month) indicates to me that if he so desired and if "column space" were not, as he says, an issue, he could have written a much more substantial piece on the topic. Moreover, the major changes to CrossGen's unique pay structure (i.e. taking employees off salary and adopting the traditional freelance mode of work and payment), which as I said were common knowledge by late September, were not mentioned in #255 (at which point they hadn't yet occurred, to be fair), #256, or the online excerpt from #257. As its unusual set-up was what set CrossGen apart from the other big American companies and was used as a selling point to both creators and fans, reverting to business as usual was a huge part of the story. (Dean also defends the notion that CrossGen's main characters are not really superheroes--I'll leave that one to you, gentle readers.)

And why was column space an issue? Even before he gets into the CrossGen kerfuffle, Dean out that, "contrary to my original assertion," he covered the fall of Bill Jemas in #256, which he did. But the coverage was three paragraphs long. Compare this to the seven full pages given to the Bad Girl Plagiarism story. Dean deflects my criticism of this story with a straw man, implying that I don't think such artists deserve to be properly paid and credited for their work. Of course they do. But does this uncontroversial point need to be made in a seven-page article in the most important comics magazine in the world, focusing on several very minor artists in the process? Of course it doesn't--not while stories of major importance, like the Jemas and CrossGen affairs, are essentially ignored, for reasons that include "column space," as Dean himself admits. News Watch could have given these stories more in-depth treatment, and did not do so. I'm concerned over the priorities this demonstrates. Did it come down to a simple reluctance to yank the endless Bad Girls article in favor of time-sensitive, probably more difficult, yet inarguably more pressing reporting on big stories? I shouldn't have to even ask that question.

(Straw men are easier to come by in these responses than they are in the collected works of L. Frank Baum, by the way: Later on in the letter, Dean tries to make it seem like I've set up some mutually exclusive dichotomy between "good" and "entertaining" news writing. Uh, okay.)

My problems with the coverage of the Jemas story also occasion a frightfully witty quip from Dean:

As for what you feel is the overly speculative nature of the report, the Journal is unfortunately not privileged to enjoy the intimate friendship you obviously have with Arad, Jemas and Perlmutter that allows you to explain with such confidence the true reasons for Jemas' change in title.

Hilarious! But even aside from the bizarrely confrontational nature of Dean's response to a concerned reader (this was neither the first nor the last such jab in Dean's reply, and I'm far from the only TCJ correspondent who's been treated in such a manner), this is just silly. In my critique I pointed out a number of angles that anyone with an Internet connection and access to Rich Johnston's rumor column or Matt Brady's special reports should have known and could have followed up on--the infamous letter to Ike Perlmutter by outraged retailer Matt Hawes, the enormous uproar over the Jemas-instigated firing of Mark Waid, the rivalry between Jemas and Avi Arad. This didn't require any more personal contact with Jemas and company than your average Newsarama poster has. Surely that's the least we can expect of News Watch.

Astute readers will note that I also criticized News Watch's facile characterization of the complex New Marvel regime. That criticism went unanswered, except to say that despite my claims to the contrary, Epic was never intended as a creator-owned line. I'm sure that comes as a surprise to Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., who have taken the creator-owned series they publicly said were intended for Epic elsewhere; Chris Eliopolous, whose book Desperate Times went back to Image after a brief Marvel dalliance; and Daniel Way & John Proctor, whose once (and future?) creator-owned title Gun Theory saw a few issues published by its new "owner," Marvel, before its cancellation sent it back to legal limbo. (I might add that it also came as a bit of a surprise to me, when, per Marvel's instructions, I submitted creator-owned stories of my own to the line, and was subsequently told that that was no longer what they were looking for.)

Regarding my claim that News Watch does not compensate for its lack of comprehensive coverage with clearly articulated agenda of advocacy, Dean's response is, well, not very clearly articulated. He first says,

I don't get too many complaints along the lines that the Journal is overly objective in its reportage and has no editorial point of view.

Then he says,

I have plenty of opinions and I'm sure they color my stories to some extent, but for the most part, believe it or not, I strive for objectivity…This is not to say that the Journal takes no positions on the issues covered…[but t]o go beyond that is to editorialize. Fine for editorials and blogs. Not fine for News Watch.

Then he lists a whole bunch of stories as evidence of News Watch's comprehensiveness, a list peppered with phrases like

The piece calls Doubleday management to task…Along with the facts of the case is the very clear viewpoint that…The story reported all sides of the controversy but consistently took CrossGen to task…

Meanwhile, earlier in the letter, Dean says the following:

This is not to say, though, that some stories haven't been left waiting overly long in the wings. You're quite right to be concerned about the absence of Journal coverage of the ongoing manga invasion. We haven't overlooked the story, but I am guilty of having held it from publication while pursuing leads that I hoped would allow the Journal to get beneath the surface of widely reported events. Those leads have not so far panned out, and I regret having held the story so long. It is planned for an upcoming issue, and since it's ongoing, it's just as much a story today as it ever was.

and later:

Having said all this, I will concede that I'm sympathetic to the "journal of record" argument, not because a monthly magazine should aspire to that label (which refers to daily or weekly newspapers that are designated venues for local legal notices and other official announcements), but because scholars do indeed use the Journal as a record of important events in the industry. Toward that end, I'm considering ways to try to get in at least brief coverage of a wider range of events.

In essence, three of my biggest reasons for writing the Journal have been addressed and, essentially, agreed with. The first is that News Watchis, despite Dean's half-hearted and self-contradicted demurrals, advocacy journalism. Individual readers may decide for themselves whether the strength of and need for the advocacy offered by News Watch excuses the lopsidedness of its coverage. (A propos of that, Dean at one point says that I didn't like News Watch's reporting on James Warren's legal and financial battles, despite its being "a minutely researched report on the demise of an important comics publishing company and an overlooked piece of comics history," because "it was not one of the hot topics of the day." Actually, I objected to it because the Journal has long had a hard-on for Warren, and too often their minutely researched reports on overlooked demises and what-have-you neatly coincide with their pre-existing personal antipathies. There is advocacy to be discerned there, to be sure; you tell me if it warrants dedicating more space to the stripper suing Stan Lee than to changes in Marvel's publishing wing over the last four years.)

The second is that the Journal dropped the ball on the biggest story in comics: the manga explosion. Now that an editor of the Journal has admitted this, I think the issue is settled. (Oddly, in a look back through the Collins Archives, I stumbled across an essay on this very topic--in the much-maligned Tom Devlin-edited Highwater issue! Casual readers (who, let's face it, aren't reading this anymore) are forgiven for not being aware of how this issue is viewed by the Journal's more vocal staff members, but "low point" is a fair and indeed understated characterization; the fact that this issue includes more column inches on the phenomenon than every issue since then combined is all kinds of ironic.) But it's also worth noting the reason Dean gives for the ball-dropping. The story, he says, was held until certain leads were followed to the end. I get the impression that this is how a lot of major stories are covered at the Journal: News Watch waits and waits until the dust settles, and writes some sort of retrospective, while those of us looking for, well, news go to ICv2.com. And to say that the story is as big as ever because it's still going on is true, sort of, but misses the point of what news is. To use an analogous situation (one a little fairer to the Journal than my citing of 60 Minutes exposes was), try to imagine Entertainment Weekly running its very first article on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films this month. Sure, it's still a major, ongoing story for that medium, but where have you been for the past three and a half years?

The third major point is that, like it or not, the Comics Journal is the journal of record for comics. This is a fact Dean basically acknowledges, his dodge regarding "local legal notices and other official announcements" notwithstanding. (When people refer to The New York Times as the paper of record, do you think they're referring to the paper's front-page reporting, or the fact that they post the time and place for zoning board meetings?) Some have greatness thrust upon 'em, a wise man once said. That's exactly what's happened to the Journal (though obviously the Journal achieved a great deal of greatness on its own). Rather than doing its best imitation of Charles Barkley, telling intelligent comics fans that it's not a role model despite all appearances to the contrary, it's high time the Journal's editors realized the standard the comics world holds them to, even if they themselves do not. These moments of clarity in Mike Dean's response seem to indicate that this is, just barely, starting to happen. Those moments are, of course, offset by the response's constant condescension (Thank you, Mike, for pointing out that censorship happens "not just in Muslim countries." My momentary lapse from goodthink is duly noted. Thank you also for "detect[ing] the comics fan's fondness for grandiose melodrama in [my] longing for earth-shaking exposes." I admit that my 60 Minutes comparisons were deliberately hyperbolic, but as you point out I can't help myself--I'm just a fanboy oh, wait, you didn't actually use the f-word, did you? How thoughtful), but they're there, and that's a start. Combine that with the strong reporting Dean and News Watch are obviously capable of (several examples of which are cited by him), and there's reason to hope.

The next response comes from Larry Rodman, who wrote an article on 2003's Small Press Expo that I felt ignored the real story, which was that this year's SPX showed a festival in real trouble. There's not much to say about Rodman's response, really. With admirable civility and an apparently genuine willingness to examine my criticism while still sticking to his guns, he essentially says that he and I are going to have to agree to disagree on the seriousness of the problems with SPX and, therefore, the appropriateness of citing those problems as the centerpiece of an article on the festival. That seems like a perfectly acceptable difference in reportorial judgment to me (though of course I prefer my own viewpoint--and I will also say that if that's his overall view of the con, he must have talked to very different people and seen it all very differently than I did).

The most interesting part of Rodman's response, though, was this:

Also, as one of the Journal's contributing writers and someone who's taken a few diversionary cheap shots at fanboys and the various warring geek subsets, I do agree on principle about how unworthy a target they are. Still, it's too bad that people continually insist on fulfilling their own grossest stereotypes. And, that I--and other cultural anthropologists like me--can't resist pointing out the painfully obvious. Oh, well. And yeah, since you've mentioned it, the enduring stigma over men-in-tights books is a juvenile stance unto itself by now. But, in TCJ editorial terms, that attitude itself was pretty much the genesis of the "muckraking," revolutionary, or controversial tone you so value.

It's extremely gratifying to hear a TCJ writer--or any serious writer on comics, for that matter--admit that however accurate their slams of fanboys may be, doing so in print is basically a cheap-shot waste of time at this point. And I'll certainly acknowledge that TCJ initially set itself apart from the herd by taking fanboy culture to task (justifiably, I might add). But since then, the magazine has inalterably changed the terms of the debate. I'm pretty sure everyone knows where it stands, and I agree with Rodman that it's too bad they can't resist pointlessly belaboring the obvious.

Which brings us to Greg Cwiklik's response. In my letter I said that Cwiklik is a good writer, but knows next to nothing about mainstream-superhero comics and seems to wear this as a red badge of courage, making his report on superhero comics in the Winter 2002 Special Edition and on WizardWorld Chicago in issue #256 exercises in condescension and inaccuracy. And if you can think of a better way to characterize his response, you're welcome to try:

Sean T. Collins' critique is not a terribly inaccurate assessment

The end. Oh, wait, there's more?

--but you really have to question his attitude.

He's starting to sound a little bit like my mother, but okay, let's see where he goes with this.

If Wizard World's shallowness, brazen pandering to the most adolescent fan tastes, breathless hype and references to comics as "properties" are not deserving of snide condescension and mockery, then what is?

Well, if you're working for a magazine as important as the Comics Journal, nothing. Snide condescension and mockery directed towards aspects of the industry that any and all informed fans could tell you deserve such things is kind of a waste of time and resources. And of course, snide condescension and mockery need not be mutually exclusive with accurate reporting, which I guess is news to Cwiklik.

Regarding "What's Wrong with Superheroes Today?" a number of fanboys complain

(non-fanboys, apparently, think it was a work of dead-on genius)

that examples cited were outdated--"Oh, so-and-so is not drawing the Hulk anymore"--yet the imbecilic style of drawing is as much in evidence as before, so what's the point?

The point (besides "How hard is it to look up Dale Keown's name?") is that this article, which again was published in the winter of 2002, didn't contain any illustrations from superhero comics more recent than 1998. The point is that while touting the virtues of Vertigo, this article failed to note that nearly all the writers of Vertigo works it cited were at that time now working for Marvel. The point is that this article does not bother mention that starting around 2000, superheroes switched from being an artist-driven industry to a writer-driven one, with Grant Morrison, Brian Bendis, Mark Millar, J. Michael Straczynski, Greg Rucka, and Jeph Loeb commanding the kind of fan followings that the hot-shit render-happy artists of the early 90s once enjoyed. The point is that this article cites the appearance Hulk as evidence of the brain-dead-ness of current superhero comics, when at the time the Hulk had barely appeared in his own comic book for months. The point is that this article makes much hay out of Bad Girl comics like Witchblade and Lady Death, which at the time of the article's publication were marginal titles that were (and are) basically on life support. The point is that this article referred to "a recent episode of Darkchylde" to make a point, said recent episode having been published in 1997. The point is that "the imbecilic style of drawing" is quite simply not as much in evidence as before--the most popular and most important artists now are hyperrealists like John Cassaday and Bryan Hitch, stylists like Frank Quitely and John Romita Jr., and retro-tinged pop artists like Mike Allred and Eduardo Risso--and was even less so in 2002 when this article was published, at which point Image stalwarts like Jim Lee and Marc Silvestri had yet to make their comebacks (the success of which is explicable at least in part because no one else draws like that anymore). The point is that on the Comics Journal message board, former Comics Journal managing editor Milo George himself said that this article badly needed reworking or even a full rewrite, for the author's own good. The point is that this article stunk, that this WizardWorld con report was more of the smug and fact-free same, that the author of these pieces has been repeatedly assigned to cover an aspect of the medium he knows next to nothing about, and that said author is both proud of this fact and unaware of why this might be seen as a problem for the Journal.

Oh, and one more thing:

Since we already have "mature readers" and "adults only," it seems to me that Marvel's cribbing of "Parental Advisory Label" from the recording industry is an attempt to cynically associate itself with the cool and outlaw image of forbidden hiphop."

Uh, sure, okay, fine. Explain again what this has to do with my stated problems with the report's take on MAX--namely that it tore apart the whole line after skimming through just one of its titles, and it referred to the line as "new" when in fact it debuted back when Enron was still a hot stock?

Finally, the late, lamented Milo George responds to my criticism of the magazine's review policies. Citing the difficulties that a small arts magazine has in trying to run timely criticism, he says that "Good criticism has no expiration date." Still, he argues, "if TCJ isn't the source for intelligent (timely) comics criticism, I'd love to know what is." Unfortunately, the answer is nothing, but it concerns me that the Journal seems content to rest on its laurels about this. Just because the magazine is the best there is at what it does (heh heh), this doesn't mean it can't get better, especially not in this industry. (In her own contribution to the Journal's Winter 2002 Special Edition, cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner--whose profile still hasn't seen the light of day, by the by--cast this phenomenon in a far less charitable light than I, saying of TCJ parent company Fantagraphics that "their braggadocio [in "call[ing] itself 'the publisher of the world's greatest cartoonists'"] is not dissimilar to a merchant who claims to be a purveyor of the world's finest dogshit!")

Then George says, as he has several times in the past, that he and I will "have to agree to disagree about how vital it is to consistently run reviews of the corporate funnybooks that garner the most hype." Hype, of course, is not the word I've used--"critical acclaim" and, often but these days not always differingly, "popularity" are what I think warrant a look-see from TCJ. I just don't find analysis of the best and/or most popular works in the dominant genre of the American comics industry irrelevant to maintaining a running chronicle of the state of the art. Your mileage may vary, I suppose, particularly if you don't see such a running chronicle as being mission-critical for the Journal--but then you have a very different vision of what the Journal can, and should, be.

Milo's reply is almost as brief (though thankfully a lot more worthwhile) than Greg Cwiklik's; all that remains, aside from promises of Gloeckner goodness to come in issue #261, is a false dichotomy he accuses me of maintaining, wherein, for criticism, timeliness is supposed to be a prerequisite for intelligence. Of course I've never said any such thing, and the self-evident silliness of this line of attack is such that I've got to wonder if George's heart was really in this reply to begin with.

So what have we gleaned from these tea leaves? What does the future hold for the Journal? Well, despite a worrisome defensiveness, its news editor seems to realize that there are, in fact, problems with the way his department has been run in recent times. When Dean said in his reply that "There's no competition between the Journal and ˇJournalista!" he was, as David Fiore has pointed out, righter than he knew; though the magazine's news department is still independent of its managing editor, I'd imagine that the presence of Dirk Deppey on the print side of things can mean only good things for the quality of News Watch. The Journal's writers, meanwhile, are a mixed bag: Some acknowledge the drawback of their biases, while others tout them as both the product of purest rationality and a boon for their writing. An editor with a clear vision of his magazine has departed, and despite my reservations about that vision, I think that's a bad thing; still, his replacement has done wonders for the Journal's reputation in the eyes of many readers, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with the place. Elsewhere in the magazine, comparatively mainstream titles are (apparently) given an honest look by writers I admire, though not without two columns' worth of tangential anti-superhero boilerplate; a thoroughgoing attempt to engage the work of one of that mainstream's great geniuses is undertaken, though (apparently) few of the writers involved delved further into his admittedly troubling politics than a cursory dismissal; and speaking of troubling politics, Dave Sim is once again inexplicably given free reign to hold forth, for what I'm told is no less than ten pages. As is always the case with this kind of train-wreck coverage, it enhances the readers' understanding and appreciation of comcis not one iota. (What was TCJ's reasoning behind this, and its previous efforts to turn the Blood & Thunder section of the magazine into a second Cerebus letter column? "You know what, Dave? We're just not convinced that your heart is really in this whole 'bashing the Marxist/feminist/homosexualist axis' thing, but hey, we've got some space to kill--prove us wrong"?)

The journal of record takes two steps forward, then two steps back. What's the next step, then?


POSTSCRIPT: I forgot to mention one further aspect of Michael Dean's reply. Twice during his response (once near the beginning, once near the end), he says he'd be interested to hear from other readers as to how News Watch and the Journal are coming across. Well, I leave it to you to let Dirk and Mike know: How are they doing?

Last night's episode of America's Next Top Model featured appearances by the RZA and the Ol' Dirty Bastard.

Could that show get any better?

The big story of the week around the comics blogosphere has been, well, the comics blogosphere itself. This means I've been doing a lot of meta-blogging lately, for which you have my sincere apologies. But if it makes you feel any better, at least it's been about relatively interesting meta topics, like the nature of blogging as a phenomenon and the effect blogging has on the thought patterns of its participants. In the wise words of Joe Quesada, never say never, but let me put it this way: Unless I get Instalanched, I'm never gonna post about, like, how many hits I got today or whatever.

Heidi MacDonald, the writer also known as The Beat, has a particularly juicy column this week on various and sundry scandals: The Marvel leaks, the Valentino ouster, the Deppey ascension (now it sounds like I'm naming Robert Ludlum novels). It also has an in-depth look at some of the top bloggers in the biz, and I'm flattered to say that yours truly was included in that number. This makes it the second article on the comics blogosphere to come out this week. Check it out, and while you're there, ignore her denials and demurrals and encourage Heidi to start her own blog. (Don't you think she'd do a great comics blog, in the Gawker/Kicker/Wonkette mode?)

While we're on the meta-blogging beat, this piece of mine from yesterday has a bunch of links on the superhero debate and the notion of groupthink. Here's a look at the bloggers who are weighing in on these topics today: Bill Sherman, saying his interest in manga is just reflective of a desire to read good comics; Bill Sherman again, defending the validity of different approaches to writing and reading comics; Rose Curtin, wondering why anyone would expect total diversity in criticism but still hopes to avoid posting simply to say "I agree" from here on out; Johnny Bacardi, pointing out that he has yet to join the manga herd; Rick Geerling, saying that unless he disagrees both strongly and coherently, he refains from writing deliberately contradictory posts; Steven Wintle, touting the diversity of the "Outer Blogosphere," those comics bloggers who stay away from industry commentary; Dave Intermittent, suggesting that the ability of enthusiastic laymen to pontificate is a feature of blogs, not a bug, but also pointing out that, through the need for link love, blogs can be ideologically self-perpetuating; and Tim O'Neil, who wonders at the role his anti-superhero rants played in this whole kerfuffle, which he basically thinks is a stupid waste of time. We report, you decide!

In a post on an upcoming animation-style Batman comic, Johnny Bacardi takes a moment to savor the absence of colorist Lee Loughridge from the book's black-and-white preview art. The frustrating thing about Loughridge is that you know he's capable of better things than his usual palette of hideous browns and greens would suggest--his work on Kingpin #1 was tremendous, I thought. And yet the muddy, acidic colors he most often relies on are enough to keep me away from books I think I'd otherwise enjoy, like Y: The Last Man. Last night I finally read through the first trade paperback of Brubaker & Phillips's Sleeper, which was great, and I couldn't help but wonder if I'd ever have bothered reading it had it been released under Vertigo rather than WildStorm, and therefore had been given the imprint's trademark Wall of Brown treatment...


Gaiman defeats McFarlane! Dewey defeats Truman! The Giants win the pennant! The British are coming! It's a cookbook! (link courtesy of ADD courtesy of Mike Sterling.)

The following two threads on the Comics Journal message board make the Journal, its writers, its readers, and alt-comix fans in general look like __________. You have five seconds to fill in the blank with a word or phrase utterable on broadcast television. Ready, set, go! (Links courtesy of David Fiore and Christopher Butcher.)

Finally, David Fiore returns to The Dark Knight Returns. Today he argues that the book suffers for a lack of a Marlowe to offset Batman's Kurtz. But David, what about that pivotal section in Book Three, when Batman nearly disappears and the story is told through the men on the street—the priest, the woman, the bald man with glasses, perpetual malcontent Byron Brassballs—or indeed the use of talking heads and vox pops throughout the book? But then again, their response to Batman range from genuine admiration to thuggish vicarious thrills to the kind of run-of-the-mill political demonization that's the stock in trade of the real world's Michael Moores and Sean Hannitys. No one seems to grasp the true magnitude of The Batman Problem—that is, his sublimity, or conversely his horror. Except, perhaps, Superman (as you say), who of course eventually relinquishes this view with a wink. But Dave, I've also got to point out that integration with the sublime happens to humans all the time—in science fiction! I'd say that Miller is painting Batman in much the same way that Kubrick paints the stargate in 2001: immense, alien, beyond good and evil… What do you think?

Again, it's stupid to be talking about this so much until I see it. But regarding the depiction of Caiaphas et al, who probably weren't swell people in real life any more than religious authorities with temporal power tend to be swell people in this day and age: I'm so used to viewing people's actions as just that--those people's actions, not the actions of the collective group to which they belong--that maybe I'm glossing over the potentially anti-Semitic resonance that making these guys into ugly villains might have. I'm so convinced of the stupidity of deriving anti-Semitism from the story of Jesus (if he'd been born in Norway, the Vikings would have killed him; if he'd been born in China, the Chinese would have killed him, etc.) that it's tough for me to see that other people would draw a different conclusion from these images.

It's like the "controversy" about the dark-skinned orcs in The Lord of the Rings. To me, it's idiotic--they're ORCS, people. They're not real. They represent only themselves. That's how I interpret the Gospels, in a sense--they're AUTHORITY FIGURES, people. Their Judaism (which is shared by Jesus and his mother and father and his disciples and everyone who protests his crucifixion) is irrelevant. They represent only themselves. But the difference between the two cases is that for thousands of years, Christian authority figures have based all sorts of horrifying pogroms and inquisitions and holocausts on that particular misinterpretation. If people were going around harrassing and killing dark-skinned people because that's how they interpreted LotR, I'd be a lot more wary of that book/those movies than I'd otherwise be. I think that's why people are so wary of this film/this religion. (The fact that Mel Gibson hasn't exactly gone out of his way to be pro-Semitic doesn't help either.)

Okay, I'm done for now.

Shawn Fumo is back from doing frivolous crap like juggling, and is talking about comic books again! He's got some details and a rave review of the new collections of Miyazaki's epic fantasy Nausicaa, and I'll admit I'm intrigued.

David Fiore went to the TCJ.com messboard and lived to tell the tale. Also, more DKR blogging.

Tim O'Neil's indipsensible daily links roundup directs us to strong reviews of Craig Thompson's Blankets (aka "the book you have to voice some big problems with in order to be taken seriously these days, for whatever reason") and Mat Brinkman's Teratoid Heights (aka "the best book from 2003 that you've never seen"--expect a review from yours truly sometime soon), both from online magazine The High Hat. Check them both out--these are two of the best comics I've had the good fortune to read since getting back on the funnybook bandwagon.

Steven Wintle touts the upcoming International Read a Comic Book Naked Day. That explains a lot about his blog in recent weeks.

Babar of Simply Comics reviews this year's APE convention, which, like SPX, seems to have dwindled compared to previous years. Could MoCCA be drawing attendance away from APE, too, despite their being a full season and a full country apart?

Finally, holy crap. (Link courtesy of Graeme McMillan.)

Andrew Sullivan weighs in. I think he may have a point with the depiction of Pilate and his wife versus the depiction of the Sanhedrin. But the passage about violence shows me nothing other than the fact that Sullivan doesn't know a whole lot about film. God help him if he ever watched Hellraiser or Casino or Videodrome.

Or: Here are Sean's uninformed opinions on a movie he hasn't even seen yet, which I guess hasn't stopped anyone else, so here we go

What to make of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ? Well, for starters, I'm not buying that it's anti-Semitic. I'm just not. In their collective rave for the film, both Roger Ebert & Richard Roeper, not exactly bagmen for the right wing, said it wasn't anti-Semitic at all; ditto for the God Squad, Father Tom Hartman and Rabbi Marc Gelman. That pretty much settles the argument for me, because it would appear that at this point the only people taking offense are professional offense-takers. Hell, on Keith Olberman's show the other day, Roeper said it actually could be considered more anti-Italian than anti-Semitic. As you might have noticed, I gun for anti-Semitism with as much gusto as anyone around, but if it's not obvious to two film critics and two religious pundits, I don't think it's there.

I think films about Jesus, paradoxically, bring out the worst in people. During the pre-release furor, when people like Frank Rich were lambasting the film without even having seen it (though, to be fair, he wasn't invited to do so), I couldn't help be reminded about the similar uproar over Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. How many of the quote Christians unquote who boycotted that movie had any clue what they were actually boycotting? I think that film is one of the most deeply felt and devout Christian statements ever committed to celluloid, and when I hear people say otherwise, I've got to wonder what film they saw, or what kind of closed-minded zealotry they saw it with. It seems to me profoundly unfair to prejudge Gibson's film as being too orthodox, in the same way that it was profoundly unfair to prejudge Scorsese's for being too unorthodox.

I am not a Christian, but I greatly admire the life and teachings of Jesus, and I think it is important to tell his story. His death, quite simply, is an important part of that story, one that I think most comfy-cozy condemnatory Christians ignore. (For whatever reason, the answer to the religious right's question "What Would Jesus Do?" rarely seems to be "throw all your money away, dedicate your life to helping every hated lowlife in your area, be rejected and hated by your hometown, undermine the religious and governmental authorities, get arrested, convicted in a kangaroo court, and tortured to death." Go figure.) This also ties into my appreciation for over-the-top violence in film, and the way the spectacle of seriously hard-core bodily trauma cuts through various layers of distanciation to reveal horrifying truths about the world and the human condition. I can't think of a more appropriate venue for such spectacle than Jesus' crucifixion, which essentially served the same purpose.

Okay, those were the pros.

On the con side, Gibson himself strikes me as a fundamentalist whack-job, a person to whom our current Catholic Church is irredeemably liberal (!) and our current Pope is a namby-pamby pinko (God help us!). His refusal to repudiate his scumbag Holocaust-denying father's grotesque anti-Semitism is offensive. (Listen, I love my Dad too and always will, but if he started saying Auschwitz was a hoax while I was trying to make a movie about a man who died out of love for his fellow man, you bet your ass I'd call bullshit on him.) Of course, Gibson also has made a string of troubling statements about homosexuals, and I'm no fan of that either. Actually, I'm surprised that no one's pointed out how Gibson chose to make Satan an androgyne, which seems in keeping with his feelings about gays. I also think it's no coincidence that our commander in chief chose the week this film was released to expand the War on Terror to American gays--I'm sure he figures his whole religious base will have a hard-on for infidels the second they leave the theatre.

Which leads me to some deeper problems not just with the movie, but with the Christian story. I've long been disturbed by the emphasis Christianity has placed on the crucifixion. It strikes me as borderline death-worship, simultaneously a celestial stamp of approval for human suffering and a divine invitation to seek revenge for this act. Like Christopher Hitchens and Patti Smith, I'm also horrified at the notion that a man I've never met (how could I? he lived 2,000 years ago) was the victim of a human sacrifice on my behalf. I did not ask for this to happen, nor would I if it were an option to me. I'd say "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," but the thing is I don't believe in sin, either. I believe in doing right and doing wrong, and God knows I've done a lot of the latter, but that's up to me to make right. I would have preferred that this wonderful, loving, caring, fun-loving (yeah, that's right!), passionate, peaceful, moral, beautiful man of Nazareth lived a full, long life then to die in torment and ignominy for what I'm constantly told are my own wrongdoings. Their my wrongdoings. Please, God, let me atone for them.

Basically, I think a much better symbol than the cross would have been the empty tomb, the stone rolled away. Isn't the point of Christianity not just that Christ died, but that Christ conquered death? Why is the joy of this essentially ignored in favor of the human sacrifice? I know you can't have one without the other, but doesn't it make more sense to focus on the end, rather than the means?

Anyway, those are my thoughts about the film. I would like to see it sometime, but I know the violence will probably keep the Missus away--the violence and the fact that her Christianity is a deeply personal affair, and she's uncomfortable with communal expressions thereof. We'll see.

Oh, hell. This seems appropriate too:

Well, a redneck nerd in a bowling shirt was a-guzzlin' Lone Star beer

Talkin' religion and politics for all the world to hear.

"They oughta send you back to Roossia, boy, or New York City one,

You just want to doodle a Christian girl and you killed God's only Son."

I said, "Has it occurred to you, you nerd, that that's not very nice,

We Jews believe it was Santa Claus that killed Jesus Christ!"

"You know, you don't look Jewish," he said, "near as I could figger

I had you lamped for a slightly anemic, well-dressed country nigger.

No, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore,

They don't turn the other cheek the way they done before."

He started in to shoutin' and spittin' on the floor,

"Lord, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore."

He says, "I ain't a racist but Aristitle Onaysis is one Greek we don't need,

And them niggers, Jews and Sigma Nus, all they ever do is breed.

And wops and micks and slopes and spics and spooks are on my list

And there's one little hebe from the heart of Texas--is there anyone I missed?"

Well, I hits him with everything I had right square between the eyes.

I says, "I'm gonna gitcha, you son of a bitch ya, for spoutin' that pack of lies.

If there's one thing I can't abide, it's an ethnocentric racist;

Now you take back that thing you said 'bout Aristitle Onaysis.

No, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore,

We don't turn the other cheek the way we done before."

You could hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor,

"Lord, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore."

"No, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore,

They ain't making carpenters who know what nails are for."

Well, the whole damn place was singin' as I strolled right out the door

"Lord ... they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore."

--Kinky Friedman, "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore"

Teratoid Heights, by Mat Brinkman. 176 pages, 5 x 6, b/w. Published by Highwater Books. $12.95. Buy it here.

I've never seen a comic like this before.

Cartoonist Mat Brinkman is the most compelling member of the Fort Thunder art collective, which was formed by a group of RISD students in Providence, Rhode Island. He combines the whimsy and chops of FT's most commercially successful artist Brian Ralph with the weirdness and choppiness of FT experimentalists like Brian Chippendale and Jim Drain. And in his little book Teratoid Heights, he's created a minor sequential-art masterpiece.

This nearly silent, black-and-white paperback has no real narrative to speak of. Rather, it's a collection of short adventure stories, in which a variety of monstrous, faceless creatures explore their respective environments with alternately hilarious and chilling results. Like Jim Woodring's Frank stories, Teratoid Heights uses scary-funny black humor and unexpected surprises as its stock and trade. But it eschews Woodring's familiar funny-animal tropes for something new, eerie, and original. The art, which simultaneously possesses the starkness of woodcuts and the manic detail of the 60s undergrounds, quite simply looks like a transmission from Another Place. It suggests a mental soundtrack wherein all that can be heard are the grunts and squeaks of these strange beings, and surrounding that, the low whirr of desolate lunar-landscape winds. It's a means of transport as much as it's a graphic novel.

The book is divided into several sections, each chronicling the adventures of a particular creature or colony of creatures. The first section, "Oaf," starts the book off right: An exciting sequence shows the titular giant storming a well-protected tower, but what he does when he fulfills his quest is far from the damsel-rescuing or king-slaying you might have expected. In other, less humorous stories involving fear, danger, and death, it's truly surprising how well the simply delineated and childlike Oaf is used to convey the pathos and occasional senselessness of his wild world, and how well Brinkman navigates the spaces of that world. The sense of geography you acquire is as clear-cut and visceral as your mental map of the fortress in the climax of The Two Towers (Tolkien, incidentally, being an obvious inspiration here).

These complex worlds are not all Brinkman has to show us, though. The book also features a collection of Brinkman's "micro-minis," 16-panel backgroundless showcases for a variety of simply drawn creatures. In "Cloudbank," a chubby fellow devises an amusingly simple method for curing his ailing tummy; in "Creem Puff," a marshmallow-man type figure has a jolly time proving that two heads are better than one; in "Dissector," an arachnid monstrosity learns too late the price of his own curiosity. What's fascinating about these stories, if you can call them that, is not just how well they hit their respective funny or grotesque notes, but the way Brinkman teases a plot out of the simple mechanics of drawing. Each creature's actions flow naturally from their own design. It's almost as if you're watching a wind-up toy--each event makes perfect, almost automatic sense, yet ends up being totally unexpected. There's a joy of drawing--one might almost say doodling--here that's exhiliarating to behold. In "Cridges," the book's final section and the only one with written dialogue, Brinkman has similar fun with wordplay. Rhyming, big comic-book-y word effects ("NO"), and a monster-driven pastiche of slacker-dude rock-concert enthusiasm show Brinkman to be as able and witty a manipulator of language for its own sake as he is of art.

The book's real tour-de-force, though, comes in the section called "Flapstack," which concerns the subterranean realm of little creatures that look a lot like pulled teeth. That section's story "Sunk" is, I think, the single best comics sequence I read all year. Three of the teeth creatures, each bound to the other by a length of rope, fall into a winding labyrinth. As they try to navigate this incredibly complex maze, Brinkman intercuts between them as though multiple cameras are involved. The three creatures are indistinguishable but for the corresponding numeral which appears each time they come back "on screen." Before long we have a sense of exactly where in the maze each creature is, and it's the intense concentration required to keep up with Brinkman's byzantine constructions that attaches us to the creatures as surely as their frustratingly short lengths of rope attach them to each other. As they attempt to overcome the obstacles they encounter, the tension is, almost stunningly, an edge-of-your-seat affair. The powerful end to this thriller--which, again, stars three silent and indistinguishable walking teeth--is testament to the power of the medium when deployed in new and sophisticated ways, and to Brinkman for having the vision to do this.

The whole Fort Thunder crew shows a commendable interest in the physical aspects of alternative cartooning, rather than just the verbal. In a way it's equivalent to modern-day dance-punks like the Rapture and DFA, who are trying to reintegrate mind and body over on the indie-rock side of things; I've also suggested it's akin to the glam and prog acts of yore, who refused to sacrifice excitement for intelligence. Teratoid Heights is the best thing the group has produced so far. Though startlingly original, it evokes an array of comics that saw viscerality as a route to creativity: Woodring's Frank, Panter's Jimbo, Kirby's New Gods, Ware's Quimby the Mouse--I myself was also reminded of Mignola's Hellboy and Miller's Elektra Lives Again. A deceptively simple book, it packs a wallop you'll be thinking about long after you finish reading. When the residents of Teratoid Heights finish exploring their own lands, don't worry--they'll be wandering around your brain soon enough.

(Special thanks to Chris Allen for pointing out that not enough people know this book is out there. It's out there!)

Superhero "realism": the case against. Zed of MemeMachineGo points out the big problem with realistic takes on superheroes: The more a superhero world looks like our own, the easier it is for us to notice when the things that happen in that world don't make any sense. Zed focuses on the exercise of political or military power by and/or against superheroes in fictional worlds--the Authority taking over the world in the Wildstorm universe, supervillains destroying whole cities in the DC Universe (Coast City was destroyed back during the Death/Return of Superman saga; I think San Diego was just dumped into the sea in Aquaman (where will the intra-DC comics industry have its big conventions, now?)), the U.S. government deploying a covert ops consisting of both ridiculously powerful superbeings and a guy with a bow and arrow in the Ultimate universe, and so forth. Paradoxically, these companies' efforts to deliver a recognizable world heighten our ability to detect their failure to do so. Events like 9/11 and the Iraq War have given us crystal-clear demonstrations of how the world would react to an unexpected and massive slaughter of civilians, or the use of force to right a wrong despite the disapproval of international institutions. We know things don't just go back to business as usual. Now imagine that instead of destroying a few buildings, the bad guys wiped out all of New York; or that instead of a country using its superior power to topple a dictator, five or six people in costumes did so. The political crises engendered by these situations would be near-apocalyptic. The reason a book like Watchmen (or even Squadron Supreme) worked was because they weren't set in an ongoing universe, where the need to keep the stories coming necessitated a glossing-over of consequences for the actions of its superpowered beings. And even in those types of limited series, your mileage may vary. Basically I think this isn't an argument against "realistic superheroes" as much as it's an argument against embedding them in a universe-style framework where the realistic consequences of those superheroes' existence and behavior can't be fully and honestly explored. (Link courtesy of Jim Henley.)

Is Bruce Wayne the Marlowe to Batman's Kurtz? Did young Bruce's trauma create Batman, or, like Spider-Man, did the birth of the extraordinary creature within him predate that trauma? Is Batman's war on crime really a quest to find the right mirror to view himself in? Yes, it's Dark Knight Returns blogging as only Dave Fiore can do it.

Speaking of Dave Fiore, good Lord. Ritual messageboard suicide is always breathtaking to behold.

J.W. Hastings says that modern-day PCisms are ruining Kurt Busiek's alternate-history-fantasy WWI story Arrowsmith, and also defends the comics marketplace. No, really.

Christopher Butcher does more than decry sneaky corporate censorship of manga and other imported comics: He points out that this is one area where informed and vocal customers really can make a difference, and really have made a difference in the past.

Finally, Dave G. at Simply Comics has devised a Comics Blog Update Page that automatically monitors when nearly all of the sites in the comicsphere have last updated. Mine's not working, though. I've got my tech guys working round the clock, rest assured!

You know, if you had told me that less than three years after the most horrific attack on American soil in history, I'd be looking at an MSNBC graphic reading "Culture Wars" with a picture of Janet Jackson and intertwined male-male and female-female symbols... I don't think I'd have been surprised at all, actually, because the fact is that this country, and all countries, really, will never want for busybody idiots.

It's gratifying to see that, according to OxBlog, Bush's proposed religious-right Constitutional graffiti doesn't stand a chance of passing the Senate. (Link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.) My hope is also that the hypocrisy inherent in this administration's endorsement of an apparently pornographically violent film, coming as it does at a time when they're using the power of the government to intimidate companies into cracking down on exposed tits and the use of dirty words, will be apparent to everyone.

Regarding the Howard Stern situation itself, I don't think it's as clear cut as people are acting. I think Stern is an unfunny moron who basically got in trouble with one of his bosses, so Jeff Jarvis's high dudgeon over the issue strikes me as hubris in the extreme. However, people in the "it's no big deal" camp, like the inexcusably oblivious Glenn Reynolds, are glossing over the fact that this corporate crackdown, while not technically censorship, is only happening because the government is using its muscle to bully the companies into doing the censoring so the feds won't have to. By the letter of the law I suppose this is okay, but the words "congressional investigation" or "government hearings" are ones I never want to see in near proximity with speech issues. When that happens, you get travesties like the Comics Code, which destroyed publishers and gutted the medium for decades, or the music industry's Parental Advisory stickers, which are treated like the Scarlet Letter by some of the country's largest music retailers. It's grotesque to watch my tax dollars at work forcing entertainment and media moguls to abase themselves at the feet of Congress, and restrict speech in their products out of fear of the wrath of the government.

The only culture war I'm interested in fighting right now is the one between freedom and tyranny, democracy and theocracy, equality and bigotry, liberty and terror. I don't want to have to guess as to which side my own government is on.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Oscar-winning writer-director of Brain Dead."

Johnny Bacardi has posted his much-anticipated David Bowie retrospective. And... well, yeah, there it is. Turns out Johnny and I don't have much in common in terms of our ideas about Bowie. (For example, I think Bowie's 90s output is thrilling, that the instrumentals from Low and "Heroes" are gorgeous, that there's a lot more going on on albums like Station to Station and Diamond Dogs than just "a couple" of good songs, that there are a few factual errors in the retrospective that a Bowiephile like me can't help but quibble over, and so on.) But don't lean on me, man--check it out yourself and see what you think. And while you're at it, vada Bill Sherman's take on the former David Jones, centering mainly on an appreciation of the astounding album Aladdin Sane. Oh no, Bill, you're not alone.

Robin Williams's date to the Oscars is apparently Bobcat Goldthwait.

It's about 10:25pm EST right now, and so far it's been a good night for The Lord of the Rings, which, given the way its installments have absorbed my movie-going budget for the past three years, is really the only dog I have in this race. I think The Return of the King is four for four right now, and I'm just ecstatic. I think only life-long Tolkien fans can know what I'm talking about: "My God--Alan Lee is onstage at the Oscars!" "A big famous actress just said the words 'Middle-earth' in front of a worldwide audience of one billion people!" It's amazing.

Am I 100% happy? I guess not. I don't understand why the movie was nominated for Best Sound and not Best Sound Editing, and why it was nominated for every visual award and Best Director and Best Picture but not Best Cinematography, and obviously the cast (especially Sean Astin) was completely robbed. But so far we've got a sweep going, and that's really nice. If by the end of the evening I can truthfully refer to the Academy Award-winning director of Meet the Feebles, I'll be very happy indeed.

I'm glad to see Errol Morris finally win an Oscar, but not, apparently, as glad as Morris himself, who made sure to let everyone know how much he felt he deserved it. And oh so humorously thanking Robert McNamara for a war that, as he said just a couple sentences later, killed millions of people, so you could make a movie about it--charming, just charming!

Some folks are down a rabbit hole, that's for sure.

"Wait--are we supposed to clap for Leni Riefenstahl?"

Mitch and Micki in character? Huge.

A memo to the people who make the "we may be a beer company but we're responsible" commercials for Anheuser-Busch:

I'm glad you're trying to encourage parents to keep tabs on what their kids are doing. But so help me God, if this commercial inspires a single kid to leave the ringer on on his cellphone while he's in the movie theatre, and then to actually start talking on the goddamn thing once it rings, I will literally find you and kill you.