Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture on this very blog since 2003, and also for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
* You heard it here last: Warner Bros. is revamping the whole way it does the superhero-movie business, both by nuking Bryan Singer's Superman Returns would-be franchise launch and starting the Man of Steel from scratch and by developing its multitude of characters with an eye toward bringing them together down the line in a Justice League movie rather than the other way around--in other words, doing it Marvel Studios/Avengers style. I think there are both good things and bad things about this news. "Good" includes the sense that they're going to try to make a good movie out of Justice League rather than doing it on a comparative shoestring with a bunch of pretty nobodies. "Good" also includes scrapping Singer's Superman Returns continuity, what with its bastard super-children and complete lack of punching. "Bad" is some dopey suit saying "We're going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it," thus ignoring the lessons the past 20-plus years of superhero comics have taught us about the wisdom of going dark with everyone and acting like the success of superhero movies begins and ends with The Dark Knight (and Watchmen, one supposes) while ignoring Spider-Man, Iron Man and so forth. "Bad" is also the taste left in my mouth anytime I read Hollywood executives talking about how best to make millions of dollars off the hard work and creativity of people who have died and will die in relative penury.
* Speaking of execs in need of defenestration: Clive Barker tears Lionsgate head Joe Drake a new one over his mishandling--deliberate, Barker once again alleges--of Midnight Meat Train, which Barker says was buried a long with several other films in order to keep the spotlight on the Drake-shepherded genre effort The Strangers. (Via Dread Central.)
* Quote of the day:
Vertigo's typically indifferent colors don't help, of course: strap in for the color brown, everybody! Do they get a discount on brown? Is that how they keep the costs down? Seriously, dead seriously: What is with these people, and the color brown? Does anyone even know? This is an open invitation to any Vertigo colorist willing to do an interview about the color brown. Please explain.
--Abhay Khosla, in a review of Air that's ever so slightly less unreadably schticky than normal. This has long been a point of bafflement with me, too.
* Joe McCulloch reviews the inaugural entry in Rick Geary's Treasury of XXth Century Murder, The Lindbergh Child. How kickass would a Treasury of Victorian Murder Omnibus be?
* I've had two dreams about the lost fourth season of Deadwood in the past week. They've been violent and awesome.
* I enjoy many current superhero comics by several different superhero comics creators, some of which are good, some of which are very good, some of which are even great, but it occurred to me the other day that really the only guy working at a level comparable to the best or even the very very good alternative comics creators right now is Grant Morrison, and when I read writing that fails to keep this sort of thing in perspective by treating random aspects of current superhero culture like it's the most important and innovative and forward-looking comics material on Earth, I get very irritated.
I've wondered about what became Vertigo ever since Sandman, when it was clear that wretched coloring was really messing up some great Sam Kieth artwork, and not much helping the cooler bits of lettering.
Over the last few years, Jonathan Rosenbaum has used his annual top ten movie list to attack other critics' lists for focusing on the official industry-sanctioned "best movies" (like No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood) and ignoring (or not even bothering to see) the actual best movies of the year, because those movies are experimental or foreign or were particularly hard to see (like Colossal Youth or Bamako).
Fred Camper, another Reader critic, has a standard (polemical) rant against using the term "film" to refer to movies with actors and scripts, as opposed to using it to include avant-garde films, industrial films, home movies, etc., etc. Camper's point is that fiction films with actors reciting dialogue are just one kind of film, so critics are wrong to make general, totalizing statements about "film" if what they are really doing is making general, totalizing statements about the "actors walking around and reciting dialogue-type film".
I'm sympathetic to these kinds of arguments. Whether we like it or not, the film critics at the New York Times can help to make or break a movie. So what they see or don't see, what they decide to champion in print, matters to me. If they're just acting as another arm of the industry marketing system, then, IMO, they're not only not doing their job, they're actively making things worse.
Rosenbaum and Camper are both arguing that the language used has bigger implications - i.e. a top ten list that presented itself as "top ten movies I happened to see and I didn't bother with all that avant-garde stuff" or a statement about film that specified that it was only pertinent to "Hollywood-style films" would pass their test, because this list and statement are honest about what they exclude and there's no attempt to pretend that they aren't limited.
So - would someone saying that what's going on in, say, Geoff Johns' Green Lantern was the most innovative Big Two super-hero comics material on Earth right now irritate you, too? That is, if the writer was up front in ignoring or just not being interested in anything but super-hero comics, would that make it less irritating? Or is it the ignoring/lack of interest itself that is irritating?
Some personal anecdotes:
Years ago, I got banned from Warren Ellis' forum because of my involement in a flame-exchange that started when I disparaged any list of great contempo super-hero comics that didn't include Love & Rockets. The folks on that forum - who were pretty smart and insightful and open minded about a lot of stuff - were pissed that I'd question the lack of any "non-mainstream" books in their canon.
On a NYC-based nerd-culture forum that I'm on (and from which I have yet to be banned), there's a weekly post listing the upcoming movie releases. The guy who posts goes by the IMDB, which tends to leave out some of the smaller movies that open here in NYC. I usually post a reply suggesting one of the omissions, but I definitely try not to be a dick about it (slowly learning how to play nice with others).
Anyway, the point of these stories is that, despite my sympathy for Rosenbaum/Camper's position, context is important. I'd hold professional film critics to a higher standard than I would a regular Joe movie enthusiast posting on an internet forum.
I think it's partly a matter of language, yeah. But I also think that if you're a smart person who supposedly cares about smart comics it behooves you to expose yourself to things other than comics in one genre published by two companies in one country--I mean, that's just common sense. If you don't, you should probably have a very specific reason for doing so. One writer I really respect tells me that for him personally, the negativity of many of the most popular/best alternative comics turns him off, whereas he's looking for that Grant Morrison/end-of-a-Geoff-Johns-arc positivity as an antidote to the current zeitgeist, and I can respect that.
I also ought to add that it may just be a personal defect in me, but in many cases I find attempts to gussy up superheroes with all sorts of lit-crit fancy-pants analysis to simply be the other side of the grim'n'gritty coin--an attempt by grown men to justify the love of the silly stuff they read as kids.
I say all this realizing that my taste in film and television and prose fiction is narrower than my taste in comics.
I'm coming around to the other side of the fancy lit-crit question, but, otherwise, that makes a lot of sense.
Personally, I think it is insane for fans of Kirby and Ditko to ignore the work of Gilbert Hernandez, their greatest heir. (Likewise, Eisner fans ignoring Ben Katchor).
Thanks, Sean! I'm really looking forward to the new gig! (I'm not looking forward so much to the whole "working in Times Square" thing, but I'll cope.)
I love Times Square! It may be my favorite place on Earth. If I were a superhero I'd have my secret headquarters behind one of the big LCD billboards (which would be a one-way window of course).
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Comments (6)
I've wondered about what became Vertigo ever since Sandman, when it was clear that wretched coloring was really messing up some great Sam Kieth artwork, and not much helping the cooler bits of lettering.
Posted by Bruce Baugh | August 26, 2008 2:04 AM
"...I get very irritated."
Is this a matter of language?
Over the last few years, Jonathan Rosenbaum has used his annual top ten movie list to attack other critics' lists for focusing on the official industry-sanctioned "best movies" (like No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood) and ignoring (or not even bothering to see) the actual best movies of the year, because those movies are experimental or foreign or were particularly hard to see (like Colossal Youth or Bamako).
Fred Camper, another Reader critic, has a standard (polemical) rant against using the term "film" to refer to movies with actors and scripts, as opposed to using it to include avant-garde films, industrial films, home movies, etc., etc. Camper's point is that fiction films with actors reciting dialogue are just one kind of film, so critics are wrong to make general, totalizing statements about "film" if what they are really doing is making general, totalizing statements about the "actors walking around and reciting dialogue-type film".
I'm sympathetic to these kinds of arguments. Whether we like it or not, the film critics at the New York Times can help to make or break a movie. So what they see or don't see, what they decide to champion in print, matters to me. If they're just acting as another arm of the industry marketing system, then, IMO, they're not only not doing their job, they're actively making things worse.
Rosenbaum and Camper are both arguing that the language used has bigger implications - i.e. a top ten list that presented itself as "top ten movies I happened to see and I didn't bother with all that avant-garde stuff" or a statement about film that specified that it was only pertinent to "Hollywood-style films" would pass their test, because this list and statement are honest about what they exclude and there's no attempt to pretend that they aren't limited.
So - would someone saying that what's going on in, say, Geoff Johns' Green Lantern was the most innovative Big Two super-hero comics material on Earth right now irritate you, too? That is, if the writer was up front in ignoring or just not being interested in anything but super-hero comics, would that make it less irritating? Or is it the ignoring/lack of interest itself that is irritating?
Some personal anecdotes:
Years ago, I got banned from Warren Ellis' forum because of my involement in a flame-exchange that started when I disparaged any list of great contempo super-hero comics that didn't include Love & Rockets. The folks on that forum - who were pretty smart and insightful and open minded about a lot of stuff - were pissed that I'd question the lack of any "non-mainstream" books in their canon.
On a NYC-based nerd-culture forum that I'm on (and from which I have yet to be banned), there's a weekly post listing the upcoming movie releases. The guy who posts goes by the IMDB, which tends to leave out some of the smaller movies that open here in NYC. I usually post a reply suggesting one of the omissions, but I definitely try not to be a dick about it (slowly learning how to play nice with others).
Anyway, the point of these stories is that, despite my sympathy for Rosenbaum/Camper's position, context is important. I'd hold professional film critics to a higher standard than I would a regular Joe movie enthusiast posting on an internet forum.
Posted by Jon Hastings | August 26, 2008 10:52 AM
I think it's partly a matter of language, yeah. But I also think that if you're a smart person who supposedly cares about smart comics it behooves you to expose yourself to things other than comics in one genre published by two companies in one country--I mean, that's just common sense. If you don't, you should probably have a very specific reason for doing so. One writer I really respect tells me that for him personally, the negativity of many of the most popular/best alternative comics turns him off, whereas he's looking for that Grant Morrison/end-of-a-Geoff-Johns-arc positivity as an antidote to the current zeitgeist, and I can respect that.
I also ought to add that it may just be a personal defect in me, but in many cases I find attempts to gussy up superheroes with all sorts of lit-crit fancy-pants analysis to simply be the other side of the grim'n'gritty coin--an attempt by grown men to justify the love of the silly stuff they read as kids.
I say all this realizing that my taste in film and television and prose fiction is narrower than my taste in comics.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | August 26, 2008 11:32 AM
I'm coming around to the other side of the fancy lit-crit question, but, otherwise, that makes a lot of sense.
Personally, I think it is insane for fans of Kirby and Ditko to ignore the work of Gilbert Hernandez, their greatest heir. (Likewise, Eisner fans ignoring Ben Katchor).
Posted by Jon Hastings | August 26, 2008 2:55 PM
Thanks, Sean! I'm really looking forward to the new gig! (I'm not looking forward so much to the whole "working in Times Square" thing, but I'll cope.)
Posted by Rick Marshall | August 26, 2008 5:36 PM
I love Times Square! It may be my favorite place on Earth. If I were a superhero I'd have my secret headquarters behind one of the big LCD billboards (which would be a one-way window of course).
Posted by Sean T. Collins | August 27, 2008 7:30 PM