In this regard, this Dawn of the Dead is sporadically entertaining but also disappointingly fleeting; the characters are emotional vacuoles and the undead but Olympic sprinters with bloody makeup on, lacking not only personality, but conviction.

--Rob Humanick, 31 Days of Zombie!: Day 1 - Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004), The Projection Booth

Um, what?

I don't like this review at all, I must say. It's interesting to see post-300 Snyder backlash added to the usual pro forma gripe about his (excellent, curve-busting) Dawn remake, which is that because it lacked the original's Introductory English Lit sociopolitical metaphors, it's a bad movie. It's also interesting to see someone complain that zombies shouldn't be able to run because that's not scientifically realistic. (He catches himself, but not enough to have removed it from the piece.) Unfortunately these and other assertions essentially replace any kind of argumentation from example; it's like reading a full length review that could be replaced by the two words "it sucks" like one of those ridiculous subtitles of Tia Carrere's Cantonese dialogue in Wayne's World.

Via The Horror Blog.

I had to do some kind of October horrorblogging special, right?

That's what I was asking myself a few days ago, without realizing that no, I didn't, since I really don't do a big October blogathon every year. My big Clive Barker Books of Blood review rampage was back in 2005, and my initial 31-day foray into horrorblogging happened in 2003. I guess I take even years off, sort of like how the Star Trek movies take the even-numbered installments off from sucking.

But I couldn't really think of anything to tackle, until I was about a third of the way into The Stand and realized that I wanted to read more about this Randall Flagg character. Hmm, Flagg's the villain in those Dark Tower books, right? And I still haven't gotten around to reading them ever...why don't I dig up those copies of the first few volumes that I got for Christmas a few years ago and read them all month long, and blog about it while I'm at it?

So that's what I'll be doing to celebrate the scariest month of the year this year. But things will be different from past years' ambitious blog projects. Even though the Dark Tower series is ostensibly Stephen King's magnum opus, my blogging thereof will stay true to the humble roots of my idea to do so. Don't hold me to this or anything, because it's a woman's prerogative to change her mind, but I'll probably be keeping things short, sweet, and informal, more logging my reactions than offering analysis. I learned from my abortive attempt to blog The Lord of the Rings that the second the writing gets in the way of the reading, it's no fun anymore.

Before we get started, I want to list the things I knew, or thought that I knew, about The Dark Tower before cracking open its first volume, The Gunslinger.

1) It's about a gunslinger named Roland. He's on some kind of quest for a big important building called the Dark Tower. These ideas were lifted from the Childe Roland folk tales of old. It's a dark fantasy epic.

2) The main bad guy is Randall Flagg, who in other incarnations is also the main bad guy of The Stand and Eyes of the Dragon. He's also known here as the man in black.

3) In the books, the Tower is some sort of interdimensional vortex.

4) The gunslinger was trained in some sort of vaguely aristocratic ritualized way as a kid, during which time he also had a hawk. (I learned this from Wizard-mandated readings of the recent Marvel Comics prequel series, The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born.) He's still got a hawk that he uses.

5) Somehow, The Dark Tower mythos is tied into many of King's other works, especially the ones with Flagg but also tons of other stuff. King became a lot more deliberate about this during the '90s.

6) The first sentence is "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

I've already learned I was at least partially wrong about some of those things, but my point was that this is it--that's all I knew. I didn't even know if I would like the books, or if they're worth writing about! To be cute about it, I'm in the dark about them.

So we'll see how this goes. I may give up. I may take longer than a month to read the books. But I'll give it a shot. It's like a quest of my very own!

Tom Spurgeon emails:

One thing you may miss about The Stand is its place in the wider historical context of apocalyptic culture; that is, it was a book that posited a non-nuclear armageddon when that's what most people were suspecting. It's like Romero; there was something at the time that was actually very hopeful about these works because they weren't as nihilistic and bleak as the thought of simply seeing a white flash and being vaporized. You had a chance to deal with things. That's why teens connected with that stuff, since the generally powerless always connect to effectiveness fantasies, whether in a book or on a tabletop with dice.

That's interesting, particularly considering the nerd-gone-bad Harold Lauder character. I guess there's an allure to providing an example of just how wrong you, the nerd reading this book, could go. Particularly if you get a sex slave in the process. At any rate The Stand certainly casts a long shadow as a post-apocalyptic work, even over King's stuff. Cell read like a semi-successful Stand remix.

Tom:

I'm with you that certain passages in there were good, particularly the Larry Underwood stuff, but that there were also huge and obvious gaps in the storytelling.

Yeah. I noticed that during my most recent re-read of It, too, which was actually worse off in that regard. And I didn't even bother listing a lot of the stuff that pertains to the supernatural aspects--why can't all-powerful Flagg kill these clowns himself instead of relying on his incompetent henchmen, why aren't the Canadians and Mexicans receiving the psychic summons, etc.--since when it comes to the supernatural you actually CAN say "because" and that's reason enough. But you (I) read King for the scares and the digressions about John Fogerty, not because he's Alan Moore with the plot mechanics.

Tom:

I'm baffled that since you correctly (I think) identify the texture of the narrative as one of the best elements of the book you would think anything positive out of that goofy-ass TV mini-series, which was all surface elements, some of which were SO poorly done, some of which were okay, and nothing was more than an quarter-inch deep. It was like a string of cinematics made to snare a producer, not an actual finished product. Just awful.

My memory of The Stand is that it failed to capture the atmospherics anywhere, and that it looked like a shoddy TV show at all times. It was on the other day on TV, and in the two minutes I saw they were showing Larry Underwood in a bar, and it was like a bar that David Banner would work in on The Incredible Hulk. I kept expecting Bill Bixby to walk up to the bar and start talking to Esther Rolle.

This really hamfisted staging put a lot of pressure on the acting, which I thought bad all around, including Sinise, Dee, Lowe, and the guy from Coach in addition to the obvious bad ones like Nemec and Ringwald and San Giacomo. Just really obvious, bad choices in the acting, nothing that would hint at lives lived beyond whatever lines were being spoken right at that moment except maybe Walston and the guy playing Larry Underwood.

I thought Sheridan was fine, but it was that kind of fine that was like, "Hey, good for Jamey Sheridan; he should get some work after this" and not so much the "Holy Shit it's Randall Flagg!" kind of fine.

I'd reserve my harshest criticism of the adaptation mainly for Matt Frewer as the Trashcan Man, who was a scenery-chewing goof, even though I can't for the life of me picture anyone else when I picture that character now. I also think they blew it in terms of depicting what Las Vegas was like, with the fascist red-and-black Flagg logos, the central-casting badass types who made up the population, and really only showing goons like Lloyd, the Rat-Man, Ace High, Julie Lawry and such as the top echelon. It would have been much more frightening and vastly more interesting, obviously, if they all looked like accountants and gym teachers.

That being said, I stand by my appraisal of the series for a bunch of reasons. One is that it's seven hours long, which is the closest that anything's come to giving one of his books the time it needs to unfold as a film. And I really do believe it was REALLY well-cast. Gary Sinise and Ed Harris and Ray Walston, for crying out loud. And Jamey Sheridan was really perfect. Much less crazy about Matt Frewer and Corin Nemec and Molly Ringwald (though she makes sense because everyone had a crush on her at one point just like Harold did on Frannie), and Laura San Giacomo is really not my type, but nothing was nearly as egregious as the casting of, say, It, where your leads were Jack Tripper, John-Boy Walton, Judge Harry Stone, and Venus Flytrap.

It also preserved a lot of King's richly idiomatic way of writing. Larry telling his mom "That brown sound sho' do get around." The plague victim at the CDC center who pops out of nowhere and says to Stu "Come down here and eat chicken with me, beautiful. It's so DARK!" Calling Flagg the Walkin Dude. Tom Cullen saying he doesn't go to the drive-in because they only show them diddly-daddly pictures. I love that stuff.

I even liked the biggest changes to the characterization that they made--conflating Nadine with Rita and giving Lucy the kid instead of Nadine. And the music was really good too, not just the W.G. Snuffy Walden score but the pop songs--"Don't Fear the Reaper," "Boogie Fever," "Eve of Destruction," "Don't Dream It's Over." Finally the scary stuff was actually pretty scary. There were a lot of great boo moments in the nightmares about Flagg, his demon make-up did a good job of conveying the sort of slovenly grossness at the heart of King's conception of what Flagg is, and the plague stuff was handled well for the budget, too.

I do wish they'd kept the down ending, though.

Read: The Gunslinger

This was the first prose book I read in one sitting in a long, long time. Not even because I was so thoroughly engrossed or anything like that--just because from the moment I saw how quickly I was progressing through my slim trade paperback edition of the book, I considered it a fun and surmountable challenge to myself to get all the way through in one night.

I'd wondered how King would adapt to a story set in a fantasy world (perhaps a distantly post-apocalyptic one, from what I can gather) where he couldn't indulge in his usual pop-culture references and American idioms. Turns out he manages pretty well, substituting all that for a very bleak, almost fatalistic tone reminiscent of some of his nastier short stories. (About the only rock and roll reference in the whole magilla is the notion that in this strange culture, the song "Hey Jude" has become a folk anthem of sorts, the kind of nod to the might of the Beatles that you don't see this disciple of Eddie Cochran make very often.)

It wasn't until the very, very end of the book, after a couple hundred pages of picturing the mysterious man in black as Randy Flagg in a monk's outfit, that it became apparent that this guy wasn't Flagg after all. Given the book's convoluted publication history--its first chapter was written some 12 years before the novel's initial publication and was printed in a genre fiction magazine as a stand-alone short story, as were all the subsequent chapters--I guess Flagg didn't even exist when the man in black was first conceived of by King.

Even more strikingly, the same can be said of the majority of the book's alluded-to backstory, since King admits in his afterword that he's really making it up as he goes along and will fill in the gaps--what kind of revolution befell the gunslinger's home, how his various friends and enemies died, what he's done on his not-coincidentally 12-year quest to catch the man in black--when he gets to 'em. He also expresses confidence that this information is there, somewhere inside his brain. I don't really doubt that, but for someone weaned on Tolkien, a guy who but for a desire to give vent to an elaborately detailed backstory wouldn't have told the main story at all, it comes as a bit of a shock.

As for the story itself, it's the kind of high concept that non-Big Two, non-arthouse comics publishers live and die for: "Conan starring Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name." That's pretty brilliant, and as is the case with The Stand, strong casting (done in this case by me and not by TV producers) carries the book through its weaker spots. Although now that I think about it there's no glaring missteps to speak of, just that bone-dry tone that can get tedious at times but for the presence of Dirty Harry in fantasy drag.

The set pieces are a mixed bag. On the high end is the gunslinger's massacre of every single resident of the town of Tull, led by a fundamentalist zealot preacher of the BBW variety; the gunslinger's discovery of Jake, a little boy from New York killed by the man in black and dragged into the gunslinger's world to be sacrificed by the gunslinger in his pursuit of the MIB and thus to haunt his conscience; and the long journey by handcart through the mountains, reminiscent of both the Mines of Moria and the Lincoln Tunnel sequence in The Stand. Weaker are the horny female oracle, the fairly nondescript Slow Mutants, and the man in black's startling revelation of the nature of their world, which presents straight-faced an idea best reserved for zonked-out collegiate bullshitting and Onion articles.

I think the best thing about the book is the overall sense of decrepitude and futility, like we're in a world that's just about at the end of its timeline and is poised to go out with a whimper. The desert, the willow forest, the mountains, the caves, the ocean--they all seem kind of hopeless, like the desert planet in King's short story "Beachworld" now that I think about it. I hope the future volumes stick with this smart use of environment as secondary antagonist, nothingplaces where the man in black and his superiors thrive.

SciFi Wire brings more news of the ever-shittier-sounding The Dark Is Rising film adaptation, aka The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising: For some reason it's now simply called The Seeker. You can check out director David L. Cunningham's explanations for some of the major changes made to the book for the movie, if you're into that sort of thing. Believe it or not this movie comes out this Friday; I love the books so much that I'll probably see it, even though I really oughta know better.

Read: The Drawing of the Three--"Prologue: The Sailor"; "The Prisoner"

I don't know if it's just the slightly more conventional typeface used in my copy of this book or what, but even before we jump into modern-day America with the gunslinger, this book feels a lot more like a traditional Stephen King story. Maybe it's those creepy "lobstrosities" (neologisms FTW!) that crawl out of the water and chop off Roland's fingers and toes--not only do they feel like angry refugees from "The Mist," but their simple presence as a swarm of megafauna in a world that I'd assumed was pretty much depleted of such things by this point changes the abandoned feel of the gunslinger's environment instantly. They also dramatically raise the stakes right off the bat, irrevocably injuring the main character in a way that fundamentally alters his ability to live up to his own title--it's a lot tougher to sling guns with two fingers missing from your right hand--and leaving him at death's door.

Speaking of doors, the door concept, the portal by which Roland can enter our world through the eyes of junkie and amateur drug-smuggler Eddie Dean, is certainly a striking image, especially when you learn it's always visible to the travelers if they turn their heads back. And Roland's culture shock is a lot of fun, as is the basic idea that he can hijack this poor junkie dude, as is the smuggler's-blues/never-trust-a-junkie interior monlogue King gives Eddie.

But I can't for the life of me figure out why the door is there, or more specifically what Roland did to earn his discovery of it. Was it sacrificing Jake and catching the man in black? Who, by the way, he didn't even really defeat--the guy just kind of gave up and ended up dying of old age in the real world while taking Roland on a guided tour of the universe in his mind or the astral plane or whatever? Having the door just magically appear feels like a cheat.

Meanwhile, Roland's initially entertaining foray into Eddie's world culminates in extravantly overwritten, not-at-all-believable confrontations with an airplane flight crew and a bizarrely multiethnic mafia family, the latter of which is gilded with an ersatz Godfather philosopher-king don and his central-casting goons who're all about as realistic as comparable characters from your basic grim'n'gritty hackwork Batman comic. Surely there have been other times where King has dropped the ball this completely in his depiction of an American subculture, but I can't think of one nearly as glaring. It undermines the already shaky realism of the climactic shoot-out and the emotional weight of Eddie's final decision to join Roland on the other side of the door. Let's see if the drawing of character #2 ends on a higher note.

PS: Looks like Bruce Baugh will be blogging a (re-)read-through of The Dark Tower too--including related novels from throughout King's body of work. Compare and contrast!

PPS: Did I ever mention that Roland doesn't still have a hawk?

According to Bloody Disgusting, the directing team of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are in negotiations to helm the Hellraiser remake. BD regards this as good news based on the duo's film À L'Intérieur, which was recently acquired by the Weinstein Co. (Sorry, Jason.) We shall see.

Read: The Drawing of the Three--"Shuffle"; "The Lady of the Shadows"; "Re-Shuffle"

At this point what strikes me the most about Book Two in this series is how different it is and how different it feels from Book One. The Gunslinger was really no-frills, a collection of very austere short stories lashed together between two covers. Even if King's comparative inexperience as a writer led him to the occasional, perhaps unintentional storytelling complexity--like the extended flashback within an extend flashback in the opening chapter--the book was a journey every bit as straightforward and austere as the gunslinger's.

In The Drawing of the Three, however, you've got this comparatively elaborate structure involving a prologue, a section introducing a new main character, a sort of intermezzo section paced to mimic fading in and out of consciousness, a nother section introducing another new main character, another intermezzo, and so on. Meanwhile you're dipped back into King's reference-heavy idiom-heavy modern-day mode of storytelling after spending all of Book One in tersely worded depictions of a barren fantasy world. What's more, the gunslinger is now sharing top billing with (so far) two characters who almost never shut up, and whose psychological conditions make them prone to sounding antsy at best and psychotic at worst. It's all but cacophonous compared to the first installment.

But I'm impressed by the way the characters' long, tedious journey up the unchanging beach maintained the feeling of austerity that I found so appealing in Book One. It really just goes on and on and on. Even the presence of the lobstrosities becomes more of a chore than a thrill due to the constancy of the threat they present, and their monotonous querulous yammering. Ditto Detta Walker, the nymphomaniacal kleptomanaiacl sociopathic stereotype split personality of Odetta Holmes, the rich, beautiful and intelligent civil rights activist whose "drawing" is the main event of this book's second major section. King makes her taunting, shrieking banter with Roland and Eddie menacing to them through its annoyingness as much as through the knowledge that she'll make good on her threats if she gets the chance.

As for Odetta/Detta herself, I'm a little bit unwilling to let myself invest in her as a character, because I was so thrown by King's hamfisted mafia characters that I've now got my convinced he's just as bad at capturing any other subculture. At least with Detta he's given himself the out that this alternate personality (and by the way, schizophrenia isn't the right word for this condition at all, though I dunno, I guess that's what they called it back then or else Ian Hunter wouldn't have named his solo album You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic) is deliberately a racist, misogynist cliché.

As a side note, I have a very clear picture of each of these characters in my head. Roland is Clint Eastwood, Eddie is the Larry Underwood from the TV version of The Stand, and Detta and Odetta are, interestingly enough to me, two different contestants from this season of America's Next Top Model, the latest episode of which I watched just prior to reading this section. (FYI: Detta, Odetta.) I have no idea what that means.

PS: I forgot to say this yesterday, but if Roland is so amazed at the abundance of things like paper and sugar in our world, shouldn't he be even more amazed at the presence of so many guns in the hands of so many losers? Isn't that kind of the whole core of his upbringing?

PPS: It might be fun if Book Three is as structurally different from Book Two as Book Two is from Book One, and so on throughout the series. Like, maybe one of them is an epic poem in free verse, and one of them is a Finnegan's Wake stream of consciousness.

Remember when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture at the Oscars? That was pretty fucking crazy, wasn't it?

I bring this up because, inspired by the completion of Ken Burns' The War, I just watched the Omaha Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan and marveled once again at how frightening it is.

What other movies have intensely scary openings? The two that jump to mind are the Dawn of the Dead remake and 28 Weeks Later, but obviously there are others that I'm missing.

Over at Comic Book Resources I have a lengthy interview with Eric Reynolds, co-editor of Fantagraphics' engrossing quarterly anthology series Mome. Check it out!

Entertainment Weekly presents a history lesson on the dispute between New Line and Peter Jackson that's keeping The Hobbit from being made--and, to put it in the terms important to the studio, preventing another couple billion dollars from being grossed. The piece largely confirms the impression that while Jackson (and the other LOTR talent who've taken issue with New Line's accounting practices) are justified in their demands, the studio seems to have gone nuclear in response more out of pique than out of any kind of legal precedent. It goes on to report that a thaw is at hand and a deal may soon follow for Jackson to at least produce the Hobbit movie(s), if not direct them (something his current slate of projects may prevent), but without any specific sources or evidence cited to support this, who knows. (Via AICN.)

Read: The Drawing of the Three--"The Pusher"; "Final Shuffle"

Now that I've finished it I can safely say that I liked The Drawing of the Three less than The Gunslinger, maybe a lot less depending on how I feel at the moment you ask me. It's not that it's a bad book, although the flaws stand out clearer here than in most of the King I've read, the main one being the ostentatious overwriting of the main action sequences. During Eddie and the gunslinger's confrontation with Balazar and his underlings, and during the gunslinger/Jack Mort's rampage through the gun shop and the drug store, practically every sentence uttered and every movement made is surrounded by three or four paragraphs detailing what the gunslinger's thinking, what his our-world counterpart is thinking, what each of their antagonists are thinking, and on and on and on. I've seen King employ this technique of superdecompressing an action sequence before during the shootout with the "zookeepers" in The Stand--and to much greater effect, since its use was basically limited to that one sequence, where it was meant to convey how a lifetime of terror and violence was packed into a minute-long confrontation. Here it's the default mode, and it eats up page after page for no reason.

But the main reason I prefer The Gunslinger is that The Gunslinger is just different. Different setting, different style, different tone, different structure than most any King novel I'd read, and this is all to its benefit. With The Drawing of the Three you can do an apples to apples comparison with pretty much any King book. It doesn't feel special, which is how an epic fantasy life's-work type thing should feel.

But I don't want to be churlish. I liked the "lobstrosities," the monotony of the characters' journey on the beach, and (in this most recent section) the fun of watching the gunslinger use the body of the serial killer he finds himself inhabiting as the equivalent of a kamikaze airplane. Of course the guy deserved it, but seeing the glee with which Roland inflicts pain upon this body he's hijacked brings back the grim gunslinger of the first book, the one who'd let a kid die rather than risk his quest. This goes double with the two cops he dupes and then assaults--as we learn, his actions that day all but ruin their lives and careers, not to mention necessitate major surgery on at least one, and their only crime was being kind of lame. After all those tender times with Eddie and Odetta, it's nice to see the gunslinger being scary again.

And oh yeah--Flagg shows up in this section! Well, kind of. He's mentioned, in passing, as someone (or something--Roland's onto him) the gunslinger encountered once long ago, a powerful magician who turned someone into a dog and was being chased by two guys named Dennis and Thomas. These of course are the characters from The Eyes of the Dragon who vowed to chase Flagg, the villain of that book, through whatever other dimensions he traversed until they caught him and put a stop to his evil. What really surprised me about this passage is how minor it made Flagg seem--it's a throwaway mention of the character, who apparently kind of briefly brushed up against Roland during a confusing time in the gunslinger's life, and who most importantly has nothing to do with Marten or Walter or any of the other big bads in Roland's quest. Consider me flummoxed.

PS: This book offered a curious amount of interior monologue for ancillary characters: Jane the flight attendant, that mafia goon who worships Balazar, Odetta's limo driver, the cops, Katz the pharmacist, etc. At any moment you'd think that one of them is about to become an important character in the book, but you'd be wrong.

PPS: Here's a custom-made Roland action figure by Joe Acevedo. (Hat tip: Justin Aclin.) He looks a lot younger than I see him, insofar as he doesn't look exactly like Clint Eastwood, but hey.

While the "infected with rage" angle is fresh, the plot of 28 Days Later essentially apes (or is it pays homage to?) the story arc of Romero's Dead trilogy (Night, Dawn, and Day) in 100 minutes.

--Stacie Ponder

There's a REVISED version of The Gunslinger?????

This pretty much makes me want to stop reading these books.

The reason I got so upset when I found out there's a revised version of The Gunslinger isn't some sort of principled opposition to authors or filmmakers or whoever altering their work after the fact. For every Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars Episode IV there's a French interlude in Apocalypse Now Redux or a Bilbo stealing the Ring rather than winning it in The Hobbit. From what I can gather--via an email from Tom the Dog and this post by Bruce Baugh, the near-simultaneous reading of which is what alerted me to the existence of the revised Gunslinger--this happens to fall a bit closer to the former category than the latter, at least in my view, because it involves going back and planting clues that weren't there after the resolution to the mystery had been thought up and judged insufficiently supported by what had already been written. It's tough to think of that as anything but cheating, but hey, I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt until I read it.

What really ticked me off is simply that this is a time-consuming project as it is, involving some fairly intense concentrated reading of a long series of long books I find I'm not super-enjoying, without having to go back and re-read an entire book. Which is clearly (clearly to me at least) what I'd have to do to glean everything that King intended to be gleaned.

Feh.

Can someone at least tell me WHEN he made these revisions? Like after which book in the series did he go back and revise the first one? I'm assuming he did this between books Four and Five, because the unrevised Gunslinger that I read bears the same trade dress as my copy of Book Four, Wizard and Glass. But I'm not gonna assume anymore. Point being that maybe after I read the last book written prior to the revisions, then I'll stop and read the revised version of The Gunslinger before reading the remaining books. This would probably mean that I have my reading schedule set through December, which is frustrating, which is why I'm not 100% sure I'll do it at all, but we'll see.

I wish the comments worked just as much as you do, but alas, so please hit the email link in the left-hand sidebar and clue me in. Do try to avoid spoilers, please.

Argh.

Read: The Waste Lands, "Bear and Bone" parts 1-21

Well, the show goes on, at least for now.

I find that I really don't give a shit about Eddie and Susannah at all, which is probably a pretty big problem given that they show no signs of going away. Indeed, one of the future installments of the series is called Song of Susannah, so unless that's intended in the same way that, like, "American Pie" is the Song of the Big Bopper, she at least is sticking around and staying in the foreground. They're just so much less interesting than Roland, so of a piece with every other screwed-up just-folks King everyman and everywoman. Give me the granite-faced cowboy-cum-knight-errant over a pair of Mary Sues for King's attitudes toward substance abuse, sibling rivalry, racial relations and mental illness anyday.

I don't know, maybe that's unfair. Maybe I just fell in love with an idea of what this series was going to be--no-frills post-apocalyptic dark fantasy starring Clint Eastwood, Stephen King's answer to The Road Warrior--and am bummed that I can't write Books Two-onward as an armchair author. But I feel pretty secure in saying that the material with Eddie and Odetta/Detta/Susannah, and the material involving Roland set in our world, is less successful even on its own terms than the original all-Roland all-Mid-World* material was on its terms.

But I'll tell you one thing: Of all the possible plot twists I expected, a giant 70-foot cyborg bear built along with eleven other giant animal cyborgs to protect an interdimensional portal by some futuristic-by-today's-standards military-tech company that in fact predates the current action by some two millennia was not one of them! I sort of wish this discovery hadn't been spoiled by an illustration that showed up before the revelation did in the text itself, but oh well. This is the kind of batshit crazy stuff the previous volume could have stood to have a lot more of. A 2,000-year-old half-animal, half-machine bear the size of King Kong! That's GREAT.

The other thing that got me pretty excited is what I believe to be the first sign that these books tie into King works other than the ones involving Flagg: the Turtle, one of the Twelve Guardians who, like the giant bear, protect the dimensional portals. Roland says he's a really important guardian and (quoting a bit of doggerel) that "he holds us all within his mind." That sure as shooting sounds like the Turtle from It, the giant extra-dimensional being that supposedly vomited up the universe and served as the benevolent opposition to It Itself.

It was at this point that I realized I'm not reading these books like regular books, where I derive enjoyment primarily from the plot and the prose and the characters. I'm reading them like a game or a puzzle, impatiently plowing through accounts of how Eddie was better at basketball than his brother and anxiously awaiting the parts where another pair of pieces come together or another major clue is revealed. I'm reading them so that I can read Wikipedia entries on King characters like Flagg without worrying about having something that happens to them in a whole 'nother book spoiled.

* PS: A whole lot of basic information about these books, like the name of the world Roland inhabits, show up in the Arguments or Afterwords or jacket copy before they show up in the text itself. Besides the name "Mid-World," I'm pretty sure I learned about the nature of Roland's quest (something's broken with reality and he wants to go to the Dark Tower to try and fix it), his last name (Deschain), and the fact that he's going insane from these extra-diegetic sources rather than the story itself.

I saw this on a movie marquee as I was driving today and nearly crashed the car. Sea Monsters 3-D? What the hell is THAT?"

Apparently, it's this.

Holy crap.

I know that, as Matt Zoller Seitz says in his review, 50% of the movie probably is kind of boring, stagey examinations of paleontology a la the IMAX movie at the Museum of Natural History, but if the other 50% is GIANT PREHISTORIC SEA CREATURES IN 3-D?

Holy crap.

Read: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Bear and Bone"

Looks like King finally figured out what his series was about, as this section of Book Three concludes with a wholly unabashed infodump about the decaying nature of space-time in Roland's world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but just like telling us Roland's going crazy in the introduction and then having Roland himself spell out "I'm going crazy" rather than showing us, this is some weak storytelling. I guess it's supposed to have a "Council of Elrond" feel, but instead it feels like what it probably was--King suddenly realizing why Roland needed to get to the Dark Tower after years of writing about the journey. Here we see the big problem with the "make it up as you go along" school of epic fantasy writing.

I did like the robots, though, and the abandoned machinery. It kind of reminded me of how creepy the air raid siren was in the old Rod Taylor The Time Machine--a machine that has outlived its purpose (and its makers) by so long that it loses, for lack of a better word, context can be very disconcerting, sad, frightening. Even this section, though, seemed overwritten, intent on telegraphing just how disconcerted and saddened and frightened the characters were rather than allowing these emotions to unfold before us.

This week's Horror Roundtable presents Halloween tips from its esteemed panel. Mine might put you in mind of a certain Smiths album title.

Read: The Waste Lands--"Key and Rose," parts 1-16

I realize it's a mug's game to criticize a depiction of time-travel paradoxes by saying "hey, that's not how that would work!", but, well, hey, that's not how that would work!

Roland's bifurcating memories make sense. He was doing his quest thing and came across Jake, who'd been killed in our world and then brought over into Roland's world. Various things that Roland and Jake did together, including Roland allowing Jake to fall into that pit in the mountains and die, enabled Roland to catch the man in black. This in turn enabled Roland to enter our world. While he was there he prevented Jake from being killed.

Boom! Paradox. The only way Roland even got to the point where he could prevent Jake from being killed is for Jake to have been killed. He's running around as an impossible man, continuing a timeline that he himself has just prevented from starting. As the storyteller you've got a couple of options at this point: You can have Roland's entire post-meeting-Jake timeline fade or blink from existence and start over at the point of origin, thereby retconning all that stuff, OR you can say "Okay, the post-meeting-Jake timeline still exists for Roland, so that he COULD stop Jake from being killed, but now that's ruptured his brain and he's got two sets of memories." That's what King did.

BUT, then there's Jake's situation. In the original timeline, he got killed in our world and brought over to Roland's world. He and Roland had some adventures, and then Roland let him die. Because of all that, Roland had the chance to enter our world, and why he was there he stopped Jake from being killed. So Jake continues living in our world.

Where's the paradox there? In the original timeline, he died and got brought over to Roland-land, and in the new one he didn't because Roland hijacked the body of the guy who pushed him. It's the equivalent of Roland going back in time to tell HIMSELF not to do something. THAT Roland wouldn't have two sets of memories; neither should this Jake. It would be one thing if the Jake that had gone into Roland-world was still around--HE'D have the two sets of memories. But this one never went there, never did any of that stuff. Why does HE have bifurcated memories?

And this is without any of the business about our-world-Jake "remembering" the circumstances of his own death even before they WOULD have happened in the original timeline. That's not a time-travel issue, that's a magic issue, pertaining (I guess) to King's collective-destiny concept ka-tet. Now that I think of it, that shows up in a lot of his books, that feeling that you're with the people you're supposed to be with and doing the things you're supposed to be doing--it certainly happened with the kids in It and with Nick & Tom and Stu & Glen in The Stand. So in all likelihood that's the explanation for the time-travel wonkiness too: Jake "remembers" what happened to him even though he never was never advanced far enough along this timeline to really-remember it at all because it was his ka and the continuing of his life along a never-got-killed, never-went-into-another-world timeline wasn't. But if you're used to thinking about these things along the lines of how they worked in Terminator or Back to the Future or whatever, man, does it knock you out of the action.

The term "comics fans" gets a lot of static because of how it frames the comics audience's relationship with the medium, or more specifically the superhero segment of it, in uncritical, boosterish terms. It's a descriptor that, when deployed a certain way, is seen to cut off critical thinking in favor of the "what's the shocking secret behind Supergirl's origin?" level of engagement with the work. To the extent that criticism is present it tends to be of the "Wolverine would never say that" variety--in other words, it's surface-level, concerned with plot and dialogue and whether characters look a certain accepted way rather than the formal aspects of the comic--and it tends to be offered as pressure to get things back on the right track, at which point the fandom can continue unabated. Plus, it's a little strange linguistically: No one ever says "I'm a prose fan," that sort of thing. For these reason I try to avoid calling the audience for comic books "comics fans" unless I'm deliberately referring to the segment of that audience that does look at comics in that way. I use "reader" rather than "fan" in other cases.

On the other hand, calling myself a "comics reader" is a woefully inadequate way to describe my relationship with the medium, which has a passion and a depth (whether or not that's a good or bad thing) that a neutral word like "reader" doesn't even come close to conveying. I'd no more think of myself as simply a "comics reader" than I would a "music listener" or "film viewer," and I doubt many people who engage with any of those art forms would either. It would be disingenuous to suggest that I'm not a comics fan (or a rock nerd or a movie buff or a horror fanatic, for that matter). It's probably a safe bet that anyone who's felt moved to write about their opinions on comics (in particular or in general) is in fact a comics fan too.

As part of its 31 Days of Horror October blogathon, Not Coming to a Theater Near You's Adam Balz reviews Who Can Kill a Child?, a Eurohorror children-run-amok flick cited by Eli Roth in his defense of a scene that deigned to answer that question in Hostel Part II.

As part of his 31 Days of Zombie! October blogathon, Rob Humanick gives 28 Weeks Later the "one of horror's recent best" props it richly deserves.

Shoot the Projectionist invites you to submit your nominees for 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies.

Snarkerati presents its list of the Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time.

Moviefone counts down its list of the 31 Best Horror Movies of All Time.

Facets Features is rolling out 31 Days of Horror Clips.

Links via The Horror Blog, My New Plaid Pants, Infocult, GreenCine Daily, and my own bad self.

I was just about ready to abandon the Blogslinger project today, because I just haven't been enjoying the books (aside from The Gunslinger), and there are plenty of other books in the sea. So kudos to my old pal Bill DeFranza for unwittingly writing in at just the right moment and saying enough intriguing and encouraging things about the rest of the series to keep me going. Perhaps not at the same clip--I might as well get over the idea that I'll finish all seven books by October 31st--but at least for the moment, I'm gonna keep on trucking.

...I think it's not only excellent that DC is publishing a line for teen female readers, it's doubly excellent that there's a teen female writer involved in the line as well. So my instinct is to write something that would, in effect, praise all involved--in essence, give them a tickertape parade and the key to the city.

--Jeff Lester, on DC's Minx line in general and Mike Carey, Louise Carey, and Aaron Alexavitch's Confessions of a Blabbermouth in particular.

I think this is an instinct worth fighting against. I'm saying this without having read any Minx books, so that's not a dig against them or the line at all. What I mean is twofold:

First, consciously gearing your entertainment product toward a particular demographic is a value-neutral act. This may be less apparent in comics because the art form in North America has been so completely dominated for so long by products geared toward men in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with that age bracket edging upward year in and year out, which makes it look like a comic geared toward any other group is half-act of charity, half-revolutionary declaration. But it is in fact still the case. It's not remarkable that there are books and movies and TV shows geared toward women and men and teens and tweens and gay people and black people and whatever else, and it really shouldn't be that remarkable that the same is true in comics. What would be remarkable is if they were good comics, regardless of the target demographic.

Second, involving a member of the target demographic in the creation of entertainment product for that demographic is also value-neutral. It can be good, it can lend authenticity to the work, it can lead to writing with an ear for the attitudes and dialogue inherent to that demographic, but it could just as easily do none of those things. John Kerry and John McCain are Vietnam veterans and by most accounts behaved admirably during that war, but I doubt either of them would make better Vietnam movies than Francis Ford Coppola or Stanley Kubrick. So having a teenage girl co-write a comic about teenage girls for teenage girls is unremarkable. What would be remarkable is if it were a good comic, regardless of who wrote it.

You'll notice that I'm using the word "product" here. I use it to refer to art that is intended to serve a demographic first and foremost, before any other concerns, possibly even before any other ideas about the work form in the heads of the creators at all. Again, I'm not doing this to slag on the Minx line, with which I'm not terribly familiar other than to say that Jim Rugg drew one and I love Jim Rugg and that book looked really lovely when I flipped through it. In that same piece, Jeff puts it thusly:

DC's Minx line openly promotes itself as being for female teen readers and I think that's good: OGNs aimed at teen females is a market that's worth tapping into; the more teens, females, and female teens we get reading comics the better; and if a teen who wanders into a shop looking for the next Minx book ends up picking up, say, Jaime Hernandez's Locas, then, really, the whole thing is worth it. But by creating a book line with such a clearly defined target audience and a clearly defined goal, you're one step closer to creating books that are more product than art. And while I don't have a particular problem with that--I don't mind picking up a Minx book knowing it's unlikely I'm going to read some intense work of raw personal vision, the next Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner--I do think the closer a work comes to being product, the higher the expectation becomes that the product be of professional standards.

What's interesting and maybe troubling about this formulation is that making great comics is an ancillary concern at best. These comics are supposed to be worthwhile 1) because teen females are an underserved market; 2) because introducing women and teenagers to the industry is good for the bottom line; 3) because maybe they'll eventually lead those women and teenagers to pick up comics that are great. But the possibility of being a work of Diary of a Teenage Girl-level passion and genius isn't even entertained.

Mind you, the only reason I'm focusing on this particular demographic is because I noticed Jeff's post; the same things can be said for any number of "new mainstream" efforts to provide competent genre-based entertainment for the non-superhero, non-art comics, non-manga comics readers out there, or the theoretical ones that might manifest were such comics made available. I don't doubt for a second that there are tons of great romance comics and young-adult comics and action comics and detective comics (as opposed to Action Comics and Detective Comics, which happen to be pretty good themselves these days) floating around in some cartoonists' heads out there quite independent of whether a targeted line or a company that specializes in getting its books optioned by Hollywood exists to publish them, or that some of those comics do indeed end up at some of those outlets. I just want to see things proceed in that order. Anything else strikes me as a desire to create the comics equivalent of a sitcom that NBC aired after Friends or an action movie you might half-watch on a cross country flight. What's really strange about it is that in some quarters this is seen as some sort of triumph for comics. It's like, I can see where Kim Thompson was coming from when he perjoratively said "more crap is what we need," but it's weird to me that people are excited to create it, or to champion its creation.

Read: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Key and Rose"

I don't know if it's my buddy Bill's encouraging words or what, but to paraphrase Gibby Haynes and Ministry, all of a sudden I find myself in love with this book--something about this section really ding a ding danged my dang a long ling long. I liked Jake's moment of clarity in the vacant lot as the true workings of the world were revealed to him. I like that someone or something knocked his ass out with a brick (surely given Jack Mort's number on Odetta back in the day, that's no coincidence), and that the action picks back up with this mystery unsolved. I like the fragment of the poem about the Turtle. I like Jake going home and pwning his dad with his eyes apparently literally on fire. I like that the French teacher was nice to him. I LOVE that he got an A+ on his crazy English essay. I like that he kind of made up with his mom and dad and it wasn't that kind of irrevocable years-in-the-making blow-out that you see with some frequency in King's work (cf. Frannie and her dad vs. her mom in The Stand, Eddie vs. his wife and Eddie vs. his mom in It, etc.). I really REALLY loved the Charlie the Choo-Choo story and the frightening suddenness with which you realize "whoa, this has gotten weird, hasn't it?" (cf. Beverly Marsh's coffee date with Mrs. Kersh in It). I like that that section meshed so well with the haunting, driving song "Moss" from Gus Gus' latest album Forever which I've been listening to all day. I like that the voices of Jake's bifurcated memory (with which I had so much trouble) are now bickering like annoying monsters in a children's story:

Quit! he screamed at them. Just quit! You were gone all day, be gone again!

I would if he'd just admit I'm dead, one of the voices said.

I would if he'd just take a for God's sake look around and admit I'm clearly alive, the other snapped back.

And I fucking ADORED this:

Ned Dameron FTW!

I'm back, back in the Dark Tower groove. (For now. No promises!)

Mrs. Voorhees is the perfect mother: Not only will she kill for her son, she'll die for him.

--Betsy Palmer, aka Friday the 13th's Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film

For the record, count me as one who does not object to the interrogation to which [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was reportedly subjected, including waterboarding. This is not because I take the use of waterboarding lightly (although I have a hard time concluding that a technique, however terrifying, to which CIA officers are willing to subject themselves experimentally can properly be counted as torture). It's because I take the threat posed by KSM seriously....when the moral trade-off comes down to KSM waterboarded in order to extract actionable intelligence, or some mother's child murdered, it's not a tough call.

--Brett Stephens, "So Be It?: The dangers of defining torture down," the Wall Street Journal

Who needs Eli Roth?

There are other ways to treat comics as a commodity rather than an art besides viewing them as product. Probably the most prevalent these days is to implicitly (or explicity) equate--or supplant--quality with popularity. Here's an example of that mindset from a letter to Tom Spurgeon from Winston Rowntree:

Your web site is focused primarily on print comics that Nobody Reads. There are thousands, like myself, who think of comics primarily as an online medium and we read online comics almost exclusively...We see the internet as the Future of comics, and are aware of emerging business models that support this theory by proving that online comics can succeed by selling merchandise and advertising associated with a freely-distributed webcomic. This is, in fact, The Future. Pretentious Art Comix from Drawn & Quarterly that 130 people buy are not the future. They are The Problem. Your website seems to ignore The Future...Granted, The Future of comics has not arrived yet, but you'll look really smart if you get on the bandwagon now before it fills.

Rowntree goes on to offer a mea culpa about his belligerence and manages to note the "high quality" of many online comics, but that last is clearly an afterthought. The point is that online comics get big ratings, and that they can make money, and that they are therefore (love the caps!) The Future. As I've frequently alluded to, you often see similar argumentation deployed in favor of manga or OEL. While not quite as vociferous, the enthusiasm shown when anyone signs a deal with a major New York publishing house, especially while still young enough to get carded at bars, even if it's to adapt some YA widget-factory novel series or something, is a related phenomenon. These cool, comparatively new, comparatively popular forms of comics, or at least their partisans, are here, they're hip, and they're banging their shoe on the table, so be warned, pervert-suit enthusiasts and sad-sack arthouse navel-gazers: They will bury you.

Curiously, however, audience size and financial success are not seen as points in favor of, say, superhero comics when Civil War sells more copies than anyone thought the Direct Market capable of moving anymore. And rightly so, because that's a crazy reason to get excited about a comic, let alone its entire genre or format. It's one thing, as an industry watcher, to be happy that this art form is finding a sizable audience beyond the strictures of the superhero industry, or that genres other than "extraordinary protagonist solves problems through violence" are at long last thriving, or that these new audiences are making it possible for creators to earn a decent living doing what they enjoy, or that this influx of cash and caché is persuading the arbiters of taste to treat comics with the seriousness it deserves. Long-time readers of ADDTF, from back during its first iteration as a comics blog, will likely remember me doing just that every time I saw those lovely rows and rows of tankubon trades at Borders or spotted a graphic-novel trend piece in any publication with the words New York in the title. But as readers or as critics or especially as creators, the second Drawn & Quarterly is dismissed as "The Problem" because Skibber Bee Bye is read by fewer people than Diesel Sweeties, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I've said this recently and so have others, but for serious: You just cannot care about keeping up with the Joneses if you want to make good comics, or want other people to make them. You can't. Naruto's Bookscan rankings, or the Flight kids getting a book deal during their sophomore year in animation school, or Penny Arcade's readership mounting a credible third-party presidential campaign or whatever--these phenomena may or may not involve good comics, but they don't replace good comics, or the need to apply all the usual standards in deciding whether they're good comics (and therefore good for comics in the way that really matters) or not in the first place.

Read: The Waste Lands--"Door and Demon"

Compared to yesterday's reading, this section was kind of by the numbers. The Dean Brothers remain a whole lot less interesting than a post-apocalyptic cowboy shooting at giant cybernetic bears, and the bit in the haunted house with Jake was like a less frightening version of the house on Niebold Street from It, or the Marsten house from 'Salem's Lot, or the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, or or or. But I did like this passage an awful lot:

She put a hand on the back of his neck, pressing his head against her thigh, and said bitterly to Roland, "Sometimes I hate you, big white man."

Roland placed the heels of his hands against his forehead and pressed hard. "Sometimes I hate myself."

That's the appeal of the gunslinger--a guy so driven to do the right thing and fulfill his quest that he becomes loathsome even to himself.

In other news, I detected some thematic allusions to other King books--the constant injunctions for the characters to "stand" and the notion that life is a wheel that keeps coming around to the same place again are awfully familiar. Meanwhile, Susannah-Detta's I've got you/you've got me sex duel with the demon was pretty much the ritual of Chüd from It.

One final note: They really have to stop putting the illustrations before the passages they illustrate. The damn book keeps spoiling itself!

Read: The Waste Lands--"Town and Ka-tet," parts 1-15

After a long, long time, the Dark Tower series once again starts feeling like how I, based on The Gunslinger, imagined the Dark Tower series would feel. The group (now a fivesome with the addition of Jake and his newfound pet billy-bumbler Oy) enters a run-down old town at a crossroads, meets its elderly but decent inhabitants, and bam! We're back to the batwing saloon doors and archaic speech of the Clint/Conan mash-up that was the first book. As I'm sure you've guessed, I think that's pretty swell.

I like all this business with the evil choo-choo train, too. I do hope that the pay-off is worth the build-up, though. I worry that this note is being hit a little too hard and too often, and that I'm gonna end up disappointed.

And I liked hearing the dimly remembered oral history of how Road Warrior-style anarchy beset the city of Lud and its surroundings; more of that sort of thing and less of Eddie and Henry playing one-on-one, please. It seems like the impression I got that Roland's world is seriously on its way out was accurate, and not just because of the mystical spacetime-breakdown stuff--we've learned that every major population center/bastion of civilization has been destroyed, that their inhabitants have been scattered and left to fend for themselves in completely isolated communities with no real means of interacting with one another, and that no one on any side of the myriad conflicts is having much luck reproducing. It's not just Mad Max, it's also a bit of Children of Men, but with Clive Owen's adventure maybe 30 or 40 years back in the rear-view mirror. It's a sad, dying world and I want to see more of it in that light.

Today I will be going to the Small Press Expo with a small coterie of my friends and former co-workers. A bunch of new Bowie sketches and perhaps some sort of con report may follow. If you'll be there, look for me.

I waged a campaign this year against horribly violent horror movies and especially torture porn. I really shamed the Hollywood execs making money on these movies. I do believe that no Hollywood player should earn a dime from a film he's ashamed to show in his own home. Then other journalists started doing the story. I'm not saying I'm solely responsible, but it's been gratifying to see that those movies have gone from doing very well at the box office to doing almost no business.

--L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke in Elle Magazine

Obviously it's a gloriously idiotic quote for any number of reasons, but I think one that's likely to be overlooked is her ghastly standard for which projects Hollywood execs should greenlight. By the "ashamed to show in his own home" rubric, I'm guessing a lot of now-classic movies wouldn't have made the grade.

(Via Glenn Kenny, via Matt Zoller Seitz)

Read: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Town and Ka-tet"

Nothing beats the catharsis you feel when characters do exactly what they should do. In this case that thing is answer by proxy the prayers of a million angry Lost critics and just sit around and compare notes. (Lost's creators are fond of citing their storytelling debt to King, with whom they've formed a mutual admiration society; maybe the bard of Bangor should point this passage out to them and say "how about you have Jack, Locke, and Juliet just sit down and explain shit to each other for about 45 minutes?")

The menace of Charlie the Choo-Choo/Blaine the Mono continues to grow. I'm still concerned it'll be much ado about nothing, but for now I'm content to enjoy the strength of the images conjured in that storybook. Using Underworld's "Dark & Long (Dark Train)", which was the song that played during the withdrawal hallucination sequence in Trainspotting if you recall, as my mental soundtrack for all things locomotive in this book is certainly helping.

Two other notes:

1) I think I realized why Susannah and Eddie just don't work as foils for Roland, even while the mere hints and suggestions we've received about his former companions like Alain and Cuthbert are so fascinating--it's because the former feel like real people and the latter like mythic archetypes. That sort of thing can frequently work in the real-feeling characters' favor, but not in this dark fairy-tale world.

2) For a second there, when Roland was upbraiding himself for mistaking Eddie's free will for his ka, I thought I'd suddenly and finally figured out how the Presbyterians reconcile predestination and free will. You've got a path (predestination/ka) laid out for you and you're gonna travel it one way or another, but you can still choose to do so or not. But this falls apart when applied to the Presbyterians, because while it seems conceivable that someone's ka could draw them into a quest like Roland's against their will, I'm pretty sure no one's supposed to go to Heaven thinking "man, this is bullshit!"

Today will probably be a skip day as I am out and about at SPX. Thank you for your patience.

Even while I was at SPX and offline for pretty much 48 hours, I still heard quite a bit about Heidi MacDonald's essay decrying a perceived lack of respect for traditional character and storytelling values among today's young cartoonists. Most objections to it have focused whether her arguments are supported by any valid examples of young cartoonists who actively dislike such comics, or whether she ignored many genre-based works that are respected and admired these days, but my problem with it is more fundamental. Simply put, why should storytelling and character be paramount concerns? That's like calling pop music a failure unless it's Tommy or one of Ghostface Killah's cocaine-deal narratives. It's imposing a narrative fiction or film model onto an artform that can just as easily incorporate the influences of poetry, fine art, music, freakin' dancing.

Many of the new comics that have meant the most to me over the past three years--a time during which I've also read and loved any number of books by authors primarily concerned with story, from Gipi and Jason to Bryan Lee O'Malley and Becky Cloonan to Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison to Minetaro Mochizuki and Ai Yazawa to Nick Bertozzi and Jordan Crane--have been primarily concerned with mood, emotion, and rhythm rather than telling gripping yarns. That seems perfectly fine to me. A conception of comics that invalidates Kevin Huizenga's "The Sunset" or Anders Nilsen's The End or John Hankiewicz's Asthma is not a useful one to me, or probably to comics.

He personally convinced Sylvester Stallone NOT to change the tile of John Rambo to Rambo: To Hell and Back.

This is what John Rambo looks like, by the way.

Now this is how you spend a weekend.

I could not have been happier with how my David Bowie sketchbook turned out at MoCCA. Did I try to go two for two at SPX? You'd better believe it! And here are the results.

Mark Burrier: Mark got REALLY excited about the prospect of drawing Bowie. He gunned right for the Thin White Duke era, which is my favorite Bowie look as well. I've found that most artists who already know and love Bowie go for the Station to Station look. I also see some of his recent nattily attired vibe, circa Heathen and Reality, in this one.

Josh Cotter: Josh knew exactly what he wanted to draw--the cover for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars--and was extremely painstaking about doing it.

Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing: Eleanor (the dreamer on the left) and Drew (the dreamer on the right) are married, so they tag-teamed this sketch. Drew was the first artist to search high and low through my photo reference for a Labyrinth shot, but he wasn't the last. For some reason, books about Bowie tend not to have big Labyrinth photos. Go figure.

Kim Dietch: Bowie sings Perry Como! In an alternate universe, this really could have happened to David instead of to Rod Stewart. Dietch is a southpaw and as such is the only artist to sketch on a left-hand page in my book.

Nicholas Gurewitch: Another Labyrinthine sketch, with a Ziggymullet twist, from the Perry Bible Fellowship auteur. It looks like it could have come straight from the strip.

John Hankiewicz: I could see this bifurcated Bowie wandering around one of the dreamscapes in a John Hankiewicz comic really easily.

Andy Hartzell: The reason I ask people to draw David Bowie is that I really dug my friends' themed sketchbooks, but they tend to be based on obscure superheroes they love, like Lockjaw, Nova, or Matter-Eater Lad. The only superhero I love is Batman, which would be kind of played-out to ask comics artists to sketch, so I went with Bowie. I explained all this to Hartzell, and the next thing I knew I had this awesome mash-up.

Gilbert Hernandez: I was absurdly starstruck as I watched Beto draw, as much as I was by Charles Burns. Gilbert didn't need photo reference, and even knew which eye had the dilated pupil--and that Bowie's still angry at the kid who roughed him up and caused the condition decades ago. I'm still pretty stunned I got to watch Gilbert Hernandez draw.

Kevin Huizenga: Kevin seemed to want to get this exactly right--he sketched and erased at least two rough versions before nailing this one. I really love the powder blue--I know exactly which outfit this is modeled after--and the paraphrased quote from "Moonage Daydream." That actually sounds like the name of a Kevin H. comic, now that I think about it.

Paul Karasik: Karasik was a very good sport about drawing Bowie for me despite professing an active dislike for him and for popular music in general. We spent most of the time he was sketching debating whether Bowie was worth a damn, which was fun, if a little intimidating. Note: This is a mash-up between Bowie and Stardust (not Ziggy), the godlike super-"hero" from the comics of Fletcher Hanks, a collection of which called I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets Karasik edited.

Matt Kindt: Old Bowie dreams of young Bowie. It's like Gandalf blowing glam smoke rings.

Roger Langridge: Langridge kicks it caricature-style. There's a bit of vaudeville in both Langridge and Bowie, so this is fitting, I think.

Jeff Lemire: I knew Jeff would create something memorable the first time I saw some of his strangely haunting superhero-sketch commissions. And again, I love the powder blue.

Ted May: Kevin Huizenga suggested that I seek out Ted May for a sketch because he's a huge Bowie fan. He definitely took the sketch very seriously. This profile shot is on the cover of Low, my favorite Bowie album.

Brian Ralph: The ever-popular pirate look makes a comeback. I don't know if it's just because Brian's drawn monkeys in his comics, but between the lanky limbs and the tail-like mic cord, there's something simian about this Bowie.

Finally, here's one that's somewhat NSFW if your boss happens to be paying enough attention:

Tom Neely: In color! Tom is one of only three artists from whom I have original art--a drawing of the Creature from the Black Lagoon I won on a contest on his website--so it was a pleasure to get his take on Bowie.

For the original set of sketches, click here, or peruse the whole shebang as a Flickr set.

Read: The Waste Lands--"Bridge and City," parts 1-15

At first I was upset that I had to skip a day of this series, because that kind of lessens the integrity of the blogathon concept. Then I realized that the day I ended up skipping was unlucky Day 13, and it became clear that this was ka.

This was a pretty crackerjack section. Dig this killer opening sentence:

They came upon the downed airplane three days later.

Better yet, the airplane turns out to be a Nazi fighter, the swastika covered up by a picture of a fist gripping a lightning bolt. And it was piloted, back in the day, by an outlaw warlord the size of Andre the Giant. But besides just being a giant-cyborg-bear bit of coolness, it sparks a conversation between the characters that casts Roland's world in a different light. Up until now I'd been assuming that this is our world in the distant future, but Eddie speculates that the plane could have literally flown right into this world from our own, during its World War II heyday, via a portal similar to the ones that he, Susannah, and Jake used. I don't think that explains all the recognizable technology present in Roland's world, but maybe things really aren't just as simple as my ancient-ruin theory.

The centerpiece of the early part of this section is the group's long conversation about riddles. Clearly this is going to be important later in the book, but even though this was maybe telegraphing that, it was interesting and entertaining enough in itself to merit the page space. If you've ever read The Hobbit, this read like an explanation of why Bilbo and Gollum took it all so seriously down there in the cave.

Next up is more world-building, or world-explaining, via some clumsy mutated white bees and their fucked-up hive. Once upon a time there was a nuclear apocalypse, and everything you see in Roland-world is what made it through the other side. The ancient-ruin theory makes a comeback.

Then there's the passage of the bridge. This might have been the weakest point of this section, actually. I found King's descriptions of the construction of the roads leading to the bridge and of the bridge itself difficult to follow and visualize; in this regard, Tolkien he ain't. Also, there was pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between Eddie, his fear of heights, and Jake with Larry Underwood, his claustrophobia, and Rita Blakemoor. Been there, done that. However, having Jake fall in an attempt to save his animal companion sharpened things up a bit. I'm obviously a sucker for animals in peril, so there's that, but the addition of the detail of Oy holding on for dear life by biting the shit out of Jake's hand was vivid enough to shake me from the stupor induced by the Stand-induced déjà vu.

Finally there's the syphilitic pirate guy with a grenade who pwns the whole gang. This made me happy for a variety of reasons, not least being that a syphilitic pirate guy with a grenade pwned the whole gang. That doesn't happen nearly often enough in fiction these days. It also brings up happy associations with The Road Warrior and Escape from New York. King's invented patois for the pirate is vivid and convincing and fun rather than jarring to read, a whole lot more so than your average sci-fi/fantasy made-up dialect. (Bruce Baugh mentioned this as well, and he's right. Be warned, though, that that post is a little too spoilery for my tastes in terms of events in the revised Gunslinger that apparently become important by The Dark Tower itself.) But my favorite aspect was how he shows up right after the big climax of the attempt to cross the bridge, with virtually no respite between the heart-pounding stuff. Having them turn back around to keep going and see a crazy urban warrior with a hand grenade was pretty much the last thing I expected.

I have a feeling that the book could get very good from this point forward, as our heroes navigate the ruined city of Lud. I expect some evocative post-apocalyptic landscapes, ragged bands of bloodthirsty outlaws, endless dystopian warfare between two sides who no longer remember what they're fighting about, striking and entertaining anachronisms like ZZ Top records used as a weapon of war, heroic pets, evil anthropomorphized trains, and other genre-tastic delights. Here's hoping.

Eve Tushnet reviews two slasher movies! Terror Train and Black Christmas, to be precise, with her take on the latter uniquely Tushnetian.

Final Girl's Stacie Ponder ponders Hellraiser.

Rob Humanick continues his 31 Days of Zombie! blogathon with a look at Lucio Fulci's wildly overrated (by Rob and others) Zombi 2. Even if you, like me, believe there's nothing to this film other than the astonishingly grotesque zombie effects and their spectacular presentation, it's a review worth reading for its thoughts on that aspect.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You's Teddy Blanks continues that site's 31 Days of Horror blogathon with a look at Brian DePalma's wildly underrated Body Double. Quote of the day:

Body Double, though, is in its own universe, a sublimely ridiculous piece of schooled filmmaking that embraces the sheen and excess of cheap 80s Hollywood as a flashy new avant-garde.

That is exactly right.

Over at the Horror Roundtable, everybody hates these taffy/toffee Halloween candies in orange-and-black wrappers that I've never seen before in my life.

On a note related to that asinine Nikki Finke quote about torture porn from the other day, here's a Jon Hastings post decrying another attempt to apply a "would you play it for your parents?" standard to art, this time to music. Shit, with a lot of music, not being able to comfortably play it for your parents is the whole point.

"It was like 'Jaws.'"

--Charter boat Capt. Robert Hill, quoted in "'It was like 'Jaws'' — 844-pound shark caught; Catch off Florida Panhandle shatters record in decades-old contest," AP, MSNBC.com. Photo by William Hatfield/AP.

It certainly serves the shark right for living in the ocean and being hungry.

Today Heidi MacDonald--

Okay, wait. First I want to pause and reflect, because opening a post with those three words made me realize I really am back to blogging about comics. How about that? Alright, I'm all set now.

Today Heidi MacDonald replied to all the reactions, mostly hostile, to her post of the other day calling for a greater emphasis on storytelling and character in comics. Even if I'm still unsold on her argument, it helps clarify her stance on various artists and comics. She mentions my response specifically:

I’m especially sad that someone like Sean Collins think that I said this:

A conception of comics that invalidates Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset” or Anders Nilsen’s The End or John Hankiewicz’s Asthma is not a useful one to me, or probably to comics.

I haven’t read ASTHMA, but I’ve gone on record many times with my respect and enjoyment of Huizenga and Nilsen. But that’s because both of them do just was I was trying to encourage — they FILTER THEIR IDEAS THROUGH MADE UP CHARACTERS AND SITUATIONS. Nilsen can get a little haiku at times, but he also knows how to use thematic and story elements to construct a greater whole (DOGS AND WATER.) Huizenga is even more of a yarn spinner, although his concerns are philosophical.

I apologize for overstating Heidi's objection to guys like Nilsen and Kevin H. My main point is that I like the times when Anders "gets a little haiku" just as much, actually probably more, than the more straightforward things, which is why I mentioned The End and not D&W or even Big Questions. Ditto Kevin H.'s real formalist freakouts, which again is why I called out "The Sunset" (my favorite short story in the history of comics) rather than "Jeepers Jacobs." And Asthma is almost pure abstraction, though to be clearer I could have specifically mentioned that book's "Jazz" as opposed to "Martha Gregory." Point being, I don't see any of that as requiring any kind of corrective measure in terms of demanding that they start liking more traditional comics more. But at the same time, nor do I see Usagi Yojimbo needing to read a little more like PaperRad. They can each do their own thing, and I'm hesitant to extrapolate any paradigms to fight against from either approach, which is where Heidi's piece lost me.

But what it all boils down to for me is the part of the new post where Heidi boils it all down for herself:

What I don't like is the trend of valuing expressionism, formalism and "comica verité" for their own sake at the expense of what I would call "mainstream fiction", or formally conventional but narratively complex stories such as Love & Rockets, Exit Wounds, Ode to Kirihito, Ice Haven (Shock!!) or American Born Chinese.

Simply put, I am totally fine with that trend! I might be less okay with it if I really thought it were being done "at the expense of" other kinds of books, but I don't think it is at all. This is what I was getting at when I said my problem with Heidi's original piece was "more fundamental" than debating the applicability of specific examples she cited, or even attempting to determine whether comics were at this kind of crisis point. Even if they were, to me, it wouldn't really be a crisis.

Read: The Waste Lands--"Bridge and City," parts 16-22

Hey, it's still pretty good! Actually, it's getting better as it goes. Already several of yesterday's predictions regarding fun genre tropes have already come to pass. It's tough to argue with the idea of a future civilization of mad urban warriors ritualistically killing someone every time the drumbeat from ZZ Top's "Velcro Fly" is played on the city's PA system, you know? It reminded me (I think I've mentioned this before) of the way the Eloi just calmly walked right into the Morlock's lair and to their own deaths every time the air-raid sirens were switched on in The Time Machine, without a clue as to the meaning behind the sirens. In this case, though, the Pubes (the drumbeat-killers) believe the drums to be the work of demons, a non-trivial possibility in this world. Of course, it's just the savvier Grays, who it seems should really have wiped these Pube clowns out by now.

While Eddie and Susannah deal with that, Jake continues his descent into the Grays' labyrinth, in a journey that's like a nightmare, child-abusing version of The Goonies. Gasher, his captor, is like the Pubes we meet an extremely believable villain. You don't doubt for a second that he's bad news through and through, but there's a weight to his cartoonishness, expressed best through his gutter slang and his resigned, almost curious attitude toward both death and youth, that actually makes you feel that he arrived at his current evil state via a lifetime of conscious choices and victimizing circumstance, as opposed to just being conjured up to play the heavy by Steve-o.

Here are three things I want to see as this section progresses:

1) A talking train
2) Gasher getting killed
3) Oy surviving

Again, here's hoping.

And here are two quotes I wanted to call out.

At some point the sound of the drums began. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and for Jake it was the final straw. He gave up hope and thought alike, and allowed himself to descend wholly into the nightmare.

Very Clive Barker!

He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble.

Sound like anyone we know? I'll give you a hint:

There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her? -- George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings -- Buffalo Bill was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell.

Of course, that gentleman's name was Mr. Robert Gray, not Winston, and it took a lot more than a shot from a Ruger to do away with him. Still, wheels within wheels, man.

But I'm going to hazard a prediction that "Messiah Complex" will be The Crossover That Got It Right; quite possibly the first successful, well-written multi-series epic since "Age of Apocalypse".

--Diana Kingston-Gabai

Aim high!

(This post originally appeared at The Comics Reporter. Thanks, Tom.)

1) I was glad for the presence of Douglas Wolk. His experience with non-aficionado periodicals was useful in highlighting practical considerations regarding the dearth of considered long-form criticism in the mass media that Gary Groth, Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, and Bill Kartalopoulos (the editors of The Comics Journal, Comics Comics, and Indy Magazine and Egon Labs respectively) never really have to deal with: three-month lead times, the current mania for "fewer words, more bullets, more lists, more entry points," tying reviews into the PR cycle for new releases to the exclusion of works that aren't new or upcoming, tight word counts, limited space for comics coverage, how hard it is for professional critics to make a living writing about comics, etc.

2) Also, at one point Doug threw things to me and the other Wizard staffers (them current, me not so much) in the audience so that we could defend ourselves if we wanted in light of a few minutes' worth of Wizard-mocking by the panel, centered on a Top 100 trade paperbacks of all time list that the magazine put together a few years before any of us started working there. I'm proud of the coverage of alternative comics that I managed to provide during my time at the magazine -- I regularly reviewed Cold Heat on the website and named Mome Best Indie Anthology of 2006, just to name a pair of examples pertinent to the publishers on the panel -- but of course I agree that any list with 99 superhero books and a curve breaker like Maus at the top is a pretty terrible one.

The point that Doug enabled me to make is that most comics and graphic-novel coverage in mainstream-media publications, as well as most alternative/indie-comics coverage in Wizard and other superhero-centric print and web publications, is written from an advocacy position. I've written about comics for a half-dozen or so general-interest magazines, and usually the way it works is an editor at, say, Stuff will ask you in September about what good comics are coming out in December. You send them a list and they pick one and say "great, write about that one." Even at the old iteration of Giant, where I had 2-4 review slots each issue to work with, it was still a matter of pre-selecting comics that were worth making room in the magazine for, which meant comics that were good. When you have an editor who is usually fighting to carve out a spot for these things because she feels that comics is an art form worth talking about, and you as a writer tend to feel the same way, they're not going to use that space to have you explain why Will Eisner's later work is overrated.

3) I only ever hear complaints that the web has diffused informed opinion and is therefore inferior to the supposed centralization of print publications from people who work for print publications. In this panel the loudest voice on this point was Gary's, who first said that it's even hard to find good film criticism online. At first he said that this is because there wasn't any, but then when called on it by Tim, he admitted that he just didn't have the time to find it. Not to be all roll-over-Beethoven about it, but I can't imagine it's really any more difficult or time-consuming for me to have found Matt Zoller Seitz's blog, or Joe McCulloch's for that matter, than it was in Gary's much-vaunted mid-century golden age of arts criticism for people to have first discovered Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, much less Cahiers du Cinema. What's more, most of the people with whom I discuss criticism (the availability of discussion being quite important to Gary and the other participants) are just as aware of these online sources as I am. In other words, I think the "problem" likely lies less with the medium than the user, but also really isn't a problem at all.

4) I obviously wasn't alive during the '50s-'60s-'70s era Gary champions, but I'm not 100% convinced that this Golden Age of Criticism really existed. I mean, it existed in the sense that there were great critics writing about various art forms, sure (though not comics, not really). But Gary seemed to be arguing that the likes of Pauline Kael were the Gene Shalits of their day. I think it's a safe bet that if the average reader of this blog asked her mom and dad who Pauline Kael was, they'd have no idea. As an audience member pointed out, criticism isn't consumed by large numbers of people because most art isn't consumed by large numbers of people in ways that would make them receptive to criticism. As she said, this is doubly true of comics, where large numbers of people aren't consuming that art form at all, so yearning for a more vibrant critical milieu for comics is in some ways a fool's errand. But while I could be wrong, I think it's unlikely that this mass audience for criticism ever existed even for more popular art forms. If we instead mean a large audience of well-educated, well-informed cognoscenti, we should say so.

5) Doug advocated for the value of "bomb-throwing" -- divisive pieces intended to provoke debate. I'm not crazy about this at all. For every act of bomb-throwing into which went a considerable amount of thought, like the Journal's Top 100 Comics of the 20th Century list or Understanding Comics, there are probably three times as many straw-men massacres. Chris Ware sucks, most alternative comics are autobiographical and therefore boring, the only comics worth a damn are "New Mainstream" genre titles, no one tells stories anymore, the Internet is the future of comics, superhero stories are inherently worthless and no one in the real world likes them, manga is all the same, super-popular webcomics > pretentious art comics that nobody reads, etc. Yes, they frequently provoke intelligent responses, but more accurately way they necessitate intelligent responses lest the white noise they generate drown out actual argument and criticism.

6) "There are no schools of comics criticism." I think it was Doug who put it in this way, though maybe it was Dan who brought it up? And obviously this is true -- you don't really have all-encompassing, rigorously articulated points of view on comics a la, I dunno, Eisenstein or Bazin. As I tried to point out, I think the emergence of Comics Comics as an antipode to The Comics Journal -- a voice seemingly less interested in combative "this is bullshit and this is emphatically not bullshit" throw-downs, seemingly more open to evaluating corporate genre work, seemingly more attuned to non-narrative sensibilities versus literary ones -- is important, but as that diverse collection of attributes would suggest, this isn't exactly a coherent philosophy. I tend to think coherent philosophies are wildly overrated at best and stultifying and poisonous at best, though, so maybe that's not such a bad thing.

7) Tim pointed out that the Journal's combative posture is understandable given the climate in which it started, one in which Maus had to be defended versus The Death of Captain Marvel. That work has been done, so now publications like Comics Comics can publish lengthy examinations of Steve Gerber's oeuvre without worrying that this will be taken to mean the work is on the same level as Gary Panter's.

8) I wish it were pointed out more often that there's really no such thing as "the Journal." There's Gary, and there's whoever's the editor, and then there's a bunch of writers who submit reviews and essays with no editorial guidelines and no back-end content editing either. (At least in my experience.) I know what "the Journal" is supposed to mean, but in reality it means the opinions of R.C. Harvey, Noah Berlatsky, Joe McCulloch, Tim O'Neil, me, Chris Mautner, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and a couple dozen more all at once.

9) I wish the phrase "the dumbing down of American culture" were removed from this discussion. A look at the top-grossing films and best-selling books during the so-called Golden Age of Criticism indicates that America has always been pretty dumb, a state of affairs not at all unique to America, hey by the way.

10) Tim Hodler looks like Walter Becker from Steely Dan.

Now don't that beat all.

Read: The Waste Lands--the rest of the book

Any reading experience that involves pumping your fists in the air and silently cheering (so as not to wake your wife, who went to sleep two hours ago) is probably a pretty good one. Such was my reaction to the return of your friend and his, Randall Flagg Richard Fannin, the highlight among highlights of the strongest section of this series yet.

You'll recall that the whole reason I decided to read the Dark Tower series was for more Flagg, who I'd heard was the big bad. Obviously I was going to be pretty delighted by his big comeback no matter what. Plus, years of reading comics and consuming genre entertainment have me geared toward appreciating the frisson of continuity. (I think my favorite example of how much enjoyment you can get out of just a little reference to past adventures is from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "What's that?" "The Ark of the Covenant." "Are you sure?" "Pretty sure.")

But it wasn't just the button-pushing that had me that excited, it was how that button was pushed. First, after a couple hundred pages of deft back-and-forth between the equally compelling perspectives of the four main characters, King suddenly cuts away from the climax itself for a chapter starring a character named Andrew. Huh? Oh, okay, that's the real name of the Tick-Tock Man, the Thor-like warlord who ran the Grays. (Funny that his opposite number on Pubes was a dwarf; funny also that his flashback to better times in his city involved the presence of a guy whose job was to beat another guy into doing his jobs. Things have been pretty profoundly wrong around here for a while.) And then, just as out of the blue, Flagg himself arrives, sounding and even dressing much like he did back in post-plague Las Vegas. The thing that really thunderstruck me is that after all this build-up of the Tick-Tock Man--the way that his minion Gasher is made to seem horrible in such a way as to make Tick-Tock seem all the more horrible as Gasher's boss, his Conan/Lord Humungous-like bearing (complete with a leg thrown over the side of his thrown), his ability to out-kill even Roland--he's just the Dark Tower's answer to Lloyd Henreid or even the Trashcan Man. (I might have known from that moniker!) It's a startlingly effective bit of writing.

So what else happens? Blaine isn't a demon after all, not really. He's HAL, a computer gone bad, only instead of operating a spaceship he operates the entire city, though he appears to be most deeply personified in the pink monorail (paging Dr. Freud!). In a way his set-up is similar to that of It's titular entity: A central consciousness located elsewhere with a sort of pseudopod/embodiment sent out to do dirty work, but if you kill the latter you kill the former too.

The waste lands themselves feel familiar too. And not just in terms of Mordor, to which in true King fashion Susannah directly compares it. If a character or circumstance in a King novel is reminiscent of something else from pop culture or literature, you can bet a character will say or think so; in fact, during this very book, both halves of my high concept description of Roland as "Conan starring Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name" are explicitly referenced as Eddie and Jake think about the gunslinger. But no, what the waste lands really reminded me of, with their misshapen bug- and bird-like beasts, is "The Mist." I wonder if Project Arrowhead had anything to do with the technology that powers the Beam?

I can see why King's fans wanted to pull a Misery on him upon reaching the end of this book, which doesn't even bother pretending to offer a conclusion, even a "to be continued" conclusion like the previous two books. It basically just stops in the middle of a scene, like an even more cliffhangery Two Towers. I'm glad I don't have to wait for Book 4, which I hope follows more in the mode of the second half of Book 3, "Lud," than in that of the first half, "Jake."

Mostly I wanna see the two hardcases throw down.

It's funny to have a movie "aimed squarely at [Americans] and our violence-saturated culture" by a German.

(Great movie, though! Question: Will the Funny Games remake get tagged as torture porn, or will it be okay because it was made by a European and can easily be read as an indictment of the kinds of things critics enjoy viewing indictments of?)

Jame Gumb is a mysogynist serial killer, fostering a brutal hatred of women. The character mocks both women and homosexuals, with his mockery of his captive Catherine (Brooke Smith) and his lisping whispers to his dog Precious; a film about homophobia doesn't a homophobic film make.

--Stacie Ponder on The Silence of the Lambs

I agree completely.

Read: Wizard and Glass--Arguement, "Prologue: Blaine," "Riddles" chapters 1-3

Once again, a boatload of valuable information makes its debut not in the story, but in the "Arguement" (or "fancy-pants word for Introduction") that precedes it. For example:

* The third person referred to by "the Drawing of the Three" is not one of Odetta's alternate personalities, Susannah or Detta, as previously suggested, but Jake, who is only the third because Roland refused to draw Jack Mort.

* Walter, the man in black, possessed Jack Mort to make him kill Jake.

* Walter is only "half-human."

That's an awful lot of fudging of previously established facts for an intro. The fudging continues in the Prologue, "Blaine," which is actually just the final chapter of The Waste Lands reprinted with slightly tweaked dialogue. I must admit I find this tendency to retcon previous books in the series on the fly worrying. Perhaps it's meant to evoke the way reality itself is breaking down within Roland's world, or maybe it's just cheating.

Anyway, I enjoyed the resolution of Blaine's riddle game. How could I not when riddles from The Hobbit actually showed up in a scene this heavily indebted to that one? Additional Tokienisms were invoked by the Falls of the Hounds, which read like a cross between the Argonath with a canine makeover and those sphinxes who guard the Southern Oracle in The Neverending Story.

One more thing: At least I don't have to worry about the illustrations spoiling the book anymore, since it's impossible to figure out what Dave McKean's illos are supposed to represent anyway.

(This post originally appeared at The Comics Reporter. Thanks again, Tom.)

1. I'd been to SPX only once before, in 2003, back when it was at its old "indie comics sleepaway camp" location in the Holiday Inn in Bethesda proper. At the time I was not super-crazy about the experience. This, on the other hand, was one of the best cons I've ever been to.

There are many reasons for that (you may have already seen one of them) but I have to think that the venue change played a big part. Now every single table and booth is all in one giant high-ceilinged room, which makes the convention floor feel more like an energetic marketplace of art and ideas and less like an estate sale, as one SPX staffer described the vibe at the old venue. There was also convenient access to a patio on which to sit and chill and smoke and talk on your cell and read, and a pretty terrific bar/restaurant. And to the extent that anything is convenient via the Metro, with its insanely vertiginous escalators and absurdly arcane payment system that I'm pretty sure involves the use of an abacus, the old downtown Bethesda restaurant area is still within easy reach.

2. I see that one of my complaints about SPX 2003 was a lack of compelling debuts. Boy, was that ever not the case here. I feel that there have been years within even my comparatively brief comics-reading memory where we'd have been lucky to see as many world-class comics appear within 12 months as went on sale for the first time at this one show, even with Sammy Harkham's new Crickets issue not actually making it in time. The full list (scroll down to the nominees for Outstanding Debut) isn't even a full list when you factor in mini-comics and the like.

3. And holy moley, the mini-comics! In terms of their craft as objects, Jeffrey Brown observed that the number of minis with color, silk-screened, die-cut, or hand-sewn covers actually appeared to be greater than the black-and-white jobs. There certainly were some gorgeous and compelling comics available; it would have been quite easy to wipe out your spending budget at Shawn Cheng, Sara Edward-Corbett and Matt Wiegle's Partyka and Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing's Little House tables alone. Trust me on that one.

4. Related: Most times I've been to a small-press convention, I've been excited to pick up new work from familiar artists but wary of diving into uncharted waters, and rarely have I seen previously unknown work capable of beguiling me into doing so. But there was an embarrassment of riches at SPX from artists I'd never heard of--and I like to think I'm a pretty savvy guy when it comes to these things. My poison included Matt Furie's hilarious Boy's Club from Buenaventura Press; Andres Vera Martinez's Tejano Ghost Stories, drawn and designed in beautiful black and white; and the minicomics anthologies of the Closed Caption Comics collective, a group clearly influenced by that notorious cultural dead end Fort Thunder that had nearly everyone I talked to saying "Whoa, did you see those kids next to the Bodega table?" There were at least that many over again on which I could gladly have splurged.

5. Speaking of Bodega and Buenaventura, along with PictureBox Inc. they formed a new trifecta of alternative comics publishing to sit alongside Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, and Top Shelf. Watching not one, not two, but three companies produce and sell high-quality avant garde work centered on alumni of the Fort Thunder, Paper Rodeo, and Highwater scenes is astonishing and invigorating.

6. Top Shelf has an exceptionally solid crop of new-ish releases and creators right now, with strong and interesting titles from Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, and Andy Hartzell, all of whom were on hand.

7. Oni was a visible and ebullient presence at the show as well, the most notable comparatively mainstream outlet there. They seem to have really internalized what made Scott Pilgrim connect and are continuing to deliver what may be the first organic wave of manga-influenced but not manga-derivative work we've seen, from their comfy digest formats on down: Wet Moon, Last Call, Black Metal and so on.

8. Where were NBM and SLG? I didn't just miss them, did I?

9. AdHouse could have gotten away with charging $50 for their latest James Jean Process Recess art collection at this show, which you could also have said for PulpHope at MoCCA. They're mightily impressive books. And if they subsidize Skyscrapers of the Midwest, even better.

10. Fantagraphics sold out of Paul Karasik's I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets Fletcher Hanks book again. Everyone loves this thing, from Comics Comics editor Dan Nadel to former Wizard Editor in Chief Pat McCallum. (You see what I mean? Everyone!)

11. The roster of creators on hand was extremely impressive, even just within the official guests of honor and panelist slots. As Heidi MacDonald pointed out to me, the line-up ran the gamut from Jeff Smith and Matt Wagner to Kim Dietch and Bill Griffith to Gilbert Hernandez to Nicholas Gurewitch to C.F., an accomplishment in itself. Moreover, the people responsible for fully six of my top 10 releases of the year -- Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga, John Hankiewicz, Josh Cotter, Tom Neely, Gilbert Hernandez -- were all present at the show. Had Nick Bertozzi made it (did he?), it would have been seven. Brian Ralph, Paul Karasik, Jeffrey Brown, and Nick Gurewitch would probably be in the top 15, too.

12. Speaking of Gurewitch, his tiny table could easily have been replaced by a giant throne made of candy and gold, such is his draw. I expect that whole webcomics corner of the floor to metastasize into a presence to rival any of the big altcomix publishers, and I'm a little surprised that hadn't happened already.

13. In terms of the lines for their signings, Bone's Jeff Smith and Exit Wounds' Rutu Modan were the belles of the ball. This would seem to give lie to Heidi's notion that storytelling isn't valued by the snobs anymore.

14. The lines appeared to be shorter for the veterans like Beto and Deitch, but I'd guess that's because they each signed for herculean stretches of time between the two days of the show. Please think about how awesome it is that you enjoy an art form where that happens. You can't exactly count on having four hours to walk up and chat with, say, Bernard Sumner and Grace Slick at the same table in this world.

15. Speaking of the two days of the show, why are they Friday and Saturday? I asked around and found out that Sunday used to be a big hang-out day for the whole indie comics community (somewhere Gary Groth just spit on the floor and made the sign of the evil eye) involving a pig roast and a softball game against Diamond or something, but neither of these things happens anymore. Having 50% of your two-day show on a workday prevents people who would come from coming, period. This happened to my wife, and it cost all my former co-workers a day of show-going. I also heard complaints from creators that Friday's late hours really screwed them up in terms of meals and sleep. Do a proper Saturday/Sunday show, for pete's sake.

16. There was a panel on the State of Comics Criticism and I wrote about it here.

17. Much of crowd at this show was very attractive, a point that should be made often and loudly. This extends to many of the creators as well, both male and female, and not just in comparison to what most people in comics look like either. I don't know how else to put this -- whatever your preference, there was some grade-A tail on display, in extremely close proximity to social lubricants and hotel rooms, and you crazy kids should be out there ticklin' and slappin' and makin' it happen.

18. I even enjoyed the five or so hours it took me to drive down from Long Island and back, despite the lack of vegetarian meal options at rest stops. I timed my departure and arrival to avoid the New York and Beltway rush hours and listened to a half dozen albums I haven't had a chance to really dig into since I stopped commuting and lost my dedicated music-listening time. The new Radiohead's pretty good, huh? Best since Kid A. "All I Need" -- holy moses.

People, including world class cartoonists, waste hours and hours fretting over the "novel" half of the term "graphic novel" because what about non-fiction or short story collections or non-narrative work or autobio or whatever, but no one cares how big your "mini-comic" is.

Here you shall find links to all of the posts in my blogathon reading of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. This post will be updated with each new entry.

Day 1: Introduction

Day 2: The Gunslinger

Day 3: The Drawing of the Three--Argument; "Prologue: The Sailor"; "The Prisoner"

Day 4: The Drawing of the Three--"Shuffle"; "The Lady of the Shadows"; "Re-Shuffle"

Day 5: The Drawing of the Three--"The Pusher"; "Final Shuffle"; Afterword

Day 6: Outraged blogslinging

Day 6: Blogslinging clarification

Day 6: The Waste Lands--Argument; "Bear and Bone" parts 1-21

Day 7: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Bear and Bone"

Day 8: The Waste Lands--"Key and Rose" parts 1-16

Day 9: Blogslinging--Reload

Day 9: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Key and Rose"

Day 10: The Waste Lands--"Door and Demon"

Day 11: The Waste Lands--"Town and Ka-tet" parts 1-15

Day 12: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Town and Ka-tet"

Day 13: Belated blogslinging

Day 14: The Waste Lands--"Bridge and City" parts 1-15

Day 15: The Waste Lands--"Bridge and City" parts 16-22

Day 16: The Waste Lands--the rest of "Bridge and City"; "Riddle and Waste Lands"; Author's Note

Day 17: Wizard and Glass--Arguement; "Prologue: Blaine"; "Riddles" chapters 1-3

Day 18: Wizard and Glass--the rest of "Riddles"

Day 19: Wizard and Glass--"Susan" chapters 1-3

Day 20: Wizard and Glass--"Susan" chapters 4 & 5

Day 21: Wizard and Glass--the rest of "Susan"

Day 22: Wizard and Glass--"Come, Reap" chapters 1-5

Day 23: Wizard and Glass--the rest of "Come, Reap"; "All God's Chillun Got Shoes"; Afterword

Day 24: The Gunslinger (revised)--Introduction; Foreword

Day 25: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Gunslinger"

Day 26: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Way Station"

Day 27: Blogslinging bump in the road

Day 28: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Oracle and the Mountains"

Day 29: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Slow Mutants"; "The Gunslinger and the Man in Black"

Day 30: Wolves of the Calla--The Final Argument

Day 31: Wolves of the Calla--"Prologue: Roont"; "The Face on the Water"; "New York Groove"

Day 32: Wolves of the Calla--"Mia"; "Palaver"

Day 33: Wolves of the Calla--"Overholser"

Day 34: Wolves of the Calla--"The Way of the Eld"; "Todash"

Day 35: Wolves of the Calla--"The Pavilion"; "Dry Twist"; "The Priest's Tale (New York)"; "The Priest's Tale Continued (Highways in Hiding)"; "The Tale of Gray Dick"

Day 36: Wolves of the Calla--"Gran-Pere's Tale"; "Nocturne, Hunger"

Day 37: Wolves of the Calla--"Took's Store; The Unfound Door"; "The Priest's Tale Concluded (Unfound)"

Day 38: Wolves of the Calla--"Secrets"; "The Dogan, Part 1"; "The Dogan, Part 2"; "The Pied Piper"

Day 39: Wolves of the Calla--"The Meeting of the Folken"; "Before the Storm"; "The Wolves"; "Epilogue: The Doorway Cave"; Author's Note; Author's Afterword

Day 40: Song of Susannah--"1st Stanza: Beamquake"

Day 41: Song of Susannah--"2nd Stanza: The Persistence of Magic"; "3rd Stanza: Trudy and Mia"; "4th Stanza: Susannah's Dogan"; "5th Stanza: The Turtle"

Day 42: Song of Susannah--"6th Stanza: The Castle Allure"; "7th Stanza: The Ambush"

Day 43: Song of Susannah--"8th Stanza: A Game of Toss"

Day 44: Song of Susannah--"9th Stanza: Eddie Bites His Tongue"

Day 44: Blogslinging apology

Day 45: Song of Susannah--"10th Stanza: Susannah-Mio, Divided Girl of Mine"; "11th Stanza: The Writer"; "12th Stanza: Jake and Callahan"

Day 46: Song of Susannah--"13th Stanza: 'Hile, Mia, Hile, Mother'"; "Coda: Pages from a Writer's Journal"; Wordslinger's Note

Day 47: The Dark Tower--"Callahan and the Vampires"; "Lifted on the Wave"; "Eddie Makes a Call"

Day 48: The Dark Tower--"Dan Tete"

Day 49: The Dark Tower--"In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle"

Day 50: The Dark Tower--"On Turtleback Lane"; "Reunion"; "The Devar-Tete"; "The Watcher"

Day 51: The Dark Tower--"The Shining Wire"; "The Door Into Thunderclap"; "Steek-Tete"; "The Master of Blue Heaven"

Day 52: The Dark Tower--"Tracks on the Path"

Day 53: The Dark Tower--"The Last Palaver (Sheemie's Dream)"

Day 54: The Dark Tower--"The Attack on Algul Siento"; "The Tet Breaks"; "Mrs. Tassenbaum Drives South"; "Ves'-Ka Gan"

Day 55: The Dark Tower--"New York Again (Roland Shows ID)"; "Fedic (Two Views)"; "The Thing Under the Castle"; "On Badlands Avenue"; "The Castle of the Crimson King"

Day 56: The Dark Tower--"Hides"; "Joe Collins of Odd's Lane"; "Patrick Danville"; "The Sore and the Door (Goodbye, My Dear"); "Mordred"; "The Crimson King and the Dark Tower"; "Epilogue: Susannah in New York"; "Coda: Found"; "Appendix: Robert Browning--'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'"; Author's Note

Read: Wizard and Glass--the rest of "Riddles"

Time for another touchdown dance: We're in Stand-world! Or at least I thought we were until the newspaper they found referred to President Reagan and Vice-President Bush. Weird, I thought. They crossed over into the world of the un-revised Stand? But I guess it's not that either, not really--that version took place in 1980 and the revised one was 1990, but this is 1986. And we eventually discover slight but strange differences from the world we know: unknown fast food chains, car manufacturers, baseball teams and so on. The idea is that there are any number of different "levels" of reality, different worlds, all connected by the Dark Tower, and all breaking down. Things like The Stand's superflu can leak from one level to the next. It's an amusingly diegetic way to explain the differences between the ultimate version, the original version, this version, and even "Night Surf," the short story that contained the root of The Stand years ago.

It also strikes me as how King will justify the eventual revisions to The Gunslinger. Roland:

...in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways...

Okay. We'll see.

Finally, it's pretty rad that they're (apparently) calling Flagg the Crimson King in this world.

And as far as the comics themselves- one thing I really noticed this year was that most of the "new" comics were long on craft and short on narrative.

--Heidi MacDonald Frank "Cold Heat" Santoro

Click the link for Frank's measured assessment of the pros and cons to this approach and its future prospects.

But here’s my argument: Jeremy Tinder should feel bad because he made a bad comic book.

He should feel good if he made a good comic, and bad if he made a bad one.

--Abhay Khosla

By this logic, should Abhay Khosla should feel bad because he wrote a bad review? Not "bad review" in the sense that it's a review of a book he thinks is bad, but "bad review" in the sense that it starts with six paragraphs of self-congratulation for writing a bad review in that sense, then hides about two grafs' worth of actual critique among hyperbolic invective, gibberish, more self-congratulation about daring to buck the critical consensus, and swipes at other critics?

Not for me to say. Just like Abhay, I don't wanna be the bad guy here. And hey, those two grafs were pretty cogent...but what else was it that Abhay said?

If you have a pet dog, and the dog shits on your carpet, you don’t give it steak sandwich. Why? Because you don’t want dogshit all over your carpets. Ipso facto. Quo vadis.

Oh, right.

Read: Wizard and Glass--"Susan" chapters 1-3

In which during an extended flashback, Roland's first love Susan visits a witch...with sexy results! Yep, the second you saw your first reference to "a familiar heat in her belly" you knew you were in for some of King's idiosyncratic, yet no less steamy for that, take on sex. That's really the whole point of this section: how Susan ends up promised as some sort of sexual chattel/surrogate mother to the horndog mayor of her town, how Rhea the witch gets turned on by a magical glass (title character!) she's been given as payment by the mayor's goons and subsequently diddles poor Susan's skittle during the course of examining her to ensure her virginity, how Susan and Mr. Underhill "Will Dearborn" meet and feel instant heat, mentally and physically. I found this last bit particularly convincing in its depiction of young love/lust, reminiscent of how I met my wife in fact, albeit with more horses.

In terms of the larger story, we discover that revolutionary warlord the Good Man, John Farson, is conducting his assault on the land of the gunslingers in the name of democracy and equality. Susan and "Will" treat this like lip service, and perhaps it is, but we've seen how deeply ingrained the aristocratic ways of this world are in its inhabitants. Maybe there's more to the Good Man than his seeming status as another flunkie of the Beast that supposedly commands Marten, Walter, and Flagg. Or maybe democracy and equality as values have as little to do with The Dark Tower's conception of goodness as they do with The Lord of the Rings'.

It's well within Gary Groth's power to solve his own problems with online critical discourse--that good criticism is hard and time-consuming to find, that it's decentralized into different individual blogs, that it's drowned out by millions of idiots, etc.--by rejiggering The Comics Journal's website into the kind of centralized, "destination" critical entity that would serve as the new-media analog to the print publications of yore that he lionizes. Or to The Comics Journal itself, for that matter. He's certainly in a unique position to capitalize on TCJ's brand recognition--as a name, if not always as an actual magazine, it remains revered among the kind of people who'd want to read the kind of criticism Gary supports, and hated among the kind of people Gary would want to be hated by. It'd certainly make it easier for him to find good criticism online if he published a lot of it on his own website. It doesn't solve his problem with the Internet's supposed inferiority to print generally, but there isn't a print publication in the world that's been able to thread that needle.

Short of Alyssa Milano's Teen Steam, this may be the greatest videocassette of all time.

Eat your heart out, Fonda. Linnea Quigley will END you.

(Photo by Theremina. Hat tip: The Missus.)

That's the subject of this week's Horror Roundtable. Mine will take you back to those heady mid-'90s.

Read: Wizard and Glass--"Susan" chapters 4 & 5

I'm impressed with how well King's handling the sudden mushrooming of his cast from a core of four people who are nothing alike, their pet, and the occasional sociopath they have to kill to an entire village-worth of Deadwood refugees speaking in faux-archaic patois. I kept a pretty good handle on who each person was, what they looked like, and what their motivation was in relation to the other characters. And any time it seemed this drama of Mid-World manners might get tedious, King throws in some world-building details about Farson's forces or the gunslingers' Arthurian roots, and bam, interesting again.

Still, it feels like we're killing time before the obviously inevitable bloody showdown between Roland and his buddies and the Big Coffin Hunters, and before whatever nasty post-coital hypnotic suggestion planted in Susan's head kicks in after she loses her virginity to Roland instead of Mayor Thorin. I mean, these things are clearly going to happen, right? Why dilly-dally?

Finally, King sure is flattering Roland by asserting that when he and the hotsy-totsy Susan meet, it's she who feels compelled to rub one out while reminiscing about the meeting.

Megan Weireter's review of The Wicker Man at Not Coming to a Theater Near You is easily the best piece of writing on this film that I've ever read. The way she elucidates how our sympathies for the two dueling religions slowly reverse, how both are portrayed sympathetically even as their adherents behave abominably, how fair a film it is--simply masterful. Please read it if you care about the movie at all.

Read: Wizard and Glass--the rest of "Susan"

We've got ourselves quite the little page-turner here. The return to the fantasy language of Book One has made for the most assured and consistent section of the series since Roland's journey through the desert and mountains. All the major beats seem to work here.

Roland and company's three-on-three showdown with the Big Coffin Hunters unfolds at a tense yet almost leisurely pace, just the way you'd imagine these cowboy hardcases would start shit with each other. The time we spend alone with the BCH boys is time well spent, since like Gasher in Book Three they come across less like one-dimensional bad guys and more like people who've arrived at their current situation through a lifetime of conscious choices and reactions to circumstance. They're bad guys you can understand.

Similarly, the mystery of what the heck's going on in this backwater town--why they're stockpiling horses and oxen, what they're doing out at the oil patch, why all the town worthies are behaving so solicitously toward the Affiliation's representatives--keeps you moving through the pages at a clip. Even when the mystery is "solved," the secret presence of that magical glass ball at Rhea's place indicates there's still more to it.

I was sort of dreading the resolution of Susan's post-deflowering bewitchment, since I find nothing pleasurable about the inevitable in fiction when that inevitable thing is the result of a ruse, but it wasn't so bad. I'm sure her hypnotized hair-cutting will come back to haunt her in some terrible way--I'm sure things end badly for everyone involved in this tale but Roland, in fact--but at least she didn't mutilate her face or genitals or something nasty like that. I'm glad it's out of the way, too; I figured we'd be waiting to find out what was gonna happen until the end of this flashback.

Then again, I also figured the flashback would end with this section of the book, and now I see that it doesn't. It looks like there's significantly more flashback than present-day in this volume. I can live with that.

Read: Wizard and Glass--"Come, Reap" chapters 1-5

Jeez, this is one long-ass flashback, isn't it? I dared a peak at the back-cover blurb (something I basically never do with a book I already know I want to read until after I finish it--who needs informed expectations?) and discovered that the book is essentially touted as being one giant "remember when" story. So again we have a pretty radical break with the format of the preceding volumes.

I'm still enthralled by this story, incidentally. It's not just King's "period" work in the series is superior to his standard modern-day mode, though it is. And it's not just the mounting suspense leading toward the final confrontation, though that's a hoot. It's little details that don't appear to have much payoff, thrown in there just because it makes things a bit richer--Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin's mutually fulfilling sex life, for example. I'm not sure why that's in there, except to make the book's heavy and one of its supporting characters more fun to read about.

But there were several momentous revelations in this section that probably trump all the fun little touches:

1) Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain all survive whatever battle is to come. We find this out in one of those throwaway glimpses at the future of which King (and Tolkien) is evidently fond:

By the time the following year's Huntress [Moon] came around, all three of them would be confirmed smokers, tanned young men with most of the boyhood slapped out of their eyes.

So unless they spend another year in Hambry--which, judging by how many pages remain in this flashback section according to the table of contents, is a non-trivial possibility now that I think of it--they live to fight another day. I was actually pretty happy to read this because I enjoy knowing the good guys will win, though a similar throwaway bit about how the young gunslingers would rue Roland's decision not to kill Rhea the witch and have done with it indicates that there's some bad stuff heading their way even though they survive. There's no guarantee Susan will, that's for sure, and I'm guessing she doesn't.

2) The Wizard's Glass is an object of Ring of Power/Palantír-level magic and addictiveness. I enjoyed how this sort of slowly worked its way into the story--brief unexplained joking references made to the Wizard's Rainbow by the boys--before we get the flashback-within-a-flashback where Roland's dad explains to them what these 13 magic crystal balls are and advises them to be on the lookout for the pink-colored one because it's believed John Farson has ahold of it. It's a hell of a coincidence that they happen to stumble across this very object in their backwater hideaway, but I guess that's ka. Ka, destiny, fate, and magic are wonderful cheats for writers, you know.

3) Um, Walter is Flagg? Walter is Flagg! Admission: I had this revelation, which would have had me totally flipping my shit and probably actually waking my sleeping wife up this time around, spoiled for me by the dopey Wikipedia entry for Eyes of the Dragon, goddammit. I tried to convince myself it was a mistake, but I wasn't good enough at that to un-spoil myself. Oh well, it's still pretty fucking rad. But it begs quite a few questions: Walter/Flagg gives everyone who meets him, including cold-blooded killers, a serious case of the heebie-jeebies--so how come he fit right in as a "loyal" member of Roland's dad's retinue? Why pick a name that doesn't have the traditional "R.F." initials--is it just because King thought of Walter before Flagg and was stuck with the moniker? Did Flagg also have a non-R.F. name at some point during his career in the world of The Eyes of the Dragon or am I misremembering? Why does Walter speak in modern-day Flaggisms to Jonas (and presumably everyone else he deals with on Farson's behalf) yet in the more archaic mode of Mid-World and In-World when he and Roland meet in The Gunslinger? Is that the part of The Gunslinger that gets the most heavily revised, in order to make Walter mesh with Flagg as we know him? Earlier "Argument" sections have called Walter a servant to the "even more powerful sorcerer" Marten--is he really Marten's servant, and is Marten really more powerful, or is that deliberate misinformation, or did King just not know where he was going with all this yet, or what? Roland once recalled seeing Flagg--as Flagg, not as Walter, presumably--turn some dude into a dog while being chased through Mid-World by Dennis and Thomas from The Eyes of the Dragon--how did he not put two and two together? Does this, and Flagg's ability to dupe Roland and his dad, have to do with his previously undisclosed power to appear as completely different people depending on who's looking at him? When Walter warned Roland about the Ageless Stranger, he was really warning Roland about himself? Whose bones were those on the ground after Roland woke up from his long vision if not Walter/Flagg's? Yes, questions, questions, questions, flooding into the mind of the concerned young person today.

Anyways, it's a crackling good yarn. One final observation: I'm keeping my eye on Olive Thorin.

A final statement? It sounds grim. I donate my final statement to all the deaf and mute.

--Alexander Pichushkin on the end of his trial, as quoted in "Trial wraps up for chessboard serial killings; Russian confessed to murdering 63; said his goal was to mark all 64 squares," AP, MSNBC.com

Since self-aggrandizement and casual disregard for the truth are characteristics boasted both by the killer and the Russian government and law enforcement agencies who captured him, there's undoubtedly a tall-tale element to this case. But the macabre particulars of Pichushkin's story--he lived with his mother; he kept track of his victims by numbering the squares on a chessboard; he may have been trying to out-kill Andrei Chikatilo; he used Russia's national vice, vodka, as both bait and weapon--make it too good to fact-check.

Read: Wizard and Glass--the rest of "Come, Reap"; "All God's Chillun Got Shoes"; Afterword

Raced through the rest of the book yesterday and already the details are fading into the recesses of memory. I sure did enjoy it, though. When it finally came, the gunslingers' massacre of Jonas, Latigo, their men and the traitorous townies was every bit as bloody, relentless, shrewd, and cathartic as I'd hoped. The fun thing about Roland and his pals--and to his credit King only hits this on the nose very rarely, preferring to leave it to the reader to realize--is that they're pretty fucking horrifying. Between the three of them they killed upwards of 200 people, right? And none of them are older than high-school sophomores, if that. In another world they could be Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Well, that's probably an exaggeration. With the exception of Roland, who's repeatedly characterized as tinged with madness, there's no evidence that these kids would have ever gone bad, or at least "gone bad on their own" if you're not feeling charitable toward their gunslinger training. It was that training and the accumulated weight of "a hundred generations of gunslinger blood" that brought out the killers in them. It occurs to me that one of the under-reported themes in King's work is the mettle of children--their ability to be pretty hardcore if called upon. In the Dark Tower alone you've seen this so far in Roland, Alain, Cuthbert, Susan, Sheemie, and Jake. Hand in hand with this is his belief that children can be cruel, a theme that echoes everywhere from the group of Little Coffin Hunters who kill and mutilate the stray dogs of Hambry to "The Children of the Corn" (a story referenced in Wizard and Glass--thematically in the blood-madness of the townsfolk on Reaping Day and explicitly in the afterword). I guess if you acknowledge the latter trait, which anyone who's been a kid probably would, you have to give some credit to the former.

Post-flashback the book took some wild twists and turns. I'm surprised at how little I was jarred by the sudden reliance on The Wizard of Oz--it's such a random direction to go in after hundreds of pages of a junior-varsity Fistful of Dollars on supernatural steroids, and yet it worked. Perhaps because it centered on Flagg, whose demented, pop-culture-riffing sense of humor would lend itself quite naturally to trying to scare his enemies with the Wicked Witch and the flying monkeys and the twister and the Great and Terrible Oz and all that. Or maybe it's just that the series itself lurches so dramatically from one style to another between books, and sometimes within books, that one more crazy jump is barely noticeable. Start on an evil supercomputer monorail, wander through The Stand in an alternate universe, flash back to the Wild Wild West for three quarters of the book, return to the present in the Emerald City, then have one last flashback-slash-Hamlet-riff before calling it a day? Sure, why not?

The Flagg situation, of course, is now more confusing than ever. So he's not just Walter--he's also Marten? I guess he's also a balls-out fantastic shapeshifter or master of disguise, because Roland had contact with all three incarnations of this character and never made the connection. Still hasn't, in fact, at least as far as King lets us know--he never says "Flagg, Marten, Walter--they're all one and the same" or anything like that. (I wouldn't be surprised to be informed of this in the Argument for the next book, though.) All my questions about yesterday's "Flagg = Walter" revelation go double for "Flagg = Marten."

Finally, we've got another Afterword, and with it we get another batch of information yet to be revealed by the story itself. Father Callahan from 'Salem's Lot is apparently going to show up? Or did he already show up and I just didn't recognize him? And the main character from Insomnia, which I haven't read, is also going to put in an appearance? Or was King saying that Dark Tower elements showed up in Insomnia rather than the other way around?

Maybe I'll get some answers to these meta-questions in the revised edition of The Gunslinger, which I'll be tackling next. As best I can tell--and I've gotten conflicting information from literally everyone who's coached me on this--Book One received its revisions (the only book of the series to get anything other than a new introduction) between the releases of Book Four and Book Five, in preparation for that final stretch. My guess is that it'll be a lot more Flaggish, and have some more of the now-familiar details about the political situation in In-World and Mid-World thrown in. And there will probably be a bunch of groundwork laid for the final three novels in ways I won't pick up on yet, other than by noticing that they're different from the original version. At any rate I'm looking forward to returning to the purest articulation of the Gunslinger and his world and seeing if it feels any different knowing what I now know.

The first official, you won't get arrested for showing it to children trailer for Rambo (that's what it's called now).

The second official trailer for The Mist.

The second official trailer for I Am Legend.

I actually think the I Am Legend trailer is the best of the three.

All via AICN.

Back when Freddy vs. Jason came out, there was talk that Dimension was toying with the idea of a Pinhead vs. Michael Myers movie. What happened with that?

I had talked to Clive about it. My understanding was that Clive was going to write it and John Carpenter was going to direct it. It was the late [producer] Moustapha Akkad who decided he didn’t want the movie to be made. But it would’ve been interesting to find out how that would’ve worked. Pinhead likes a good conversation—and that’s a bit of a problem when it comes to Michael [laughs].

--Doug "Pinhead" Bradley, interviewed at Playboy.com

I did not know that!

Read the interview for Bradley's thoughts on all things Hellraiser, from the comics to the upcoming remake. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

For me, looking at this photo is like getting socked in the gut by my comics-reading past.

That's Nick Bertozzi, Tom Devlin, Brian Ralph, Megan Kelso, Jordan Crane, and Paul Lyons, on their signing tour with the still incredible anthology Non #5. My copy, signed by all six, plus David Choe, Greg Cook, Dave Kiersh, James Kochalka, and Paul Pope, was the final brick in the edifice that built me up into a comics reader. (The others were The Dark Knight Returns in sixth grade, The Maxx and Sin City in high school, The Acme Novelty Library and Savage Dragon in college, and New X-Men and The Last Lonely Saturday in 2001.)

I think everyone in that picture is younger then than I am now.

(Via the must-read New Bodega blog.)

Read: The Gunslinger (revised)--Introduction; Foreword

The new Introduction to this revised version of Book One is harmless enough. I'm glad he decided to finish the series and sorry it took a near-fatal car accident to make it happen. I'm glad he was once young dumb and full of the desire to mash up The Lord of the Rings and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The Foreword is where things get fishy. Here King explains why he's revising The Gunslinger, and now it sounds worse to me than just a cheat--it sounds like a bad idea. He's not revising this like he did The Stand, to add in material that was cut for logistical reasons. As I already knew, he's revising it to bring it in line with the later volumes. In cases like the one he cites, where the name "Farson" is changed from referring to a town to referring to a guy, I'm fine with that. Like I've said before, even Tolkien had to rewrite the Ring chapters from The Hobbit. But if he's adding 35 pages of story, he's doing a lot more than that--he's shoe-horning things in that weren't there at all before, in erroneous form or otherwise. It's already apparent that there's now going to be a bunch of numerological stuff regarding the number 19, which irritates me because by this point he'd written and released four books, more than half the series, without so much as a peep about it. I've had certain information revealed to me regarding changes King makes in this revision to the way Roland's quest progresses, which also seems like a pretty major overhaul. And surely (ha, I say this like I haven't already flipped to the end to see what's going on) there will be significant alterations to the man in black's words and actions, to make his triune nature as Flagg/Walter/Marten more apparent when it wasn't even conceived of as such when the book was first written. Put it all together and it feels like a cheat; at the very least it totally shifts the ground beneath long-time readers' feet as they try to get a handle on what's going on in the series.

But worst of all, he's not just revising for information; he's revising for style! He can explain it however he wants, but apparently he's made the book's prose sound more like something he'd write today. I'm sure even bigger King fans than myself would agree that's not necessarily a good thing, especially when that original style, so different from anything else King had ever written, was what made the first version of The Gunslinger such a stand-out.

Sigh. Time to take my medicine, I guess.

I think something is going to give very soon. I mean, when Fangoria, which is a magazine I've loved for many years now, on the cover--maybe in relation to "Hostel 2," and I'm not sure--has the headline, "Has Horror Gone Too Far?" From Fangoria magazine? I mean this is--hello. This is outrageous, an outrageous thing for Fangoria to be asking. But I believe it's asking for a legitimate reason because what I'm gonna call horror porn, which is what I think some of these torture pictures are, the "Hostels" for instance...And "Saw." This is stuff which presents--you're there to see one thing and one thing only, just as you are when you see a porn movie. Don't tell me you're there for the story, mate, 'cause I ain't believing you. [Laughs.] My point is that the "Hostel" stories don't begin until somebody has already been caught and tied up or whatever else. In even the Camp Crystal Lake adventures [the "Friday the 13th" movies], there was an element of excitement as to, is she gonna get away? Are they going out to the same woods to make love as the two who proceeded them? There was that tension. There's something about the "Hostel" movies--I've only seen the first one, though I've seen it two or three times partly because I admired Roth from "Cabin Fever"--that I thought "Boy, is this a cynical exercise or is this somebody being very smart, or both? Or is it something where he's just decided that this is the best way to scare people?"...And I found that I wasn't scared so much, just slightly disgusted at myself. Now, that's just me. Everybody makes their own judgments. But I think eventually people are going to say there just isn't enough to hold me for 90 minutes to watch this. There isn't enough humanity in it. Do you know what I mean?

--My hero Clive Barker, characterizing Hostel in a way that I don't think is at all fair, in the latest installment of a truly epic interview with N'Gai Croal of Newsweek's video game blog Level Up. As you might have guessed from the venue it focuses primarily on Barker's new game Jericho and his ongoing debate over the artistic merits of video games with Roger Ebert, but from there it branches out into pretty much every conceivable place it could go. It's a must-read conversation with a guy who's not just one of the best horror artists around, but also one of its best thinkers.

Part one
Part two
Part three

And there's at least one more part in the offing, apparently.

(Via Ken Bromberg.)

PS: Click here to find out why Barker is wrong about Hostel.

Here is the official official second trailer for I Am Legend. (The one I put up before is apparently the international trailer.) I like this one even better. If Will Smith spends this entire movie playing off only himself and his dog, thus forcing him to tone down the "oh HELL naw" posing, this could be a pretty fantastic little survival-horror movie. (Alright, maybe not "little." But I think Dawn of the Dead and 28 Weeks Later and even Spielberg's War of the Worlds proved that bigger can be better.)

(Via IGN, via BD.)

Eli Roth might get his rocks off from literally torturing the audience but his chickenshit exploitation schlock knows not of such savagery.

Rob Humanick, unfavorably comparing Roth's work to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. Once again, this is an unfair and inaccurate characterization of Hostel, and not just because it misuses the word "literally." Here's why it's wrong. (Hostel: Part II I'll give him.)

Read: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Gunslinger"

A fifth of the way through this dopey vanity project of King's and I'm already tired of it. I don't know how else to characterize this revision but "vanity project"; it doesn't give me any choice. It's the work of a guy convinced he knows better than the author he once was--if he could just expand this one sentence into three, if he could just take that amorphous sense of mystery and load it with clues, then it'll be a better book, right?

Good golly miss Molly, wrong.

Case in point: The first section of The Gunslinger's first chapter, also called "The Gunslinger," was in its original form maybe the best pure prose King ever set to paper. Ruthless, relentless, economical, terse, mysterious, haunting. Minimal distractions of mythos or invented patois, but still enough to hint at deep waters beneath the still surface. So when I started rereading it in this revised format, I gave it a straight read through, then went back and flipped between the two versions every paragraph. The still, Sergio Leone opening has ballooned. It's been made flabby and flaccid with extra conjunctions, extra sentences, extra paragraphs. It's like watching someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder try to comb his hair, incapable of leaving well enough alone.

Like the rest of "The Gunslinger," it's also laden with forced references to events from the other books in the series, those already published and those yet to be, as if King's internal editor had stepped aside and his internal Dark Tower Concordance publisher burst forth to say "Hey, didja know about the Manni cult? Or that we call Jesus 'the Man Jesus'? Or that the north star is Old Mother? Or that Roland had a horn once? And that that's REALLY important? Or that he went to this place called Mejis and his girlfriend was burned to death and a guy named Eldred Jonas led a bunch of guys called the Big Coffin Hunters and there was a Charyou Tree ceremony and livestock grow mutated and autumn is called Reap and thankee-sai and kennit and crimson king and Sheemie had a mule and the beam and LaMerk machinery and Jericho Hill and long days and pleasant nights and blah blah blah blah blah blah..." Exhausting. King has noted his detractors' diagnosis of his condition as "diarrhea of the typewriter." Now I understand what they mean. Look, all of these things are not equally important. They're definitely not as important as telling a good story in an artful fashion. They leave you swiveling your head in all directions instead of staring straight across the desert with the gunslinger. We had four fucking books to learn all that shit and did just fine, thanks. The conviction that it's all SO IMPORTANT that it just HAS to be in the FIRST CHAPTER of the FIRST BOOK? Vanity.

See, it's not just his typewriter that has the green apple splatters; if it were, that might be forgivable. (Might--watching what he did to this chapter even from a purely stylistic perspective isn't pretty.) It's his imagination, an imagination that had conjured up an epic that was already pretty damn engaging, for crying (your pardon) out loud. Now you find that some of the most fundamental things you thought you knew about it are wrong, and that there are whole new things you need to learn and fit into what you already had internalized about it. Out of nowhere comes the number 19, and with it a new subplot in which the man in black (now outed as Walter from the get-go, and how the hell does that make sense?) uses it as a "don't think about a blue polar bear"-type mental trap to goad the gunslinger's lady friend Allie into unlocking the secrets of the afterlife and driving herself insane. Try to imagine if The Illuminatus! Trilogy had been more than half-completed and published before Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea went back and inserted the number 23 into the first part, then re-released it. Equally fundamental, I'm half-guessing half-sure, is this "Resumption" business that's tagged onto the beginning of the book, and that dizzy sense Roland gets that the world momentarily blinked out of reality. If it was so vital to the entire enterprise, why wasn't it there when Steve King As The Apotheosis Of All 19-Year-Olds wrote this fucking thing years ago? And since it wasn't, may I submit that it shouldn't have been jammed in there years later by the director of Maximum Overdrive?

Here, though, because I'm a fair guy, is the one part of the revisions I really liked. Not because of what it imports for the story, because like I said I think it's cheating, but because it's well-written and creepy. It's the man in black Walter O'Dim's farewell note to Allie.

Allie

You want to know about Death. I left him a word. That word is NINETEEN. If you say it to him his mind will be opened. He will tell you what lies beyond. He will tell you what he saw.

The word is NINETEEN.

Knowing will drive you mad.
But sooner or later you will ask.
You won't be able to help yourself.
Have a nice day! :)

Walter O'Dim

P.S. The word is NINETEEN.

You will try to forget but sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit.

NINETEEN.

"Sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit." That's beautiful. I wish King had learned his own lesson.

If you can remember when the comics blogosphere consisted of about dozen people, this will come as a blow: David Allen "Johnny Bacardi" Jones has decided to close down his long-running (five years!) blog. Johnny had a well-defined, intelligent viewpoint about comics and he intelligently articulated it for a long, long time. I'll miss him, especially now that I'm getting back involved in comicsblogging. Fortunately he'll still be keeping up Elton John blog, where he's writing about every song in John's 1966-1979 catalog one post at a time, which is the kind of fabulous idea only good bloggers would come up with in the first place.

Johnny's departure, hinging as it does on his impression that blogospheric tastemakers had him on the pay-no-mind list, also brings up the kind of "why blog? and for whom?" issues that are worth airing from time to time. I can tell you that getting away from comicsblogging and shifting gears to horror was probably a great thing for me to do. The horror blogosphere isn't nearly as concerned with industry punditry or advocacy as the comics blogosphere is; for one thing, in horror media like film, television, and prose, the lines of demarcation between fan, critic, and creator are a lot firmer than they are in the still comparatively romper-room industry of comics, so you're operating at a remove from the business end of things and therefore feel like you have less clout, so who cares? It's just people talking. There also tends to be less snark involved--I don't know what it is about funnybooks that makes people come out swinging, but I noticed that my own dick-o-meter started edging up the second I started blogging about comics again a few weeks ago and it takes some doing to force it back down. All this makes horrorblogging an enterprise that feels much less dependent on the approval or opprobrium of others for its survival, which is a feeling that carries back over into other kinds of blogging you do, which is why I'd keep this thing up regardless of how much feedback I got or didn't get.

Anyway. Go tell Johnny goodbye. Goodbye Johnny!

So to me, the exciting thing is watching trajectories of all these media crossing, and watching them all go their merry ways is very, very interesting. I feel like we've only begun. I'm thinking about the way books are published now and the way they were 20 years ago when I first came in. The way that comics are held now, the regard with which comics are held. How much of cinema--commercial cinema--is dependent upon our comics. That astonishes me. There was a time when you couldn't get a comic book on a screen for neither love nor money. Now, it seems like something that's had a two-issue run is legitimate fodder for somebody somewhere. So I think we've got a lot of very interesting collisions coming, and I'm glad to be sitting at the crossroads as the various media race towards the same spot, each from a different direction.

--Clive Barker, in part four of his interview with N'Gai Croal at Newsweek's video game blog, Level Up.

This is what it's like when worlds collide.

Go read what he has to say about The Sopranos and Melville, too.

Read: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Way Station"

Maybe I just needed to vent. Maybe I'm less tired and grumpy, I don't know. I'm a lot less irritated with the revisions made in this chapter, that much I can tell you. I think many of the changes are still on the obnoxious side--more overt references to the events of Wizard and Glass' flashback, more "hey here are some references to NYC that Roland doesn't understand, because Jake comes from New York in the modern day, get it?", and for some reason more references to poop, which is something this chapter has in common with the previous one. What I'm guessing the most pivotal change will be is the insertion of a warning about "the taheen"--a man with the head of a bird; a reference Roland spotting one as he chased the man in black had been inserted into "The Gunslinger" as well--into the prophecy of the speaking-demon in the way station's cellar. Considering how crucial the other two sentences the demon uttered ("Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger" and "While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket") have been, this'll probably be big too. It also happens to describe the creature that appears in the delightfully, mysteriously incongruous man-vs.-monster logo for The Stand.

One revision cleared up a major plot point: Marten is Farson, the Good Man. I actually had to go back and check this against the original version to make sure this wasn't another brand-new element. After all, this means that all four big bads--Farson, Marten, Walter, and Flagg--are the same being. But sure enough, the original has Roland musing on the love triangle formed between his dad, his mom, and Marten, "known in some quarters as the good man." But as King mentioned in his foreword to the revised edition, the original passage that led up to this revelation used Farson as the name of the town the Good Man's saboteur Hax was going to poison, not the name of the Good Man himself. Changing the sentence to read "Marten--known in some quarters as Farson, the good man" brings it all home to those of us with cloudy memories. And now I find myself a lot more open to the idea that Flagg, Marten, and Walter are all the same dude, since there's no longer the mystery of what their real relationship to Farson is--I probably should have remembered that passage during my read through the subsequent three books, but yep, all four are one and the same. Throw in the Ageless Stranger and you've got five. But what about the crimson king, and the Beast that rules the Tower? They seem to be references to Flamartersonger's boss. (Apologies to those Wes Anderson phone commercials.)

I'm still confused, but at least I'm a bit less infuriated.

I am traveling this weekend and may or may not have Internet access, so there may or may not be a gap in my Dark Tower blogging. Whenever I have net access again I'll add in those entries, then pretend they were always there, revised-Gunslinger-style.

Read: The Gungslinger (revised)--"The Oracle and the Mountains"

In reading The Gunslinger again (for the first time), I've discovered part of what made The Drawing of the Three feel so lame by comparison. In Book One, the gunslinger (calling him Roland in this book's context doesn't feel right) reacts to any tenderness he feels toward Jake with shock bordering on horror. Eventually he allows himself to love the kid, but puts it aside the second the man in black makes it clear that he will face a choice between saving Jake and chasing the Tower. Finding and then killing Jake adds another log on the simmering fire of the gunslinger's guilt, but it doesn't change him in any fundamental way. As we're constantly reminded, he's got a lot of dead friends, many of whom ended up that way thanks to him.

But along comes Book Two, and by the end the guy's a changed man, using the idioms of, genuinely caring about and taking risks on behalf of other people. Two of the most irritating people of all time, by the way--a junkie who never shuts up and a woman with a split personality, half of which is psychotic, who also never shuts up. We're supposed to buy that these clowns peel away Roland's layers to find the still-warm heart within, but not Jake? Bullroar.

Jimmy crack corn and I don't care, but I thought you'd be entertained.

(Via B-D)

What was my worst Halloween costume ever? Find out at this week's Horror Roundtable--the answer may surprise you!

Why does Batman laugh so much in All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder?

There's a number of possible, more-or-less mutually inexclusive answers.

First, maybe writer Frank Miller is completely fucking nuts, and simply has no control over what his fingers are doing anymore, which, naturally, is why he's been entrusted with creative roles on expensive movie projects.

--Joe McCulloch.

You'd be surprised how many times this theory has been advanced to me by a straight face by people you'd think would know better. Or I dunno, maybe you wouldn't.

Like an ugly duckling, Day of the Dead took some time to get the love it deserved (and even then it has remained a black sheep amongst its brethren) – a scenario not uncommon to works of art that tell people what they simultaneously need to know and want not to hear.The film was – and to a large extent, remains – a victim of its own implicit place in film history; like the occasionally artful summer blockbuster, Romero’s third "Dead" entry is routinely examined and dismissed less for its own qualities than its “failure” to conform to the expectations unfairly assigned to it sight unseen, here as a zombie movie sequel indebted to two highly lauded works come before. Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were both brilliant and easily among the greatest horror films ever made, but that Day of the Dead doesn’t follow the expected trilogy arc of capping off its saga with all-out climactic spectacle is hardly an inherent strike against it. Part of this degrading misconception lies in the fact that Romero’s original vision was cut short by budgetary restraints over issues with the increasingly more powerful MPAA rating system, the final result being far from the originally conceived "Raiders of the Lost Ark with zombies", and gore hounds subsequently decrying the relative lack of visceral bloodshed (regardless of the fact that, during its brief moments of splatter, Day features some of the sickest zombie action ever filmed).

--Rob Humanick on Day of the Dead.

Is this really accurate? I know that supposedly the initial audiences were let down by the movie's failure to be as large-scale in comparison to Dawn as Dawn was to Night, but I've never heard anyone talk about it on those terms in any present-day conversations. I've certainly never heard anyone "decry the relative lack of visceral bloodshed," since it's easily the goriest, most disgusting entry in the trilogy. The reason most people I know who don't like it don't like it is that they feel it's boring and slow and sloppily paced and the characters are poorly written and acted.

I happen to like it more each time I see it, but in the defense of those who don't, I hardly think this is because "they can't handle the truth!" or what have you.

Keith Uhlich calls our attention to several interesting pieces on horror films at Reverse Shot, part of their "A Few Great Pumpkins" horrorblogging series this year.

The funny thing about Reverse Shot is that they published maybe the most spectacularly wrong-headed horror movie review I've read all year, Andrew Tracy's angrily dismissive take on 28 Weeks Later. (I gave that review the business here and reviewed the film myself here.) So you might be forgiven for ignoring a horror blogathon that kicks off by reiterating his sentiments and decrying 28 Weeks Later's "useless 'verité.'" But lo, the intro quickly rights itself by lambasting the "tired excess" of Robert Rodriguez's "waste-of-space" Planet Terror half of Grindhouse. (Agreed.) Best of all, it refers to Hostel: Part II as "loathsome, self-congratulatory" and "the granddaddy of all badness," all of which it is.

The critical schizophrenia continues at the site's review for Hostel: Part II itself, by Michael Koresky. This has to be one of the juiciest bits of horror criticsm I've read in some time, because it's split about evenly between insights with which I agree so emphatically I'm tempted to have them tattooed on my person and real head-slapping howlers. Most of the latter arise from Koresky's conflation and dismissal of the two Hostel films, which to me are as different as night and day--so different that each day I grow more convinced that the first one was a fluke. Once again he repeats the fatuous notion that Hostel merely presents torture for the gratification of the audience in the most businesslike and unartful way possible, and I'm just baffled that you could watch a movie with (just a few examples) that factory shot or the American businessman's monologue or the heart-stopping cat-and-mouse game at the end or that meaning-laden conversation about staying in the closet and think that there's nothing going on in that movie.

But for every head-scratcher, there's a passage like this:

The need to align epochs of genres, especially horror, with sociopolitical realities has always made for neatly encapsulated criticism and terrific sound bites, but this sort of assessment works better in retrospect. Those who make up this contingent of new filmmakers are from such disparate backgrounds and sensibilities, nationally and otherwise, that to group them together as some kind of coalition comes across as desperate at best, disingenuous at worst. The truth is that the need to place instantaneous social readings on this new wave of horror willfully ignores the pathetic opportunism behind some of the films, as well as the savvy genre reclamation of others. Those influential Seventies horror films, from the dingy cult basement specials of Wes Craven to the multiplex delights of John Carpenter, were for the most part recouped decades later as trenchant post-Vietnam meditations on social disillusionment as a way of putting a neat bow atop a tumultuous past.

Heh, indeed! And the thing ends with an encomium to The Blair Witch Project, which of course is the way to my heart.

And oh, while we're on the subject of Hostel, Jason Adams reports that the director's cut of Hostel--and how annoying is it that the unrated cut I already own isn't the director's cut? If Roth cares about the fans as much as he says he does, he wouldn't participate in this kind of transparent, almost clichéd DVD-rebuying huxterism, but oh well--makes a change to the original ending that's supposedly a vast improvement. I wasn't wild about that ending, though not for Jason's reasons--I didn't read it as homophobic catharsis, but simply as a not-particulary-believable move for the characters involved. Maybe that's changed.

Back to Reverse Shot, in a move sure to make Jason happy, their aforementioned "Great Pumpkins" series contains a review of Paperhouse (by Robbie Freeling), a movie that I don't think I've ever seen discussed outside of horror blogs.

Better still, Freeling also looks at Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers with the explicit goal of giving it the credit it's due as an unqualified classic of the genre. I think he's right. I don't know any horror fan (or even casual, Halloween-time horror-movie watcher) who hasn't seen that movie and loved it, and gotten the bejesus scared out of them at least twice (you can probably guess when if you've seen it), and yet even I rarely give it the time of day. I'm thinking the reason it's not talked about in the same way and with the same frequency as, say, John Carpenter's comparable '50s-scifi-parable-as-body-horror-and-paranoia remake The Thing is because it wasn't made by a genre stalwart like Carpenter, but by the guy who did The Right Stuff.

Follow those links and read is my advice.

Read: The Gunslinger (revised)--"The Slow Mutants"; "The Gunslinger and the Man in Black"

This page enumerates the non-grammatical/stylistic differences between the original and revised Gunslingers. IIRC it only contains three spoilers that made me want to chuck my laptop out the window, which is a minor miracle when it comes to online reference material about fiction. Part of me feels like I could have just read the list and saved myself the trouble of reading the book, but it's probably worth seeing the changes in context. They're hard enough to wrap your head around as it is without having a full-fledged reading experience to help you internalize them.

So, Jake is dead, and unless the lobstrosity attack that kicks off The Drawing of the Three is to be interpreted as karma-by-shellfish, Roland still doesn't get his comeuppance for letting the kid die. The man in black now openly cops to being both Marten and Walter during his post-chase palaver with the gunslinger; the servile relationship of the latter to the former is redacted, as is the one between Marten/Walter and the Ageless Stranger, who is now called Legion and not Maerlyn. The Beast has been removed altogether, replaced by a king with a red hand--the crimson king, I presume. And now Roland basically says "yeah, right" when he comes to at the end of his mystical chat with Walter to find the dark man's bones on the ground.

In other words, everything you thought you knew about the villain of the series is wrong. Listen, I appreciate King wanting to go in what he thought was a better direction, but when you have to change that much about the second most important character in the series, whose nature defines the quest of the first most important character in the series, maybe, to quote LCD Soundsystem, it's late for revision?

Finally, my guess is that the series ends with the gunslinger stuck in some kind of moebius-strip time-loop. I can live with that, I guess. It's slowly dawned on me that Roland's world is what things would look like if Flagg really won at some point, and that's too cool to let the good guys screw up by winning themselves.

Troma is selling its Hell's Kitchen walk-up and moving to Long Island City due to financial woes. I spent a summer in that building, and I have, well, let's call them vivid memories of the place. In a way I feel like the McDonald's next door that Lloyd Kaufman has blamed for Troma's rat problem in every interview he's done for the last decade has won some sort of titanic struggle for the soul of that block.

Brian Ralph presents the Zombie Hall of Fame, parts one and two.

There's more at the links, but not enough, goddammit. I want to see Flyboy, Bub, Big Daddy, the priest from 28 Weeks Later, the little girl from the Dawn remake, the mom from Dead Alive...and then I want to pay money to own these things, so Brian, if you're listening, let's make this happen.

I'm linking to Tom Spurgeon's post in praise of the current state of comics because I think it's at least as important to read as the recent complaints about same by Craig Yoe and Frank Santoro and Heidi MacDonald. Hell, I was going to write something along the lines of Tom's post (particularly the "Craft and Story Are Valued as Never Before" section) myself, but my version would have come out something like "if you are interested in and knowledgeable about comics enough to write about them but still think they're in dire artistic straits right now, WHAT THE HELL????" so I didn't.

Bruce Baugh sings the praises of Children of Men and 28 Weeks Later, my two favorite films of the past year and harrowing post-apocalyptic narratives both. Interestingly, he cites Children of Men's long-take action and suspense sequences, singled out by many critics as a case of ostentatious filmmaking getting in the way of emotional immediacy, as doing precisely the opposite--recreating the emotional endlessness of traumatic moments in filmic terms. That feels right to me.

I think criticism of the technique used in those set pieces bespeaks a certain conservatism among film critics in its implicit belief that movies use the stuff of moviemaking at the expense of emotional resonance.

Read: Wolves of the Calla--The Final Argument

Another book, another infodump of stuff that had never been revealed in the actual story. The magical crystal balls are called Bends o' the Rainbow. The guy who accidentally ran Jake over when he was pushed into the street by Jack Mort, who's now called "Walter's representative on the New York level of the Dark Tower," was mafia don Enrico Balazar. The Turtle's name is Maturin. Roland is the last seppe-sai ("death-seller"). Books Two, Three, and Four are subtitled "Renewal," "Redemption," and "Regard" to match Book One's "Resumption" and this volume's "Resistance."

And yet King still can't bring himself to make it clear that Walter is the same person as Marten Broadcloack/Richard Fannin/Randall Flagg/John Farson/The Good Man/The Walkin Dude, just in disguise. At the beginning of the Argument he even appears to use the names "Walter" and "Marten" interchangeably, with no explanation as to who this "Marten" character might be.

Also, the letter R is not the 19th letter of the alphabet. Come on, man.

Time Magazine has posted its list of the Top 25 Horror Movies of all time, by critic Richard Corliss. It's pretty ridiculous. Red Dragon? It includes a lot of films that are fondly remembered but not in serious contention for the canon--Dead Alive, Black Sunday, freaking Blood Feast. And then there are the countless omissions--obviously these things are subjective, but the absence of The Shining, The Blair Witch Project, Dawn of the Dead, and Rosemary's Baby seems particularly glaring, and that's before we get into more tenuous or debatable territory like The Sixth Sense, The Ring, Hellraiser, Evil Dead 2, Henry, Suspiria, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hostel, 28 Days Later, etc. And again, The Silence of the Lambs doesn't make the cut but Red Dragon does. Finally, the too-clever-by-half non-horror selections are pretty preposterous--Bambi? Arrival of a Train? I understand what they're saying, but those films aren't horror films, they're movies that had parts that scared people. The flying monkeys scared the shit out of every little kid in America but The Wizard of Oz is not a horror movie.

Lists like this one really make me question the value of listmaking as part of the critical enterprise, because the "hey, it started a conversation" thing is only worthwhile if the conversation doesn't muddy the waters and force knowledgeable people to spend valuable time smacking down stupidity. This goes double when the list is presented not as one dude's opinion but by a publication that presumes authority on all topics about which it speaks.

Watching the film once again, Romero's carefully calculated deconstructions on social woes of the time seem most brilliant in their simultaneously identifying the film as a distinctly American work rooted in the cultural anarchy of the 1970's as well as one packed with universal truths on the human condition, borders of time and place notwithstanding. The former packs the greatest punch in the third-act war between the main protagonists holed up in their shopping mall fortress and the military convoy that overruns them (bringing the zombie population flooding back in), stealthily evoking not simply the tensions between pacifist movements and more aggressive social orders of the time, but any scenario in which men turn on each other in the face of greater disorder (in other words, look at any historical timeline and pick your example of choice)....In a prolonged television debate meant to inform viewers on how to handle the crisis at hand, a lone scientist stresses the importance of exterminating the dead "without emotion." How fitting, then, that the soldiers who underestimate the zombies – treating them more like disposable hunting targets worthy of ridicule than a lethal force to be reckoned with – are generally those who find themselves being torn limb from limb.

--Rob Humanick on Dawn of the Dead.

I feel like I pick on another one of Humanick's zombie-blogathon posts every day, but the people who overrun the mall simply aren't soldiers in a military convoy--they're a biker gang. Meanwhile, the people who supposedly represent "pacifist movements" in this formulation include two SWAT cops.

The Onion AV Club has posted two lengthy, boffo pieces on horror in time for Halloween. First is Noel Murray's film-by-film overview of the Friday the 13th franchise, with special attention paid to the ways each film is a creature of its era. Lately I've been almost preoccupied with how gratuitous violence works in a movie, so this is like crack to me. Highly recommended.

Next is an imaginary 24-hour horror movie marathon curated by Eli Roth. Listening to Roth repeatedly place himself in the company of the likes of John Carpenter and Sam Raimi indicates just how much the guy believes his own press at this point. Actually, perhaps "believes the press he thinks he should have" is a more accurate way of putting things post-Hostel: Part II. But that aside, he's made many interesting choices from a range of eras and styles, and has some intriguing things to say about them, from their influence on his own work (which only feels like he's paying himself a compliment some of the time, and frequently yields insights like his characterization of the second half of Hostel as driven by a Vanishing-derived compulsion to know) to an almost elegiac appreciation for the kinds of horror films that could never get made today (the original Wicker Man, for example). Also highly recommended, and with the hope that he eats some humble pie and finds his way again.

I became a vegetarian two years ago, and I'm married to a vegan recovering anorexic who initially became a vegetarian because of upsetting scenes in the horror movies Wolf and Jurassic Park. Naturally, I've picked up on the relationship between horror and carnivorousness. (You might have noticed this in my "state of the beast" posts, among others.)

A pair of noteworthy posts elsewhere make this case. First up is David Carter of Not Coming to a Theater Near You on PeTA's Chew on This: 30 Reasons to Go Vegetarian, which views the animal rights organization's bloody documentary on the treatment of animals by the meat industry through a horror lens.

Meanwhile, Lindy Loo of Yeah, That "Vegan" Shit (and, not coincidentally, horror blog Come Play with Us, Danny...) examines the anti-meat implications of arguably the meat-movie (rimshot!) masterpieces, The Texas Chain Saw Massacare and Hostel--and Motel Hell for good measure.

Happy Halloween!

Read: Wolves of the Calla--"Prologue: Roont"; "The Face on the Water"; "New York Groove"

I wouldn't call what King's doing in these opening sections subtle--repeating certain unexplained phrases regarding life in the Calla over and over so we make sure to catch that there's a mystery behind them, giving Father Callahan from 'Salem's Lot an entrance as big as a Ray Harryhausen monster, brewing up a nice hot glass of instant 19 numerology (just add incessant repetition!), even indulging in a conversation between Roland's ka-tet about mixed-genre storytelling in which the gunslinger all but turns and winks at the audience. King's not so much guiding the reader as riding herd.

But while it may not be subtle, it's definitely intriguing. Years of toiling away in comics criticism have taught me that I should have nothing but contempt for those "hey, look, it's a character I'm already familiar with!" reveals, but even though I knew it was coming eventually I was still thrilled by Father Callahan's appearance here in Roland's world. (Shouldn't he be a vampire by now, though?) I mean, those kinds of continuity-porn moments are a big part of the Dark Tower-verse's structure, so it would be churlish to deny myself the pleasure of them because Green Lantern is inaccessible to new readers.

The set-up in this little farming village hooked me, too. It was smart of King to root the prologue in this farmer character Tian. He's not super-bright (though apparently he's Mensa material compared to the Calla's other residents, not even counting the "roont" ones), he's not super-nice; in fact, he comes across as a bit of a jerk. But that makes his rage against the raiders who loot his twin-heavy town of half their children every generation, then send them back as retarded giants, all the more convincing. If there was any way at all he could stand to take the easier way out of the situation, we know he'd do it. No such luck. He's as mad as hell and he's not going to take this anymore.

This leads to the most spaghetti-Western twist in the series so far: the townsfolk, led by Tian and Father Callahan, are going to hire Roland and his band of gunslingers to defend against the raiding Wolves. I for one would love to see the book serve up a straightforward, lead-slinging Western action-adventure, maybe with the occasional robot or vampire thrown in for good measure. I don't think that's what I'm going to get--the book's size, that dopey number 19, and the return of the central-casting mobsters from The Drawing of the Three during Jake, Eddie, and Oy's interdimensional sojourn back to New York indicate otherwise--but there will be water if God wills it.

AOL/Moviefone has finished up its countdown of the 31 Best Horror Movies of All Time (click the link for the whole shebang). Unlike that goofy Time/Richard Corliss list, this one's very, very solid. There are a lot fewer surprises (maybe some in where the selections are ranked, but not in the selections themselves)--and that's good! If you're honestly trying to come up with a list of the 31 greatest horror films of all time, rather than just run down your own favorites or impress people with your catholic tastes, the list should be full of the standards. Indeed, most of the selections here that did make me say "huh!" are ones that mainstream audiences still thrill to but we horror cognoscenti largely ignore (Scream, say, or The Sixth Sense), and most of the ranking decisions that took me aback were in the same vein (the high placement of the initial Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th installments, for example, the latter complete with an anachronistic hockey-mask-Jason photo, the lists's one big misstep). It was also satisfying, and comparatively bold when you look at Corliss' list, to see a film as recent as The Descent make the grade. Well done.

1. 28 Days Later

2. 28 Weeks Later

3. Aliens

4. Barton Fink

5. The Birds

6. The Blair Witch Project

7. Body Double

8. Dahmer

9. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

10. Dawn of the Dead (2004)

11. Deliverance

12. Della'morte Dell'amore (Cemetery Man)

13. The Descent

14. Eraserhead

15. The Exorcist

16. Eyes Wide Shut

17. Heavenly Creatures

18. Hellbound: Hellraiser II

19. Hellraiser

20. Hostel

21. Jeepers Creepers

22. Lost Highway

23. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

24. Nightbreed

25. Psycho (1960)

26. The Ring

27. Rosemary's Baby

28. The Shining (1980)

29. Shivers

30. The Silence of the Lambs

31. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

32. The Thing (1983)

33. The Village

34. War of the Worlds (2005)

35. The Wicker Man (1973)

Watch one tonight! Happy Halloween!

How's this for a treat--don't quote me on this, but I think my comments are working again!

(At least for new posts. It LOOKS like you can comment on old ones, but you can't. Still, good enough, right?)