Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
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Below is a transcription of the panel I hosted on the new wave of alternative-genre comics, featuring Frank Santoro, Benjamin Marra, Kazimir Strzepek, and Shawn Cheng. You can listen along by downloading an mp3 recording of the panel here.
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Sean T. Collins: Well, welcome everybody. Thanks--I appreciate your patience for our late start here. My name is Sean T. Collins. I have a blog called Attentiondeficitly--bleh, even I can't pronounce it--Attentiondisorderly Too Flat at AllTooFlat.com. I also cover comics for Maxim and I've written for The Comics Journal, Wizard, The Comics Reporter, Robot 6, and The Savage Critic. This panel is about "The New Action," and this is our New Action Pack, as I've taken to calling them. [Laughter] Here on my left: Frank Santoro is the--
Frank Santoro: [begins clapping] They'll never know on the tape. [Laughter]
[audience applause]
Sean: He's the author of Storeyville, Chimera, and Incanto. In terms of the relevant comic here, he's the coauthor with Ben Jones of Cold Heat, and the coauthor with a murderer's row of talented young cartoonists of the Cold Heat Special series.
To his left is Benjamin Marra. [audience applause] Ben is the author of Night Business and Gangsta Rap Posse, which are all on sale for a whopping $5 total upstairs, so I definitely recommend that when this panel is over, you go to his table and purchase them.
Kaz, I'm not even gonna try with your last name...
Kazimir Strzepek: "Strepek." The "z" is silent.
Sean: Oh, that's easy! Oh wow, how about that! Kazimir Strzepek. [audience applause] He is the author of The Mourning Star, two volumes of which are currently available; also, his stories have appeared in various anthologies.
And to his left is Shawn Cheng. [audience applause] Shawn is one of the co-founders of the Partyka group of very talented minicomics creators. Kid Coyote & Whiskey Jack vs. the King of Stink--did I get that title right?
Shawn Cheng: Yes.
Sean: Wow! [It's actually Kid Coyote & Whiskey Jack Meet the King of Stink--STC]...and The Would-Be Bridegrooms are two of his more action-related comics. He is also one of the artists, along with Zak Smith and Nicholas DiGenova of the webcomic On the Road of Knives, which you can tell from the title is pretty exciting.
So this panel came together when Bill Kartalopolous saw that I had frequently listed some of the comics done by this group in various posts I've done online. It seems to be an informal school of comics that are based on action/adventure/fantasy genre elements but are also defiantly and definitively not a part of the mainstream action-adventure tradition that's dominated North American comics for decades now. One thing I'm curious about with all the panelists, particularly those of you who might have started out doing comics of a different direction: How did you come to start doing this type of material, versus non-genre fiction or nonfiction or autobio or things like that? The genesis of these particular works or just your interest in it in general...
Frank: Kaz? [Laughs] I know for me, I did a comic called Storeyville in the '90s. It was an attempt at--I had seen Chris Ware and this was my reaction to Chris Ware. It was really straightforward. I was trying not to do a genre thing. I did a story about a hobo in the Depression. So I was trying to get out of genre and try to do a short story, but the stuff I did for fun looked like Jack Kirby. The stuff that I did for fun, to draw to warm up for my book for drawing every day--my serious comic book, my serious novel short-story wannabe--I remember Chris having a big impact on me, but for fun I drew Kirby robots. They were just these Kirby characters, and they just fought each other in a Danger Room kind of setting. I never published them; they were just fun for me. The current project I'm working on now was the idea of my co-creator, my co-conspirator Ben Jones. We said "let's collaborate," and he said "I wanna do a story about a girl ninja." This was after the movie Kill Bill. It was a curveball to me, and I wasn't doing work like that, and for me it felt like a challenge: "Can I make a comic in this tradition? How would I do it? And it was promptly rejected by the biggest distributor who distributes comics. [laughter] I obviously didn't hit the mark according to what the mainstream desire for that kind of work is. But then it's been really fun for me. A project that was supposed to be a year long turned into four years, and now I'm still having fun working on this material because there's a lot of room to play with conventions in this material.
Benjamin Marra: I was living in Philly for four years, and I lived in a really terrible apartment for a long time. I'd come home from work--I was working at a newspaper--and I Netflixed like nobody's business. And I also had this really great--
Frank: What's Nobody's Business?
Ben: Netflix.
Frank: What IS Nobody's Business?
Ben: I don't--
Frank: Oh, you mean--I thought it was a movie! "I Netflixed Nobody's Business." I've never heard of that movie!
[Laughter]
Ben: No, I'm using Netflix as a verb. [Laughter] So I did a ton of Netflix, and I had this great video place in Philly that had this insane wall of Eurotrash. I rented a ton of Italian '70s thrillers called giallo. I rented so many of those things and watched them all. I was like, "I wanna make a comic that's like these movies." They're all sort of similar: It's always these hot chicks getting killed by some mysterious slasher. They're really sexy and they really have no story whatsoever. [Laughter] There's really gratuitous violence. I was like "Man, this is awesome."
But the other thing was it was also a reaction, I felt, to a lot of what was on my radar for indie comics--a lot of, like you mentioned, autobiographical stuff. I was like, "I don't really care." A lot of that stuff, formally, is really excellently crafted, but the subject matter--I just didn't care about some wimpster's life and how he couldn't get chicks. I just couldn't stand that. I wanted to make some action comics that were a little bit more, I don't know, visceral, and a little bit more base in what their ambitions were, which was just sex and violence and revenge and killing and stuff. [Laughter] And nudity. [Laughter]
Kaz: I started just drawing comics with some friends in my area. We did a comic called PM for "Project Masturbation." It was pretty much just us--kind of like an Eightball anthology for our local town. Just little weird things happening, little short stories, but no reoccurring characters or anything like that. I always felt like I was going to try to exercise and try different ways of expanding drawing comics for myself. After that I did a comic called Spaz, which was more Johnny Ryan influenced. It's mostly potty-humor one-gag strips, some recurring characters, kind of situational, based off of two neighbors and their cat. It's really embarrassing stuff. When people bring it up to me now, I don't like to look at it. But I thought, "Okay, I have these reoccurring characters and they're kind of generic and flat, but I want to exercise and expand some more." So I wanted to make a story that was a lengthy thing. I didn't really, back then, realize what I was getting into with The Mourning Star, which is kind of an epic. [Laughs] It's a really long comic, and I don't know if I've bitten off more than I can chew. It's kind of swordfighting creatures in this post-apocalyptic world. I really wanted to exercise and try more with character development and action and fun, and really incorporate the joy that I get from drawing. I really love drawing things exploding and people getting in fights and different dynamics. The attraction to comics, for me, is being able to render these different series of actions and movement. That's what really attracted me to doing The Mourning Star. So yeah, I've been drawing all the time. [Laughs] Or trying to. And drinking. [Laughter]
Shawn: For me, I kind of, like the rest of these guys, stumbled onto this genre, I guess. It wasn't really a conscious choice. I had been drawing a bunch of weird monster creatures and posting it on our website. One day, my friend Zak called me and said, "I notice you've been drawing a bunch of weird monster creatures. What's your plan with them? What are you gonna do with these guys?" "I don't know. I don't have a plan. I'm just drawing these guys for fun." He suggested, "Well how 'bout you draw a monster and then post it on some website, and then I'll draw another monster, and then you can draw the two monsters fighting each other. We can go from there." I said "Sure, why not?" Now we've been doing that for about two years. We have a bunch of stuff going on. There's some narrative in there, though you have to look at it pretty carefully sometimes to suss it out since it's more a narrative corpse-like exchange kind of thing. It's not a traditional action comic where there are choreographed scenes, because I don't know what's gonna happen next.
Frank: That's interesting.
Shawn: I can just do a set-up and see what happens when Zak gets the drawing. The best sequences so far are when we do rapid-fire exchanges. I'll do one and he'll do something almost right away. But a lot of the time, it's more results like I'll show two monsters jumping at each other, and then in the next panel one has already decapitated the other. [Laughter] And you have to fill in the blank. I don't think we're consciously defiant of any standard out there. It's just we're doing things that we like and that come naturally. It's a little bit adolescent, I guess.
Sean: Well, On the Road of Knives is literally a game in one way, and I've heard from all of you that it's about doing what's fun. Is it recapturing an element of the childhood joy you got from drawing, at all? That's something I've thought about recently, having read Brian Chippendale's Ninja, which I would say is a New Action comic if ever there was one--it literally takes the comics he did when he was 12 and builds, in the present, a narrative off of them. Is that something, in terms of bringing in video game influences or comic influences or movie influences that you liked when you were a kid, or just the act of drawing?
Kaz: Definitely, for me. I was really into Legos as a kid, and I used to build little mountainscapes and have my warriors get ambushed. There's kind of playing God, playing, making things happen, your own adventures in your mind--I stole that. That's how drawing comics is for me: I'm able to create these stories and meld different events to happen. It's a fun play for myself, and then I let people read it and hope people like it.
Ben: For me, I feel like the two comics I make are definitely speaking from a 13-year-old voice that is still inside me. Tone is a really important element in what I'm making, so I definitely wanna hit this chord where it's this idea of adulthood or idea of the city or urban landscape where it's from a kid's or an adolescent's understanding of that world that they don't really have a whole lot of contact with or understanding of outside the media they're bombarded with.
Frank: I just wanna talk about--I'm really resisting trying to talk about Hitchcock movies or Fritz Lang or genre movies or Westerns, stuff like this, but I want to speak to the conventions that are there within something like a romance comic or a Western or a sci-fi comic. There are these very specific, traditional structures that exist for comics. Somebody like Kirby, who invented the romance comic, more or less invented the superhero comic, had a big hand in the sci-fi comic, the Westerns, and everything--by the '70s, he was combining all this stuff. He's just telling "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl"--it's just like any traditional movie structure like that, like Hitchcock or Fritz Lang or something--but for me as a maker, there's a plug-in structure that I directly connect into. So I'm attempting to break down the way they're structured. Most comics are 24 pages, that was the way they were always made back then--not back then, but still to this day for the most part--so I try to have arcs that go up and down these 24 pages. But now people make 700-page graphic novels, and it's a very different way of presenting your work, it's a very different way of executing your work. So for me, I used to make, and still make, kind of Fellini-esque art-comic riffs, where I go on and on and on and on. I like to be indulgent in my drawing. But in 24 pages, to tell the story that I wanna tell, I can't be indulgent. I have to open the throttle. So I'm trying to plug into very specific narrative structures.
Ben: Just to add on to that--even a lot of mainstream comics, this whole decompression way of writing comics these days--I found that really really frustrating. I remember reading this issue of New Avengers by Bendis, and it was just a long monologue by Spider-Woman. I was like, "Twenty-four pages, I'm reading this one character, and hardly anything fucking happens? Man, this sucks! I can't get into any sort of story here." I don't know what they're writing for, but they're making these really long, epic, blown-out superhero stories, and it's really gotten away from those 24--
Frank: Yeah. It used to be you'd get a comic and it'd be contained. Even if it was a Fantastic Four comic, it was contained within that. Romance comics, Western comics, everything--whether it was four stories in 24 pages or one 24-page story, it's a different way of being in the narrative structure.
Sean: Does the fact that you are doing action enable you to do something visually that you wouldn't be able to get at without that sort of activity going on, in terms of character design or layout or just how you're conveying what's happening on the page?
Kaz: I would like to do a romance comic with my characters. That'd be kind of interesting, I think. They're warriors, but they're like "We fight, but we love, too!"
Frank: If anybody here hasn't read Jack Kirby's New Gods, that's what that is. It's a romance story in the guise of a really weird sci-fi epic. He invented romance comics, so thirty years later, instead of doing romance comics, he's doing this bizzarro science fiction story and it's just about the pathos of these characters. It's a remarkable achievement, but people just see it as, "I don't wanna read that--that's a superhero comic" or "I don't wanna read that--that's a sci-fi comic." He's playing with conventions, he's tricking you. It's just a boy meets girl story, and that's what interests me. But in terms of character design, I just want to...Everyone's familiar with David Mazzucchelli, right? David Mazzucchelli said he was going to school for traditional figure painting and drawing and he got a job at Marvel Comics because he was really good at drawing figures in space. He wanted to draw dynamic action, figures in space, so he draws Daredevil. But look at the evolution: He's now doing a completely different style of cartooning. He's gone the other way, whereas the alternative guys now want to go toward what David did. They wanna be this mainstream guy. I find that really interesting.
Sean: That's another thing I was gonna bring up: I think Jaime Hernandez was probably the last big alternative cartoonist who got away with unabashed enjoyment of genre comics. After that, you had story elements like the guy dressing up like Superman and killing himself in Acme Novelty Library, or Eightball #23--
Frank: You mean like an irony?
Sean: Sort of a critique of superheroes, mainly, but that kind of storytelling in particular. I don't really see that in any of you guys' work. Shawn, I barely see a reaction to that material of any kind at all in yours. Why do you think you guys don't feel that need to comment in a negative way like a Clowes or a Ware has done?
Shawn: For me, I don't feel that there's that tension between indie and mainstream comics, or that the superhero and action genre is a fringe thing. You have primetime TV shows about vampires and superheroes now. It's expanded to a certain degree so that you can be doing this kind of work without it automaticall being a critique.
Frank: Yeah. May I interject--I think that this generation, the younger generation, doesn't have the same sense of self-loathing that the Clowes generation had. My comic Cold Heat is a complete, sincere statement. There is no irony whatsoever in it. It's total fun. It's not an ironic take on these characters.
Ben: It's like a celebration of those points.
Kaz: And being able to do it on their own.
Frank: Yeah, but having fun with it. They, that whole generation, was trying to get away from that. I think at least my peer group, and younger, doesn't have the same kind of issues with that.
Ben: I think Chris Ware probably really loves superheroes in a lot of ways, that genre.
Frank: No. [Laughter]
Ben: I love superheroes, but--
Frank: But it alienates people! The more we talk about it. Like, the last panel [the Critics Roundtable]--I don't wanna hear critics like, "But then superhero comics! But then Acme!" It just alienates people. The new readership for comics don't wanna talk about superheroes! Especially girls. They don't wanna hear it! So the more we're like "But we love superhero comics"--the problem with that is that it just becomes this mantra, and the work suffers for it. I don't have a problem for it, you don't have a problem with it, but for the most part, there's still this desire to be engaged in the mainstream--
Ben: Well, I do have a problem with it, because I hate the way superhero comcis are written. The stories are all just this property management system.
Frank: It's the corporate work system.
Ben: They're not actually making any interesting stories at all that are engaging or compelling, they're just trying to manage this whole spectrum of intellectual properties in a certain way that they can. So when you read some of these superhero comics today, they're not the same as they once were. I mean, if I'm gonna read a superhero comic, I'm gonna go read a Curt Swan Superman--
Frank: Right right right, I know, but it's tough because the new readership doesn't get that. They go into Barnes & Noble and they see what there is and there's so much of this and so little of that. I mean, that's a whole different discussion, but I think that what we're trying to do--and I'm not trying to speak for everybody--this is just a new branch in this tree. This is what we're all trying to figure out. We're trying to go out on new ground, you know?
Sean: One thing I see that I think is going on in several different ways--perhaps in the publication of the Fletcher Hanks collections and even Supermen!, the old-school Golden Age superhero collection that Fantagraphics put out--some of what you guys are doing, and correct me if I'm wrong or if I'm overstating the case, is reclaiming action-adventure tropes away from that sort of [traditional] material and exploring other venues in which it's done, whether it's manga, action movies, video games in particular... I'm curious as to whether these are things you guys are thinking about when you're making your comics. Bringing in other ways of showing action.
Frank: I just wanna say I think that's a great point, because those two books are a big deal for the general public's understanding that there were weird comics, weird quote-unquote "outsider" comics, before the Silver Age Marvel stuff. You know what I'm saying?
Ben: Totally.
Frank: There's a reclamation of this older pulpy weirdness in comics that could be monster, could be sci-fi, could be Western, whatever, and weren't just costumed heroes.
Ben: Yeah. Those two books, the Fletcher Hanks books, were really influential on me as far as coming at comics from a naive way of working, a fundamental way of working. But to talk about action and other things I'm thinking about--I love a lot of action movies that were created in the '70s and '80s. Those are things I think about constantly. Especially Rambo: First Blood Part II. [Laughter] I love that.
Sean: I know what you mean! [Laughs]
Ben: You know what I mean? When the music starts and he shoots that guy on the waterfall with the bow and arrow and the guy explodes? [Laughter] It doesn't get any better, for me. That type of action? At the time, I think they were just like, "This is not ridiculous at all." But now, looking at it from the prism of time, it looks totally humorous. I like that. That's the type of action I'm--
Frank: But he's talking about video games like--
Ben:Grand Theft Auto?
Frank: Yeah.
Sean: Well, not even Grand Theft Auto. I was thinking...I remember when I first read Teratoid Heights by Mat Brinkman--just the way that the characters explore space, the sense that you're moving on to different levels. I think that Brian Ralph, who was supposed to be here but could not be here as I'm sure people have noticed, did a similar thing with Cave-In.
Frank: Oh, totally.
Sean: To the point nowadays where you have guys like Bryan Lee O'Malley who's doing an action-romance comic in Scott Pilgrim that's almost like video-game realism. In the middle of this twentysomething drama, a guy will fight a ninja and get a 1-Up and then move on and go to a bar someplace or play a show.
Frank: I agree with that, yeah, totally.
Sean: I see elements of that with some of your character designs, but also Kaz's characters moving around and exploring environments, and Shawn's comics which are, in a certain way, a game to play. Is that something you guys are conscious of, just as a part of your vocabulary?
Shawn: Yeah, definitely. My friends and I have just recently started playing Dungeons & Dragons, the old '70s version that's really complicated. We spend a lot of time doing math and looking things up.
Ben: You're talking about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. [Laughter]
Shawn: That's right, AD&D. [Laughter] I think it's definitely related to what you were talking about with video games. People are playing World of Warcraft and it's the same kind of thing, but it's become more formulaic, and what you're doing is pressing the attack button and walking around. Whereas I think there's a bit of a reclamation project in being able to say, "Well, instead of just charging at this monster and hitting the button, I'm gonna do something different, I'm gonna walk behind him and do this other thing too." It's taking that structure and that world and doing something that you would like to do with it, instead of what we're seeing on TV or on the movie screen, which always leaves me feeling like, "Wait, they took Transformers and that's what they did with it?" [Laughter]
Ben: Wait--I love Transformers 2!
Frank: But what about Kevin Huizenga's Fight or Run?
Kaz: Ah, I love that comic!
Frank: But it's like abstract shapes. You know that comic? It's one of Kevin Huizenga's more recent comics, and it's sort of a video game, but he breaks it down into almost modern-art shapes of things in space. It's interesting because he's breaking the actual cartooning language down and then he's using, again, a narrative structure of video games and plugging into that. But I wanted to talk about, or get you to talk about, Brian Chippendale and Brian Ralph again, because they come out of a similar school. If you guys are familiar with these comics, Ninja and Cave-In and Fireball and everything? With those guys, their drawings are just so pretty, but they just plug it into a really simple "follow the main character around this adventure land," and by doing that, they get to do a lot of interesting things formally.
Sean: Yeah. I remember the first time I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, I saw some 20-minute preview that the movie studio was doing for press. There was this shot when they're running down the big bridge underground: Legolas shoots an arrow, and the camera follows the arrow until it hits the orc, who then dies. When that happens, the angle switches, and you see that just by following the arrow, you've visually described this whole space and opened this whole vista up. I think that's one of the things that action can do really well, and is perhaps underappreciated when people focus on the genre aspect or the narrative aspect. It's a way to get you around the page that's different than more straightforward comics.
Frank: That's a great point.
Shawn: Yeah. I think there's definitely an aspect of world-building. Instead of just describing very procedurally, "This happens and then this happens, and as a result this is possible," I think what Zak and I have realized in doing our project is that it's actually much more interesting to describe the context that these characters are in, the grimy setting that they're walking around in. Where this monster's coming out of, or how he's revealed, is more interesting than the fracas that ensues a lot of the time.
Sean: Kaz, world-building strikes me as something that's probably hugely important to you.
Kaz: Yeah. I was hoping with the first Mourning Star...People say "Who's the main character? Who are we following? Who stands out?" I wanted the whole environment to be a character. You're learning about their world through them, and they're kind of like the body parts of this dimension or this place. You learn by reading the comic about the whole world. But they're not really that special, and I'm trying to express, in a way, that anybody can die. It's a ruthless survival world, and even if the guy's a main character, they can be entirely maimed. Just because they're somebody that's important in the story at that point--anybody can die for any kind of reason. I'm not trying to be a standard kind of story.
Sean: That's the perfect transition to what was going to be my last question before I can start opening it up to the audience, if you guys are up for that. I wanted to talk to you about violence. Violence is obviously a core component of an action comic. I'm curious as to whether you think violence--having characters fight, having characters hurt each other and kill each other--does that enable you to say something, and you can interpret that however you want, that you can't say with comics that don't have fighting and killing?
Frank [presses a button on his Mr. T talking keychain]: "Don't gimme no backtalk, sucka!"
[Laughter]
Frank: I don't know. That's weird. That's an interesting question. I know that in autobiographical comics, for example, whether it's romance or just life or whatever it is, it's just two people in a room talking. Dave Sim said, "How many car chases have you ever seen in your life? How many fistfights have you ever gotten into? So how do you tell that story from a personal perspective?" So more to your question, does violence...what do I think...My comic is a big Maguffin, though. It's a big joke. There's really no fighting in my comic, so much. It's all this eerie set-up and I'm trying to trick you that there's going to be some big lightsaber fight at some point, but there really never is.
Kaz: You're spoiling it, man! [Laughter]
Frank: Exactly! It happens, but I'm trying to trick you, that's what I'm saying. I'm using those genre conventions, and I'm saying the violence I'm going to depict is more almost psychological.
Kaz: That guy's guts came out, though.
Frank: Yeah, that's right. His head exploded. [Laughter]
Ben: For me, I think the reading experience I'm trying to get across is dependent a lot on the violence that occurs in the story. But I think the violence wouldn't carry the same weight if I didn't, like with Frank, if I didn't set it up in a certain way. I have to create a context for the violence to occur, so the soap opera that's happening--
Frank: Is way more fun.
Ben: Yeah, is actually a lot more fun to develop--the characters' interactions and their relationships and then the reason why the violence would occur.
Frank: We've gotta tell you guys, Ben has tearjerker operating-room scenes where people are dying...
Ben: Right, yeah, it's super over-dramatic, melodramatic. I don't know if it necessarily is, like, for other comics that don't have violence in them...I think the experience we're trying to create is different. I think we're probably commenting more on genre itself and less on real-life interpersonal experiences.
Shawn: For me, the violence is more of a stylized--they're more like tropes. It's not really--like, the way that Tarantino treated violence in Kill Bill. It's almost camp. I'm not reveling in the blood. That makes it more, what is it, horror, like Saw VI or whatever? For me, the violence is just a way to release the energy that I've hopefully been able to set up in the scene. It allows more for formal play, I guess. I think about it as choreographing the characters.
Sean: Right, it's more spectacle than some sort of commentary.
Shawn: Yeah.
Kaz: Yeah. For me, actually, I don't like too much violence--even though my comic has lots of decapitations. [Laughter]
Sean: It does have a lot of decapitations!
Kaz: I just think of different ways of people...when you're fighting, what if something hits your sword and your sword hits yourself in the head? I think it'd be kind of funny to draw, and so... [Laughter] But stuff like Saw or the Hostel movies that are out--I can't really watch those. I get really squeamish when somebody's guts are being poured out and they're like laughing in their face, like "I've got your innards!" "Noooooo!" [Laughter] It's like, "Oh my God, I can't! This is too...shock." I'm afraid, also, as a creator drawing comics, that people think I'm trying to be like "Ah, I'm gonna do a decapitation--it's in your face!"
Shawn: Body count.
Kaz: It's not really that. Personally, for me, my story is in a world where I'm just trying to depict survival and the fear of people in this world. Violence is happening, you have to survive, there's awful people. And also I get mad at work sometimes. I'm sitting in the office all day, and I just wanna draw somebody with a giant sword. I don't have a sword at home, so I can't just fling it at people and stuff. [Laughter]
Sean: Well, I'd be happy to take any questions from the audience if anybody has anything they'd like to ask. Yes sir?
Audience Member #1: I've got a question going back to what you were saying about video games and multiple levels and all that kind of stuff. Something I've been thinking about lately is open-endedness in comics, as opposed to what we've seen in quote-unquote graphic novels over the last 10 or 15 years, where you know you're getting into something that's like a movie or a novel with a beginning, middle, and end. That's not the same as what you're getting in, like, Chris Claremont/John Byrne X-Men where there's this whole universe to explore, and as a kid, the joy of it is being in there and knowing that anything can happen. There's a special magic about comics being one panel to the next; to me the best comics are ones where whatever happens in the next panel, you didn't expect it, and anything can happen. I'm wondering if that open-endedness is something you guys are trying to get back to--get back to that joy of comics you felt when you were a kid.
Frank: Just really quickly, I know that for me that's hard with Cold Heat, because there's such a desire to...Everyone's asking for the collection, but they don't buy the issues, and they didn't. I mean, whatever, I don't expect everybody to buy these issues, but I don't want it to end. I like putting a comic out twice a year. Forty-eight pages twice a year is pretty great. I want that to keep going, but everyone's just waiting for it to be collected. I could collect a story arc and put that out, but I want it to be a self-contained thing because that's what the culture is right now. I need it to be, maybe even financially. It's a really strange conundrum. [Laughter]
Ben: When you mentioned video games in your question, it made me think of Final Fantasy VII and the way it relates to comics. You're creating this world, like you're saying, and there's this sense of discovery you can have with this episodic story that occurs in this self-contained imaginary world. My friends and I used to sit around in college and watch my friend play Final Fantasy. [murmurs of assent] It would be super-entertaining because there'd be something around the next corner that was revelatory and great. That's one of the things about having a comic that's a periodical that's great--you know you can look forward to that next issue where you're gonna learn something new. You know it's not necessarily going to have an endpoint in sight. From a creative standpoint, it's really a lot of fun to not know. I know where certain things are gonna happen in my story, but I don't necessarily know how I'm gonna get there, so it's really fun to try and figure out how those pieces are gonna fall into place within those 24 pages of these serialized issues.
Sean: I just want to interject that in terms of comics that are spiritually akin to the ones we're discussing, Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit and C.F.'s Powr Mastrs--those are two books where I literally had no clue what the fuck was going to happen on the next page! [Laughter] And that's really exciting. Even though Powr Mastrs is serialized and eventually it will be collected, and I guess there'll be another episode--or volume--episode!--of Prison Pit eventually, that's the sense that I got. I have no idea where this is going, and that's exciting to me. Shawn, even you don't have any idea where On the Road of Knives is going most of the time.
Shawn: No. I thought it was just a year-long thing at first. So when the time came, I talked to Zak and said, "So, how should we start to think about wrapping this up? When does this end?" And his response was, "Well, when one of us dies!" [Laughter] Maybe then we'll just find someone else, but it'll just keep going. I think that is really liberating in a way. You don't have to hesitate to introduce random stuff.
Sean: Do you think--and I hate to monopolize again--but it seems to me that the economic and logistical pressures on you, since you and Zak and Nicholas do this on the web, are much much different than what Frank is dealing with publishing a pamphlet-format comic and trying to get it out there to an audience in this day and age, with Diamond--
Frank: [in a booming voice] It's over! Just forget it! If there's somebody out there who wants to do comics, just start doing your iPhone application! [Laughter] Just forget it, you know? I'm telling you, it's over! Take it from me, I've been doing it for 20 years: Just forget about it! [Laughter]
Ben: You might not be able to make a living doing it, but you can still do it.
Frank: Yeah, and you'll just wanna kill yourself. I like doing my blog because I can upload the drawing right after I do it, like, "Woo! Done! Okay!" Like, scan, done, everyone gets on the RSS feed: "Hey, I love that comic you put on your blog last night!" "Thanks!" "When's your Cold Heat coming out?" "Uhhh, I dunnoooo...." [Laughter] I'm just telling you--forget it.
Sean: Kaz--again, I'm sorry--but your format is different. It's not a pamphlet like Ben and Frank's, it's not on the web, it's perfect-bound. The dimensions are different from what you might expect from, like, a manga thing, but it's basically that size and that amount of content. Do you feel a different set of expectations than these guys do?
Kaz: It's really stressful, yeah, because I'll be contained in my room drawing for almost two years, and then it's sent, mailed out, and it's published, and I'm like, "Alright, you guys--is it cool? Is it alright?" [Laughter] "I spent two years on this!" Especially with an epic comic. I like these characters, I like the series and working on it, and there's this constant--I gotta send it out. I have friends who I bounce off ideas and show things to, but people will just move on if I fuck up, and then it's gonna be...who knows? [Laughter]
Sean: Anybody else?
Audience Member #2: You were kind of getting at this. I don't see you having as much of a problem with the web, but Frank, when you're dealing with pamphlets, you're going for an ideal market that's kind of--
Ben: Gone.
AM #2: Well, if it's not gone, part of this is that you guys are floating in between. It's why when you get a Cold Heat you know what it is and you buy it and you love it. IT's the action, it's fucking movement there, which has been gone from superhero comics forever, but at the same time you're floating somewhere between the indies, and the indies, there is still, as much as people will say they're tracking down Kirby or Steranko--
Frank: You're in between these two worlds, totally.
AM #2: Exactly. Do you find that you're losing your audience?
Frank: I'm trying to gain an audience! Honestly, as an "art-comic guy," quote-unquote, this was a conceit to all my friends who didn't like my bullshit arty comics. [Laughter] "Okay, watch this! I'll make a fun thing for you! Watch this!" It was kind of like a joke at first, and then it becomes real. But I think I have more of an audience now. Even though the alternative comics and SPX--that's a whole 'nother discussion, but we're not living off of this body of comics anymore. They've moved on and gone corporate and this is what's left of fandom. Really, this is fandom. Comics has split, so now we really are in a no man's land. So it's an interesting time, though. It's fun to chart out this territory without--like, the book publishers want 700-page graphic novels. That's the thing Kaz was speaking to: If you mess that up, and that one page, for whatever reason...The benefit of the pamphlets is you can put out 24 pages at a time, 48 pages at a time, and then collect it, edit in the meantime, see people's reaction, stuff like that. But when you put it out in one go, it totally changes the expectations of it and the way it works.
Kaz: That's why you should do minicomics. The first Mourning Star, I did self-publish the first two and sold them. I was able to actually edit it before it was published into a binding.
Sean: That's an aspect I've barely talked about with you, Shawn, but minicomics are obviously as important to you as the web stuff, it seems.
Shawn: Oh yeah. I think the web is a way for me to organize my thoughts before I put it into print form. We've discussed how to get Road of Knives into a print format. I think it probably requires some going back and doing some in-betweens, because right now we have, like, key frames of this large storyboard. But publishing on the web is a way for me to feel like I'm getting somewhere, like people are still seeing this and I'm not just off on my own with no feedback.
Audience Member #3: This is for Frank. Have you ever thought about trying to contact more mainstream talent to work with on a Cold Heat Special?
Frank: Oh yeah! I'm working with Jim Rugg. Anybody familiar with Jim Rugg's work? Jim Rugg's great. He lives in the same town that I live in. I literally approached Jim: "I'll pay you to draw Cold Heat." [Laughter] "I'll rewrite it for you and we'll pitch it to Image." And he's just like, "Okay, I will, but I'm really busy right now!" So I have, but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. I'm working with Jon Vermilyea, I'm working with people that have a broader appeal, and then [readers] sort of come back to the original series. I want Cold Heat to be like Batman, you know? I want Cold Heat: Black and White! [Laughter] I want all these different people to do their takes. So absolutely.
AM #3: Have you thought about more, maybe, classic mainstream artists? I know you're a big fan of Trevor Von Eeden...
Frank: Yeah, yeah, and Mike Kaluta, all those people. I would love to. That's the cool thing about comics, too--those people are around. It's just that I can't pay Mike Kaluta's page rate, and my publisher can't really either, or doesn't want to. That's another discussion, but yeah, sure. That used to be way more popular back in the day-- someone would do a Madman pin-up or something. That's possible. Absolutely.
Audience Member #4: How much do you feel confined by your format? Whether it's the big sprawling manga or the 24-page pamphlet or the webcomic, does that really change the kind of story you're trying to tell?
Frank: I think so, absolutely. I make everything I make specifically for the format. I'm doing an iPhone comic right now, and I've broken down all the dynamics of what that form is. I teach classes on this, Ben took one of my classes--everything is for the format. There's certain limitations per format but there's such a broad choice in comics that I don't feel limited by it.
Ben: For me...Frank is really into process and the way that all relates to the story. For me it's a lot less of a concern. But I do try and always end on a cliffhanger, so setting that up, I need to measure out how many pages I'm going to do. The way I work is I actually open up an email to myself and make numbers down the left side, 1-22, and then I write in less than two sentences what happens on each page. Then I just sort of formulate...well, I'll have to measure out, like, "Okay, I need three pages to get to this point, and I've got three pages that I need to fill here, so I'll extend this scene, and I'll back this scene up." That's the only constraint that I feel. As far as the overarching narrative that the story is taking, no, I don't feel confined. In fact, I really like having just 22 pages to operate within. I'm a really big fan of HBO TV shows, like The Wire and True Blood, and the way that those operate within a 40 minute, 42 minute time frame.
Frank: Ooh, and now the thing with iPhones: They're not talking about how many pages, they're saying, "It should be a five-minute to ten-minute reading experience." [Laughter]
Ben: Really? Wow.
Frank: No joke. That's what editors are coming back with. I was like, "Well, how many pages do you want it to be?" "Well, you wanna think about it in terms of you'd be sitting in a doctor's office and you would download an episode of your comic." [pause] "Okay--got it." [Laughter] That's the constraint, you know? Some people are gonna go through that like "click-click-click-click." Anybody looked at Bone on the iPhone? It actually looks pretty cool. I'm the biggest print guy in the world, but I'm just saying there's so many possibilities that I don't feel at all constrained by formats. It's fun to play with formats.
Kaz: Do these iPhone comics--do they pan and stuff?
Frank: There's all kinds of different things. You can--that's a whole 'nother discussion. [Laughter] It's actually pretty cool.
Ben: There's cool stuff happening with that.
Audience Member #5: You guys have been talking about superhero comics now and why you're doing what you're doing. I was wondering what you all thought about manga as a whole. In manga, there's romance, there's Western manga, there's cooking manga now--
Frank: Golfing.
AM #5: Yeah, there's golfing, baseball, everything. Where do you guys see that, especially the super-violent stuff, the Narutos, and the general manga scene?
Frank: Kaz? [Laughter]
Kaz: Uh, I don't know. I'm, just...I'm not really rich, and so I don't... [Laughter] I'm sorry, I'm not rich at all! But I can't afford, like, when I see a wall of manga, I'm just like, I don't know...
Frank: Okay, but what do you think about all the genres. The stuff you've read, what did you think?
Kaz: Oh yeah! It's exciting. It's really interesting that they can find stories to tell in different environments. Golf!
AM #5: But in terms of action comics, does that change the way you guys write action comics? Because that's "The New Action."
Frank: Oh, totally. There's a lot of stuff that's been available recently that was never available. You'd see it in bits and pieces, but...For me that's been kind of overwhelming at times, because I know this sounds really weird, but I liked absorbing Tezuka through something like Speed Racer more than I liked actually reading Tezuka. Does that make sense?
AM #5: You're getting the more honest sense of it.
Frank: I'd rather read the tenth generation of the original manga thing. There were all these weird American mangas in the '80s that were trying to do manga. You couldn't even get--when I was younger, the only manga I ever saw was Barefoot Gen, Akira had just come out, Maya the Psychic Girl, Aria 88. Now all this stuff from the '70s is getting published, like Tezuka and Drifting Classroom, and you realize--or I realize, I should say; I speak for myself--that American comics are so behind the curve in terms of what's possible narratively. Japanese comics and Asian comics in general just blow American comics out of the water visually. That's how I feel, and I just feel overwhelmed by that. I think something like Scott Pilgrim and a lot of Dash Shaw's work--they just absorbed that as youth, and it's a completely different take then where I'm coming from. I'm coming from John Buscema, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and Jack Kirby and Ben Katchor, a whole different thing. These kids are seeing stuff so differently--it's just incorporated right into it. There's no--
Ben: It's second nature.
Frank: Yeah. Framing styles...I don't know if you guys are familiar with Rick Mays, he used to do Kabuki and he did a comic called Nomad. We went to high school together. When he started working for Marvel and he had a manga-esque style and he'd leave a nose off a character, which is really common in manga, they'd take him to task. "You aren't allowed to do that stuff!" Then the tide turned. It's overwhelming how much material there is. It's beyond comprehension. And somebody like Yuichi Yokoyama, who does a comic called Travel, is like modern-art manga, and not ironic or anything.
Sean: It's pure action.
Frank: It's pure action, but it'll be like giant machines fighting each other, no people. He wants to tell comics from a bird's-eye point of view with no human emotion, practically, and they're just images. What's interesting about that is how that's different from emotional manga. There's just a lot of purity out there.
Lane Milburn [from audience]: It's interesting that when I read Slam Dunk, the action in that is so informed by fighting comics.
Frank: That's that basketball comic?
Lane: Yeah, basketball, but it reads exactly like a regular, genre, fighting manga or ninja comic. It shows you that they have no problem taking those storytelling strategies and applying them to a completely different situation, like sports or basketball.
Kaz: Is it really interchangeable, though? Is it like this basketball comic pretty much could be a golf comic if you just...
Frank: Yeah, because the ball's going through space superfast, like "whoooosh!" [Laughter]
Lane: Well, what you're saying is that people who want to do indie comics throw away everything from the past. Action storytelling, they think it's totally irrelevant to what they want to do, and so they can just linger on stuff. I think it's good [manga creators] use that quick fighting storytelling, because it shows you there's value there. It shows you how to make things happen.
Frank: Well, it's almost like melodrama. Like what Sean was talking about: You follow the arrow through space--it's like a melodramatic, subjective camera.
Sean: Shawn, I remember seeing some of your comics in our school paper when we were in college, and there was a much more direct manga influence if I remember correctly than I see now in your stuff.
Shawn: Yeah. I mean, I grew up with manga. I lived in Asia for part of my childhood. So to me there's no...Here, we talk about manga as a separate genre, but to me it's just comics that are from Japan. I think the fact that they have all these different subject matter speaks more to their audience and how mature and wide the audience is out there, that they can support cooking manga and basketball manga, rather than--there's no formal or structural difference to me. You might see more speedlines in a Japanese comic, but I don't think it's a completely separate genre. I think it's all fair game to me as a comics maker. I enjoy drawing the sweat beads flying off and things like that. [Laughs]
Sean: Well, we've reached the hour mark, so I wanna thank our panelists for taking the time to speak with us.
[audience applause]
Sean: All four of these gentlemen are upstairs hawking their wares, all of which I highly recommend if you are interested in a thrilling, visceral comics experience. You really cannot go wrong with these guys' stuff.
Frank [pressing a button on the Mr. T keychain]: "Quit your jibber-jabber!"
[Laughter]
Sean: Thank you Mr. T, and thank you everybody--you were a terrific audience. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
* My guest in the Strange Tales Spotlight today is Jim Rugg.
* For those of you keeping score at home, I think I'll be ponying up three more SPX posts: A Carnival of SPX link post (hurry the fuck up Jog, I'm on a deadline here), a "here's what I got" post (which, honestly, are the most important posts, because they're about comics!), and probably, because I'm a glutton for punishment, a transcription of the Critics' Roundtable panel.
* "Is this a musical table?": They can nominate him for all the Oscars in the world, but to me, Richard Jenkins will always be Agent Paul Harmon, Bureau of Tobacco, Tobacco, and Tobacco, from David O. Russell's Flirting with Disaster--one of my all-time favorite comedies, and one of my all-time favorite comedic performances. Lebowski-level shit, dude. Anyway he's going to be in Cloverfield director Matt Reeves's egregiously titled remake of Let the Right One In, Let Me In. So I'm interested.
* Do I ever just stop and say what an amazing, consistent blogger Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains is? Eye-popping images day after day after day. Today's gallery is the latest in a series of posts on monstrous video game art. God how I loved Karnov and Rygar! You really, really need to stick Monster Brains in your RSS reader.
At a place dominated by sad-ass comics about exes and your parents dying, it's shocking to see comics creators that want to have fun, hopefully "indie" will start to mean "independent" again and not simply "everything but super heroes".
But! The closest that panel came to an argument occurred when I asked the panel why they didn't feel the need to visibly react against the "mainstream," superhero-dominated action-adventure comic tradition, either in the negative way that the likes of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware did, or really even in any way at all. While Shawn Cheng argued that the omnipresence of nerd genres in today's culture obviated the need to comment on them for or against and Ben Marra stated that he loves superhero comics, albeit not contemporary ones, Frank Santoro literally pounded on the table while arguing that we shouldn't be discussing superhero comics at all--it's an instant turn-off to the new generation of comics readers, he said. So even if the sort of negativity directed toward superhero-style storytelling by the original altcomix generation is less prevalent than it once was, the newfound openness to superhero-style storytelling Sammy detects isn't universal--in Frank's case, at least, it's more a sense that that genre shouldn't be the lens through which we view what we're doing, good, bad, or indifferent. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)
* In terms of con reports, I enjoyed Chris Mautner's six observations, and Rob Clough's interesting take on the proceedings, which included musings on the way that webcomics, college comics education programs, and the fall of straightforward indie-genre comics coupled with the rise of the "New Action" variation of same have all gone into shaping the show.
* In Heidi's longer report, she (like Rob) summarizes several panels, as well as reflects on how the Team Comix generation of alternative comics creators has largely abandoned the show for New York City book deals and Act-I-Vate strips, leaving it in the hands of a different generation. But I would disagree with how she (and to an extent, Rob) characterizes that transition:
SPX (and MoCCA, but I haven't been to APE or TCAF so I can't say what the sitch is there) is now the province of the very young and aspirational, and their work is even more personal. As CCS, SVA, MCAD, SCAD, and other art schools turn out class after class of highly competent and well-informed art students, it's become a bit more of a pageant, in some ways. Young cartoonists get their Xeric, put out a perfect book, spend a season or two as the deb of the year and then...some will go on, some will just become memories in the shoe box.
On a basic level I don't get how they can be both more aspirational and more like pageant contestants ending up in the shoebox of history, but that's not the main thing. It seems silly to say I have a philosophical difference with Heidi over this, but that's the closest description I can come to regarding the primacy she frequently affords youth and ambition in terms of who and what matters in comics.
Here's the thing: The core table presences at SPX are still Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, and Drawn & Quarterly, the former two of which were staffed this year by Gary Groth & Kim Thompson and Chris Staros respectively--veterans, to say the least. Meanwhile, PictureBox, Buenaventura, Bodega, Sparkplug, and AdHouse may seem like the new wave, but guys like Dan Nadel, Frank Santoro, Alvin Buenaventura, Randy Chang, Dylan Williams, and Chris Pitzer have all been fighting the good fight in the alt- and artcomix trenches for a long time now. At the Ignatzes, the big award-winner was Jordan Crane, who made his bones when I was picking up cheerleaders and just keeps getting better. Since I started going to SPX again with the move to the new hotel, my big discovery was Geoff Grogan's Look Out!! Monsters--Geoff's a lot of things, but he'd be the first to tell you that a young turk isn't one of them. Frank Santoro and Dustin Harbin are in many ways two emblematic East Coast altcomix figures right now; neither of them is some fly-by-night college boy. And that's even before we get to the the fact that the guests of honor this year were Gahan Wilson, Carol Lay, and John Porcellino.
Of course the place is stacked to the rafters with kids makin' comics (many of whom are doing so online in a way that the old folks never dreamed of), and that youthful enthusiasm is part of the lifeblood of comics just like it is in any other art form. But I don't think it's necessary or desirable, or even accurate, to make a grand statement about how they've inherited the SPX earth, to contextualize things in terms of "Look out, us fogeys, the torch has been passed, the kids are coming up from behind." Characterizing things that way is bad for fogeys and kids alike. It leads to regrettable phenomena like successful, talented cartoonists spending valuable panel time discussing a freaking Hi & Lois comic. Who cares what the Hi & Lois guy thinks about your awesome, popular comics? Unless you're setting up a narrative of old guard versus new blood, what difference does it make? Do you, folks! It's not a contest, it's not a beat-the-clock situation, and where your work shows up or how old you were when you made it matters much, much, much, much, much less than whether or not it's good. This should be truer at a small-press expo than anyplace else.
But if you're talking about SPX primarily in terms of the social scene--who saw and was seen, who made the drive and who didn't, who has the best hotel-room parties, who went on the karaoke expedition, who closed out the bar, who went to the award show where they gave out beer bottles--then it stand to reason you're going to focus primarily on the youthful and strong-livered, rather than, oh I don't know, dudes like me who literally collapsed from exhaustion on his hotel bed at the stroke of midnight-thirty, or all the folks with young kids. But that's a distortion. Comics is an artform, not a hang.
This may even out some as the days pass, but I've read way more about the fact that the karaoke joint was closed than I have about what people thought about the books they got at the show, other than some perfunctory stabs at a "book of the show," which is as much about Heidi's "pageantry" concept as it is about art. I wish I saw more posts like Johanna's panel report, or Chris Mautner or Rickey Purdin's "here's what I bought" write-ups--both of which are sort of awe-inspiring in just how much compelling stuff there was to purchase and read at that show--than photo parades of folks holding beers. I think that focus offers a distorted view of what SPX is, what SPX means, and why SPX matters. SPX and altcomix in general may be full of the young, but it's not a young person's game.
Cold Heat Special #6
Chris Cornwell, writer/artist
PictureBox, September 2009
24 pages
I think it was $10 Buy it from Copacetic Comics
Chris Cornwell is the joker in the Cold Heat deck. The only Cold Heat Specialist who doesn't create his installments of the spinoff series in collaboration with Cold Heat-proper cocreator Frank Santoro, he's also the farthest afield from CH's usual tone of wistful, sensual menace and transcendence. His first CHS involved an assassin whose dayjob was rock stardom and the evil Senator Wastmor piloting a giant minotaur robot. Similarly, this issue is summed up by that gorgeous, iconic cover, featuring some kind of robed Satan worshipper rocking out; this leads into an opening sequence in which a band comprised of monsters "rehearses" by destroying their own equipment in a montage that reminds me of Yacht Rock's take on Van Halen in terms of sheer half-parody/half-salute comedic rockitude.
Indeed the whole comic feels a bit like a montage. There's that opening Monsters of Rock sequence' a credits-spread scene of a nude Senator Wastmor getting drunk and drowning in an ocean of his own puke' a "secret history of Cold Heat" story (really the core segment) about one of Wastmor's ancestors attempting to sacrifice a beautiful girl to his demonic masters in colonial days before being thwarted by alien protectors; a near-abstract spacetime-rupturing transition sequence linking that centuries-old adventure to the present-day viewing of a Chocolate Gun videocasette by other aliens; and a glimpse of how the aliens' power affects CG lead singer Joel Cannon juxtaposed with how Cannon's music effects Cold Heat heroine Castle. Got all that? It can be tough to follow, particularly toward the end of the book, but following it doesn't appear to me to be the point. It's more a case of latching on to isolated images and impressions, meaning that Cornwell in his goofy slapstick way is mimicking the more lyrical approach of Santoro and Ben Jones in Cold Heat itself. And he can do it, too--he's got the visual chops to bounce back and forth between slick cartooniness (the cover, Wastmor's bender), rough-edged Fort Thunder/Closed Caption Comics-style monstrousness (the band, the aliens), non-narrative visual-driven psychedelia (the transition sequence), and on the last two pages, a glimpse of Cold Heat's trademark music-as-emotional-salvation leitmotif. Plus the book is as lovely an object as the CHS series has seen so far, with that killer, please-make-it-a-poster cover and two gorgeous color pin-ups literally pasted to the inside covers. If only every comic-book franchise had this kind of quality control.
* If you read any SPX report this year, make it Jog's: Subtitled "Comics and Connecting Fabric"--in that order for a reason--it's mostly an excuse to review nearly everything he got at the show, including a bunch of Cold Heat comics, Driven by Lemons, Ganges #3, James McShane's Archaeology, that weird "fuck you Craig Thompson" minicomic, the Buenaventura three-for-all, Jonathan Chandler's 2BY2, and Marvel Fanfare #40 featuring holy shit David Mazzucchelli:
* Frank Santoro's brief report contains some gems too. For example, this was apparently the first time Frank met John Porcellino, but they've been corresponding for sixteen years! Also, there was a couple of the original "Gloriana" Supermonster issue by Kevin Huizenga for sale at the PictureBox table?!?!
* The Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? crew continues weighing in on SPX: Here's Sammy's second post, and here's site quasi-editor Brandon Soderberg commenting downblog. Both guys (Sammy a bit more stridently) decry what they perceive as an unthinkingly oppositional stance on the part of the independent comics community regarding "mainstream"/Big Two/superhero comics. Which I suppose is true for some people? Maybe? Gary Groth, for example, though I don't think anything Gary does is reflexive, except maybe arguing with Tom Spurgeon. Indeed, when Sammy slams Jeffrey Brown's loving Transformers parody Incredible Change Bots as poorly drawn and irony-filled and therefore acceptable to the indie-comics hoi polloi in a way that unnamed sci-fi comics pioneers aren't, or works in a sarcastic dig about how the only pamphlet-format comics that are cool to this crowd are published by Fantagraphics, I start to detect an oppositional militancy of a different kind. And one that's largely waging war against an army of strawmen to boot: Judging from the Critics Roundtable, for example, Gary and Rob Clough's "no superheroes please, we're critics" stance is a minority position, while the notion that indie people don't like pamphlets is belied by all the hoopla about the Buenaventura and Ignatz lines, Cold Heat, etc.. I totally agree that the new wave of altgenre comics is thrilling in part for how it doesn't take a purely oppositional stance, but the extent to which by virtue of their existence they're taking slaps at Clumsy or Blankets is by far the least interesting thing about them to me.
* I got my Uzi back, you dudes is wack, face it, The Horror Blog is back! And spending the month asking various horror luminaries to list their top ten horror films to boot.
* The astroturfed "word of mouth" release pattern for Paranormal Activity continues, with a bunch of added towns and a contest to add more. Whatever works, man, though particularly after reading Jason Adams's report on the bungled midnight sneak preview I almost went to, I'm a little sour on the way the studio's handling this, even though in principle I think any deviation from the standard "how it does on Friday night opening night basically determines its entire future" operating procedure ought to be applauded.
* Kevin Mutch and Andrei Molotiu debate the readability of abstract comics. Can they work as "stories," i.e. things you sit down and read by proceeding from beginning through middle to end, or are they best experienced as "ambient comics," i.e. by flitting in and out and back and forth through them at your leisure, accruing an understanding in dribs and drabs rather than in one discreet read-through? I think I'm on Team Andrei here--I have yet to dive into his Abstract Comics anthology, but in my experience (Hankiewicz, Nilsen, Cotter, Mattotti) abstract comics are not as attention-deficit-disorder-defying as Kevin makes them out to be.
* Part Charlie White, part David La Chappelle, part "when you see it, you'll shit bricks" internet meme, the horror photography of Joshua Hoffine stages scenes based around various familiar horror tropes, sometimes with a no-beating-around-the-bush tip of the hat to famous works, often with an admirable willingness to go there when it comes to linking horror to fairy tales' menacing of children. Here are a couple strong images:
From left to right, that is, I shit you not, Glenn Danzig, John Singleton, Beto Hernandez, and Nina Hartley. Other photos feature Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky, Russ Meyer, Hank Ketcham, Sergio Aragones, the Flight of the Conchords, Vampira, and Michelle Shocked. Jiminy Christmas, go become a Fan and browse the whole thing. (Via Mike Baehr.)
Carnival of souls: Special "I'm blogging at Robot 6 now so check that out too" edition
* Today I made my debut as a permanent member of the Robot 6 blog's roster. I kicked things off with an auspicious story: the 40th anniversary of Monty Python.
* Alan David Doane interviews two of the best/most important/my favoritest people in alternative comics, Tom Spurgeon and Eric Reynolds.
* Dash Shaw ponders the mainstream/alternative/genre/autobio/whatever divide which has been much discussed in these parts of late. I would say that a) I do indeed think genre work has more critical currency in alternative comics circles right now than it used to; b) there's a difference between "indie" and "alternative" which plays into what I'm saying in (a); c) I don't dig using altgenre/"new action" comics as a cudgel against autobiography or nongenre alternative comics any more than I enjoy using alternative or literary comics against genre or superheroes or whatever. If you must set up a conflict of that nature, use good comics against bad comics--there are plenty of both on every side of every divide.
Band logos are an interesting thing, and when they succeed at visually representing a band's musical and aesthetic project, a pretty awesome thing. Which makes a lot of old-school heavy metal logos a baffling thing--instead of offering a clear, brandable distillation of the band, they're often illegible to the point of incomprehensibility. (Spend some time on Obsidian Obelisk and you'll see what I mean.) I suppose this is a tip of the hat to the uncommercial, underground nature of much of that music--it's so not for you that the masses can't even make out the band name. ("Songs for the deaf--you can't even hear 'em!") My favorite recent example of this aesthetic cropping up in comics is Rinzen's title design for Paul Pope's Batman Year 100, which combines past stabs at shaping the word "BATMAN" into a logo with an unmistakable and acknowledged metal vibe.
Michael DeForge's Cold Heat Special combines this with a project that stretches the boundaries of "comics" in much the same way as Kevin Huizenga's minicomic Untitled. That book was little more than page after page of scribbled, rejected names for Huizenga's then-upcoming solo series Or Else. And though its contents were almost entirely text, it was at least as much intended to be viewed as read; like any comic, its contents accrued meaning through sequential juxtaposition, building into a memorable exploration of the creative process and the by-definition arbitrary nature of assigning signifiers to the signified.
DeForge's work here is different, to be sure. For starters, it's very, very metal: His eye-meltingly ornate band-logo versions of the names of various Cold Heat characters (including, of course, the pivotal noise band Chocolate Gun) frequently rely on motifs that evoke thorns, spikes, bodily fluid, scales, horns, lightning, fire, and in one memorable case a fist with the name spelled across the knuckles in spilt blood. It's a far cry from Huizenga's no-nonsense all-caps lettering. It's also a far cry, in a lot of ways, from the aesthetic I tend to associate Cold Heat with: the hazy sensuality of shoegaze. It's way more Cannibal Corpse than My Bloody Valentine. (There's also at least one explicit homage that I caught--the lettering for Black Sabbath's Masters of Reality, not to mention 1000 Homo DJs' Supernaut EP.) But what this explosive, offensive, savage designwork does get at is the importance of POWER to the Cold Heat project: The violent power wielded by the sinister Senator Wastmor, the emotionally liberating power of Joel Cannon's music, the self-discovery of internal power by our heroine Castle, and so on. It also reinforces Cold Heat as a sort of samizdata, an attempt to recreate the magic of the "lifeline music" that got us through our teenage years and the handmade, ramshackle media, from zines to mixtapes, that chronicled that community. Logos like these are meant to communicate just how important and immediate and irrepressible the art they're a stand-in for is to its makers and consumers. In the context of Cold Heat, they make more sense than you'd think.
* Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy's Joe the Barbarian has been expanded to eight issues. This looks to be very, very pretty, and given Morrison's heretofore unabashed embrace of heroic fantasy as a means of uplift, its "tween's toys come to life in a fantasy world" plot could get interesting, presuming Morrison's approach goes beyond "hey, that's awesome!"
* Real-Life Horror: The government appears to have neglected to destroy tapes of the interrogation of detainee Mohammed al Qahtani. Of course, the only things more depressing than the videotaped spectacle of a man being tortured at the hands of American agents will be the Obama Administration's Bush-like attempts to suppress its release, and the full-throated endorsement of the videotaped behavior by conservatives should those attempts fail.
* The Masters of the Universe Society? Oh, indeed. I don't even care that it's kind of a cheap shot at nerds, or that He-Man's a reference that people in the Gossip Girl writers' age group are a lot more likely to make than people in the Gossip Girl characters' age group. "The madness and genius of Skeletor. That is correct--I said genius." Indeed. Indeed.
* Just how many cast members did Hilary Duff coincidentally bump into during the course of this episode, anyway? Small island!
* Wow, they've gone to the "character with a secret identity" well twice so far this season. And they've done it before with the British aristocrat last season, and Georgina, and that dude who grifted with Poppy. I'm starting to wonder if aliases really are this common among the upper crust.
* Still, I'm appreciating how much better they're doing at introducing new semi-permanent cast members into the mix. Haha, remember that artist last season? Carter, Georgina, Nate's girlfriend, the Duffster, and even Brother Scott all put that clown to shame. I feel like you could go interesting places with any of them. I still don't understand why they haven't made Serena's brother into a main-main character by now, though.
* Did anyone catch what motivated Jenny to start exercising her divine right of queens at the end? Was it just because she was pissed at Blair for stepping in? At any rate it seemed pretty obvious, as it should have been to Jenny, that publicly abdicating the throne would lead to a power vacuum someone would rush to fill. She should have set herself up as a benevolent dictator all along.
* I really enjoyed watching Nate trick Dan by encouraging him to ask Duff out, then laughing about it under his breath, simply because it was new. When was the last time Nate got to do something that wasn't an on-again off-again romance or rebelling against his family? It was just a pleasure to get to see him do something different. Chase Crawford gets the short end of the stick because Nate is pretty much just the "Not Chuck or Dan" character. I'd love to see him fleshed out some more.
* Tyra Banks? As a character? ThaFUCK? Just when I had successfully weaned myself off of America's Next Top Model! Okay, maybe I'm just a little upset at the dropped ball that was showing her and Serena after a sleepover night and not having them wake up in bed together. Okay, maybe a lot upset.
* "So, Jenny, we're cool with the whole sexual-assault thing now?" "Totally, Chuck. These things happen!" Part of me is still pulling for a Comedian/Silk Spectre I-style post-sexcrime romance.
* As the Missus put it: "Jesus, Serena, why even bother wearing a skirt?" Seconded!
* Chuck, and Ed Westwick, just gets more and more magnificent with each passing episode. Chuck Bass is the Sol Tigh, the Omar Little, the Al Swearengen of Gossip Girl. Amy and I will hit the little rewind button on the TiVo remote and simply rewatch him turn his head or arch his eyebrow and just laugh and laugh with delight. And holy shit, Chuck's speech to Blair at the end was amaaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaazing. What a fucking stroke of genius for Chuck, like God, to take Blair's despair as a sin against him! Dammit, Blair Waldorf--if you can make it with Chuck Bass, you can make it anywhere!
* Due to freelance-related stuff that would taint me even worse than my usual conflict-of-interest calvacade, I won't be reviewing Daredevil #501, the official start of Andy Diggle and Roberto de la Torre's run on the title. Leave us say, however, that fans of the Bendis/Maleev and Brubaker/Lark runs should at the very least give the new team until the end of this particular issue to win them over. My goodness! Greg McElhatton agrees.
* I am 100% behind Adrien Brody starring in Predators. That makes me feel like it might be a real movie instead of just some stupid studio sequel bullshit. Then again, Christian Bale was in Terminator Salvation. (Via AICN.)
* The Missus's sojourn amongst the Internet's female-fandom contingent has revealed to me that Eli "The Bear Jew" Roth has set off a firestorm of fapping for ladies nationwide, which is totally awesome. Only slightly less entertaining is the fact that Roth is cowriting a kung fu movie with the RZA that the Wu-Tang mastermind is slated to direct. It's called The Man with the Iron Fist (at least until Disney-Marvel's lawyers get involved) and it joins Roth's full slate of "who knows if they'll ever get made" movies, along with the Grindhouse spinoff Thanksgiving and the giant-monster movie Endangered Species and the Stephen King adaptation Cell (which I think is officially off the table at this point). All I know is that as long as he keeps wearing wifebeaters in his on-screen appearances there won't be a dry seat in the house. (Via Jason Adams, whose Rothlust puts that of The Missus's Twilight-fan cronies to shame.)
* Jeet Heer presents a nice concise summary of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy strip and its impact on comics. It's really a public service. For comics readers like me for whom classic strips played hardly any role in our evolution as fans of the medium, the appeal and import of Nancy is the kind of thing that needs some explanation. Most of the strip's devotees talk about it in ways that take a preexisting knowledge and appreciation of it for granted, something you don't really see in similar cases like Krazy Kat or Peanuts.
Of all the alternative action-adventure comics I've been lumping together in discussions for the past couple years, Kaz Strzepek's The Mourning Star is the ripest candidate for crossover success. His cartooning is clear and appealing, with endearing, often adorable character designs and well-choreographed action sequences, reminiscent of the work of Brian Ralph without Ralph's ars gratia artis, printmaking-derived design sense. Strzepek's world-building--in the sense of both "backstory" and "readily understandable physical environment"--is top drawer, recalling everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Tolkien to The Road Warrior to The Dark Tower without coming across like a rehash of any of them. While its blend of an obviously personal vision with universally accessible ideas and visuals puts it more in line with Scott Pilgrim than Powr Mastrs, the involvement of Highwater vets Randy Chang and Jordan Crane in its production leaves little doubt as to its altcomix cred. It's like a post-Fort Thunder Bone.
In reading The Mourning Star's first two volumes back-to-back recently, what struck me hardest wasn't the admittedly rock-solid introduction to the characters and world provided by book #1, but the time we spend with its villains in book #2. It's very easy and tempting for one's grown-up, self-aware genre art to willfully return to a black-and-white conception of protagonist and antagonist. And I don't blame anyone for doing it! The point of escapism is to escape, and giving your villains big black hats is a welcome relief from the shades-of-gray nightmare we live in day to day. But taking the time to depict villainy as the result of relatable choices is rewarding in its own way. In Volume 2, we discover through Strzepek's seamlessly natural dialogue that the Rule aren't just sinister, unfeeling killers--although they're that, too. They're people who banded together in The Mourning Star's postapocalyptic world for security and safety and who believe their brutality is what can continue to ensure this. They have leaders whose approval they sometimes crave and whose orders they sometimes resent. They have medics to heal them when they get hurt, and equipment that breaks down. They've got seasoned veterans and wet-behind-the-ears rookies. They tell each other urban myths. They jockey for position and remember their lives before they became the barbaric rulers of the cities and wastelands. In short they're just like anyone who's ever shored up an evil regime--potentially normal guys and girls who at some point lost or deactivated their ability to empathize, who don't mind ordering or supporting the murder of people they don't know. Maybe that's why I'm rooting even harder than ever for the good guys to beat them in the end.
* In this Robot 6 post I pointed to some recent statements by Marvel's Joe Quesada and Tom Brevoort on how they determine what can and cannot be done with characters by writers and editors outside their core series.
* And in this post I linked to Joe the Barbarian artist Sean Murphy's bitchin' deviantart gallery.
* Meanwhile, over at Marvel.com, I've got Strange Tales Spotlight interviews up with Tony Millionaire and Max Cannon. Catch me after hours at a con someday and I'll tell you about the parts of Tony M.'s interview that ended up on the cutting room floor.
* In the course of reviewing the book and the movie of The Surrogates, Joe McCulloch ponders "The New Action" vs. "The New Mainstream." I think there are many clear points of distinction, but the largest is that "New Mainstream" books seem to me to have been created with the express goal of reaching a particular, and theoretically large, audience. The "new action" comics? I doubt it.
* Real-World Horror #3: How do I know that the Zazi terror plot has authorities in New York genuinely frightened? The security level in Penn Station is as high as I've seen it since 2003. Packs of police in full armor stand around holding machine guns, armed NYPD officers patrol Long Island Rail Road trains all the way out into Suffolk County, and military K-9 units sweep through the lobby of my office building on top of the station. Well, at least I get to see some cute doggies.
* God bless my friend Jesse Thompson for helping to put together this montage of great movie laughing scenes. That bit from The Money Pit where Tom Hanks reacts to the bathtub falling through the floor is my single favorite scene in any comedy ever.
You wanna talk about a gateway comic? How 'bout handing this sucker to anyone who's ever had trouble falling asleep? The whole thing is dedicated to nothing more or less than reproducing the mental and physical sensations of insomnia. Ironically it's Huizenga's most action-driven comic this side of Fight or Run or the video-game bits in Ganges #2. In order to evoke the insomniac mind's uncontrollable wanderings, Huizenga takes Glenn Ganges's mental avatar and sends him on a series of Cave-In-like explorations--dipping him into water, sucking him down the drain, walking him up a tree, bouncing him off thought balloons, floating him along on sleep bubbles. At one point he mentally fends off invisible burglars; at another he's armed with a bow and arrow, or a machine gun, taking aim at his own wiredness. Combine it with one of the most effective uses yet of the Ignatz series' two-tone color palette--here a cool small-hours blue--and the experience is almost tactile, as though you're physically tunneling through the mysteries of your own mind. It's only when Glenn finally gives up and gets out of bed that the gutters switch from black to white and everything instantly feels less dense, less close; naturally, removed from the million-miles-a-second flow of his Glenn's thoughts and reset in the real world, the action switches from complex reverie to straightforward cutesy business involving playing music late at night and freaking out when the cops show up about the noise. The mastery of tone is deeply impressive.
Look, I'm always gonna be up front about how I think the "Gloriana" issue of Or Else, #2, is the best thing Huizenga's ever done. That thing hit me with the force of a revelation, and so I tend to be deaf to the claim that he keeps getting better and better. (Particularly regarding Ganges #1 and its disastrously wrong take on the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home"!!!!!!1!!111!) That's as good as he's gotten. But it's obviously true that each new release proves just how much he's mastered the stuff of comics, and how thoroughly he's staked his claim on chronicling areas of contemporary American human experience few if any other cartoonists are going anywhere near. It's pretty darned exciting.
* Well this is interesting, to me at least: CBR interviews Jim Rugg and C. Allbritton Taylor on their upcoming post-punk action period piece One Model Nation without any mention of the fact that C. Allbritton Taylor is Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols. A little different from how Tyrese Gibson or Gene Simmons's kid are playing it. (Jim, if you're reading this, it's my fault you were misattributed as both writer and artist for this book in the little bio at the back of Strange Tales #2. I'm sorry to you both!) Via Jim Rugg's blog, whose banner image is this awesome fucking thing:
Radiohead threw me not when they made their shift into electronic music with Kid A--I'd been listening to Aphex Twin since I was a sophomore in high school, yeah that's right, I'm an IDM OG, or at least as close as we got to one on L.I.--but with the two albums after that, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief. I now listen the heck out of those records (okay, more Hail than Amnesiac), but the band's sudden lack of interest in providing the big, sweeping, soaring moments of catharsis they were still doing as late as "How to Disappear Completely" and "Morning Bell" struck me then and now as a willful avoidance of their own strengths. Now they're doing that sort of stuff again on In Rainbows and all is well with the world, but I do wish that more people would acknowledge that guitar rock or no guitar rock, that was the big, not-entirely-successful risk they took this decade.
Something similar is going on in Cold Heat #7/8. For about 4/5ths of this limited-edition double-issue installment of Santoro & Jones's punk-rock sci-fi saga, the psychedelic vistas and geometric reveries that were the series' aesthetic calling card are largely abandoned. In their place is a comparatively straightforward, albeit tongue-in-cheek, international espionage quasi-parody involving cynical jetsetting journalists, deadpan quip-dropping CIA agents, sinister pharmaceutical conglomerates, crooked conspiring politicians, and Castle, the small-town American fuck-up who's unwittingly unravelling the plot. Silence is rare, with more voluminous dialogue and lots of those little labels Santoro likes to drop in. It's the sort of thing some combination of Stephen Soderbergh, George Clooney, and Matt Damon might release in a limited September theatrical run, or what you might see in one of the Coen Brothers' seriocomic conspiracy-caper flicks if they were given an effects budget and asked to throw something spacey in there now and then. There's even some broad comedy about the U.K. rock press and a celestial poker game involving not-exactly-dead rock star Joel Cannon being invited to play a hand with Jimi, Janis, Jim, and John. (Jerry opted to kick it in the hot tub.)
This ain't your father's Cold Heat, long story short. Honestly it's so different in tone it feels more like a particularly off-model Cold Heat Special than a Cold Heat proper. And it may not be the droids you're looking for--at least until the very end, where Castle searches for her kidnapped journalist lover, running through the streets of Rio in a wet bathing suit, fleeing the psychic and physical attacks of the evil Senator Wastmor's puppetmasters. That's the sort of dreamlike/nightmarish imagery you've come to expect from Cold Heat, and it'll be interesting to see if there's more of that in the offing, perhaps wedded to the new potboiler-parody structure we're seeing here. Here's hopin'.
* The Let the Right One In remake Let Me In is being produced by the revivified Hammer Studios. Jason noted this because this PR seems to indicate the movie's being filmed on a soundstage, but I just assume it means parts of the movie are being filmed there, not all of it.
* Speaking of Zombieland, this pretty awesome post by CRwM at And Now the Screaming Starts calls the movie a feature-length version of the "Merry Looter" scenes from flicks like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, which is a wonderful term to add to the lexicon; it then goes on to compare Zombieland's eschatology with Thundarr the Barbarian and Adam Rapp & George O'Connor's First Second graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer. Lateral thinking at its finest!
* And speaking of Paranormal Activity, the triumphalist tone of this Bloody Disgusting article on the flick's $7 million limited-release haul this past weekend really has me scratching my head. Mr. Disgusting's argument is that We the Horror Hardcore are the people who made this possible. But isn't it abundantly clear at this point that the film's ever-widening release and ever-mounting receipts have nothing to do with the horror grassroots (beyond, of course, the benefit any movie can derive from rave reviews online) and everything to do with an extremely well-planned and well-executed release plan by the studio? If you honestly think that Paramount fully intended to bury this movie until the demands of rabid Bloody Disgusting readers "forced" them to make it their big Halloween horror movie of the year, I've got a bridge to sell you.
* Blair is childish! I don't know why I didn't see it before her bad behavior around Bree. I'd been looking at her attempts to recreate her high-school dominance just in terms of fear of failure in a new environment, but (provided the writers connect the dots) what's playing into it at least as much is that she's just not a grown-up.
* Crazy pathetic cartoonish Georgina is a let-down. Plus, I wanted Georgina and Vanessa to solve their impasse the only way they know how: with lovemaking.
* Holy shit, Chuck giving Blair a massage in black silk pajamas. Me and Charlie, eyeball to eyeball. The man in the black pajamas. Worthy fuckin' adversary, dude. Worthy fuckin' adversary.
* Vanessa dropped the Scott bomb on Dan pretty unceremoniously. It was done as part of a funny mix-up scene rather than built up to as a life-changing detonation. Interesting choice.
* I loved Serena's post-Carter revelation, post-Brooklyn Botanic Garden wedding-failure moping. The Thinker with cleavage.
* The Human Turtleneck stood up for himself pretty nice there as he was hunting for Scott with Lily, I thought.
* "By the power vested in me by having recorded Daydream Nation..."
* MOST of the cast is now officially related. Rufus, Lily, Dan, Jenny, Serena, Eric, Scott, and Chuck. It's like the Brady Bunch!
* Anyone else catch Carter's Long Good Friday impression there at the end?
* Shuffling Scott, Carter, Bree, and Georgina offstage in one fell episode. Wow. As my friend Ben Morse put it, every fourth episode of this show is like a season finale. Will they rotate new cast members back in?
* Chuck kissing a dude in the next-week teaser!!!!!!!!!
* Kevin Melrose notes that Alaskan legislators are making moves in the direction of labeling cartoons and computer-generated images that depict minors in sexual situations as child pornography. Gross, loathsome art is still just art, not a criminal act.
* Lots of news-of-note for superhero comics fans came out during last night's Diamond Retailer Summit--Kiel Phegley has a full report. The Invincible developments sound particularly intriguing, and I'm as curious as anyone to see how Marvel wraps up its years-long meta-plot with their upcoming Siege miniseries.
* Here's a loooooong interview with Mike Mignola about the state of the Hellboy and B.P.R.D. universe. You don't often see Mignola sounding off about his franchise the way, say, Brian Bendis gets interviewed about Marvel or Geoff Johns gets interviewed about Blackest Night. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
I still don't get where this whole "Jeffrey Brown can't draw" thing comes from. I mean sure, if your standard for artistic excellence is Neal Adams or something, you're gonna be like WTF, but as always I'm ignoring those people and talking about altcomix fans who should know better. I've said this before, but compare the work of Brown (full disclosure: I like him a lot personally) to that of any of the ultra-lo-fi slice-of-life humor/pathos diarists who've emerged in his wake and he's just doing so much more--with how he arranges space in his panels; with how he adds line upon line for shading, depth, and detail; with the expressiveness of his characters; with how even his action pastiches are genuinely dynamic and fun to follow; with how he bounces from genre to genre with the same "here's something I thought was funny about this topic" good humor. Especially in the outright humor stuff, he's like your funny friend bullshitting.
That's not necessarily to say that everything he does is for everyone. As in previous genre-parody works like Incredible Change-Bots, the sci-fi/action/fantasy hodgepodge of Sulk #3 presupposes simultaneous knowledge of, affection for, and skepticism of the kinds of stuff he's swiping from/at, plus (obviously) an appreciation of Brown's visual approach to the material. It's an acquired taste: The ribbing might be too gentle for people who wanna see an indie stalwart get some yuks at the expense of elves and unicorns, while the irony might be tough to stomach for po-faced "new action" fans. Indeed I think the reason why Brown's Bighead books (including Sulk #1) are the strongest of his work in this area is because this kind of parody is more familiar with superheroes than with any other subgenre; you can "get it" easier than you can when you're dealing with pirates or D&D or Godzilla or boy geniuses as you are here. Meanwhile the MMA-based Sulk #2's 80-page fight scene was easy to grok as an exercise in ways drawing combat and writing the combatants' interior monologues. The anchor point in The Kind of Strength That Comes from Madness is much harder to locate.
I suppose it just comes down to what you think you might want to see in a comic. Do you want to see an adorable, realistically depicted stag smack his antlers against a tree and then stare at the reader, demanding to know "DO YOU STILL WANT TO TANGLE WITH ME?" in giant capital letters? Do you want a ground-eye-view parallel to Brown's memorably poetic giant-monster rampage comic from Mome in which a couple of moron brothers take the opportunity to make a "looting list" out of their weekly grocery list and then smack the dying reptile around with a baseball bat? Do you want to read lines like "A vampyre! It's exactly like a vampire, but far more dangerous," or hear small-city residents thank goodness that the giant monster is attacking their town instead of big important places like New York or L.A.? Do you want the occasional visual digression about boobs or beards or babies? I know my answers at least.
* Absolute must-read of the day: Curt Purcell interviews the living shit out of Night Business and Gangsta Rap Posse creator Benjamin Marra. Marra throws bombs left and right, and names are named. Where most "indie comics are wishy-washy autobio crap" provocateurs take jabs at Clumsy or "My Sex History," Marra comes gunning for Maus and Jimmy Corrigan. Shit gets REAL, son. (For the record I strongly disagree with his assertions in that regard, though the stance feels performative, of a piece with his comics themselves.)
* The Expendables trailer! Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Rourke, Austin, Couture, Roberts...magnificent and utterly '80s. It's like if you added a bunch of ampersands to Tango & Cash. Get it while it's hot--Lionsgate has been yanking 'em down. (Via Topless Robot.)
* Afrodisiac trailer! In the words of Clay Davis, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. I've seen the book and it's as good as it looks. It's awesome to see Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca at a publisher that knows what to do with them. (Via AdHouse.)
* Nick Bertozzi talks to CBR's Alex Dueben about a lot of things. Apparently he took his Stuffed! gig as a response to editorial feedback that his own comics are too complex, which is fascinating to me. There's also an update in there about his long-gestating Lenny Bruce bio with Harvey Pekar. And he feels like choosing to do comics at age 27 makes him a late bloomer, which strikes me as a deeply unfortunate consequence of the premium placed on youth in this medium. We could use more late bloomers like Nick Bertozzi!
* I'm really happy that Brian Bendis and Mike Oeming's Powers is coming back--like Ultimate Spider-Man, it's been really good for a really long time even as some of Bendis's more high-profile projects have left me flat, but its erratic schedule has pushed it even further off most people's radar than USM. Here's a report on the books' 10th anniversary panel at the Baltimore Comic Con. Wow, ten years of Powers, and ten years of Planetary too, right? Those two books anticipated pretty much this entire decade. (Well, maybe more The Authority than Planetary.) The modern age of superhero comics is getting old.
You can use academic and critical tools to critique comics, such as close readings, theory, and thorough research. I think, though, that there's a lot of what I dub "bad academia" going on: people who don't bother to learn the material and technological history behind how comics were produced (fortunately, there are now excellent sources such as Men of Tomorrow and The Ten Cent Plague for that), so they don't put comics in the proper context--theory for theory's sake, divorced from the actual comic; bad comparisons based on lack of breadth of knowledge (Johnny Ryan is like Chris Ware, because they're both alternative); people who feel guilty or ashamed for liking comics, and so use their academic credentials and training to justify it, or people who have a pet area of study and use comics to justify it (Blackest Night is like Paradise Lost); etc.
* If you ever want to know why the world is in such shitty shape, just remember that people in positions of authority, like government officials and newspaperreporters, don't have the first fucking clue what they're talking about.
* I know I've disagreed with some of the Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? gang's positions on alternative comics, but while there's some stuff I think they get wrong, I'm really enjoying what they get right: an attitude of wide-eyed discovery and awe when it comes to reading cool comics with little attention (digs on traditional altcomix aside) paid to tribal allegiances. Dig, if you will, Brandon's post on Joe Casey and Nathan Fox's sleeper sensation Dark Reign: Zodiac (man, Casey's work really takes off when he's paired with a good artist--seems like a truism I know, but for serious), or Sammy's Baltimore Comic-Con haul report (Tatsumi belies the anti-literary comics stance somewhat, no?). I do think, from time to time, that my reliance on book-formatted comics--really my weapon of choice no matter what genre you're talking about--causes me to miss out on some weird and wild finds out there. Maybe I do need to go longbox-diving at a show at some point--I hope I get half as much out of it as the Serious Comic Book Readers seem to.
Abstract Comics
Andrei Molotiu, editor
R. Crumb, Victor Moscoso, Spyros Horemis, Jeff Zenick, Bill Shutt, Patrick McDonnell, Mark Badger, Benoit Joly, Bill Boichel, Gary Panter, Damien Jay, Ibn al Rabin, Lewis Trondheim, Andy Bleck, Mark Staff Brandl, Andrei Molotiu, Anders Pearson, Derik Badman, Grant Thomas, Casey Camp, Henrik Rehr, James Kochalka, John Hankiewciz, Mike Gestiv, J.R. Williams, Blaise Larmee, Warren Craghead III, Janusz Jaworski, Richard Hahn, Geoff Grogan, Panayiotis Terzis, Mark Gonyea, Greg Shaw, Alexey Sokolin, Jason Overby, Bruno Schaub, Draw, Jason T. Miles, Elijah Brubaker, Noah Berlatsky, Tim Gaze, Troylloyd, Billy Mavreas, writers/artists
Fantagraphics, 2009
232 pages, hardcover
$39.99 Buy it from Fantagraphics Buy it from Amazon.com Visit the Abstract Comics blog
One of the pleasures inherent in anthologies is the way proximity draws out the contrast between successful and unsuccessful work. One of the unique pleasures of this anthology is how that success or lack thereof can be determined not just by the subjective standards of the reader but also by the ostensibly objective standards of the anthology itself. In his introduction, editor Andrei Molotiu defines abstract comics thusly:
What does not fit under this definition are comics that tell straightforward stories in captions and speech balloons while abstracting their imagery either into vaguely human shapes, or even into triangles and squares. In such cases, the images are not different in kind, but only in degree, from the cartoony simplification of, say, Carl Barks' ducks....While in painting the term ["abstract"] applies to the lack of represented objects in favor of an emphasis on form, we can say that in comics it additionally applies to the lack of a narrative excuse to string panels together, in favor of an increased emphasis on the formal elements of comics that, even in the absence of a (verbal) story, can create a feeling of sequential drive, the sheer rhythm of narrative, or the rise and fall of a story arc.
True, none of the comics featured here use (legible) captions or speech balloons. But as Molotiu's subsequent emphasis on "images" implies, the lack of text is incidental to the more fundamental lack of narrative or story. It's by that petard that several of the strips Molotiu selects are hoisted. The contributions from Ibn Al Rabin, Lewis Trondheim, Andy Bleck, and to an extent Mike Gestiv and Bill Shut all rely precisely the sort of "difference in degree" Molotiu warns about--in their comics, abstracted shapes perform actions based on recognizable, and in some cases quite clearly depicted, physical motivations and even emotions, just like the "triangles and squares" we're told may as well be Uncle Scrooge. These strips are cute, but not exactly challenging, and far from abstract.
But the successful strips in Abstract Comics prove that comics need not depict emotions to pack an emotional wallop. Indeed, part of my long-held enthusiasm for this project stemmed from my suspicion, based on steps (small and giant alike) in the direction of abstraction during this decade by such alternative comics artists as Kevin Huizenga, John Hankiewicz, Anders Nilsen, Josh Cotter, and Frank Santoro, that abstract comics stripped completely away from their narrative moorings--abstract comics "in the wild," as it were--had the potential to generate emotional content of enormous power. What I didn't expect was just how...I don't know, idiosyncratic my reaction to such comics would be.
For example, I've already described how the more openly narrative works contained here elicited a chuckle but not much else. What's interesting to me is how the sorts of shapes used by those artists--outlined blobs, for the most part--left me cold even in purely abstracted form. The squiggles of Elijah Brubaker, the whorls of James Kochalka, suggest a warmth and an airiness I'm just not tuned into at all. I'm not a curve man, it turns out. Meanwhile, I'm equally unaffected by strips that eschew drawing sharp contrasts from image to image and panel to panel, either by muting the differences between juxtaposed visuals (Warren Craghead, Richard Hahn, Janusa Jaworski) or by weakening or eliminating the parametric framing and structure provided by panels (Noah Berlatsky, Billy Mavreas, Troylloyd, Tim Gaze, Bruno Schaub).
What I am interested in, it appears, are angles. boxes, cold geometry. Jason Overby's "Apophenia" is perhaps my favorite comic in the whole book: Beginning with a grid of penciled-in panel borders containing nothing at all, it proceeds to flash various sharply carved shapes into panels at random intervals like sudden words emerging from a haze of silent static, or subliminal messages erupting from a blank screen. Mark Goneya's "Squares in Squares" is just that, panel after panel of brightly colored squares surrounding one another like an infinite regression, their position within the panel shifting slightly to slow our eye's descent into the abyss. Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell's untitled, college-vintage contribution uses a repeated bisected-circle motif in black, white, and watercolor-blood red to suggest cold sunrises and magisterial eclipses. And Spyros Horemis black-and-white concentric circles and swirls practically glow off the page with the force of an optical illusion.
I'm also interested in a sense of awe and scale. Molotiu's own excerpts from The Cave overwhelm with bright colors and massive slopes that dwarf panel borders and seem to escape his control, like a microscopic process blown up to IMAX size or a projected filmstrip set on fire. Henrik Rehr's "The Storm" is as aptly named as was "Squares in Squares": Great waves or windgusts toss us to and fro across black backgrounds, sending tiny offset panels scattering like leaves. Alexey Sokolin's "Life, Interwoven" sees its panels slowly overwhelmed by furious black scribbling, like a diary of a madman, until it not only totally blots out the grid but appears to topple it over.
And sometimes I'm like John Cleese's pope: I may not know art, but I know what I like. I like the loneliness of Blaise Larmee's tiny, shaky, frail, incomplete rectangles against their off-white background in his Nilsenesque "I Would Like to Live There." I like the humor of Geoff Grogan repeating a bullseye motif until the laugh-out-loud punchline photo of a woman's nipple in "Bullseye." I like Jason T. Miles creating shapes out of chunky, semi-monstrous black and white lattices--Brinkman Blocks, if you will--then signing it with a great big clumsy JASON T. MILES in "Mainstream Blackout." I like the implied sequentiality of Mark Badger following up a pencil-sketched "Kung Fu" strip from 1980 with a boldly colored remake of the same strip from 2008. And I like the pure psychedelia--in the information-overload sense--in R. Crumb's "Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics," drawn, laid out, and even titled as though attempting to get it down on paper winded him.
So. By my count I liked, mmm, about half the book, give or take a couple strips. And there are potentially fruitful paths that remain largely untrodden. For example, I know Molotiu has been doing yeoman's work on carving out a space for nonnarrative comics for years because I remember jostling with him a bit about on the Comics Journal messageboard following the release of Kramers Ergot 4 in 2003; however, the work of Fort Thunder and its fellow travelers, showcased so memorably in Sammy Harkham's anthology, isn't represented here (unless you count their spiritual godfather Gary Panter). Meanwhile, Crumb and Larry Zenick excepted, the use of representative figures in an abstract way is elided here; I wish Molotiu had selected one of John Hankiewicz's enormously effective strips in this style rather than the comparatively staid and painterly contribution we see here. And for my money, the sequencing peters out toward the end--I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from the final strips, rather formless black and white affairs. An editorial focus not so much tighter as tweaked, I suppose, is what I'm looking for.
But what I liked! What I liked, I liked for more than just the strips themselves--I liked them for the proof they offer that comics really is still a Wild West medium in which one's bliss can be followed even beyond the boundaries of what many or even most readers would care to define as "comics." That an entire deluxe hardcover collection of such comics now exists is, I think, one of the great triumphs for the medium in a decade full to bursting with them. And even if the book's existence is ultimately more impressive than the sum total of its contents, it strikes me as churlish to complain.
Before everyone gets all Rich Johnston breathless about this
I know the last time this happened this was a bizarrely controversial point to make, but can we please agree this time around that if your convention gets closed down by the fire marshal, it's not a sign of success, it's a sign that you should have planned your convention better?
* My Strange Tales Spotlight interview with Stan Sakai was a lot of fun, too. Samurai Hulk!
* I've been keeping pretty busy at Robot 6 now that the post-Anaheim/C2E2 "phony war" phase of the Reed/Shamus conflict is over and the Blitz has begun. Here's my latest Con War report, featuring reactions to the now-completed Big Apple Comic Con over the weekend. Earlier reports are here and here.
* Jeet Heer calls for the creation of a "proto-graphic novel" master list. Seriously, it really would be nice to gather all such titles all in one place. I'd love to see "graphic novel" be fairly generously defined in such a list, too, because the purpose should be comprehensiveness rather than orthodoxy. In other words, Milt Gross and "The Monster Society of Evil"--come one, come all!
* Ceri B. walks us through the lair of the silithids, a sentient insectoid race wreaking Lovecraftian havoc in World of Warcraft. The still-twitching limbs of a long-dead beast so big it could pass for a geographical feature are a marvelously disgusting touch.
So yeah, this is pretty much the ideal Josh Cotter comic for me. Didja like the bizarre, symbol-laden wordless reveries of Skyscrapers of the Midwest? Here's a whole book full of them! This shit makes the locust/migraine sequence from Skyscrapers #2 look like Dilbert! What's it about? In large part, who cares? Like (in my experience) most great comics, it's about how, and what, it makes you feel. It makes me feel like one of those '80s special-effects sequence where some being's exterior shell is chipping away and beneath each chunk that falls off a blindingly bright white light shines out like a beam--like that's basically what Cotter did to his own brain to produce this thing, and like that's what you run the risk of if you stare too long.
That's essentially what Cotter does, visually, over and over again throughout the book: Something will cause one of Cotter's nominal protagonists (anthropomorphized Life in Hell bunnies, pretty much) to spew forth from his person an amount of visual information that totally overwhelms them and the page itself, scribbled and scribed like a Charles Crumb notebook, and at one memorable point caked/painted with watercolors squeezed straight from the tube. In that light, and considering the first section's apparent Chicago setting and slow evolution into comics from a straightforward-ish stream-of-consciousness prose-plus-doodles diary format, it's tempting to read the book as some sort of autobiography: a story of the onset of, treatment of, and recovery from mental illness. For what it's worth, I interviewed Cotter about his life and work at length for The Comics Journal and such an incident never came up, though I could have just whiffed on it. If I'm wrong, so much the better for Cotter, because having dealt with the mental-health institutionalization of two people very very close to me, this is about as accurate a representation of what I always pictured going on in their heads as you're gonna find. Noise, blotting out signals and forming its own.
Glorious noise, too. For all of the books insular inscrutability, several passages here stand out with an effect as awe-inspiring as a great visual effects sequence in a blockbuster by some genuine Hollywood visionary. The paint explosion. The great cloud of scribble, with sensuously tangled lines looking like they've somehow been carved through other lines. The marvelously reproduced, bright reds and blues representing warring states of mind, popping off the off-white pages like 3-D. (The whole book, a facsimile of Cotter's sketchbook, is really an astonishing work of design by Cotter and Chris Pitzer.) The forward momentum of the chase sequence, with two bunnies battling for supremacy in frame after Haring/Muybridge mash-up frame. An eruption of a column of red that rockets into the sky so powerfully you can practically hear the noise. And a creepy cameo by the mad god Dionysus, quoting the soundtrack from the animated Transformers movie, rings out as a reminder of madness after all is said and done like that dissonant shot of the cab's rear view mirror at the end of Taxi Driver.
Outstanding work. Where the hell does he go from here?
Sometimes Victor Davis Hanson despairs, too, mostly over the surfeit of homos and hip-hop and liberals and such sullying the beautiful pop-culture of our grandparents. But fortunately, sometimes Frank Miller shows up in his comment thread to cheer him up. Does that "he is the hero" Chandler quote get invoked? You bet your ass it does.
* Perhaps the best way to describe Dana Goodyear's instant-classic New Yorker profile of James Cameron--and describing it doesn't do it justice at all; you simply must read it--is to say that after reading it, you'd find suggestions that the rig in which Cameron sits in the picture below is either a movie prop, his directing rig, his personal mode of transportation, or a throne upon which he insists on sitting during meetings with studio executives all equally plausible.
* Not as long, and more intro-level, but almost as interesting, is Brian Rafferty's Wired profile of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! I've talked about maybe writing something lengthy about Tim & Eric around here in the past, but I'm frankly daunted. I don't think they're done having whatever effect it is they're having on how I look at art yet; I get the hunch it could be eventually be measured on the same scale as my discovery of Velvet Goldmine and David Bowie in late 2000. The Missus and I compare them to Monty Python and mean it.
* Tom Spurgeon's right: It is fun to yell "Con War." I like to do it in the voice of Jack White doing his "Conquest" cover. Anyway, Spurge interviews NYCC's Lance Fensterman, as does Kiel Phegley, about the now open hostilities between Reed Exhibitions and Gareb Shamus Entertainment. Fensterman points out something I'd missed, which is that Shamus's Toronto show isn't just a rival to Fan Expo, but to the Reed co-sponsored Penny Arcade Expo East, directly against which Shamus scheduled the Tornoto show; he says they saw this particular move coming in that light. And to Spurge's credit, he explicitly asks Fensterman about alleged Shamus/Wizard misconduct, reports/rumors of which have been circulating off the record for several months now. Fensterman doesn't take things much further than that, though he asserts that Wizard inflates its attendance numbers in his interivew with Kiel. I wonder who will be the first to talk on the record about some of the other allegations making the rounds.
* Over at Robot 6 I put in my two cents on Sandy Bilus's 100 Best Comics of 2008 meta-list, an excellent mathematically derived list that rose phoenix-like from the ashes of the late great Dick Hyacinth. Sandy chimes in in the comment thread with some interesting info about the list's Number One, so do check it out.
* Dude. Dude. Dan Nadel writes about Happy Hooligan. Look at it, dude. They face the audience. They face the audience! What a motherfucking eureka moment this is for me, I really can't even begin to tell you. They face the goddamn audience!!!
* At first it seems like David Allison's piece on Inglourious Basterds and Hitler riffing is out to hoist me by my own petard, but that's mostly a headfake to illustrate how what Quentin Tarantino is up to in his movie is quite different from revisionist trivializing.
Slow Storm
Danica Novgorodoff, writer/artist
First Second, 2008
176 pages
$17.95 Buy it from Amazon.com
This is like half of a good book. The visual half, for the most part. Danica Novgorodoff's story of a Kentucky firefighter and the undocumented Mexican worker she kinda sorta befriends after a fire claims the stable he tended is a stunning-looking thing. She has a wiry line that often suggests handwriting, with all its idiosyncracies, so that the occasional wonky scale or perspective seems like (or can be passed off as) a deliberate choice. Individual moments beam out a little Taiyo Matsumoto, a little Ralph Steadman, a little Gerald Scarfe, only with the dial turned from savage to lilting. And her watercolor coloring takes a limited palette of greens, browns, grays, and oranges and fleshes out the artwork so lushly I barely even realized just how few colors she limited herself to in the first place. It's in the moments where she really draws with the colors--a creek, a tornado, the omnipresent cloud and fire motifs--that the book comes alive.
But its in moments where the dialogue takes the lead where it sputters. Frequently too portentous--every conversation creaks under the weight of capital-M Meaning--it fails to convince us of firefighter Ursa's shattered psyche, so that when she perform's the book's central act it feels like a horrifying, selfish overreaction. Which, granted, it's supposed to feel like, but you're also supposed to think "okay, I could see where that came from," whereas I just thought "Christ, what a fucking maniac." Ditto her behavior during the event's fallout, which adds "asshole" to the equation. Meanwhile, Rafi, the Mexican immigrant, is laden with poetic visions of saints and white horses--it's just laid on too thick. The key for Novgorodoff (an Isotope winner and Eisner nominee who clearly doesn't need any advice from me but what the hey) will be to scale back her swing as a writer and tell a story as understated as her art is sweeping.
* Is the $3.99 price point on certain Marvel and DC comics hurting post-launch sales? I'd add two other questions: Does Marvel's method of raising the price on its "important" books cannibalize mid-list sales? And does DC's method of adding back-ups starring B-list characters to justify its price increases move the needle one way or the other?
* This week's "best of the horror blogs" round-up at The League of Tana Tea Drinkers focuses on bloggers' favorite horror novels. I've got a couple links in there for the curious.
* Blair's All About Eve dream sequence marked the Gossip Girl debut of Vanessa's cleavage. Let's hope it's a recurring role!
* Not to be outdone, Chuck makes his first appearance in a purple paisley bathrobe. For those keeping score at home, Prince is now the second-coolest man to (presumably) have worn this garment. And Chuck is two-for-two for sleepwear this season.
* I was pretty impressed with the poker storyline. Clearly they're going to keep the "schemes" portion of the show as larger-than-life as Chuck and Blair's earlier anti-Carter machinations would indicate. Betting for a man's life is about as big as it gets.
* Blair listed Mao as one of the philosophers she wanted referenced in her speech? Alert Glenn Beck!
* Despite getting off to an auspicious start, Vanessa was really loathsome in this episode. That was some bush-league psych-out stuff from her regarding Olivia, Dan, and the speech. With each scene she dug herself deeper, fucked over her supposed best friend for no reason even worse, and made me hate her more. And it wasn't just her that was annoying, it was the whole mix-up storyline, which is the sort of thing I almost physically can't stand. Cleavage pass revoked, Vanessa.
* And here's the funny thing: The kind of behavior that makes you hate Vanessa makes you love Blair. "You really think you're that much better than me?" "Oh, I think we both know the answer to that?" We sure do, Blair!
* She was so horrible that I kind of enjoyed that her mom was even more insufferable than she was, to the extent that it made her life worse. Mom walking in to hear Vanessa declare how much she hates her was just icing on the schadenfreude cake.
*Related: By all means, Gossip Girl writers, lay shit like "He's installing the solar panels on the chicken coop at the co-op" as thick as you please. In the Gossip Girl world, that is of course the only lens through which progressivism could possibly be seen.
* That said, Vanessa's instantaneous reaction to her mom blowing her off at the coffee place was beautifully acted by Jessica Szohr, and actually moving. The Missus and I just turned and looked at each other and made sad faces, which is saying something given that we'd spent the whole episode hoping they'd kill her off.
* Okay, okay. I know what you're really here for. And yes, the Chuck-on-dude kiss was a cop-out. (I wanted tongue, goddammit.) But here's the thing: The lead-in and follow-up were sooooooooooooo magnificent that I couldn't stay mad if I tried. Chuck's affirmative smile and nod when Blair revealed the target was a guy and asked him if he was still up for it..."Can I help you?" "Oh, definitely."..."You think I've never kissed a guy before?" Hoyay to the UNNNNNNNNF power. Chate shippers, there's still hope!
* Real-World Horror: A group of prominent pop and rock musicians have joined together to demand that their music stopped being used to torment prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. No one saw the irony of using "March of the Pigs" to torture people?
Its a wild world. You can travel to the US city of your choice with your cowboy hat and your stirrups and have a gun fight in a back alley. You can sign up with Blackwater Inc and go murder woman and children in Iraq and get good health benefits as well. Grab a job at the Pentagon or a private firm piloting robotic drone bombers in Afghanistan, 10 points for a grandma! 20 for a pregnant lady! You might even hit a Terrorist! Air conditioned office, ergonomic chairs, free coffee! Hell, sign up to print those huge signs that folks with lots of extra time and solid legs hold outside of family planning clinics, photos of bloody, melted, gnarled, oozing aborted fetuses. Drive home after a long hard day of life-saving life-affirming work to eat a good rare steak, dripping red juice. Beat your kid. Feed the dog. Swing by the church to check out the choir boys. You can sleep under a bridge with homeless families near a halted condo development, or you can peep under a different bridge to see a sanctioned village of sex offenders, each with a scarlett letter stamped on their forehead. You can pray in a circle of your friends around your sick daughter as she dies of treatable diabetes, a display of failed Magic/Kung Fu. You can listen to radio hate-seller Rush Limbaugh spew violence that we can only hope will turn inward on his vacant icy soul, causing a massive, prolonged, agonizing heart attack. His already bloated body writhing in an unseen torture, as his inner demons "blow off some steam". He can broadcast the grunts, the groans. I will turn on my receiver, I will amplify his final address, the hospital gets caught up in paperwork but he will live on in some fashion.
* Get this: Two Kentucky librarians refused to allow an 11-year-old to check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because they thought it was "pornography"...and they got fired for it! Regardless of the wisdom of letting your 11-year-old read Alan Moore's Mina Murray/Allan Quartermain May-December fanfic, you have to admit it's delightful to see the kinds of nitwits who'd label this book "pornographic" get shitcanned for it.
* I'm not reading this until I see the movie, and god only knows when that will be (The Hurt Locker, A Serious Man, Zombieland, etc.), but for what it's worth, the estimable Rich Juzwiak has titled his review of Paranormal Activity"Believe the hype".
Invincible Iron Man #19
Matt Fraction, writer
Salvador Larroca, artist
Marvel, October 2009
40 pages
$3.99
It's been a long time since I read superhero comic that wasn't by Grant Morrison more than once out of enthusiasm rather than confusion. But golly, I enjoyed this one, and I enjoyed it just as much the second time around.
Subtitled (somewhat pretentiously) "Into the White (Einstein on the Beach)," this is the conclusion of the year-long "World's Most Wanted" arc of Fraction and Larroca's movie-toned Iron Man book, in which the disgraced and deposed Tony Stark runs around the world trying to destroy both his tech and his own mind lest both fall into the hands of new King Shit of Turd Mountain Norman Osborn. In the past I've found this set-up very hard to swallow because of how dependent it is on other, lesser comics like Civil War and Secret Invasion. For example, I don't care what universe you live in, if Bernard Kerik can go from Homeland Security chief nominee to getting his mugshot taken, it strains credulity that a guy who used to dress up as a goblin and throw pumpkin bombs at people is gonna get put in charge of jack shit.
But Fraction compensates for this inherited conceptual sloppiness simply by making the plot mechanics for this story as tight as he possibly can. He cuts relentlessly back and forth between the protagonists and antagonists: the Charlie's Angels trio of Black Widow, Maria Hill, and Pepper Potts attempting to escape from Osborn's lair; Osborn's second-in-command Victoria Hand trying to prevent this and quaking in terror of what will happen if she doesn't; Osborn himself cockily closing in on his quarry; the intelligence-officer grunt who's secretly feeding Osborn bad information and the colleague who smells something fishy about him; and Iron Man himself, experiencing an Algernon-like loss of his faculties as he hurls himself in his dilapidated old armor toward his final destination. If you've ever tried to write an action sequence, let alone cross-cut between several of them, you know how hard it is to get what needs to happen to happen for any reason other than your need for it to happen, right? Well, never once do the A-B-C sequencings of Fraction's various plots feel like they've skipped a letter just to get to point Z quicker. From the captured spies moving up and down and in an out of an elevator, to the precise interpersonal dynamics between all the personnel involved in Norman's pursuit of Tony Stark, each moment proceeds directly from the last, whether physically or emotionally.
How many fight scenes have you read lately where a character will get smacked several dozen yards by some giant powerhouse only to be up and about a few pages later? How many times have creators had to go online to clarify the physical fate of a character whose beating they wrote into incomprehensibility? How many times has a climactic battle been undercut completely by glib banter, almost completely disconnected from the circumstances of that place, that moment, those characters? You're not gonna get any of that shit here. Each scene and sequence feels like it's taking place in a physical space you and the characters could navigate, with physical maneuvers having readily understandable physical consequences. Each move toward and away from the characters' goals comes with a sense of the stakes involved--the grand illusion of serialized shared-universe superhero storytelling, that there really can be winners and losers, has rarely been so astutely conveyed.
This is all the result of what feels like a real partnership. This issue's success is equally due to Fraction's just-right dialogue and direction and Larroca's deft work with body language and fight choreography. (His days as a Greg Land-style spot-the-photoref novelty act are loooooong behind him.) Both shine brightest in the climax, making Osborn's slide from glee to rage to frustration to confusion to defeat snatched from the jaws of victory as clear as day and almost frightening. It's capped off with a one-liner in which the totality of Tony's pwnage of Norma is made hilariously clear (provided you're a Marvel nerd), and a one-page coda that manages to set up the coming mega-crossover without losing a sense of beatific victory and loss.
Did I mention that they managed to rehabilitate Iron Man's badly damaged character in my head, despite the fact that even now none of his actions during Civil War have turned out to make any kind of practical or moral sense within the world of the story in any way? And that they managed to establish Spider-Man villain the Green Goblin as a for-the-ages Iron Man enemy as surely as Frank Miller made Kingpin the archnemesis for Daredevil? I dunno, man, this is some mightily effective work in this genre. I feel like it should be taken apart and studied at story summits for a long, long time: If this is what you want to do, this is how you want to do it. Aw, hell, I'm gonna read it again.
Today's Comics Time review has been canceled because I accidentally read and reviewed a book that's embargoed until Wednesday. I am a doofus. Comics Time will resume on Wednesday, and I may throw in an extra review at some point this week just to make up for this. You never know.
* I also enjoyed the lengthy round-up by Heidi MacDonald and Tom Spurgeon's "what does it all mean, and not mean?" piece. Tom makes one really interesting distinction, between "aesthetically gross" stuff done by the various cons and "ethically gross" stuff, which is a different and more pressing issue but which remains difficult to separate from the former category simply because so few people are willing to go on the record about the many, many shady things being whispered about behind the scenes.
* I loved The A-Team as a kid, and while I think the movie version will have a really really tiny needle to thread in terms of finding a tone that'll make it enjoyable, I am indeed delighted by this picture of the cast. That's Liam Neeson, believe it or not.
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker starts off by playing upon what I believe is the oldest and most primal human fear, developmentally speaking. You sit down in the theater with its stereo surround sound blazing, you watch a team of explosive experts use an all-too-clumsy robot to gingerly manipulate a roadside bomb in Iraq, and before you know it your heart is pounding because an explosion could occur at any moment and some part of your brain really, really does not want to be startled by a loud noise.
The whole rest of the film is essentially a demonstration of how life as a soldier (or civilian) in Iraq works in much the same fashion. Though far from the comfy confines of a movie theater on 13th Street, these people are similarly subjected to an environment where something brain-rattlingly terrifying could happen to them at any moment. Most of the film's set pieces--and it basically moves from set piece to set piece, like Saving Private Ryan (with one key difference I'll get to in a moment)--create tension and suspense simply by demonstrating, through a few shots of a byzantine network of alleys or featureless expanse of desert or cramped and hole-riddled warren of rooms, that there is literally no possible way that our trio of American soldiers could prepare themselves for every way in which that brain-rattlingly terrifying thing could happen. Keep your eyes in one direction and get shot from another. Defuse a bomb and get blown up by the one five feet away from it. Pop your head up to shoot someone and get shot in return. And unlike in Spielberg's paradigm-shifting shakicam action epic, there's no sense of forward momentum, no inexorable drive to the fulfillment of a quest. There's just a countdown till the last day in Bravo Company's rotation, a slow grind of hundreds of daily life-and-death situations, an increasingly indistinct and almost pointless parade of triumphs and tragedies. A tedium of terror. To the extent that the film has an ideological or political component, you can suss it out from there.
But it's a very big world with a lot of people in it, and surely there are people out there who don't just survive such a situation but thrive in it. That's Sgt. James, our hero, played by Jeremy Renner just as marvelously as anyone who's seen Dahmer or 28 Weeks Later would expect. Like Sanborn and Eldridge, the two other men in his three-man bomb squad, I spent much of the movie trying to figure out what makes this guy tick. Is he an arrogant, cigarette-smoking John Wayne wannabe, living every day as if this is the one during which he can walk away from an explosion in slow motion? Is he Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, a bloody-handed sociopath glibly waltzing through the killing fields, knowing that some day this war's gonna end but never quite allowing himself to finish the thought? Is he enacting some sort of slow-motion suicide by haji, running headlong away from responsibility for others and for himself alike until someone or something finally puts him out of his misery? Or is he just the best damn explosives expert anyone's ever seen--as Eldridge puts it, "not very good with people, but a hell of a warrior"? In one brilliant scene, a murderous commanding officer follows up a near-disaster outside the UN compound with a creepily complimentary inquisition of James that seems to entertain all these possibilities at once.
Two key conversations convey one last possibility: that there's no real method to James's madness. We can rule out sociopathy, at least, because he clearly cares deeply about some of the violence's victims--though his pathos in this regard turns out to be both dubiously inspired and stupidly, self-aggrandizingly addressed. But beyond that, how can he do it? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, he says; later, he casts life as a process by which the things you love are slowly revealed to be basically garbage, except for one or two real, true things. It's love as a fix, and his love, his fix, is his pas de deux with death. He seemingly can't help being the way he is any more than Bodie from Bigelow's Point Break (or Johnny from Mike Leigh's Naked, whom I thought of quite a bit by the end). In this light what looked like recklesness, like not caring, is revealed to be what he cares about the most. His body needs a blast radius.
* Today's Strange Tales Spotlight subject is Chris Chua, a relative unknown who more than anyone else in the series so far is gonna make you marvel that this is being published by Marvel.
* Battlestar Galactica: The Plan comes out on DVD today, and thus ends the series. It turns out I don't enjoy this sort of release pattern at all--instead of making this appointment television, it's become "eh, I'll buy it eventually."
* Oh yeah, buncha Monty Python docs of the sort I usually really enjoy come out today too.
* Given my usual preoccupations in terms of this show it's probably no surprise that my favorite parts of Whitney Matheson's reader Q&A with Lost honcho Damon Lindelof center on how outside concerns like actor availability and budget overruns affected Lost's story.
* Honestly, my main takeaway from these interview snippets with Marvel VP of Sales David Gabriel is that Marvel will be switching to a more DC-style release pattern with its trade paperbacks--i.e. they'll take forever to come out--which really bums me out as someone who really only ever wants or buys trade paperbacks for this material. I imagine the reasoning behind not wanting to stagger the release of books featuring the same character will raise some eyebrows.
* Jason Adams is on the Scott Pilgrim movie beat, catching some interesting tweets from Juno director Jason Reitman following a screening of 30 minutes of footage from Edgar Wright's adaptation:
It is a game changer for Edgar and the genre. It moves the speed of light and carries more unadulterated joy than Ive seen in recent cinema.
SP does what everyone our age has been dreaming about: achieves the first all encompassing film of the joystick generation.
I'm in awe of the sheer control in the filmmaking. It feels like a "Matrix" for love and how willing we are to fight for it.
Honestly I wasn't as crazy about the first volume of Scott Pilgrim as a lot of other people were, but I still remember the way it worked video-game combat and iconography into its relatively normal story hitting me like a ton of bricks. If the movie can really do the same thing, hoo baby.
* Green Zone, a Paul Greengrass-directed Matt Damon-starring politicized action film that isn't a Bourne movie? [Pause for thought] Sure, I'll eat it.
* My friend Ben Morse hired Todd Nauck to draw portraits of the groomsmen at his wedding as their gifts. That's a pretty rad idea.
Dark Reign: The List #7--Wolverine
Jason Aaron, writer
Esad Ribic, artist
Marvel, October 2009
48 pages
$3.99
Well well well, looks like Marvel decided maybe they should have strained that Grant Morrison bathwater for babies before they threw it all out. Yeah, Joss Whedon (and, in those nobly intentioned but ill-conceived Phoenix minis, Greg Pak) got to nod in New X-Men's direction now and then--Cassandra Nova, a one-line reference to Magneto's trashing of Manhattan, even the Bug Room. But other than wiping out Genosha, killing Jean Grey, and establishing Emma Frost as the X-Men's new HBIC, Marvel basically ran, not walked, away from Morrison's ideas and tone alike. (Exhibit A: that Xorn arc from New Avengers.) So writer Jason Aaron's full-fledged Morrison Marvel Team-Up in this very very central event title, pitting Wolverine, Marvel Boy (!), and Fantomex (!!!) against Norman Osborn for the fate of The World (i.e. the Morrison-created birthplace of the Weapon Plus program that spawned everyone from Captain America to the ol' Canucklehead), is something of a turning point. Certainly I didn't expect to see a French-accented international man of mystery playing a role in Dark Reign, except perhaps as someone for Ares to chop in half in a throwaway sequence in Dark Avengers.
What's impressive about this is that rather than try to ape high Morrisonian "mad ideas" (except for a played-for-laughs viral-religion thing), Aaron riffs on an entirely different Morrison tone: cheeky high-concept comedy. Instead of writing Marvel Boy as some sort of brooding military brat, Aaron returns him to the quasi-Clockwork Orange blend of arrogance, ultraviolence, and killer good looks that made his original Morrison miniseries such a hoot. He's like Chuck Bass with insect DNA. (Okay, more insect DNA.) Similarly, Fantomex is treated as a charming rogue with a cool white uniform rather than Aaron simply waving his hands in the face of his weird power set and Frenchness and giving up or phoning in some black-ops boilerplate. Wolverine actually plays a supporting role more than anything else, but when he's unleashed, it's in a splatstick fashion consistent with the joli-laid physicality Morrison's collaborator Frank Quitely imbued him with. Ribic's art goes a long way in this regard--I'd previously known him only for his admittedly dynamic Alex Ross-indebted painted work, but his pencils have a cartoony zest that would be right at home on some three-issue Vertigo miniseries.
What does it all mean in the context of Dark Reign and The List and so on? As best I can tell, not much. But reintegrating Morrison's many toys into the mainstream Marvel Universe, as opposed to the province of editorially hands-off limited series, is pretty momentous in and of itself. Fingers crossed we'll see the Phoenix Corps again when all is said and done.
Let me explain to you why I don't care for Basement Jaxx
Honestly I don't feel very strongly about Basement Jaxx in either direction. But lately I've been listening to "Where's Your Head At" a bunch. It's a very good song, mostly thanks to the firepower of its fully armed and operational Gary Numan sample. But it's as though they were unsatisfied with merely centering their song around one of the most monstrous synth lines ever constructed and felt compelled to add a bunch of unnecessary junk to it, like some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The single edit in the video above is better than the full-length version in this regard, but it still gets a little too goofy with the funny voices. And the full-length version has about 45 unnecessary seconds in the middle and another 45 unnecessary seconds at the end. It's not like I've listened to a ton of Basement Jaxx, but pretty much everything I've heard is like this in some way--just too busy. I understand that this is considered "maximalism," but for me it's clutter, or mania, or trying too hard, or something else unappealing, and when you've divorced it from a colossal Numanism it's not something I'm interested in hearing at all.
* Curt Purcell reviews the Superman and BatmanBlackest Night tie-in minis. I think Curt is right to defend them against accusations that they're "red skies" tie-ins, i.e. that they perfunctorily acknowledge the existence of some wider crossover framework but then go about their regular business. Clearly, they're about nothing but the Blackest Night goings-on. But for me, that's sort of the problem. What they are is really nothing more or less than three-issue depictions of what's going on with Superman and the new Batman (and their sidekicks) during the invasion of the Black Lanterns. They don't really have their own beginnings, and they certainly don't have much in the way of endings--they're basically like the "here's what's going on with so-and-so" sequences we've seen in the main miniseries, only extracted and expanded. It's just kinda weird, is all. And compared to the two-issue Final Crisis tie-ins for these two characters, which also removed them from the main flow of the event but showed them dealing with unique problems, they feel a little unnecessary. I dunno, man, writing tie-ins that make those who buy them feel like they matter and those who don't buy them feel like they're not missing anything crucial to the enjoyment of what they are buying is perhaps the toughest row to hoe in this the event-comics era.
* My love-hate relationship with the Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader gang continues with Brandon's post on '70s & '80s Eurocomic weirdness. I'm all for reclaiming forgotten, fecund areas of comics history, but your argument for this needn't be laden with egregious strawmen or attacks on publishers simply for not sharing your own tastes. You may not like, say, the comics of Fletcher Hanks, but isn't that pretty much exactly the kind of "hey, look off the beaten path and shake off your insularity and publish something overlooked" project you're calling for? And I'm sorry, but you shouldn't get to say things like this...
It does not really benefit the smaller companies, especially the tastemakers like Fantagraphics or Top Shelf to try to republish this stuff because their bread and butter is still very much the overtly sophisticted, gets-write-ups-in-the-New York Times type comics, be it personal, arty stuff made now or lost pieces of early comics history.
...without getting called out about the Hernandez Brothers and Josh Simmons and Johnny Ryan and Charles Burns and Gipi and Robert Williams and Jacques Tardi and Portable Grindhouse and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The SurrogatesSuper Spy and Renee French and everything else those publishers publish that gives obvious lie to those claims. If you think people should publish more weird '70s and '80s genre comics that aren't superheroes, that's what you should say. If you've got confidence in your case, make it on the aesthetic (and financial) merits.
* No way am I burying the lede this time around: Best Serena cleavage ever.
* Of course Rufus is lame enough to make KISS jack o' lanterns.
* Make Blair kiss a girl, Chuck! Make Blair kiss a girl!
* That publicist character is the fucking worst. Every minute she's on screen is insufferable. This, of course, is an accurate portrayal of publicists.
* These people just routinely lie to each other. Trick or treating, career stuff, helping your boyfriend, dating your costar, whatever, it's always time to lie.
* I liked that goofy shot of Serena taking all that time to walk out of the Humphrey loft as Dan and Olivia argue over her pretending to still be dating her ex-costar. It was like something out of Wet Hot American Summer, only featuring awesome stems.
* The gangster outfits were a little much even for this show.
* Here's why the end of the episode was a mess: If getting busted by the cops is so self-evidently good for the hotel, why would Serena think it would be bad for the celebrities? Even if you want to grant her the initial freakout, eventually it's no longer theoretical--it turns out to be great for the celebrities. And yet she's still pissed at Blair. Meanwhile, Blair never says "hey, it'll be great for them too," she makes some kind of lame "I'm putting Chuck first" argument instead of pointing out that it's an obvious win-win. Bad writing.
* Now that I've watched Matt Zoller Seitz's "Zombie 101" video essay, I'm linking to it all over again. You know, for a subgenre that's so dominated discourse about horror this decade, the canon, as demonstrated by Seitz's choices, is really pretty small--the vast majority of the major clips come from the Romero and the 28...Later movies, with Shaun of the Dead for laughs and pick your black and white voodoo-zombie movie for roots.
* Seeing theselists of "Best of the Decade" lists for music makes me realize--have you seen any such lists for comics yet? I haven't. And I sure haven't made one, because frankly the prospect is too daunting. Not only does this decade contain virtually my entire comics-reading life, it's also just such a seismic time period. It includes everything from Jimmy Corrigan to Kramers Ergot 7, you know? I think you could do a 100 Greatest Comics of All Time list that could conservatively be 25% books from the last ten years.
* Purple Reign: Meet the Flamingo, terror of the Gotham City underworld and apparent Prince fan. (I don't know what it says that it feels like this is the first time we're seeing him even though he's already appeared in this series at least twice, but hey.) Gotta love that this got out there on the same day I spent all this time comparing a Batman comic to colorful '80s-conscious pop art.
* And here's another song I coulda linked to in that DK2 post had the review gone up at the right time. Woo doggie, more like this please.
* Wanna see a new comic written and drawn by Alan Moore? Also, he's working with Gorillaz, he tells a cute story about Brian Eno, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book he's finishing now takes place in the present day!
* Oh yeah: While Moore's thoroughgoing ignorance about many aspects of contemporary culture is lamentable (no matter how good a writer he is), it's also increasingly clear that his expression of it in interviews is in no small part due to lousy questions from his interviewers.
* Well, this is odd: This interview with Sleigh Bells and this interview with Gary Numan (via) reveal that both owe their entire careers to a coincidence: Sleigh Bells' Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss met when he waited on her at a restaurant and happened to ask if she sang, while Numan discovered his signature instrument, the Moog keyboard, because someone left one at the studio where his ersatz punk band was recording. I can relate: the only reason I bumped into the old high school and college classmate who got me my first job as a writer and remains my editor at Maxim is because I was wandering around Manhattan looking for a party that turned out to be in Brooklyn.
My entire circle of friends has been clamoring for this long-delayed collection of video box art for over a year--and could this be any more in my wheelhouse right now? If you made a Venn diagram out of the New Action, the Manly Movie Mamajama, and everything I talk about it that Dark Knight Strikes Again review, you'd find this right in the sweet spot. Even if this book didn't exist, it would be necessary for me to invent it.
So let's start by talking about what I didn't like about it. Well, "didn't like" is probably too strong--it's fine, just not what I was looking for--but I couldn't help but be let down by editor and compiler Jacques Boyreau's introduction. You get a brief sketch of his personal history with home video, a lengthy technical history of the format, and a diatribe about the evils of digital. Actual discussion of "the lost art of the VHS box" is reserved for an interesting but meager two-paragraph rumination on the way their display in video stores made them the iconic equivalent of the films they contained, but this quickly gives way to one last swipe at DVDs, downloads, and digital projection. Nothing about any of the artists or designers involved, nothing about the evolving aesthetics of box art as home video went became a megabusiness, nothing about any of the covers on the pages that follow. If you're looking for information about the business and creative decisions that led to the creation of this childhood-memory art form, you'll come away disappointed.
But if you're simply looking for a gallery of those memories and beyond, Boyreau did you right. He and designer Jacob Covery wisely chose to present the front cover of every box in the context of a product shot, rather than simply scanning the art and running it full-bleed--he's absolutely right to argue that these images are inseparable from their status as objects. The box shots of the front cover (and spine) occupy the right-hand side of every spread, while the left-hand side reproduces the back cover. And here they do scan it and run it full-bleed, which actually just makes it funnier. Why? Well, it was clear from the start that what you needed to do with the front of your VHS box was make the image as lurid and eye-catching as possible, so there are surprisingly few variations in that regard beyond obvious budget and talent limitations in some cases. But what to do with the back cover? For a long time, no one seemed to know. The familiar tagline/teaser blurb/stills/credits framework was far from universal, and in its place were long lists of other movies released on home video by the studio (on the back of Vanishing Point, Magnetic Video Corporation listed fully fifty-eight), terse flat-affect plot summaries (The Chamber of Fear's blurb begins "The crevice of the volcano is very deep. Scientists are searching for a form of underground life that according to theory still exists."), poorly written catalogues of the depraved behavior contained inside (Blood Spattered Bride notes "Although not rated this film contains nudity and scenes of graphic violence"), and in one memorable case (The Best of Burlesque--somehow I doubt it!) just a flipped and blown-up segment of the front cover's airbrushed T&A illustration. Seeing all this proto-professional weirdness on the page normally reserved for placing the image next to it in some sort of factual context is hilarious.
But let's face it, you're here for the front covers, and they don't disappoint. You've got titles like Drive-In Massacre, Don't Go In the House, and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity. You've got taglines like Video Violence's "...When renting is not enough!!", Slashdance's "SAVE THE LAST DANCE...FOR HELL!" and The Lift's "TAKE THE STAIRS, TAKE THE STAIRS. FOR GOD'S SAKE TAKE THE STAIRS!!!" You've got images you likely remember from the scary sections of your local mom-and-pop video shop--the girl-gun of Master Blaster, the knife-through-the mask of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (the back-cover blurb appends a question mark to that increasingly inaccurate adjective, by the way), and the genuinely striking redneck cheesecake of 'Gator Bait. You've got bloody knives, Giger knock-offs, urban warriors, and underboob.
As is probably clear by now (if it wasn't already from the book's title), the bulk of these boxes are for B-movie genre pictures. The exceptions are therefore often all the more interesting. Go Hog Wild is a glorious example of a truly lost art, the cartooned/painted high-school sex comedy poster. Barbie and the Rockers: Out of this World, with a 1987 copyright date, demonstrates the by-then astonishing moneymaking potential of the medium--a full rental fee for one 25-minute cartoon! The box-art design for Sidney Lumet's Network, though crude by today's standards, provides a representative look at the far classier approach to A-list studio affairs.
Most anomalous of all are the non-fiction efforts. A Johnny Bench documentary stands out for its blandness, while the Unknown Comic's bag-clad noggin and overall awfulness could, with a little tweaking, fit right in with the various monsters and slashers. There's a Gulf War I cash-in from ABC News, simply repackaging a military briefing from Norman Schwarzkopf. Grossest of all is an obliviously bloodthirsty hunting documentary called Bowhunting Whitetails: Just for Fun!: A grinning hunter holds a dead deer's head by the antlers on the front, the back-cover copy revels in the hunter's triumph over the poor stupid unarmed animal he slaughters, and there's a tagline advertising "5 Vivid Arrow Impacts!" Even more than hilariously inept stuff like the Lon Chaney/John Carradine vehicle Alien Massacre and its crosseyed cover babe, it's these documentaries and hobbyist videos that show just how widely the doors were thrown open to media producers and consumers of all stripes by the home video revolution.
And believe it or not, a couple of the covers even succeed as art! Boyreau smartly puts the two that do best right next to each other--the jagged '80s splash-of-paint surrealism for the euro-slasher Eyeball (featuring an extremely rare artist credit, for illustrator Dick Bouchard) and the striking still of a loincloth-clad Cornel Wilde running from his life from spear-chucking African natives that bedecked the colonialist adventure The Naked Pray. Elsewhere, the bold two-color art for Walter Hill's rock'n'roll fantasia Streets of Fire is ripe for reinterpretation today, I'd say; it's easy to picture a Scott Pilgrim promotional piece riffing on its look and pose. And did I mention 'Gator Bait? Step it up, Terry Richardson!
Now here's the thing: A little Google Fu and you could probably come up with jpgs of nearly all the titles I've mentioned, and more besides. Boyreau laments how digital phased out analog when it comes to our movie viewing; has the Internet done the same with his book commemorating the losing side of that battle? I say no. It's not just because of the tremendous job Boyreau and Covey did with the cover reproductions, or the lovely, solid paper stock, or the cutesy slipcase. It's because Boyreau is right: the aura of the object is irreplaceable. A book collection of VHS box art contains preserves what was special about them in a way a Flickr gallery just can't. Next time you have a trashy movie marathon, pass this around between movies--unlike your laptop, you won't even need to worry that much about spilling beer on it.
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