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
* These long weekends have been bizarrely link-rich as of late, so rather than make this evening's regularly scheduled Carnival more like a Disney Theme Park, I figured I'd throw an A.M. edition together. Great day in the morning!
* Well I'll be a monkey's uncle: Robin Hardy's The Wicker Tree, the...thematic sequel, I guess? to his '70s horror masterpiece The Wicker Man, is actually happening, and this teaser trailer is the proof. Nearly impossible to say for sure with a few lines of dialogue and five seconds of footage, but dare I say it actually seems good? (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* whoa: "Right Thing the Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books", an art show based on Tom Devlin's late great publishing imprint and featuring work by Jeff Zekaj, Megan Kelso, Brian Ralph, Ron Rege Jr., Marc Bell, Greg Cook, Jordan Crane, and Kurt Wolfgang, coming soon to Boston's Fourth Wall Project. I'm actually tempted to drive up there for this.
* Chris Arrant talks to Paul Pope about THB and Battling Boy--one thing I like a lot about Paul is how candid he is regarding behind-the-scenes goings-on;
*and Chris Arrant also notes delays in Grant Morrison's work for DC. It has to be a concern for the publisher that, for all intents and purposes, two guys drive their entire line. I'd be more worried about any hiccups in Geoff Johns's schedule, given just how much of the line he holds down singlehandedly, how much the rest of the line revolves around the stories and events he cooks up, and the fact that he just got a major desk-job promotion that surely takes time away from his comics writing.
* Ben Morse of The Cool Kids Table takes a whack at my personal comics pinata: '90s mutatnts with vague energy powers. I don't think I realized just how vague they got--like, to the point of going for a year or two without even being introduced or explained--until I read Ben's piece. "[Cable's] powers would be incorporated into the character in a major way as time went on, but if you had said he was a super-fast typer or something, it wouldn't have changed his first two dozen appearances."
* I've been watching The Young & the Restless lately, and I'm so hugely thrilled by the density and byzantine complexity of the relationship drama on that show I can hardly tell you. To me it's delivering in practice what serialized comic books are supposed to be delivering in theory. With that in mind I endorse Douglas Wolk's call for more weekly comics, but without a lot of optimism. Of the bonafide weekly comics we've seen over the past several years, two have been among the worst comics I've ever read, and moreover I just don't know if they'll ever contain anything nearly as entertaining as Victor Newman.
* Over the weekend I saw several people on Tumblr lose they shit over this four-part essay on 28 Days Later and the allegorical difference between slow zombies and fast zombies by Christian Thorne. Longtime readers of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I wasn't quite as impressed, given how ruthlessly allegorical all readings of horror movies by non-aficionados have become and how inured (if not actively hostile) I am to them. Like most such readings, Thorne's overreaches in some areas and elides complicating details in others. Meanwhile, the prestige of his trick here, in terms of the complexity of 28 Days Later, is sort of no-duh stuff if you ask me--certainly if you've ever seen any of the countless films well and truly referenced by the ending of that film, not to mention the similar audience-sympathy shenanigans of The Wicker Man. But I still think it's worth your time, if only because, for me at least, the fast zombie is the enduring stuff of nightmares. Seriously, I had one this weekend! The more information I can get on why they bother me so much, the better, even if I'm reasonably sure it has nothing to do with a craving for the Strong Leader. (Given my history you don't need to look as far afield as my affection for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake for evidence of that!) (Via Mike Barthel, among others.)
* Andy Khouri has been creating cool little grids of album art for various astutely art-directed artists' complete works. Here's New Order, and here's Bjork, and I'm told there are more to come. I saw this done with the Smiths and Morrissey once; talk about a guy with a well-formed aesthetic.
* Finally, Rob McMonigal reviews seven Matt Wiegle minicomics, including my own collaboration with Matt (and Matt Rota and Josiah Leighton), Murder. He says nice things, which will help me get through the day.
This is me reading that thing about fast and slow zombies. This is me being perplexed. It seems to me that both versions of Dawn of the Dead convey the same basic message - that we're all of us no damn good in the clutch, often enough to ensure that our better impulses will amount to nothing in the end. Nihilism is one of the things zombie stories do especially well. They present different mixes of specific challenge and opportunity to get there, and this is what makes remakes worth doing.
What's hard about any of this?
"If you want to see this for yourself, all you need to do is ask one basic question – the one you should always be asking anyway when watching a horror movie (or a science-fiction movie or a fantasy movie): What are the real-world associations that the movie is triggering?" This strikes me as fundamentally wrong. I think the fundamental horror question should always be "How does this make you feel?" What specific mix of thoughts and emotions does this particular situation conjure in you the audience? What does feeling that way do to you - in a sense, how does feeling that way make you feel?
I'm not actually opposed to allegorical readings, but I think they should always come after dealing with the reality of the situation as it's given. (Unless there are specific reasons not to do that. Sometimes so, I guess.)
Reading for allegory first strikes me as being primarily interested in movies for their choices in wallpaper and upholstery.
This is me reading that thing about fast and slow zombies. This is me being perplexed. It seems to me that both versions of Dawn of the Dead convey the same basic message - that we're all of us no damn good in the clutch, often enough to ensure that our better impulses will amount to nothing in the end. Nihilism is one of the things zombie stories do especially well. They present different mixes of specific challenge and opportunity to get there, and this is what makes remakes worth doing.
I would say this is truer of Night than of the original Dawn, which had a happy ending as far as it goes, but you're right in general. I almost went on in this direction in the post, but thinking about my dreams, fast zombies (and zombies in general) scare me through my fear of my own failure and weakness a lot more than they scare me as terrorism analogues. When I have terrorism nightmares, and I can think of...maybe three that I remember, they tend to be pretty explicitly about terrorists and terrorism. Underlying both, of course, as well as almost all my nightmares, is raw terror at the notion of being in a kill-or-be-killed situation--whether it's zombies, al Qaeda, the Aliens, skinheads, the mafia, vampires...all of which it's been for me at one time or another.
"Reading for allegory first strikes me as being primarily interested in movies for their choices in wallpaper and upholstery."
It's sad in its way. Don't get me wrong, I like this piece, but there's something so dreary about looking at any work of horror art and saying "Yes yes yes, but what does it MEAN?" I keep going back to Zak Sabbath's formulation: "There's some work of inspired madness, and then there's some fuck."
Yeah, I just don't have terrorism nightmares that I know of. My nightmares are largely dominated by body horror, as you'd expect from someone with my history of disability and all.
I read a good side comment just the other day on a blog written by an autistic woman who's fascinated by her cats' behavior, and studies it carefully. She writes Behaviorism (in my opinion) fails miserably to account for everything that could potentially be important (for one thing it often seems to completely fail to account for, say, different sensory and perceptual modalities on the part of the researcher vs. subject), and much of what I hear from "evolutionary psychology" sounds like it's been pulled straight from someone's nether orifice, to put it politely. And I say "Yeah!"
Some work really is allegorical in the sense that each thing symbolizes one (1) other thing. But anything that evokes can evoke more than one thing.
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Comments (5)
I HOPE HOPE HOPE that Wicker Tree thing has the bee helmet in it.
Posted by Tim O'Neil | September 7, 2010 5:25 PM
NOT THE BEES
Posted by Sean T. Collins | September 7, 2010 6:43 PM
This is me reading that thing about fast and slow zombies. This is me being perplexed. It seems to me that both versions of Dawn of the Dead convey the same basic message - that we're all of us no damn good in the clutch, often enough to ensure that our better impulses will amount to nothing in the end. Nihilism is one of the things zombie stories do especially well. They present different mixes of specific challenge and opportunity to get there, and this is what makes remakes worth doing.
What's hard about any of this?
"If you want to see this for yourself, all you need to do is ask one basic question – the one you should always be asking anyway when watching a horror movie (or a science-fiction movie or a fantasy movie): What are the real-world associations that the movie is triggering?" This strikes me as fundamentally wrong. I think the fundamental horror question should always be "How does this make you feel?" What specific mix of thoughts and emotions does this particular situation conjure in you the audience? What does feeling that way do to you - in a sense, how does feeling that way make you feel?
I'm not actually opposed to allegorical readings, but I think they should always come after dealing with the reality of the situation as it's given. (Unless there are specific reasons not to do that. Sometimes so, I guess.)
Reading for allegory first strikes me as being primarily interested in movies for their choices in wallpaper and upholstery.
Posted by Bruce Baugh | September 7, 2010 9:23 PM
Bruce:
This is me reading that thing about fast and slow zombies. This is me being perplexed. It seems to me that both versions of Dawn of the Dead convey the same basic message - that we're all of us no damn good in the clutch, often enough to ensure that our better impulses will amount to nothing in the end. Nihilism is one of the things zombie stories do especially well. They present different mixes of specific challenge and opportunity to get there, and this is what makes remakes worth doing.
I would say this is truer of Night than of the original Dawn, which had a happy ending as far as it goes, but you're right in general. I almost went on in this direction in the post, but thinking about my dreams, fast zombies (and zombies in general) scare me through my fear of my own failure and weakness a lot more than they scare me as terrorism analogues. When I have terrorism nightmares, and I can think of...maybe three that I remember, they tend to be pretty explicitly about terrorists and terrorism. Underlying both, of course, as well as almost all my nightmares, is raw terror at the notion of being in a kill-or-be-killed situation--whether it's zombies, al Qaeda, the Aliens, skinheads, the mafia, vampires...all of which it's been for me at one time or another.
"Reading for allegory first strikes me as being primarily interested in movies for their choices in wallpaper and upholstery."
It's sad in its way. Don't get me wrong, I like this piece, but there's something so dreary about looking at any work of horror art and saying "Yes yes yes, but what does it MEAN?" I keep going back to Zak Sabbath's formulation: "There's some work of inspired madness, and then there's some fuck."
Posted by Sean T. Collins | September 7, 2010 10:04 PM
Yeah, I just don't have terrorism nightmares that I know of. My nightmares are largely dominated by body horror, as you'd expect from someone with my history of disability and all.
I read a good side comment just the other day on a blog written by an autistic woman who's fascinated by her cats' behavior, and studies it carefully. She writes Behaviorism (in my opinion) fails miserably to account for everything that could potentially be important (for one thing it often seems to completely fail to account for, say, different sensory and perceptual modalities on the part of the researcher vs. subject), and much of what I hear from "evolutionary psychology" sounds like it's been pulled straight from someone's nether orifice, to put it politely. And I say "Yeah!"
Some work really is allegorical in the sense that each thing symbolizes one (1) other thing. But anything that evokes can evoke more than one thing.
I like that Zak Sabbath quote a lot.
Posted by Bruce Baugh | September 7, 2010 10:20 PM