* I'm very excited to be a part of this year's Best of 2009 critics roundtable episode of the venerable Inkstuds podcast. Tim Hodler, Chris Mautner, host Robin McConnell and I discuss Asterios Polyp, You'll Never Know, The Photographer, You Are There, Multiforce, 20th Century Boys, Pluto, and George Sprott, and man did it fly by. We could have gone on for hours on a dozen more books. This was a real pleasure--thanks to Robin for the gracious invitation, and thanks to Chris and Tim, two of my favorite critics, for the conversation.

* Man, there are a lot of great comics being posted online lately.

* Forgot to link to it the other day, but Noah Berlatsky followed up his post on the problems with the TCJ.com relaunch with one focusing on Gary Groth's irksome "welcome" essay. It's funny: Many of the things Gary says about how hard it is to find critics online--and I mean literally find them, like the logistical process of locating critics--and how shitty nearly everything he managed to find was, he said before in the SPX Critics Roundtable in 2007, to widespread dismay on the panel (and in my case, in the audience). I mean, that's pretty clearly his fault, not the Internet's fault. I really figured the reaction to his statements of that sort at the panel, and the subsequent move of the Comics Journal from print to web in the first place, meant that he'd educated himself enough to change his mind. Guess not. It's a bummer, because Gary is usually a rigorous thinker.

* Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day: John Byrne sees that Wolverine-in-the-Hellfire-Club-sewer shot as the birth of the "momentist" school of superhero storytelling, though he obviously doesn't use that term--the frantic attempt to capture in a single image everything awesome about a character. Actually I get the sense he's complaining more about the splash-page-heavy pin-up-style '90s Image/Marvel stuff, but the idea is the same either way. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* On Robot 6 yesterday I wrote a post about Manohla Dargis's recent complaints about the lousy status of women in Hollywood. It's pretty freaking lousy.

* I was inspired to do this by several recent brouhahas in comics. To wit: This simplifies things to reductio ad absurdum levels, I'm sure, but it seems to me that the vituperative manner in which people are explaining that Marvel's Girl Comics is a terrible idea is in fact evidence that it's a great idea. I'm old enough and liberal enough to know that "affirmative action" is not inherently pejorative. All these comment-thread geniuses either deny institutional biases or shrug their shoulders and say whaddayagonnado, and then assert that any effort to redress this--anything other than women just up and writing superhero comics, just like everyone else, right this very moment--is sexism or reverse sexism. But the playing field is not level, and that assertion is ridiculous.

* Also this, from the aforelinked Heidi MacDonald post:

1) We really, really really need to move beyond Power Girl’s breasts, girls. It’s totally a distraction from actual progress. To the point where one prominent female blogger who blogs about those chachas all the time can’t even praise a female cartoonist without comparing her to a female body part. Isn’t it better just to sneak in mentions of female creators as if they were, y’know, NORMAL? Like I just did today elsewhere on this blog?

* Here's another terrific quote, from Tom Spurgeon:

it looks like Marvel doesn't know what to do with its Incredible Hercules series. I hate to backseat drive companies because I've barely made like sixteen dimes from working in comic books, but at some point it seems that if well-regarded series after well-regarded series is broken on the rocks of a market that won't respond to them, you should start to look at changing the game board to be more receptive to such series as opposed to picking up a game piece you think might work better.

Look, people who get mad at me for ragging on movies based entirely on their trailers and previews (cough Robin Hood cough) -- that's what trailers and previews are for. They're made so you can see what a movie's like, and hopefully, make you want to see it. Bottom line, there's nothing in any of the Avatar promos that have ever made me want to see it -- although, as discussed, the movie's biggest draw is something that can't be portrayed over a 30-second TV commercial.

* This one's a little too dense to quote, but I greatly enjoyed Charles Reece's explanation of the role of irony in Ghost World, which I think is my least favorite Dan Clowes book, but I'd still never accuse it of trying to be cool. On the contrary.

* "A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter." (Via Mike Barthel.)

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