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.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
Carnival of souls: Special "no love for legacies" edition
* Douglas Wolk was not nuts about Blackest Night #8. He argues that by reviving various old dead superheroes and supervillains, the series undermines both the DC Universe's unique "legacy" aspect, by which the mantle of different superbeings is worn by different characters over time, and the dramatic impact of their original deaths. I disagree with all this for a few reasons. (Spoilers ahoy...)
For one thing, very very very few of these characters' deaths were all that dramatic to begin with. I'll grant you Martian Manhunter and Osiris, even Maxwell Lord and the Hawks (even though their deaths were pretty icky). But the rest? Aquaman had been turned into Squidbeard the Grey or something when he bought it, Firestorm and Jade and Captain Boomerang were run-of-the-mill sacrificial lambs to juice up an event comic (which frankly was the case with MM and the Hawks too), and the Reverse Flash and Hawk died so long ago I forget how it happened. Gwen Stacy they ain't. Plus, nearly all the characters who've been revived during the last year or so, including everyone in Blackest Night except the Reverse Flash and Hawk, were killed by the same editorial regime that ended up bringing them back. It's not like some storied classic run was undone by any of this.
Meanwhile, legacies are hardly relevant with many of these characters: There are no younger versions of Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Deadman, Maxwell Lord, Osiris, or Jade for the old versions to replace, while it appears the new and old Firestorms will be combined, and Professor Zoom had already been resurrected to interact with his successor Zoom several months ago. And frankly, God help you care passionately enough about the new Captain Boomerang or the new Hawk to complain that they'll no longer have the spotlight to themselves.
Which leads me to my core contention, which is that the legacy aspect of the DCU is perhaps the single most overrated concept in superhero comics, not least by the company itself. It reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's routine about how sports fans are really just rooting for laundry: Is it really all that exciting to anyone that this or that outfit has been given to some new clown? With the possible exceptions of the various Robin characters and the new Blue Beetle--who can't maintain a title in today's market, for whatever that's worth--has there even been a legacy character worth his or her salt since the Silver Age reinventions of the Flash and Green Lantern anyway? Douglas says this keeps things feeling fresh, like the world moves on, but if you've ever read any DC comic dealing with the legacy concept--Justice Society of America is about legacies almost exclusively--you'll know they're about anything but keeping things fresh and forward-looking. They're the most nostalgia-obsessed, most past-fixated comics in their entire stable. As Douglas himself says, in reality "legacies" are about copyright service as much as anything else. So why not bring back the classic dudes and dudettes if you've got the chance?
* If you followed all the stuff I wrote about Siege's sales levels on Robot 6, you might wanna check out Joe Quesada's take on the topic in this Robot 6 interview with Kiel Phegley. One angle he introduces that I find interesting is that the company has a variety of smaller but still high-profile series and mini-events going on that perhaps diverted some sales away from the main event. I'm not sure how convinced I am, but it is true that over at DC you're really only talking about Blackest Night and Batman and Robin.
I don't think I've ever in my life been as shocked by a book as I was by what I read in book three of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Storm of Swords, last night. Maybe by the end of part two of Nineteen Eighty-Four, possibly by "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" in Watchmen, but I'm not sure. Seriously, I was so stunned that even though it was way past my bed time, I decided I had to keep plowing through the book to get to the next section that dealt with that segment of the storyline--but then stopped when I realized I wasn't even actually reading the chapters, just letting the words pass through my eyes until I got where I wanted to get to. I had to put the book down. Then I had a hard time sleeping, I was so flabbergasted. I mean, for pete's sake, I'm up at 7:16am on a Saturday blogging about it. Wow. Folks, you need to read this series. How I'm going to be able to wait until 2025 or whenever Martin will finish the final book is completely beyond me.
(Just a request for commenters who've read books three and four in their entirety: Please don't hint at any coming developments for me! I want to go in as blithely unsuspecting as I was here. "You ain't seen nothin' yet" is acceptable.)
* WonderCon announcement #1: More All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder! Only now it will shrewdly be called Dark Knight: Boy Wonder. I hope it still sells great and baffles and enrages even more people.
* WonderCon announcement #2: Greg Rucka flounces from DC and Batwoman. Did he jump or was he pushed, or as he is insisting, did he simply choose to go where his muse was taking him? I've seen a lot of people saying "he just wanted to tell creator-owned stories again because that's what was getting him fired up," and that's largely true, I assume. But at the same time, he's saying he had a planned wrap-up to his Batwoman material that now he's not sure when if ever it'll get done. If it's all about telling the stories he wants to tell, well, that's a story he wants to tell, right? You'd think he could wait another six months. Anyway, I hope he does get to do that Batwoman story eventually, and I'll check out whatever he does with J.H. Williams III on his own as well.
* WonderCon announcement #3: Tom Spurgeon's epic con report does more con reporting by breakfast than most people's con reports do all week.
* Big ups to Tom Spurgeon's thoughtful Best Comics of 2009 list. He's worth reading on The Photographer and Cockbone alone.
I can't remember the last movie I went to see in the theater with expectations as low as those I had for Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans. It's not even that I had fond memories of the apparently cheesy-but-fun-if-you-were-a-kid-at-the-time original and its Ray Harryhausen special effects (so if you were dreading my impersonation of Harry Knowles explaining how this raped the unforgettable afternoon he spent in the theater with Father Geek, don't sweat it). When all I had to go by were the trailers and commercials, I was actually pretty excited. Lord of the Rings meets 300? Sure, I'll eat it.
Then I got wind of the hideous 3D transfer, and the supposedly turgid and stupid movie underneath, and nearly got spooked off. But I've got a buddy I wanted to see who likes seeing big dumb shit on the big screen even more than I do, so off I went. By this point, my theory, and my solace, was that having eschewed the bogus 3D version and with expectations resting somewhere in the underworld, I might actually enjoy the thing. Relatively speaking.
And I suppose...I did? I mean, I didn't wanna walk out or anything. I don't even think I got bored. But I want to assure you that if you've ever seen a fantastical genre action movie, and I mean ever, there is no need for you to see Clash of the Titans. You've seen it allllllllll before, over and over.
Indeed, Clash is counting on you having done so. It relies on a kind of popcorn-movie shorthand to convey key plot elements, attach you to its characters, intimidate you at its low points and rally you at its high points. It's so ersatz it's almost mind bloggling. Aside from the fond memories you have of the Fellowship of the Ring or the Colonial Marines or whoever the hell else, there is no reason for you to care about any of the film's anonymous, uninteresting...I wanna say "characters" here but I have to put it in sneer quotes. Nothing that the green young rookie warriors or the grizzled old veterans or the crazy ethnic tagalongs do or say rises above stock poses and cliches you've seen and heard a million times before. The casting department scored a bit with some guy named Draco or Drago or something to that effect simply because he's played by an older, whiter, more unintelligble doppelganger of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but beyond that? Ciphers to a man. And I'm including Sam Worthington, who in the course of his three SFF tentpole films has established himself as the most bizarrely uncharismatic action superstar since--hey, I'm drawing a blank, so maybe he takes the taco! Gemma Arterton distinguishes herself as Io by being extraordinarily attractive, something that (say) Old Veteran Who Makes Quips In The Face Of Danger doesn't have going for him, but that's some faint praise right there.
Now, I'll say this for Clash: Almost anything creature-related is surprisingly well done. Given how overly fluid, artificial, and biologically unconvincing CGI creatures can look--cf. Avatar--it takes some real doing to, say, light giant marauding scorpions so that the desert haze is properly reflected off their carapaces, or convincingly depict the way the heft of a giant snake-woman's tail drags her dying body off a ledge. I was impressed that Clash pulled it off and found myself looking forward to each, well, clash. True, Medusa herself was kind of unimaginative and the Hades bat-demon things were never on screen long enough to get a good look at, but the witches and Djinns or whatever they were were delightfully creepy and gross, grand nightmare fodder for little kids. I even preferred the eye-in-hand witch things to the Pan's Labyrinth critter they ripped the look off from.
But it was pretty much all one step forward, two steps back. For each rock-solid monster there was an embarrassingly obvious greenscreen shot--is it really that hard to make people standing around on a moving ship or animal blend in with the background? The battle sequences were generally well put together, a series of intelligible beats that made use of the space in which they took place and had physical consequences that could be readily understood--again, contrast with Avatar. But within those sequences, individual one-on-one fights were a hastily crosscut blur a la Batman Begins. As my friend put it, it was like they didn't bother to choreograph, they just shot a bunch of people swinging swords in different directions and put it together in post. This works fine when you're Peter Jackson and Weta and you've run out of time to do the warg sequence in The Two Towers, so you wing it, and even though it's the least meticulously constructed fight in the whole trilogy, it thereby stands out as a quick, nasty, down-and-dirty tussle. This doesn't work at all if it's your whole movie, and you've really only got a total of three battles to work with. And seriously--three monsters, one of which was basically just the Cave Troll grown to Godzilla size and slapped with some Watcher-in-the-Water tentacles and Cloverfield appendages? I'm glad they kept the movie short by the increasingly overblown standards of today's self-important popcorn flicks, but with so little actually happening, it didn't feel like much of an adventure.
If you've read my blog for a long time, you know I always say that plot holes can be forgiven if the stuff that surrounds those plot holes is compelling enough. But a few impressively done scorpions does not a movie make, and thus I just sat there shaking my head at the whoppers in this thing. How did the people of Argos find out Perseus was a demigod? Why does Zeus agree to punish humanity for its hubris (a word never used!) but then constantly attempt to help Perseus stop the plot he himself set in motion? Isn't the hilarious religious zealot figure, who looks like he came straight from an Oberline hackey-sack circle, completely reasonable in his desire to sacrifice one person in lieu of the tens of thousands who would die if the gods carry out their threat to wipe out Argos--to say nothing of the dozen who actually do die on Perseus's absurd quest, or the hundreds who actually do die when the Kraken attacks, or even the dozens who die after Perseus defeats the Kraken by turning it to a stone statue so fragile that it collapses, raining concrete death upon the citizens he supposedly just saved? Why should we care about Perseus rescuing a character we've barely met and have no reason to care about any more than all the cannon fodder who've been sacrificed while the important people work out their daddy issues? Are we supposed to cheer for the return of those two ethnic hunter guys whose names we don't even know and who participated in a grand total of one battle? Why didn't the Argossians just, you know, leave Argos before the clearly articulated deadline for destruction arrived? Why cast a real actor as Poseidon only to give him one line and--this part I stress--not even make him the person who releases the Kraken? Was I the only person who got the giggles when watching Liam Neeson as Zeus argue with Ralph Fiennes as Hades because they were both in Schindler's List?
Look, I care about action and violence and monsters onscreen as much as pretty much anyone I know. I'm always happy to see cool stuff like the scorpions or the Kraken or whatever, they go into the old fantasy memory bank to be drawn from at a later date. I got my money's worth in that regard. But I could have walked over to the office copy machine and photocopied the cover of The Return of the King, put the page back in the paper tray, then photocopied the cover of 300 on top of that and called it a day.
* Well, how about that: On the list of cartoonists I expected to participate in Robert Goodin's Covered blog, John Byrne was nowhere to be found. My mistake!
* I guess watching this video for Kelis's shamelessly button-pushing dance song "Acapella" is what watching a Fischerspooner video would be like if I were extremely attracted to Casey Spooner. (Via Tom Ewing.)
* Why I put off listening to this for this long I have no idea, but I am pretty much floored by the excellence of Brad Smith's MOON8, a cover album of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon done in the style of an 8-bit video game soundtrack. Think of how good you think this will be--it's that good. Since I've pretty much been mainlining this album and Super Mario games for the past year or so, this is some serious two-great-tastes shit for me. To be semi-serious for a sec, it's also a fascinating combination of the nostalgic flavors: The video games of your childhood combined with the music of your adolescence (or whenever) which itself was likely the music of your parents' adolescence (or whenever)...but screw being serious, it's 8-bit "Us and Them"! (Via Topless Robot.)
* While you listen, be sure to pop in for one last look at last week's Lost thoughts thread--and I'll see you tonight for this week's!
S.H.I.E.L.D. #1
Jonathan Hickman, writer/artist
Dustin Weaver, artist
Marvel, April 2010
36 story pages
$3.99
Supremely confident superhero comics-making from Jonathan Hickman here. In fact I'd say there hasn't been a debut issue this sure of itself, this willing simply to throw its audience headlong into what the writer has cooked up, since the Nu-Marvel golden age of Morrison & Quitely's New X-Men, Bendis & Maleev's Daredevil, and Milligan & Allred's X-Force. Who knows where it'll all end up, who knows if it'll hold up or make sense or not be really stupid or something. But within the context of these 34 pages of comics and two pages of Hickman designiness, I found it extraordinarily invigorating.
S.H.I.E.L.D. purports to tell the secret history of a Marvel Universe (I'm not comfortable using the definite article for reasons that will become apparent), in which a blend of fantistorical figures like the Pharaoh Imhotep and actual real-world Great Men like da Vinci and Galileo have banded together over the centuries in an ancient secret society called the Shield (I'm not comfortable using the acronym for reasons that are a little nebulous at this point). The Shield has quietly protect the world from assorted apocalyptic threats familiar to us from Marvel's outer-space material, including Galactus, a Celestial, the Brood, and (I think) the Phoenix. You are perhaps at this point tuning out: Secret histories and secret societies and super-awesome science heroes who protect us both from threats and knowledge of those threats are obviously a pretty shopworn concept at this point, and the influence of Hickman's mad-idea-mongering predecessors Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis is unmistakable.
But it's not the size of the boat, it's the motion of the ocean, and Hickman and artist Dustin Weaver keep things moving at breakneck speed. You get a grand total of one page to ease into the action, with main character Leonid slowly and silently walking toward the viewer, and then BOOM, he's whisked off by a pair of suited agents in a sweet '50s car, he's revealing that his body is made of stars or something, he's flown to Rome and shown a gigantic underground city--by page four. Most comics today might get that far by issue four. I'm not one to complain about decompression, or at least I didn't used to be, but obviously the technique has gotten so common as to become predictable; most anyone who's read enough superhero comics could write a new series' first story arc in their sleep, knowing exactly where each beat would fall. With Kirkman and S.H.I.E.L.D., I'm kept dancing to a different beat, one where world-ending threats are introduced and thwarted in the space of two to three pages, only for a jump of centuries to bring us to the next one; where a character learns his great destiny and then a three year lacuna reveals him stuck in place, bored and staring at the ceiling; where villains are introduced for the very first time anywhere as if we have the same lengthy history with them that the characters do; where names of great import to Marvel fans are dropped in, precisely calibrated to do that whole "everything you thought you knew was wrong" thing; where Leonardo da Vinci flies into the sun, All-Star Superman-style. In my favorite panel, a council of elders just starts rattling off omgcrazy terminology like they're reading the specials at the Cheesecake Factory: "The Greater Science." "The Quiet Math." "The Silent Truth." "The Hidden Arts." "The Secret Alchemy." Rat-a-tat-tat!
I know he's being singled out for a lot of praise, but I think Weaver's the weak link here, to an extent. He's doing great things with the designs of the Shield's unique armor and architecture, in a fashion that reminds me of similarly impressive filigrees by the likes of Steve McNiven and Mike Choi. But his characters sit awkwardly among the splendor: Their scale is off at times, and but for a blink-and-you'll-miss it caption and school bus it's impossible to tell that this is a period piece and that Leonid's in high school at the oldest. I'd love to see as much attention paid to the mundane aspects of establishing the story's world as the mind-blowing ones. But this is sort of small beer. Call it supercompression, call it simply a return to the no-nonsense pacing of the Golden and Silver Age superhero origin stories, but S.H.I.E.L.D. comes across as a book that knows what it wants to do and can't wait to show you. It's a delightful feeling.
* I like Desmond; I've never loved Desmond. Despite a consistently warm and compelling performance from Henry Ian Cusick, one of the seemingly countless casting coups that I think really saved the show's bacon once things started getting truly baroque, Desmond's the kind of character I'd call "Internet-beloved" and mean it as a sneer, I'm afraid. He strikes me as what people who hate Jack wanted Jack to be: A hero. Desmond will never let anyone down, which is what makes him much less interesting to me than Jack. I'm glad he's in love, but that doesn't really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with umpteen million star-crossed couples; I'm glad he can time-travel and dimension-shift with greater ease than the rest of the cast, but that also doesn't really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with smoke monsters and psychic children and immortals and people who see dead people. I liked Desmond best in Season Two, when he was the crazy Scotsman in the Hatch injecting himself with drugs, listening to Mama Cass, and trying and failing to escape the Island where he'd lived a hallucinatory hermetic life as the only thing keeping the world from ending.
* So I don't dread Desmond episodes; I dread the aftermath of Desmond episodes. I'm just not fully on board with the rapturous reception all his episodes get--at least two of them are usually held up as potential "Best. Episode. EVER"s, and I'm not feeling it. My quick, dismissive post last night was just an attempt to dodge the deluge of "OMG!!!!"s I knew was coming; I couldn't even close my computer down fast enough to avoid a few, and Todd VanDerWerff's review is probably the apotheosis of the form: "If you did not like "Happily Ever After," then I'm pretty sure we can't be Internet friends anymore." Rats!
* But, you know, I did like the episode. It was fine. In the immortal words of History of the World Part I: "Nice. Nice. Not thrilling...but nice."
* Aside from my general lack of "DESMOND FTW" vibes, my biggest problem with it--and this is what I was getting at with that one-line post--is that it's pretty much exactly what I expected. Veteran time-jumper Desmond is the first to figure out that the flashsideways timeline is a bogus existence created by (according to Daniel) the detonation of the nuclear bomb by the Dharma Bums, and now he's going to try to persuade the castaways to abandon their new, fake lives for the old one. Like, duh, right?
* Admittedly, that first moment when Charlie opens his eyes underwater and smilingly puts his hand on the glass sent a little shockwave for me. It's one of the show's most memorable images. But of course, it's an image from another, earlier episode. Whatever revelatory juice we were supposed to get from the discovery that these aren't the lives the characters are supposed to be leading was undercut, for me at least, by the fact that that was my assumption from the jump.
* So, unlike the "I want ANSWERS" crowd VanDerWerff rightly rails against in his review, I was perfectly satisfied with the volume of answers we got in this episode. It seemed like a lot to me. Moreover, anytime Lost does one of its big super-science experiments--like throwing some switches and forcing Desmond to quantum leap through the stargate in arguably the cheesiest effects sequence the show's done so far--I feel like I am getting an "answer" even if you end up just having to shrug your shoulders and roll with pseudoscientificity of it all.
* I also had no beef with spending all that time in the flashsideways universe rather than on the Island. Like I always say, I like these characters, and since the core of who they all are has remained consistent from the main universe to the new one, I never feel, as apparently many people do, that these flashsideways sequences are a waste of time we could be spending on the "real" characters and the answers they seek. These are the real characters too, as far as I'm concerned.
* Specifically, I was thrilled to see Desmond receive not just the approval, but the friendship, of Charles Widmore. I'm a sucker for when grown men are kind and cooperative to each other in fiction, it really hits my buttons, and seeing them smile at each other and warmly hug, their real-reality animosity vaporized, was a treat.
* So too was the part when he got really angry at Desmond for losing Charlie: I thought we were gonna see the old, awful Widmore come out, but his ultimate punishment was just making Desmond tell his wife himself. Chuckle!
* I also really enjoyed the return of Charlie Pace. Is it just me, or has Dominic Monaghan grown as an actor considerably since the start of the show? I find him really convincingly dissolute and puckish; if he were older I could see him going toe to toe with the reigning Manchester junkie-rockstar champ Shaun Ryder. (PS: "You All Everybody" needs to be transported back to about 1994 and released as a single.) It warms the cockles of my heart to see a drugged-up rock star break on through to the other side for real, you know?
* I also got a big kick out of the return of George Minkowski. Poor Fisher Stevens: Everyone was so excited to see him join the cast, but he stuck around for all of an episode before biting it. (Zoe Bell too!) He was so unctuous here he made me uncomfortable through the television screen. Well done!
* Some guy on Twitter spoiled the return of Daniel Faraday for me, so I was kind of left flat by that. (If you're wondering how any of these return appearances could surprise me to begin with given that they're all in the opening credits, I cover up the lower third of the screen until the "Guest Starring" section is finished in order to avoid getting spoiled by the show's own credits.) I mean, I like Jeremy Davies fine in that role, and I liked seeing how he accessed those same mannerisms through the filter of a brilliant musician who's basically happy rather than a brilliant scientist who's basically miserable. I just wasn't bowled over by it, is all.
* Eloise is always fun, isn't she? A Harry Potter harridan. Perhaps the one aspect of this episode's mythology advancement that did take me by surprise was that she's apparently a timecop in this reality as well. I thought the show was clever to present her as this intimidating but ultimately kind lady, only to flip a switch the second she hears Desmond nosing around about something that might trigger his memories of the original reality--boom! out comes the hardass.
* Finally, just because I'm not head-over-heels for Desmond doesn't mean I wasn't glad that he managed to score a date with Penny despite an entire reality built on the premise that they'd never met. If I were Penny I would have been blowing my rape whistle and spraying him with mace the whole time, but whatever, good for those two crazy kids.
* So yeah, like VanDerWerff and unlike the ANSWERS!!!!1!! crowd, I had no problem with the flashsideways reality dominating the show, and enjoyed a lot of it. It's just that at long last, this was a case of the show zigging exactly where I expected it to zig, zagging where I expected it to zag. It's a bummer is all.
* Over on the Island: This is kind of picayune, but I think casting that dimpy dude from cereal commercials or whatever as one of Widmore's scientists was the first big casting mistake I can remember the show making in a long time. I'm just not scared of or impressed by a guy who looks like a chipmunk. Casting Debbie from Singles as Dark Tina Fey is fine, though.
* After all these years, Sayid actually is a badass! Sure, it took the Lost equivalent of demonic possession for him to successfully infiltrate anything other than Shannon's vagina, but give the guy a hand.
* A friend of mine was all psyched up after the episode, saying that it was the show declaring "Alright, it's on"--but I don't see it, certainly not any moreso than all the episodes where Jacob or Fake Locke revealed their motives and goals. I mean, Desmond has his quantum leap and returns all beatific and doo; over in the flashsideways timeline it's pretty clear what he's up to, but on the Island? First he's joining the Get-Along Gang with Widmore, then he's just as pleased to wander off with Sayid after Sayid ices the two Widmorians and (in what I assume was a pretty bad move, aka classic Sayid) lets Zoe run away. That's intriguing, certainly, but it's far from "a-ha! Now we know what the endgame will be."
* So there you have it. My little one-liner was more a response to the response to the episode than to the episode itself, which I liked fine. I'm sorry about that; that's lame behavior and it's not the kind of thing I'm glad to have done. But like I always say, I'm always trying to find a way to approach the art I like that maximizes my enjoyment, and kicking against the pricks late last night wasn't that way. Turns out gettin' a good night's sleep and then writing about the episode this morning was, so thank you for your patience!
* Matt's almost always worth reading when he's writing about comics-related issues at length, and over the past day or so he's served up a couple of doozies. First, here he is on comics and the iPad. Among many other things he, like many other folks I've read, take Joe Quesada to task over his claim that the increased accessibility of digital comics via Marvel's iPad app will drive more people to comic stores. To me it's pretty clear that Quesada's saying this because he has to in order to placate his understandably nervous retailers. Direct Market retailers are vital to comics, don't get me wrong, and I want them to weather the storm. But with the exceptions we all know and love, they are a reactionary group at the best of times, and I'm sure this vocal constituency has equally strong advocates within Marvel. They have to be the only thing that's kept Marvel and the rest of the comics companies from jumping into the digital world with the same totality as, say, music companies and iTunes. He's gotta make the right noises.
* And here's Matt on Greg Rucka's departure from DC and Batwoman. I'm positive Rucka's being honest when he says he's fired up and ready to go vis a vis getting back into creator-owned work again, and that's awesome. But as Matt puts it:
Looking at this, it's clear that Batwoman was his baby (if you'll pardon the double entendre) and for him to simply walk away, drama or no drama, is not a small deal (even if [he's] insisting that it’s not a big one).
*Anyway, over at Comics Alliance you can read the entire transcript of Rucka's WonderCon panel, where this bomb was dropped, to get it straight from the horse's mouth.
* Speaking of conventions, it seems pretty clear that the plan behind Wizard's relentless con expansion is to piggyback off the goodwill and audience interest generated by larger, better comic cons (the rebranding from "Wizard World" to "Comic Con" wasn't a coincidence), and then to piggyback again off the press generated by those shows among reporters who don't know any better (this LA Times article being a case in point), all through a series of local con-promoter proxies at minimal cost to Wizard proper. You, dedicated comics fans, are not the target, unless you're in a market that doesn't have recourse to those other shows, in which case the hope is that you'll grin and bear it.
* Speaking of THND, founder emeritus Matt Zoller Seitz serves up another of his trademark video essays, this one a 25-minute pondering of Dennis Hopper. Click the link for Seitz's introduction, then take a little time to watch the video. What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say--he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bull-SHIT, man!
* Your quote of the day:
We are born into structures of law and tradition which were invented by men who were dead long before we were born. All our lives, we struggle against their vast, ubiquitous and posthumous powers.
Isaac Moylan and I will be selling copies of our David Bowie bio-comic The Side Effects of the Cocaine at the Partyka table at this weekend's MoCCA Festival. And I will generally be prowling around, Bowie sketchbook in tow. If you see me, please say hello!
* Congratulations to this year's Eisner nominees, apparently selected by pulling names out of a hat. (No offense to the worthy ones--you know who they are.)
Spider-Man: Fever #1
Brendan McCarthy, writer/artist
Marvel, April 2009
21 story pages
$2.99
(UPDATE: Now with fewer hideous mixed metaphors)
I went into Spider-Man: Fever with absolutely no brief with Brendan McCarthy, not even his Solo issue a few years back. All I knew is I liked the looks of the preview images floating around the Internet--I mean, I would--and wanted to see more. See more I did: McCarthy's scribbled psychedelia, powerfully augmented by his and Steve Cook's woozy glowy neon colors is a thing of gooey beauty. He's even calling the style "glo-fi," much to my delight!
Would that the surrounding comic were equally delightful, but it's a pretty perfunctory rehash of Bronze Age rehashes of Silver Age storytelling. An avalanche of knowingly stiff dialogue, which turns out to be as numbing as the unknowing variety, crushes whatever action hasn't already been flattened by the surprisingly inert physicality McCarthy cooks up for Steve Ditko mainstays Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. (Nice-looking Vulture, though.) There's even some embarrassingly cringeworthy African-American dialect, for that true late-'70s feel. I'm as happy as anyone to have a Spider-Man comic featuring a mystical poetry-reciting dog-god named Pugly, but when it comes to reading the thing instead of just looking at it, turns out I oughtn't have gone beyond those preview images for the glo-fi thrill I wanted.
* Isaac Moylan has a blog! At the link you'll find a page from his strange, NSFW superhero-ish comic.
* I'll tell you what: If this weren't MoCCA weekend, I'd be sorely tempted to hoof it northward for the Boston Comic Con. Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Michael Golden, Mike Mignola, Eric Powell, Joe Quinones, Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Starlin, Cameron Stewart, Ben Templesmith, and J.H. Williams III could put a real hurting on my Bowie sketchbook.
* Tom Spurgeon has updated his post on the 2010 Eisner nominees with his thoughts on them. Since it perhaps behooves me to elaborate on what I thought rather than chiming in with a douchey one-liner, I'll say this: You probably don't need me to tell you how frustrating I find the year-to-year prominence of adequate-to-good front-of-Previews titles versus the actual best comics of the year. That's the same complaint everyone has about every award show every year--well, the Oscars at least, and the Emmys to an extent; no one's cared about the Grammys since at least as long ago as Metallica and Guns n' Roses lost to Jethro Tull.
But I think what's uniquely flummoxing about this year's nominees is that it's pretty easy for all of us to put together a list of Eisner-bait DC/Marvel/Dark Horse books from the year that was, based on the typical Eisner nomination pattern. A few squeaked in there--J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart got individual nods for their Detective Comics stuff, there's the usual slew of Vertigo books and big-name artists who mostly do covers rather than interiors, The Walking Dead made it in there, Ed Brubaker appears to have joined the "what he does gets nominated" pantheon, etc. But so many of the obvious "Eisner books"--and regardless of their actual merits I think Batman and Robin, Wednesday Comics, Ex Machina, Strange Tales, Invincible Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror are very much "Eisner books"--were passed over in favor of comics regarded as junk even by junk fans, or as popcorn fare at best. It sort of rips the band-aid off of how arbitrary the process is even at the best of times, how non-rigorous the standards being applied are.
Visit the Partyka table at MoCCA tomorrow--underneath the big clock on the back wall opposite the entrance, right across the table from Sparkplug--for not one, not two, but THREE Sean T. Collins minicomics:
SURPRISE ADDITION! HOT OFF THE PRESS! It's CAGE VARIATIONS VOL. 1, three interlocking tales of unspeakable depravity and unshakeable despair, featuring the art of Matt Rota!
This ain't rock 'n' roll, this is THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THE COCAINE--it's David Bowie drug abuse, occult imagery, and Nazi dilettantism as you like it, featuring the art of Isaac Moylan!
And of course the classic MURDER, an anthology of space-age adventure, suburban ennui, and serial killing featuring the art of Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, and Josiah Leighton!
Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat is now Attentiondeficitdisorderly. I figured I'd make it easier for the publishers of the world to use quotes from my reviews as back-cover blurbs--"Attentiondeficitdisorderly" has a nice pithy ring to it, while "Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat" sounds like something someone would say during an Ambien hallucination.
Coverage of Lost, Tom Neely, and Clive Barker will continue as scheduled. Thank you!
* My MoCCA report is up at Robot 6. I'd gotten really excited for this show for no discernible reason--it was quite aside from selling my own comics there, honestly--and though I know others might have had different expectations and results, I personally was not disappointed. I had a lovely time.
* Frank Santoro found the show nice, nice, not thrilling, but nice.
* My collaborator Isaac Moylan broke it down in terms of the CCS style vs. Fort Thunder, with extra observations on the Scandinavians and the "new action"eers. (Isaac, "the New Action" was a Bill Kartalopoulos coinage.)
* My chum TJ Dietsch approaches the show from the valuable perspective of a genre-comics reader using the festival as an excuse to dip his toes into the wilder and woolier material.
* Tom Spurgeon had a good post rounding up reaction from afar.
* Strange Tales 2 is a go! Hornschemeier, Gurewitch, Brown, Cloonan, Kupperman, Santoro, presumably many more, all of whom I will likely interview.
* Alright, so what did we have in this episode. We had cameos from Michael and, extensively, from Libby. These are the kinds of cameos that I personally really love on this show--not Arzt or whoever, not even various Others types, but the characters who really mattered back in Seasons One and Two, before (I think) the game plan for the remainder of the series was fully firmed up. It's important to me to feel like those characters and their plights matter as much in the world of the show as they mattered to me as a viewer, you know?
* And even beyond that, I was always awfully fond of Michael, whose downfall was one of the first signs we got, along perhaps with Locke's devolution from Jungle Wolverine to neurotic button-pusher, that the show was willing to really sully its heroes, however temporarily.
* I also liked Libby. We've still got a few more feet of Libby mystery to dig through, of course--we have no idea why she was in the mental hospital in the "real" universe, or whether it was really just coincidence that she bumped into Desmond and gave him a boat. I always assumed she was one of Widmore's agents, like Abbadon or perhaps Mrs. Hawking. But this gave us some cross-dimensional closure on her and Hurley's truncated love affair, which was one of the show's least convincing and therefore somehow most convincing romances. And Cynthia Watros, who should wear sundresses as often as possible, gave a bedraggled, barely-keeping-it-together performance that was touchingly optimistic despite it all. I really wanted things to work out for her here, you know? I'm glad they did, more or less.
* So what else did we have? We had Ilana blowing the fuck up! Hahahaha! I can't believe they went to the "old dynamite from the Black Rock blowing someone the fuck up unexpectedly" well once again, and that it worked as well as it did. My jaw dropped like a cartoon character's. Again, I assume we'll get a little more detail on Ilana at some point, but Ben's assessment seemed accurate: The Island was done with her. I still wonder if "the Island" is a separate entity, in terms of exerting influence on what happens, from Jacob and the Man in Black, but I take his point. Anyway, good, I wasn't much of an Ilana fan, and I think giving her this kind of ending gives her more oomph than she otherwise had.
* We had a full-fledged, no messing around, seriously guys on the Internet we're making this as clear as we possibly can ANSWER! The whispers are dead people stuck on the Island. So it turns out is really is purgatory, for some people at least. Let me know when Lostpedia is finished going through all the whispers' appearances and figures out who was probably whispering in each one and why. This explanation works fine for me, if you were wondering, though I imagine "ghosts" will be unacceptable to the LOST IS SERIOUS BIZNESS crowd.
* We had Fake Locke tossing Desmond down a well! Hahahahaha! Poor guy. Somehow I think things will work out for him anyway. I know this wasn't the same well Locke went down couple seasons ago, but given all the tunnels and passageways under the Island, I wonder if Desmond can turn the donkey wheel without being teleported?
* We had Ultimate Richard/Ben/Miles team-up! Can't wait for the walking-through-the-jungle banter that combo will serve up.
* Crap, I feel like I'm missing some more stuff I was really excited about! Dammit.
* No bad guy in Hurley's flashsideways, did you notice? Unless you count Chang/Candle/Halliwax.
* Jack's resignation of the presidency went down a little more smoothly than I'd worried it would with me. I don't wanna see him turn into the happy wanderer, that's my concern about a Jack who can let go, but I'm glad they're directly addressing that failure has consequences, and his change of behavior makes sense.
* The owner of a fried chicken fast-food chain sponsoring the humane society? Yeah, right.
* Desmond's a GQMF in addition to being a timecop. It was fun watching him traipse around the flashsideways, all blithely bringing people to consciousness and shit--but it was even more fun watching that get flipped on its head when he ran over a man in a wheelchair. He's being positively Jacobian in his serene weirdness in both worlds.
* Haha, I take a contrarian's pleasure in watching Desmond a) get tossed down a well, and b) run over a cripple.
* Dr. Linus on perv patrol. Love it.
* I found the swagger of Fake Locke and the silence of Dark Sayid good and sinister in this episode. I particularly like how Sayid's now all but an extension of Fake Locke, answering only to him, even speaking only to him.
* Basically, what I want to communicate is that a lot happened in this episode! It was all over the place, fast and furious, and at nearly every pre-commercial cliffhanger, since I was watching it via TiVo and fastforwarding through the commercials, I worried that was the end of the show, since they'd packed so much in. They even added an "extra" flashsideways segment, if you will. Last week I expressed skepticism that the Desmond episode meant we'd arrived at the "okay, it's on now" segment of the season, but I stand corrected, apparently! Edge of your seat stuff.
* Tom Spurgeon laments the dawn of the $3.99 For Monthly Comics Age. Personally I thought the $2.99 price point was ridiculous, too. A 22-page sliver of a story with virtually zero re-read value on its own? No thanks. As I told Geoff Grogan at MoCCA, a choice between dropping four bones on some random Avengers issue or dropping it on something like Pood is no choice at all. I can't even get into the spirit of buying stuff from Frank Santoro's lonboxes, much as I tell myself I'll give it a shot virtually every time I go to a show. I can't get past "I'm not getting a whole thing, I'm just getting a part of a thing."
* I'd forgotten to keep track since you can't get a separate RSS feed for it, but Zak Smith's I Hit It With My Axe is up to its fifth episode. Turns out it really is fun to watch a bunch of weirdo friends jackass around playing D&D in efficiently edited installments--having briefly spent time in such a group of weirdo friends jackassing around, albeit not an efficiently edited one, I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise.
* Tom Spurgeon smacks around that superhero panel featuring Jaime Hernandez, Frank Miller, Dean Haspiel, Paul Pope, and Kyle Baker. I think there were a few problems here: First, you had a few different "one of these things is not like the other" panelists in there, depending on which direction you wanna go in; second of all that's too many people on a panel for cartoonists of most of their magnitude, all of whom could have easily held down a panel on their own--poor Xaime couldn't get a word in edgewise; and thirdly, I'd rather hear those particular cartoonists talk about anything but superheroes, and I really like superheroes!
* Rob Clough's MoCCA con report is indeed as good as Tom says, comprehensive in scope and laser-focused in its observations and recommendations. The show can and should improve.
* Secret Acres was really unhappy with MoCCA this year. Leon and Barry voice a complaint I've also heard from a prominent retailer who attended the show: Individual artists have basically been priced out of tables entirely. That shouldn't happen for all the obvious reasons, but after seeing all the empty space at this year's show, it seems it also shouldn't happen for revenue's sake. The SA guys suggest a sliding scale for table rates, free admission, and a better system for awarding choice locations to earlier purchasers. Plus, they've placed an open call for minicomics submissions they can host at their own table next year.
* I'm flat-out amazed by the brutaldrubbings Gareb Shamus's Wizard World comic cons, specifically its Chicago show, are receiving in the local press on the eve of Reed's rival C2E2 show this weekend -- and Wizard's own Anaheim Comic Con, debuting this weekend as well. I've said for a while now that given the stigma attached to Wizard within the industry (especially after the showdown with Reed began), Shamus's strategy, to the extent one can be discerned, was to first to glom off the positive public awareness of the phrase "Comic Con" (taking a page from Reed's playbook in fact), and then to take advantage of the credulity and ignorance of local and mainstream coverage of comics to land fluff pieces during all his shows. But it turns out that model couldn't withstand the very first Wizard/Reed head-to-head match-up. There's nothing so vapidly fluffy you can't land it safely into the New York Times' comics coverage, so who knows, but that aside, this can't augur well for the Big Apple/NYCC showdown this fall. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* My pal TJ Dietsch's account of being seduced by Kevin Huizenga's Ganges, one of the first alternative comics he ever read, is fascinating to me. That's really strong material and I'd imagine it could have this effect on a lot of people. Also, I'm glad to hear someone else say that the first issue is the least impressive of the three.
* Todd VanDerWerff's weekly Lost round-up makes me glad I stopped reading Alan Sepinwall's coverage of the show a few years back when it became apparent he was waiting to not be entertained, and makes me nervous that something I really want to happen isn't going to happen.
* Rest in peace, Peter Steele. I can't pretend to have been a huge Type O Negative fan, but the deluxe edition of Bloody Kisses is really something special--gigantic songs drenched in doomed glamour and leavened with just enough tongue-in-cheek humor to let you know Pete and the gang were in on the joke. Just ask Trent Reznor, whose threetweetson Pete's passing were exactly the kind of eulogy I was looking for. I mean, really--being a goth is funny! Steele got that, even as he got the power of all the sex'n'death'n'outcast stuff that made the lifestyle appealing in the first place. He knew it went hand in hand. That's why I love "Christian Woman" so much: It's a nine-minute, three-part epic about a religious woman masturbating to the crucified Jesus Christ on her wall, and they understand that this is both sad and pathetic and loathsome and touching and funny and angry and sexy and creepy all at once. I saw Type O at Ozzfest one year, and they were super-heavy and super-hilarious, ending the set with a joke as memorable as the songs. Godspeed doesn't seem to be the right word to use, but oh well.
* Sean on Dead Tree alert: I have a piece on Grant Morrison's Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne in the new issue of Maxim, featuring a lovely young lady with brown hair whose name eludes me on the cover. It's on page 34, I think. Woo!
* Speaking of Morrison, here he is being interviewed by Comics Alliance, io9, and MTV Splash Page, all on the topic of Batman. If I were the assistant principal at time-displaced Tom Spurgeon's middle school I would make him copy all these by hand for detention. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Diamond and the comics retailers it distributes comics to are talking about moving new comics day to Tuesday, bringing it in line with music, movies, and books. How about just getting in step with every single other form of media and not shipping everything a day late when there was a holiday the week before? That is the romper room-est thing about this romper-room industry.
* Yesterday I finished A Feast for Crows, the fourth and at this point latest book in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, which is being adapted on HBO as A Game of Thrones. Holy shit, you guys, these books. Anyway, I decided to put aside the prospect of hunting down and reading the three prequel novella's he's written and just dive right into the Song of Ice and Fire sections of the internet. This means I finally got to read his story about Jaime Lannister, aka the Kingslayer, fighting Cthulhu. Good golly miss molly. WARNING: The Ice and Fire-verse characters in the story are situated in-continuity, so the story's spoilery for all the way up through the third book in the series or so. That said, it's also awesome.
The Arrival
Shaun Tan, writer/artist
Arthur A. Levine, 2006
128 pages, hardcover
$19.99 Buy it from Amazon.com
(Before I begin the review, can you believe this book came out four years ago? I swear I thought I was a year at most behind this particular curve. But comics barrels headlong through its Golden Age and you have to run to keep up sometimes.)
Don't let the sepiatones fool you. This fine, captivating wordless graphic novel re-strange-ifies the immigrant experience, shaking it free of elementary-school field-trip/filmstrip nostalgia and making it something scary and wonderful again. Taking place in a fantastical, almost Expressionist city filled with incomprehensible writing, bizarre architecture, and creatures that look like they evolved in a world where Jim Woodring's Frank stories are the central creation myth, it powerfully conveys that traveling far from home, all alone, to a place you've never been before, where you know no one and don't speak the language and aren't even guaranteed a place to work or sleep, is extremely risky...but also worth the risk. I don't think it had occurred to me how weighed down by cliche such narratives have become until I read The Arrival, but with each of Tan's dreamlike or nightmarish twists on the pitfalls and miniature triumphs of his suit-wearing immigrant protagonist, I marveled anew both at his inventiveness, and at how effectively he burrows down through a million PBS documentaries to get to the core of emotion in each vignette.
Me being me, I was hit hardest by Tan's depictions of the things that caused each character to flee his or her native country: representing persecution as faceless giants in hazmat suits, sucking people up with enormous vacuum cleaners; representing ruinous war as happy men in conical gnome hats happily marching out of a city, their feet crossing ever more harsh landscapes, giving way to a tableau of skeletal remains, and culminating in just one of the me, badly wounded, returning to a city that's totally destroyed. But there's cute business too, like our protagonist's short, ill-fated stint putting up posters; and there's genuine joy in seeing him slowly form the makings of a new community of friends with his neighbors and co-workers. Tan's neo(magic)realist art is particularly good at the latter: He puts us in the place of the protagonist as his new friends directly address him, drawing us in with their gaze and gestures, as intimate as his massive splash pages and spreads are intimidating.
Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about what Tan does in The Arrival is that despite its provenance as a children's book, he keeps the action on the knife's edge, the danger of failure (or worse) radiating from our worried, harried hero at every turn. I really wondered whether things would work out for him or not. The effect is enveloping. I imagine this will make the eyeballs of little kids and parents who pick it up from the library melt out of their skulls, it's so lush and lovely and fully conceived an act of visual worldbuilding. Well worth a read, a flip-through, and a read again.
* Regarding the attendance figures, I'll say this: 1) I figure San Diego casts a long shadow over the other big shows. Given several years of widely derided Chicago cons, a new con in Chicago will probably have to wait a while before attracting some of what could be seen as its natural constituency back from Southern California.
* 2) The Con War storyline may be Reed's best friend, in that it's difficult to look worse than Wizard tends to. Simply releasing an honest attendance figure already puts them a step ahead of the game, and I figure there'll be plenty of "oh man this is so much better than Rosemont" buzz going around the city by this time next year.
* Beyond that, as Tom Spurgeon notes, it obviously crushed Wizard's concurrent Anaheim show in terms of fan and media buzz. But that's to be expected given the near-total lack of industry support for Wizard's shows following Gareb Shamus's decision to pit his Big Apple show head to head against Reed's New York Comic Con, and the much-rumored behind-the-scenes antics that followed that decision. Without the publishers playing ball, there's nothing to buzz about, after all.
* Beyond Heidi and Tom's aforelinked ruminations, my colleagues at Robot 6 have posted three catch-all round-up posts for Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.
* Announcements that caught my eye: Steve Rogers: Super-Soldier by Ed Brubaker and Dale Eaglesham; a street-level Marvel crossover miniseries called Shadowland; more Ultimate [Cryptic Noun] minis by Brian Michael Bendis; Powers going (arrrrgh) bimonthly; Jonathan Hickman saying that Secret Warriors has a natural end-point coming up before issue #30, making it almost a manga-model run; Casanova moving from Image to Marvel/Icon with new colors; maybe the strangest-sounding X-Men line relaunch ever.
* Ah, I thought I remembered Frank Miller saying Batman was out of his anti-terrorist graphic novel, but that the book itself was going ahead without Batman anyway--in fact, I thought that when he said at MoCCA that he wasn't doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore, he meant he was abandoning the whole idea. But it sounds like he's not, and like Xerxes, the 300 prequel, is proceeding apace. Good news.
* Now that I'm finally allowing myself to follow news about the production of A Game of Thrones on HBO, I'm pretty surprised to discover that one of the two female leads has been recast following the completion of the pilot, while the other is the subject of persistentrecasting rumors herself. Now, shit happens, even on great fantasy projects--Peter Jackson recast Aragorn after shooting started, after all. And supposedly HBO suits are still making all the right noises about the pilot being good. But it's weird.
* The comics Dave Kiersh has been posting on the New Bodega blog over the past week or so are like the perfect cross between his old, wistful stuff and his more recent teenspolitation-type things.
* It's weird that cryptozoology expert Loren Coleman reprinted this whole article on his own site--slightly less weird than the time he heavily implied that the reason the Destination Truth guy wasn't gonna do as many cryptozoology episodes of his series was so he could be a sex tourist in Asia, but still weird--but please don't let that put you off this very cool piece on, among other things, how escaped snakes and crocodiles from medieval menageries helped give rise to reports of dragons in England. It gets a little wild and wooly after that part, but the material on actual animals is delightful.
* The video for "Drunk Girls" by LCD Soundsytem looks like it was pulled from the Joker's Director's Series DVD. I feel like this is what unlucky henchmen have to deal with all the time. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)
* Finally, on Saturday the Missus and I went to see Eric Whitacre conduct a program of his work at Carnegie Hall. Christ, what beautiful music. He word-premiered a piece that moved me to tears based on its sheer loveliness alone; how often can you say that?
* Can comics be scary? Josh Simmons, Richard Sala, CRwM, Karswell, Kimberly Lindbergs, and myself attempt to answer the question, courtesy of Curt Purcell.
* Lost is on tonight. Why not take one last look at last week's Lost thoughts discussion before joining us again tonight?
* One of the all-time great MCs, Guru of Gang Starr, has died in what sounds like a deeply sad, John and Tom Fogerty-style state of estrangement from both his former creative partner DJ Premier and his own family. Tragic on any number of levels. Guru rapped like he was sitting on a high-backed armchair, calmly but firmly explaining the hard truth to you. Man, the internal rhymes in the first verse of "You Know My Steez" (bonus points for the THX-1138 recreation):
* Feels like the homestretch! If this is what all the episodes are like from here on out, we're in great shape. I think this was my favorite episode of the season so far.
* First of all, it was jam-packed, picking up directly from last episode and then just hitting us over and over again. And I don't just mean on the revelation front, as I'll explain. But first those revelations!
* We got a nice explicit ANSWER about the Smoke Monster impersonating Jack and Claire's dad, and that people need to be dead for him to impersonate them. From that you could infer that he also posed as Yemi, for example, while the Walt who appeared to Locke when he'd been shot and left in that burial pit by Ben must not have been the MIB at all. And I'm gonna go ahead and assume that the whole disappearing-bodies thing was just the MIB trying to throw people off the trail of what was really going on, to better persuade them that these really WERE their dead loved ones come back to life. Once the Ajira flight arrived, his endgame went into play, and he didn't need to maintain that deception anymore.
* This wasn't quite a "HEY LOOK AUDIENCE WE'RE GIVING YOU AN ANSWER WE REALLY COULDN'T BE ANY CLEARER" thing like what we've gotten about the Whispers and Christian, but Kate and Claire's conversation on the dock made it pretty clear that all the dire warnings about Claire needing to raise Aaron were really for Claire's benefit rather than Aaron's. A nice script-flip there. (Also, it gives me hope that similarly important-in-the-early-seasons questions regarding the other prominent child, Walt, will indeed be addressed. Hope springs eternal!)
* And we even got an explanation as to why the heck Sawyer let Kate escape from that elevator. Which was pretty much the theory I advanced back when we first learned Sawyer was a cop. Of course, there's a happy medium between "blowing your cover story by arresting a woman at the airport when you're supposed to be someplace else" and "helping a woman in handcuffs escape airport security," but okay, fine, whatevs.
* We also got the various flashsideways threads intertwining in dramatic fashion. It was kind of funny seeing how fast all the dominos fell toward one another all at once. Maybe a little too fast at times: Sawyer and Miles got to Sayid's house like half a minute after Sayid did! But the boom-boom-boom of Claire meeting Desmond meeting Ilana meeting Jack into Jack seeing Locke again was deliciously done. This oughta go a long way toward placating the "they're a waste of time!" crowd.
* But beyond the mythology signposts and Answers and serious forward movement, I thought this episode was chock full of strong moments between various pairs of characters. To wit:
* I thought the conversation in the well between Sayid and Desmond was beautifully done, emotionally desperate and draining.
* I loved Sawyer's confrontation with Jack on the boat--Sawyer's disbelief that this guy could be this stupid, and Jack's stubborn insistence that it's not stupid at all, plus an apology for Juliet's death that echoed Ben's various apologies for his transgressions over the years.
* Kate's confrontation with Claire was equally good, particularly the part where Kate basically shouted down Claire's protestations regarding Fake Locke, like "I've wanted to reunite you and your child for three years and you're gonna trust a smoke monster over me? FUCK that!"
* That opening powwow between Jack and Fake Locke recalled the heat of Jack's arguments with the real deal back in Seasons One and Two. And that Jin/Sun reunion put an "awww!" in my throat despite myself--plus, it was funny how they kept cutting to that long shot of them running toward one another with the sonic pylon right where they'd end up embracing.
* My favorite of all, though, was one in which the second person was absent--Sawyer crying while watching Jin and Sun's reunion because Juliet is dead.
* Even in the flashsideways, that was some fun business between Kate and Sawyer, I liked how Nadia had about ten seconds to process her devastation before Sayid had to run out the door, Claire's revelation to Jack worked...
* All these little micro-capsule payoffs of various character relationships. More like this, please!
* Bonus points for taking advantage of how unnerving Desmond running Locke over was to make his relentlessness toward Claire kind of disturbing. Creepy Desmond is creepy.
* Wow, put her in a suit and neaten up her hairstyle and suddenly I'm an Ilana fan after all! More evidence for my own personal Grand Unified Theory of Lost, which is that the women get hotter as they get cleaner but the men get hotter as they get dirtier?
* If that's the resolution to the "Sun can only speak Korean because she hit her head" storyline, well, that was a pretty superfluous storyline.
* "It's him!" I guess her near-death experience triggered a Revelation. Did she remember it when she came to in the hospital bed later on, I wonder?
* So who is it that was shooting at the castaways in the outrigger during last season? Obviously we were being teased by putting this season's model castaways on a boat, but my new operating theory is that it was Widmore's goons during some pending spacetime freakout.
* Why can't the MIB kill Desmond? Wait, I think I just answered my own question, didn't I--it's because the MIB can't kill Desmond, isn't it?
* I am not gonna feel the least bit bad anymore when Dark Tina Fey bites it.
* Admit it: You expected to see Juliet in that hospital, right?
Young Lions
Blaise Larmee, writer/artist
self-published, March 2010
96 pages
$10 Buy it from Blaise Larmee
Now here's an interesting combination: A fairly straightforward "aimless young smart people" graphic novella in the vein of Adrian Tomine or Ghost World-era Dan Clowes, drawn in the wispy, dreamlike style of C.F. Larmee's take on the CF "tradition"* foregrounds its frequent warm beauty rather than its fetishistic cold transgression. It pushes back the Henry Darger and pulls forward the Nell Brinkley, if you will.
This has a dual effect within the narrative ("story" isn't quite right), which is about three young "conceputal artists" whose routine is shaken up by the unexpected intrusion of a beautiful young woman whose drunken disruption of one of their performances leads to their most successful gig yet, and a subsequent road trip to determine whether she's worthy of official inclusion in the group. First, in the hands of Larmee's delicate pencil line, these people are gorgeous--skinny, babyfaced androgynes constantly hitting effortlessly languid, painfully beautiful poses. If the characters in Young Lions were real, you might not want to talk to them, but you'd sure wanna stare at them, or, you know, dash your heart to pieces on the rocks of their indifference, tossing underappreciated mix CDs in their direction every now and then.
The second effect the beauty of the art, and by extension the characters, has on the narrative is making it immersive and appealing. A lot more so, in fact, than it might otherwise have a right to be. Cody and Alice seem completely oblivious to how easy they have it as (apparently) wealthy, (definitely) gorgeous, (avowedly) artsy young Americans; Wilson is less attractive but makes up for it by sheer force of obnoxious intellectual domineering and is the type you know will always be able to find a scene he can dominate; Holly is a bit harder to get a handle on, but she clearly enjoys the attention inherent in her exploitation by the trio and is thus difficult to sympathize with even as the others condescend to her naivete and poverty. A less charitable documentarian of this particular demimonde might simply stick "Bohemian Like You" by the Dandy Warhols on loop and be done with it. In the hands of a less visually charitable cartoonist--Clowes, say, or even Tomine!--this would read as a pretty merciless satire. Given Larmee's deeplyunfortunateinternetpersona (the fact that it's a put-on doesn't make it anylessofahead-scratchingheadacheinducer), you might even say merciless satire is what both characters and creator deserve.
But when I said Larmee is dragging the beauty of this art style forward, I meant that literally: As opposed to CF's side-scrolling distance, we're in constant close-up close quarters with this quartet. Their reclining bodies occupy entire panels, their upturned, closed-eye'd faces appear inches away from our own, the background details are all but nonexistent. It's tough to stand in judgement of people you're seeing primarily through the POV you'd get if you were about to make out with them, you know?
It's that intimacy that makes Young Lions successful, that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, these are assholes. But who--especially among artists and arts-interested people of the sort who'd buy a Xeric-winning self-published graphic novel such as this one--hasn't been an asshole? Who hasn't been friends with assholes, worked with assholes, been impressed by the creative output of assholes, been disappointed with the creative output of assholes, fallen in and out of love with assholes? Larmee may doom them to an open, down ending, but as Kevin Smith once said, that's exactly what life is. Beyond that it's not our place to judge.
* the emergence of which is fascinating to me, by the way, a second generation of the Providence artcomics aesthetic following Fort Thunder and Paper Rad, which are themselves obviously quite distinct but still noise-dominated while I think CF is quiet-dominated, but anyway
* Oh man, is this ever a treat: David Bordwell on Martin Scorsese, French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage. Bordwell offers a really astonishingly clear breakdown of Impressionism vs. Expressionism: Expressionism depicts subjectivity in what the camera records, while Impressionism depicts subjectivity in what the camera does. (Montage is a separate beast, done through editing and not really interested in subjectivity, because Communism is incredibly dull.) Extensive analysis of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Bringing Out the Dead follow, as do a few paragraphs on Crank 2: High Voltage. God I love the Internet.
* Tom Spurgeon weighs in on whether or not comics can be scary in a very novel fashion: He says that in addition to whatever obstacles are inherent in the medium itself, there are institutional and logistical disincentives that prevent most comics and cartoonists and, importantly, readers from even trying.
The story of a teenage outcast's traumatic, illicit first love, Skim impressed me with what it chose to show and what it chose to hide. On the show side of the ledger, first of all, it's a book about a teenage Wiccan lesbian and about suicide, and it really doesn't skimp on any of that. There are rituals, there's a love story, there's cursing out the wazoo, and teenagers die. It's an article in a local newspaper about What Our Children Are Reading waiting to happen. In that sense, even though it's very much a Young Adult book, it felt to me less like something created to be maximally appealing and accessible to a YA readership and more like something created the way we like to imagine all good comics are created: A writer and/or an artist had an idea and committed it to paper, full stop. Ballsy.
Also in the "show" column, there are the stylistic filigrees and flourishes of Jillian Tamaki's art. Her figurework is really singular and memorable, most prominently: There's a shot early on of a hallway full of Catholic high school girls, the plaid of their skirts more a suggestion of motion than a pattern on fabric, that is simply swoonworthy if ever you've swooned over a hallway full of Catholic high school girls. Main character Kim "Skim" Cameron's "otherness" is suggested with the clever visual shorthand of making her face look like someone that stepped out of a classical Japanese portrait. Ms. Archer is every bohemian art or English teacher you've ever crushed on, swirling around under yards of fabric and hair. Suicide-haunted Katie Matthews's face is a pinched little scowl, not depressed so much as enraged. Even the cowlick epidemic that plagues the hair of what seems like a solid 50% of the characters comes across as an endearing tic rather than a goof. It's all very cleverly done.
Then there's the equally clever "hide" column. I fairly marveled at just how much was left unsaid or performed offstage. Why on earth would Ms. Archer do what she did? Though we get a lot on the damage she did, and can infer how she chooses to deal with that damage, the damage that caused her to do what she did is unexplored. Actually, so is...what she did itself. There are hints, there's a fleeting glimpse, but we never learn how far things went, what was done, what was said. This is where the wise choice to make Skim such an unreliable narrator comes into play. She's constantly crossing out and rewriting her narration, and we establish early on that she's willing and able to skip over major, major events if she doesn't feel comfortable discussing them. We're never able to trust that she's giving us the whole picture, and that lack of trust is the structuring absence around which the story and our understanding of it is built. This in turn is reflected in the rumors and half-truths and lies and gossip that keep buzzing in the background, and in the lack of candor between Skim and her supposed best friend Lisa...it's really a book about hiding, now that I think of it. The villains of the piece, such as they are, are villains precisely because they make such a show of everything. Even the climactic happy ending is presented to us as obliquely as possible. The moral of the story is that private lives are private, and you offer access to them at both your great pleasure and your great peril.
* Quote of the day: "I adore Superman, and I hope I get the chance to use him"--Action Comics writer Paul Cornell. Wait, what? Aww, who am I kidding, I just enjoyed a year of "Superman" comics starring fucking Mon-El, the Guardian, and Flamebird. Lex Luthor's a great character and Cornell's a good writer. It's just a spit-take-inducing turn of phrase is all, particularly given the reception of that year of "Superman" comics by everyone who isn't me. (Via Marc-Oliver Frisch, who notes that this probably explains why Marc Guggenheim isn't writing Action Comics anymore.)
* I wish this Jim Rugg Rambo 3.5 minicomic was gonna play the "Rambo vs. al-Qaeda" storyline straight (note: that doesn't mean it couldn't also be satirical), instead of turning it into a big silly goof as is apparently the case. But I'll still read it regardless.
That question mark up there is doing a lot of work. I remember following Keeping Two in serialized fashion...but I don't remember where. Were any installments in NON? Were they on Jordan Crane's old Red Ink website? Did he make minicomics of them? Was maybe some of it in Uptight? The comic's presentation on Crane's gorgeous webcomics-anthology site What Things Do bears the date "18 December 2001," but I have no idea what that means. I think that's when it started? I don't know when it ended. Hell, I don't know if it ended. But I'll get to that.
Anyway. Comic!
Jordan Crane's comics are Mary Poppins' maxim at work. The spoonful of sugar, and actually it's more like a dumptruck full, is Crane's art. His characters have the slightly disproportionate and adorable heads of children. They see the world through little dot eyes. They're drawn with a line so soft you wanna reach out and pet it. His omission of periods at the end of sentences gives even the dialogue a vulnerable, open feel.
Then the medicine comes along, and it's like one of those giant needles doctors admit in advance will hurt like hell. In the case of Keeping Two, the medicine is death. It's presented here with shocking directness. When a baby is stillborn, you see his corpse, see his weeping mother hold him and say "Oh my sweetie". When a dog dies, you see his body lying on the ground, eyes open, his owner's recounting of her discovery of her dead best friend staggered out over the course of countless word balloons as though every word is an agony. I hadn't read this stuff in a long time, and seeing it again knocked the wind out of me. It's brutal and unflinching.
The story itself is a multifaceted look at a young couple on a day when death touches their lives in several ways: Through the book the woman is reading, through the passing of an acquaintance and the death of the man's mom's dog, and finally in the head of the man as the woman takes too long to return from the video store. (Video stores: Sign #1 this comic was started up a long time ago.) In a way it reminds me of Richard McGuire's "Here," dazzlingly complex but centered on absence rather than presence and stretched out for an entire story. The couple's story is sequenced out of order, there are flashbacks, there are multiple perspectives on the same conversation, there's a story within the story, there are multiple daydream sequences, there are scenes imagining what the real scenes must have been like, there are lengthy "Scott McCloud explaining manga"-type sequences of washing dishes, there's an ending so open I'm not 100% convinced it is an ending...but it all circles around the direct and devastating image of a dotted-line silhouette where a person, a dog, a baby used to be, just like your mind does. That it's so lovely to look at doesn't soften the blow so much as aim it.
* This long interview with Ross Campbell of Wet Moon fame is occasionally too chummy for its own good, but there's much of interest in here, including Campbell's uniformly harsh take on his own art, specifically its sexiness. Personally I think we could use more comic art that's constantly sexy without trying to be.
* Allow me to be the 3,892nd person to direct you to Chris Ware's awesomely angry, predictably shitcanned cover for the annual Fortune 500 issue, which it's occurring to me now would have been like putting out a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue with a model who'd recently died from an eating disorder on the cover. Click the link to see it at full size and soak in all the details.
* My main concern upon learning that Heroes may be renewed after all is that Rob Bricken from Topless Robot will probably die from alcohol poisoning and/or stress-induced heart failure should this occur.
* Speaking of: "For some reason, I can't get over the eyemask -- the torn fabric, the bandage-like quality of it -- it looks like something a mutant turtle living in a sewer could conceivably make, which I hope to god is the most insane sentence I type all day." --Rob Bricken on the turtle head design for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Sorry, Rob, you ended up having to write a whole post on Heroes getting renewed!
* "Most monsters you can only kill their bodies, but a clever enough PC can actually do worse to the unicorn: it can rob it of meaning."--Zak Smith on unicorns. That's the Chicago way!
Here's how you know the Night's Watch ain't what it used to be: They let Matt Wiegle slip past their defenses and graffiti some birthday wishes for me on the Wall. Poor Jon Snow must be wondering what he's gotten himself into!
Yes, if you're wondering, getting personalized George R.R. Martin/A Song of Ice and Fire birthday art for my birthday is a pip and a half.
* I am quite flattered and surprised to see that my and Isaac Moylan's The Side Effects of the Cocaine: David Bowie April 1975-February 1976 made the illustrious NeilAlien's Favorites of MoCCA 02010!
* Lots of good news on Robot 6: Graeme McMillan is back, Graeme and Kevin Melrose are also working on our new Hollywood/nerd-culture-centric sister blog Spinoff Online, and we've revised our comment guidelines. I know there are people reading the blog who wouldn't touch the comments with a ten-meter cattle prod; we're going to change that. The "MARVEL/DC/BENDIS/JOHNS SUXXXX" days are over.
* Case in point: Inspired by Tom Spurgeon and Tim O'Neil, I asked Robot 6's readers what makes them say "okay, that's enough" when it comes to a comic, creator, or character. The responses have been smart, civil, and in some cases provocative. Check 'em out.
* Holy cow, is this fascinating: Scientific America's Joshua Harthshorne whips up a linguist's wishlist for heretofore largely theoretical features of language he'd like to see the creators of the Dothraki tongue for HBO's adaptation of George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones pick up, just for the experiment of seeing how the fans who'll make it a point to learn the language work with them. For example:
Action verbs. For action verbs in English and possibly all languages, the subject is the doer and the object the do-ee ("Mary broke/kicked/threw the vase"). Though again there are a few more complicated languages, prominent theorists posit this pattern is an innate part of our linguistic minds. However, others argue the dominance of this pattern is an historical accident and verbs where the doer is the object and the do-ee is the subject should be perfectly learnable. Numerous studies have shown that both adults and preschoolers find it very difficult to learn subject-do-ee verbs ("The vase shbroke Mary" = "Mary broke the vase"), but again these studies are short, so perhaps the participants simply didn't spend enough time learning and using the new verbs. Use this pattern for Dothraki -- or, even better, have some verbs follow one pattern ("break") and other verbs the other (shbroke) -- and we'll see how well students can do given more time.
You'll want to click the link to read the whole thing and catch all the linkage and annotations that my rudimentary copypasta won't convey. (Via Westeros.)
* Heidi MacDonald catches that that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle head from yesterday isn't part of the upcoming movie, it's from a class taught by Tom Savini. On the other hand, this Jon Vermilyea zine cover she found is totally real.
* I wish our shitty fantasy movies were as weird and pretty as Red Sonja apparently is, at least when you take five frames from the movie and divorce them completely from, you know, Brigitte Nielsen and the whole rest of the movie.
* The new M.I.A. video could be improved if it ended with a title card reading "GET IT????" in giant block letters, but as it stands you'll just have to supply that message yourself. Trust me, it won't be difficult.
* You ever wanna shatter your innocence? Visit Loch Ness, where the big walk-through museum exhibit thing ends by telling you all the most famous pieces of evidence are either misidentified or outright hoaxes and that the Monster is most likely a series of landlocked sturgeons. Anyway, the locals used to believe a lot more than they do now, I guess. (Poor form on the part of that article for labeling the deathbed-revelation hoax Surgeon's Photograph as "an undated file photo of a shadowy shape that some people say is a photo of the Loch Ness monster in Scotland.") (Via Loren Coleman, who in addition to cryptozoology appears to be investigating the outer limits of the fair use doctrine.)
Death Trap
Lane Milburn, writer/artist
self-published, April 2010
112 pages
$12 Buy it from Lane Milburn
It feels good to see someone win a Xeric Grant whose work you've already been following, then to discover that the work they won that Xeric for is their best work to date. In that light, Lane Milburn's Death Trap is the feel-good comic of the year. Everything he does well, he does as well as he's ever done it here: Immersive environments, crosshatched and "lit" to look like they were constructed from solid smoke. Weird, ugly monster designs that connote some sort of infectious sickness of reality as much as they do simply somethin' scary. A real mastery of building the human body out of its constituent parts into something that appears meaty and palpable on the page--from his trademark fireplug goons to a convincingly sexy teenage girl. A flair for the ridiculous that manifests itself both through far more controlled riffing on the over-the-top writing of comics of yore than what you saw in his recent Feeble Minded Funnies and through a series of action beats and sight gags that juxtapose his bizarre creatures with the '70s redneck-stoner-horror demimonde he squeezes them into. Some truly killer beat-by-beat action sequences of the sort you wish somebody, anybody who isn't working with Grant Morrison on Batman & Robin would attempt in a contemporary superhero comic. An intelligent combination of the teenagers-preyed-upon-by-maniacs horror of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with even woolier comics villainy. Off-to-the-side visual flourishes, from the separate full-color science fiction story that opens the book to a Mario Bava/Barbara Steele-style pin-up that kicks off the main titular tale. And perhaps the most finely tuned sense of queasy, bottom-just-dropped-out horror and madness you'll find in comics this side of Al Columbia. If any of this sounds at all appealing to you, drop the 12 bones, and put some cash aside for whatever he does next.
* A couple of big interviews with A Song of Ice and Fire/A Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin popped up over the past couple of days. First, here he is in the Cover to Cover podcast at the Dragon Page. There are a few interesting tidbits in this one.
* First, he confirms that HBO's plan is to dedicate one season to each book in the series. I wonder if each one will have a new title, or if that'll be too confusing? It'd look cool on your DVD shelf, at least.
* Second, he talks about the extensive delays for the publication of volume four, A Feast for Crows, and the still-unfinished volume five, A Dance with Dragons. Martin says that one of the main obstacles for these two books was a five-year jump in the storyline he'd initially planned to take place between books three and four. He spent a full year writing the fourth book with that device in place before coming to the conclusion that it just wasn't working, scrapping it and starting over. That's what led to the publication of A Feast for Crows as we know it, and of course in that book's afterword he explained that the story expanded in the writing to such a degree that one book essentially became two, with A Dance with Dragons following the characters we don't really see in Crows. However, in the podcast he notes that while the five-year gap didn't work for most of the story, it did work for some of the story. But to get rid of all that bathwater, he had to lose the baby too, and it's reworking the parts that worked fine with his original plan that's giving him so much trouble.
* Third, he comes out and says that he knows A Song of Ice and Fire is his magnum opus, the work for which he'll be remembered, so he's become a perfectionist about it. When the interviewers point out that this is self-applying an ungodly amount of pressure, he kind of sighingly acknowledges it. Poor dude. (Link via Martin's LJ.)
* The other big interview is with the Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan, the Battlestar Galactica superfan whose nerd-centric TV writing for a mainstream publication has established her as a sort of less annoying man's Doc Jensen. Ryan confirms through HBO that the actress playing Daenerys Targaryne is indeed being recast, along with the previously switched-up Catelyn Stark. The interview itself focuses on Martin's long history with Hollywood, his role in the creation of the HBO series, and of course the lateness of A Dance with Dragons, plus the upcoming comics adaptation of Martin's vampire novel Fevre Dream from Avatar. Nothing earthshattering, but I am such a fucking whore for these books I'll take whatever I can get. And you, dear readers, get to take it with me! (Via Winter Is Coming.)
* The Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias tackles Neil Marshall's The Descent as part of his New Cult Canon series. It's a solid piece, but I really don't understand the very popular notion that the original cut of the film is somehow bleaker and more uncompromising than the revision. There are more horrifying things than monsters, you know?
* Allow me to be the 3,892nd person to direct you to Jay Pavlina's Super Mario Bros. Crossover, an online simulator of the original Super Mario Nintendo game wherein you can play as Link, Samus Aran, Simon Belmont, Mega Man, or one of the dudes from Contra--complete with their customary moves and weapons. Good golly, as soon as I finish New Super Mario Bros. Wii I know how I'll be spending my weekends.
Tales Designed to Thrizzle #6
Michael Kupperman, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, April 2010
32 pages
$4.95 Buy it from Fantagraphics
Aw, bummer, this one isn't that good! I never thought I'd be saying this, but this issue of Michael Kupperman's heretofore unfailingly, unflaggingly hilarious humor series is kind of flat. That manic twisting-and-turning of his, where each new panel or turn of the page can completely upend the premise of the previous one, is nowhere to be found. You don't know how disappointing it is for a die-hard Kupperfan to discover that, say, the "Jungle Princess" story begins and ends with the same jungle-heroine premise. Yeah, it's funny that she dresses the exact same way in her city-dweller "secret identity," and there are some cute sight gags involving jungle creatures doing unusual things, but that's as you'd expect it to be. Similarly, a Richie Rich parody in which the little rich kid eats jewels ends with him needing surgery to remove the jewels from his intestines; the story of a has-been Broadway actress in danger of getting upstaged by her new production's elaborate drainage system ends with her getting upstaged by her new production's elaborate drainage system; Einstein and Twain in space is basically just Einstein and Twain in space, and though it does end with the out-of-nowhere death of director Tony Scott, it's your basic "spaceship lands on someone annoying" gag. (I preferred it when Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie wished that the crashing spaceship at the end of This Island Earth would land on, of all people, Kenny Loggins.) Kupperman's unmistakable art is as meticulously constructed as ever--I've seen him draw and I still can't figure out how he does it--and the appealing color work still lets his uncanny linework shine, but beyond that? It's like half of the ideas fell out someplace, and you keep waiting and waiting for craziness that never comes. :(
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