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
* Tom Spurgeon keeps on posting terrific interviews with interesting comics figures. My favorite at the moment is with Kurt Busiek, in part because Tom used a question of mine about my favorite moment in one of my favorite Superman stories, Up, Up and Away!
* I found Tom's interview with PictureBox's Dan Nadel really informative in terms of how Nadel sees his company and his mission--not to mention the breaking news that PBI is closing its brick-and-mortar store.
* Tom got Eddie Campbell to talk a bit more about his belief that the big New York publishing houses will push comics/graphic novels (I'm not sure which, exactly--terminology means a lot more to Campbell than it does to me!) toward children's literature. I don't buy that anymore than I buy the notion that they'll push it all toward boring memoirs. I just don't think they have that kind of power or that level of investment.
* And if you've got two hours to kill, you're encouraged to dig in to Tom's astonishingly long interview with Tucker Stone about the year in mainstream comics. It's a treat to hear Stone's thoughts on the genre in snark-free mode. However, I do disagree with this assertion:
when you're working on the biggest super-hero character of the year, and your job is to do that characters big bestseller of the year, then that isn't the time for you to put out something that any Batman fan, even the dumbest one, calls "confusing."
I don't know what it is about superheroes that occasionally draws this sort of thing out of critics, but you rarely see people demand that the big summer movie or the big autumn hip-hop record be more simplistic lest some people get turned off. Keep in mind that even though Tucker's not a fan of Batman: R.I.P. on a qualitative basis, that's not what he's talking about--this criticism would hold even if it were a great comic, as long as it was still confusing to some readers. That seems proscriptive and self-defeating to me.
* The Spirit came out and tanked. Questions of its quality aside, I was always perplexed by the decision to make it a Christmas movie. For what it's worth, no one I know who's seen it hated it, but I know very few people who saw it, which is part of the problem. (I'm at the in-laws' and unlikely to see it till next week at the earliest.) Harry Knowles and Heidi MacDonald both point to problems with the editing as among the film's more insurmountable, which again is different from the fanboy buzz about the film, which seems more related to a desire to make Frank Miller suffer personally.
* French director Pascal Laugier talks to AICN about his film Martyrs--part of a trinity of well-regarded, hardcore French horror films of late, along with Inside and Frontier(s)--and his upcoming Hellraiser remake. It's interesting to hear him talk about how easygoing his working relationship with Bob Weinstein has been, that's for sure. I also was struck by this passage about "cynical," "self-referential" horror directors:
"I love the same films that you do, guys. We all know where it comes from, isn't it fun?" Some people find it fun, [but] I don't. I know it makes me sound like an asshole - very arrogant, very pretentious - but who cares? I don't. I pay... I go to see movies to be amazed. I go to see movies to believe in what I see. So that's why I love for example M. Night Shyamalan. He's brave enough to take some risks to make the audience believe something amazing. You know? Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he miss the points but I will always feel more respect for him than for A LOT of cynical directors.
* Jog takes the last vestiges of my post-"finding out the guy who wrote Benjamin Button also wrote Forrest Gump" interest in seeing the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett/David Fincher film out back and shoots them repeatedly at point-blank range. You've gotta love the American Beauty-style sexism about who's allowed to follow their bliss.
* Matthew Perpetua talks a bit about Beck's funk masterpiece, Midnite Vultures.
* The Vault of Horror's B-Sol reviews Let the Right One In, referring to the central human/vampire relationship as "a pure and beautiful friendship." I think we mistake codependence for pure and beautiful friendships at our own peril.
* Shaggy presents his favorite films of 2008, with an emphasis on "edge of your seat" filmmaking.
* Ben Morse reviews The Wrestler from the perspective of a life-long wrestling fan trying to sell the flick to non-fan audiences.
* Chris Ware is only 41 years old. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.
yeah! edge of your seat! i felt the same way last year with No Country For Old Men... i think i actually stopped breathing during that one and had to remind myself how to breathe.
and you don't consider Sarah's review of The Spirit ("BLEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH") as hated? i don't understand why they released it at Christmas, either. they should have tried earlier in the month when there was even worse blehhhhhh.
I think we just come at RIP from a different idea of what it is "supposed" to do--I do think that, in the case of the big summer action movie comparison, that part of the job of those films is to appeal to a large audience and not demand a whole lot of the audience. I think you would get criticism--and that said criticism would reflect in box office returns--if something like Iron Man had been written and directed by Andrew Dominik. Whether that's self-defeating or not, I'm not sure I agree--the goal of a film like Iron Man, or a Transformers, or an Eagle Eye--these aren't the goals of a film like Hunger or There Will Be Blood. That can get interpreted as snobbery, even though I don't mean it to be, but it's more an acknowledgment that the mass audience--the ones who want the big summer hip hop album, the ones who pay for tickets to Transformers--they don't show up when it's something that asks them to fill in blanks, to play active audience roles. Big crowd-pleasers can do more, sure, but I don't think that's their job. Your remark about those films--I don't really see it. Are their popcorn blockbusters that are insular films, taking the epic (the super-hero) and then telling off-putting stories that demand active audience members?
The thing is--and Tom and I didn't really go into this, and that's on me, not him--is that I do think it would benefit comics to have a bit more clear demarcation of where their Summer Crowd-Pleaser is going to be. With the super-hero stuff, a huge Batman epic event story--one that's going to get as much hype as DC is willing to give anything--that should be their tent-pole. Instead, it's an insular text that operated without connection to the books it's listed as being connected too, it appealed to the primarily Grant Morrison fan (instead of the primarily Batman fan) and I think that was a stupid call to make.
The other thing is, that if I had really liked Batman RIP, or even if i'd even liked it as much as I like Final Crisis (which I think shares some of the similar "johnny doesn't get it" problems), I'd still think that having the big Batman event in 2008 be something this far removed from what a huge amount of non-Batman readers liked and were willing to pay for was a pretty bad idea. I don't think that Batman comics should be Dark Knight part 2, the comic/Nolanverse, but I do think that it would've benefited Warner Brothers & DC to get on the same page, especially when Chris Nolan showed everybody how profitable Bruce Wayne could be. For me, that's just standard economics: Batman's popular, and he's profitable. The version that the comics offered this year wasn't. That version was insular and unwelcoming. I think that's a bad call.
Oh, and since I so rarely do link posts, I really liked your interview! Great stuff in there, I've already read it a few times. Nice to have some time off and still find intelligent shit to kill the day away with.
"part of the job of those films is to appeal to a large audience"
Sure.
"and not demand a whole lot of the audience."
That's where we disagree and I'm not sure there's much more to say about it than that, but like I said above I disagree with it because a) that's just giving up on making a great film right out of the gate, and b) I think it's demonstrably untrue when you look at things like The Dark Knight and The Lord of the Rings, some of the most financially successful films of all time--no one's going to be confusing them for Tarkovsky, but no one's going to be confusing them for Michael Bay, either, and c) I think you get into tricky territory as a critic when you start criticizing (or praising) material for how it does or doesn't function as commerce--to me that's an entirely separate issue. Maybe you're not actually blurring that distinction, but that's how I read it at least, and it usually makes me nervous. "Accessibility" is a valid topic to tackle in certain cases, but I feel like you're going beyond that?
I definitely view the commerce aspect all the time--that's as much a part of my life as the act of reading comics is, I just can't shut the two off. I don't disagree that it sort of ruins my ability to be a true objective patron, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, nor do I think it's that unique--the specifics of why I'm not an objective, art-only reader are distinct to me, but everybody has their personal crosses they're bringing to bare each time. Some critics struggle against that, but some don't. I'm reminded of my experience recently reading Lopate's collection of film criticism--there's all different kind of takes in there, and some of them clearly pay attention to the commerce/product ramifications. I don't see that as something that immediately draws them out as being less valid. It's not as pure--and that lack of purity does seem to reflect in the quality and it's relation to the art--but it's still valid.
On the Michael Bay thing--well, I just flat out disagree with you there. The reasons why a Michael Bay movie might (in my case, ARE) be better than Dark Knight aren't the sort of things that I think the fabled "mass audience" cares about. Action movies, big ones, when done well--loud, have explosions, beginning, middle, end, not 3 hours--that's a pretty simple recipe. You, me, other people who read Sight and Sound and watch Let The Right One In--sure, we can probably tell differences. But big movies, big summer movies--those ticket sales aren't coming from people who are "into" film.
Also--i'm just being nice when I say "doesn't demand too much". Another way to put it, and one that I think embraces your point about shooting yourself in the foot and saying "don't make a great film out of the gate", is to say "Doesn't think the mass audience is smart enough to get it." Michael Bay thinks people are dumb, and he wants to make money off dumb people, and that's why he makes the films he makes. And he gets proved right, time and again.
"Tom got Eddie Campbell to talk a bit more about his belief that the big New York publishing houses will push comics/graphic novels (I'm not sure which, exactly--terminology means a lot more to Campbell than it does to me!)..."
In your own interview you use a bewildering array of terms to distinguish the various idioms within the world of comics (alt-comix, non-comics, literary comics, webcomics, minicomics, funnybook format, OGN, comic strip, ) and the informed reader always knows what you mean. But in your glib reference to myself above, I haven't a clue what you mean.
"Tom got Eddie Campbell to talk a bit more about his belief that the big New York publishing houses will push comics/graphic novels (I'm not sure which, exactly--terminology means a lot more to Campbell than it does to me!)..."
In your own interview you use a bewildering array of terms to distinguish the various idioms within the world of comics (alt-comix, non-comics, literary comics, webcomics, minicomics, funnybook format, OGN, comic strip, ) and the informed reader always knows what you mean. But in your glib reference to myself above, I haven't a clue what you mean.
Eddie, I think "bewildering" is definitely the operative word when it comes to my own use of terminology, as you point out. I bounce around from word to word based more on the needs of the moment than on a coherent philosophy of how to properly employ them. I know semantics are a big part of your written work as a comics thinker, so that's what I meant. As for the specific bit you quoted regarding the effects of the NY book publishers, what I was getting at was that if I recall correctly, in your view, the term "graphic novel" refers to artistic intent rather than format, so I wasn't sure exactly how to characterize the effected area of the art form. But it was pretty glibly put, you're right, and I'm sorry. I also apologize if I'm grossly mischaracterizing your position on any of these issues, which is entirely possible given my admitted inability to cotton to some of this stuff.
re: the back-and-forth between you and Tucker here.
I like that tentpole super-hero comics are full of idiosyncracies and weirdness. If you take that stuff away then you get a comic book version of a summer super-hero movie and, honestly, I don't think that makes any sense at all - business or otherwise. But I really have absolutely no interest in whether or not a given comic book is a good business decision for DC or not. (I'd add that a lot of my favorite pop arts & culture stuff seems like it came out of very bad business decisions).
Tucker - I disagree with any kind of defense of Michael Bay along the lines of "at least he knows he's making dumb movies". There is a long tradition - in Hollywood, in Hong Kong, in India, in Japan - of filmmakers who try to reach a large popular audience and make a quality movie. Michael Bay makes movies that are enjoyable enough, I guess, but holding him up as an exemplar of a "purer" kind of action filmmaking is condescending reverse-snobbery. Another way to look at it is no matter how well Michael Bay's movies do when releaseed, I don't think he's made anything that has had (or will have) the long term appeal (popular and otherwise) of movies like Die Hard, T2, and The Matrix.
(Also - Michael Bay's movies are pretty long - Bad Boys II is well over two hours: just when you think it's done, they invade Cuba!)
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Comments (11)
yeah! edge of your seat! i felt the same way last year with No Country For Old Men... i think i actually stopped breathing during that one and had to remind myself how to breathe.
and you don't consider Sarah's review of The Spirit ("BLEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH") as hated? i don't understand why they released it at Christmas, either. they should have tried earlier in the month when there was even worse blehhhhhh.
Posted by shags | December 29, 2008 5:38 PM
I think we just come at RIP from a different idea of what it is "supposed" to do--I do think that, in the case of the big summer action movie comparison, that part of the job of those films is to appeal to a large audience and not demand a whole lot of the audience. I think you would get criticism--and that said criticism would reflect in box office returns--if something like Iron Man had been written and directed by Andrew Dominik. Whether that's self-defeating or not, I'm not sure I agree--the goal of a film like Iron Man, or a Transformers, or an Eagle Eye--these aren't the goals of a film like Hunger or There Will Be Blood. That can get interpreted as snobbery, even though I don't mean it to be, but it's more an acknowledgment that the mass audience--the ones who want the big summer hip hop album, the ones who pay for tickets to Transformers--they don't show up when it's something that asks them to fill in blanks, to play active audience roles. Big crowd-pleasers can do more, sure, but I don't think that's their job. Your remark about those films--I don't really see it. Are their popcorn blockbusters that are insular films, taking the epic (the super-hero) and then telling off-putting stories that demand active audience members?
The thing is--and Tom and I didn't really go into this, and that's on me, not him--is that I do think it would benefit comics to have a bit more clear demarcation of where their Summer Crowd-Pleaser is going to be. With the super-hero stuff, a huge Batman epic event story--one that's going to get as much hype as DC is willing to give anything--that should be their tent-pole. Instead, it's an insular text that operated without connection to the books it's listed as being connected too, it appealed to the primarily Grant Morrison fan (instead of the primarily Batman fan) and I think that was a stupid call to make.
The other thing is, that if I had really liked Batman RIP, or even if i'd even liked it as much as I like Final Crisis (which I think shares some of the similar "johnny doesn't get it" problems), I'd still think that having the big Batman event in 2008 be something this far removed from what a huge amount of non-Batman readers liked and were willing to pay for was a pretty bad idea. I don't think that Batman comics should be Dark Knight part 2, the comic/Nolanverse, but I do think that it would've benefited Warner Brothers & DC to get on the same page, especially when Chris Nolan showed everybody how profitable Bruce Wayne could be. For me, that's just standard economics: Batman's popular, and he's profitable. The version that the comics offered this year wasn't. That version was insular and unwelcoming. I think that's a bad call.
Oh, and since I so rarely do link posts, I really liked your interview! Great stuff in there, I've already read it a few times. Nice to have some time off and still find intelligent shit to kill the day away with.
Posted by Tucker Stone | December 29, 2008 11:33 PM
"part of the job of those films is to appeal to a large audience"
Sure.
"and not demand a whole lot of the audience."
That's where we disagree and I'm not sure there's much more to say about it than that, but like I said above I disagree with it because a) that's just giving up on making a great film right out of the gate, and b) I think it's demonstrably untrue when you look at things like The Dark Knight and The Lord of the Rings, some of the most financially successful films of all time--no one's going to be confusing them for Tarkovsky, but no one's going to be confusing them for Michael Bay, either, and c) I think you get into tricky territory as a critic when you start criticizing (or praising) material for how it does or doesn't function as commerce--to me that's an entirely separate issue. Maybe you're not actually blurring that distinction, but that's how I read it at least, and it usually makes me nervous. "Accessibility" is a valid topic to tackle in certain cases, but I feel like you're going beyond that?
Posted by Sean T. Collins | December 29, 2008 11:54 PM
Thanks for the kind words btw. Tom's interviews really are a Christmas miracle!
Posted by Sean T. Collins | December 29, 2008 11:58 PM
I definitely view the commerce aspect all the time--that's as much a part of my life as the act of reading comics is, I just can't shut the two off. I don't disagree that it sort of ruins my ability to be a true objective patron, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, nor do I think it's that unique--the specifics of why I'm not an objective, art-only reader are distinct to me, but everybody has their personal crosses they're bringing to bare each time. Some critics struggle against that, but some don't. I'm reminded of my experience recently reading Lopate's collection of film criticism--there's all different kind of takes in there, and some of them clearly pay attention to the commerce/product ramifications. I don't see that as something that immediately draws them out as being less valid. It's not as pure--and that lack of purity does seem to reflect in the quality and it's relation to the art--but it's still valid.
On the Michael Bay thing--well, I just flat out disagree with you there. The reasons why a Michael Bay movie might (in my case, ARE) be better than Dark Knight aren't the sort of things that I think the fabled "mass audience" cares about. Action movies, big ones, when done well--loud, have explosions, beginning, middle, end, not 3 hours--that's a pretty simple recipe. You, me, other people who read Sight and Sound and watch Let The Right One In--sure, we can probably tell differences. But big movies, big summer movies--those ticket sales aren't coming from people who are "into" film.
Also--i'm just being nice when I say "doesn't demand too much". Another way to put it, and one that I think embraces your point about shooting yourself in the foot and saying "don't make a great film out of the gate", is to say "Doesn't think the mass audience is smart enough to get it." Michael Bay thinks people are dumb, and he wants to make money off dumb people, and that's why he makes the films he makes. And he gets proved right, time and again.
Posted by Tucker Stone | December 30, 2008 12:29 AM
"Tom got Eddie Campbell to talk a bit more about his belief that the big New York publishing houses will push comics/graphic novels (I'm not sure which, exactly--terminology means a lot more to Campbell than it does to me!)..."
In your own interview you use a bewildering array of terms to distinguish the various idioms within the world of comics (alt-comix, non-comics, literary comics, webcomics, minicomics, funnybook format, OGN, comic strip, ) and the informed reader always knows what you mean. But in your glib reference to myself above, I haven't a clue what you mean.
Eddie Campbell
Posted by Anonymous | December 30, 2008 9:53 AM
"Tom got Eddie Campbell to talk a bit more about his belief that the big New York publishing houses will push comics/graphic novels (I'm not sure which, exactly--terminology means a lot more to Campbell than it does to me!)..."
In your own interview you use a bewildering array of terms to distinguish the various idioms within the world of comics (alt-comix, non-comics, literary comics, webcomics, minicomics, funnybook format, OGN, comic strip, ) and the informed reader always knows what you mean. But in your glib reference to myself above, I haven't a clue what you mean.
Eddie Campbell
Posted by Eddie Campbell | December 30, 2008 9:55 AM
"I think we mistake codependence for pure and beautiful friendships at our own peril."
Alas, my personal life in a nutshell.
Posted by B-Sol | December 30, 2008 10:19 AM
It also explains why I never get a return Christmas card from chocolate chip cookie dough.
Posted by Tom Spurgeon | December 30, 2008 10:54 AM
Eddie, I think "bewildering" is definitely the operative word when it comes to my own use of terminology, as you point out. I bounce around from word to word based more on the needs of the moment than on a coherent philosophy of how to properly employ them. I know semantics are a big part of your written work as a comics thinker, so that's what I meant. As for the specific bit you quoted regarding the effects of the NY book publishers, what I was getting at was that if I recall correctly, in your view, the term "graphic novel" refers to artistic intent rather than format, so I wasn't sure exactly how to characterize the effected area of the art form. But it was pretty glibly put, you're right, and I'm sorry. I also apologize if I'm grossly mischaracterizing your position on any of these issues, which is entirely possible given my admitted inability to cotton to some of this stuff.
Posted by Sean T. Collins | December 30, 2008 12:39 PM
re: the back-and-forth between you and Tucker here.
I like that tentpole super-hero comics are full of idiosyncracies and weirdness. If you take that stuff away then you get a comic book version of a summer super-hero movie and, honestly, I don't think that makes any sense at all - business or otherwise. But I really have absolutely no interest in whether or not a given comic book is a good business decision for DC or not. (I'd add that a lot of my favorite pop arts & culture stuff seems like it came out of very bad business decisions).
Tucker - I disagree with any kind of defense of Michael Bay along the lines of "at least he knows he's making dumb movies". There is a long tradition - in Hollywood, in Hong Kong, in India, in Japan - of filmmakers who try to reach a large popular audience and make a quality movie. Michael Bay makes movies that are enjoyable enough, I guess, but holding him up as an exemplar of a "purer" kind of action filmmaking is condescending reverse-snobbery. Another way to look at it is no matter how well Michael Bay's movies do when releaseed, I don't think he's made anything that has had (or will have) the long term appeal (popular and otherwise) of movies like Die Hard, T2, and The Matrix.
(Also - Michael Bay's movies are pretty long - Bad Boys II is well over two hours: just when you think it's done, they invade Cuba!)
Posted by Jon Hastings | December 30, 2008 1:06 PM