Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
Seriously, watch Monty Python's Meaning of Life sometime.
Anyway, I stumbled across this info graphic at The Onion and I can't for the life of me figure out which side of the line it's supposed to fall on. I'm not sure it matters.
My thoughts on the new issue of Jordan Crane's Uptight, as well as World War Hulk, New Avengers: Illuminati, Justice Society of America, Conan and the Midnight God, Detective Comics, The Exterminators, and Iron & the Maiden can be found--where else?--at Wizard's Thursday Morning Quarterback.
I can't decide which of these genuinely amazing T-shirts from Rich Juzwiak's Poison concertgoer photogallery I love more. God damn ziggety zam do they hit my crass T-shirt sweet spot: tacky, funny, yet not racist, misogynist, or otherwise offensive, and with awesome no-nonsense fonts.
The latest installment of my interview column is up, with Angry Youth Comix's Johnny Ryan. If you've ever wondered about the inspiration behind Blecky Yuckerella, Loady McGee, and Sinus O'Gynus, I've got you covered.
Another very, very cool image of Vinnie Jones as Mahogany from The Midnight Meat Train. I've heard great things about the footage shown at San Diego Comic-Con from a friend who was there. Hope springs eternal. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
This week's Horror Roundtable asks if we ever drifted away from the genre, and what brought us back if so. The responses are fascinating. It may be my favorite Horror Roundtable so far.
Scott Pilgrim artist Bryan Lee O'Malley just posted this gorgeous David Bowie sketch he drew for me at MoCCA. I've got a lot more where this came from, actually; watch this space.
In the comment thread in the Midnight Meat Train image post below, Bruce Baugh points out the striking and obviously thoughtful composition of the image, leading me to note what a pleasant surprise it is any time I come across an image from a horror film (let alone a promotional image for a horror film) that has any kind of panache. I've thought of this the last several times I went to the mall and saw this poster for the werewolf flick Skinwalkers hanging up:
If you care about horror in comics, you really ought to read this Tom Spurgeon interview with Tom Neely, author of the new graphic novel The Blot. The Blot contains some of the most unnerving and original horror imagery I've seen in comics all year, including my favorite spread of the year thus far.
The guy from TV on the Radio is wearing a PaperRad/Ben Jones T-shirt
Premature T-shirt blogging! Check this beauty out! (You can sorta see it behind the guitar and the beard.)
As made by the great Buenaventura Press. I eyed this covetously at MoCCA this summer, but couldn't bring myself to spend $60 on a T-shirt knowing what I tend to do to the things. My loss is avant-rock's gain!
In a new interview with Ain't It Cool News' Quint, Clive Barker says a lot of things to inspire confidence in the upcoming Midnight Meat Train adaptation--I mean, referencing Weegee is a good sign, I would say. But at the same time he says he has no idea if the Hellraiser remake is going forward. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure if that's bad news or good. Ah well, go read.
On his blog, Paul Pope has posted a quote from Frank "Dune" Herbert's son Brian about how upset his father was over the (ahem) similarities between his work and George Lucas's later, much more successful Star Wars. It got me thinking in a way that's sort of in direct opposition to the way I've been thinking about a lot of art lately.
This is something I've gone into on the blog before: Basically, a sometimes-writer and a frequent consumer of fiction, I'm a very big fan of what I think of as "the art of enthusiasm"—the magpie approach of constructing your own little mythos or whatever based on elements of other stories that you really really enjoy. That's why I like that the He-Man/Masters of the Universe toys and cartoons were an incoherent mish-mash of sci-fi, fantasy, pulp and superhero conventions; they just took everything awesome and jammed it together. That's also why I like Kill Bill, or Scott Pilgrim, or The Immortal Iron Fist*, or Star Wars itself, and so on. And it's not just fiction. The same principle probably applies to Bowie throughout his career, latching on to whatever music had him psyched at the time and then moving on when he felt like it, as well as really really sample-heavy late-80s/early-90s hip-hop. So on the one hand I'd say that a big part of the appeal of Star Wars is that Lucas took all the stuff he loved—Flash Gordon, Carlos Castaneda, Dune, the Fourth World, drag racing, Joseph Campbell, World War II dogfighting movies, 2001—and jammed it together. Of course the downside is when you appropriate from a specific-enough source that it's recognizable, even if it's in a different context or surrounded by enough other elements that it's just part of a patchwork. It's a fine line aesthetically and morally as well as legally. I think it's likely that both sides are right—it's a perfectly valid artistic approach, and it's perfectly valid to be upset if it's your work being appropriated.
My yapping aside, click the link to see a badass Paul Pope drawing of a Tusken Raider sandperson.
Gary Frank is one of my favorite superhero artists. He gives his characters a realistic but heightened physicality and an intensity in their eyes that connotes both potential violence and, well, sex appeal (for both sexes). We've got a ginchy gallery of Gary Frank sketches for his upcoming run on the Superman title Action Comics over at Wizard--take a look.
This week in the hotseat at my regular Wizard interview column: Jeffrey Brown of Incredible Change-Bots and sundry autobiographical graphic novels fame. Sex is discussed.
Beginning with [Indiana Jones and the Temple of] Doom, [Steven Spielberg] begins a process of apologizing for disturbing his audience - outside the film at first, but internalizing these dual impulses *within* the films as he continues.
This is what happens when comic book nerds go to Jamaica.
Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets digests make unbelievable beach reads, by the way. You may recall me panning Locas in The Comics Journal a while back; I was really proud of that review because it actually caused at least one drunk guy to grab me at dinner and yell at me, which to me is the hallmark of a good Journal review. But I've since come around on the "Locas" stories, thanks in large part to these wonderful digests Maggie the Mechanic and The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.. They're much more complete, much more readable...just the way the stories were meant to be presented. It's like a soap opera shot by Fellini.
Wizard's got an interesting interview up with Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and the upcoming Watchmen, a line-up of films that were he to die after completing movie #3 would make him the nerd-director equivalent of John Cazale (whose C.V. consisted solely of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter). It focuses primarily on his relationship with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, with whom he's collaborating on promotional, conceptual, and storyboard art. Snyder reveals that he himself is actually drawing many of the film's storyboards (the ones that aren't straight lifts from the comic).
I think it was only this past week that I realized how cool it would be if they make a good movie out of this book.
Turns out that cool 31 Days of Spielberg blogathon is plagued with plagiarism (click here for examples). The author's kind-of sort-of not-really mea culpa is here; Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door comments here.
Look, any time one of these cases pops up people talk about how it's a thin line. It's not. It's a giant mile-wide crystal-clear line. It's really, really easy to not plagiarize, and it's really, really hard to do it, especially in the fashion illustrated by those examples, without knowing that you're doing it.
My thoughts on the latest issues of The Immortal Iron Fist, Batman, Green Lantern Corps, Amazing Spider-Man, Green Arrow: Year One, Thunderbolts, and World War Hulk: Gamma Corps may be found at this week's Thursday Morning Quarterback at Wizard.
"Lovingkindness," from the series And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull, Charlie White
I urge you to look at more of White's deeply horror-inflected work, which I believe has made the blog rounds at some point in the past, at his website.
Jog on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey's Soldier X, the Cable-starring "existentialist/absurdist superhero" series that's the hidden gem of the late Bill Jemas era at Marvel. Cancelled just before the "we'll collect any goddamn thing" era at Marvel began, its individual issues are among the few floppy-format comics I continue to treasure.
Curt Purcell, whose Groovy Age of Horror blog has been bringing us the heavy heavy monster sound for quite some time now, has announced his attention to expand past his "60s/70s sleazesploitation horror" niche to include whatever genre of fiction is tickling his fancy at the moment. Good for Curt, I say! Though he's certainly correct that his laser-like focus on horror's groovy age put him on the map, my guess is he'll find the freedom to follow his bloggy bliss on the newly rechristened Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror blog rewarding as all get-out (he already has, by the sound of it). Anyway, Curt and I have discussed this in the past; click here and here to see.
In other news, I didn't tell you that I saw Wolf Creek a few weeks back. It was good. Intense, at least in part because of all the baggage I took into it. The "torture porn" label is honestly the best thing to happen to a lot of these movies, because the dread you feel when you start to watching them is 50% due to that label alone. I forget who it was who pointed out that that's the genius of the title The Texas Chain Saw Massacre--it does half the work for the filmmakers right there. But that of course is also a brilliant movie. This isn't on that level I don't think, but it's rough. Parts of this reminded me of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, though the setting, protagonists, and antagonists are all very different. Haneke, I've learned through Jason Adams, is remaking that movie in English. I think he's a little too late to catch the torture porn wave, which crested and crashed, but oh well.
Jeff Lester saw Cemetery Man (aka Della'morte Dell'amore) and didn't like it! (You know you're in trouble when he says "It's designed to be a horror film for the Smiths set"; simply put, no.) Here's a bunch of reasons why he's wrong.
Jason Adams didn't like Monster Squad all that much, at least in part because kids called each other "faggot" in it. I'll admit that my main reaction is "that's how kids talk, so maybe lighten up a bit." This despite being absolutely ruthless in weeding out uses of the word "gay" as an epithet on the Wizard message boards where I am a moderator, for example. IIRC it was mainly the asshole bullies in the movie who used the word, if that matters.
We all have sort of real-world hot-button issues we're more sensitive about when they come up in a horror context. Frex, Jason couldn't bring himself to cheekily salute the curb-stomping from American History X, but was okay with tipping the proverbial bowler hat to Alex crushing a woman's face with a ceramic penis in A Clockwork Orange. In my case I'm really not crazy about killing animals, with children in second place, and if I get the sense that the filmmaker is getting off on violence against women, I tune out.
Dig this, post-apocalyptic fiction fans: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, a collection of eschatological short stories by everyone from Stephen King to Jonathan Lethem to Cory Doctorow to George R.R. Martin. (Via GalleyCat, via Justin Aclin.)
Paging Bill Shatner and/or Frodo Baggins: A 200-yard spiderweb is attracting entomological attention in Texas' Lake Tawakoni State Park. Theories differ as to whether this is an effort for multiple spiders to work together or get the hell away from each other. I know which one I'd do if I were there.
This week's interview subject in my I Can Has Comix? column is one of my favorite cartoonists and the guy who really got me started on alternative comics in general, Jordan Crane. And just so you horror fans don't say I never did anything for you in this column, he talks about why he doesn't like The Walking Dead and how he keeps writing and drawing ghost stories because he has yet to read a good one.
Me and the Missus, taken tonight on the log flume during Astroland's likely final Labor Day weekend ever. The Wu-Tang Clan shirt was purchased at the local Hot Topic. Some kid at Coney Island came up to me and said "sick shirt!" I agree. Greatest Of All Time.
Wizard's got an interesting interview up with 
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