Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on December 20, 2010 at 2:28 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on December 13, 2010 at 2:28 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on December 6, 2010 at 2:28 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 29, 2010 at 2:26 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 22, 2010 at 2:26 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 15, 2010 at 2:26 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 8, 2010 at 2:25 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 7, 2010 at 2:23 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 6, 2010 at 2:23 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 5, 2010 at 2:23 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 4, 2010 at 2:22 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 3, 2010 at 2:22 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 2, 2010 at 2:19 PM|plink!
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Posted by Sean T. Collins on November 1, 2010 at 4:14 PM|plink!
Endless thanks to Jason Ervin and Ken Bromberg for making this move possible, and to the ATF team of Ken, Ben, and Ton for being such gracious hosts all these years, long after my blog outlived whatever dubious usefulness it had for them.
See you on the other side!
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 31, 2010 at 8:32 PM|plink!
* Lookit, Fantagraphics previews the Strange Tales II contributions of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez! LOVE AND ROCKTOBER marches on! And hey, Jon Vermilyea too! I'm happy to be involved with this series, and some of the folks who made it in were my suggestions, I'm proud to say.
* Now this is a first, for writers of my acquaintance: Sean Belcher liked the Friday the 13th remake. I remember being really impressed by how quickly and unstoppably Jason was moving in that first trailer, and then never hearing anything good about the movie ever again.
* Here's a nice thoughtful piece by Amypoodle of the Mindless Ones on Batman the Dark Knight vs. Batman the Caped Crusader. Even as a kid I thought that one of the greatest things about Batman was that he fit so convincingly in all sorts of differently flavored stories--straight-up superheroes, science fiction, horror, gritty crime/noir stuff, mysteries, whatever. Keep in mind, The Dark Knight Returns totally featured flying talking robot dolls.
* Programming note: As I mentioned in my (alas!) delayed LOVE AND ROCKTOBER review of Heartbreak Soup earlier today, I am experiencing computer problems for which I do not anticipate a timely resolution. So you can probably expect my regular blogging to be a bit erratic, linkblogging to be slightly behind the curve, comment spam to linger a bit longer, and accidentally deleted comments to remain in limbo for longer too. For once this has nothing to do with my blogging platform--it's laptop-related. Thank you for your patience!
* Speaking of Jason Adams, whose quote I just quoted, he caught something I missed: Cinefamily's 100 Most Outrageous Kills screening tonight First Kramers Ergot, now this--what will the Harkhams contribute to society next???
(Programming Note: Due to technical difficulties, I was unable to post this review during the regularly scheduled Comics Time slot on Wednesday of this week. This is the first time I've missed a Comics Time deadline, scheduled time off aside, in probably two years, and I'm pretty bummed. My hope is to resume the regular MWF schedule beginning tomorrow, but delays or erratic scheduling may continue until the issue is resolved. I apologize for the interruption in service. Anyway...)
The great temptation when discussing Los Bros Hernandez, and it's a temptation I've succumbed to, is to operate under the assumption that they're both trying to do basically the same thing, only one of them is better than the other at it. Now, obviously, they are doing many of the same things. They're brothers who co-founded a series they share in which they tell the sprawling saga of groups of (mostly) Latin American (mostly) young adults that unfold over (mostly) real time, dealing frankly with issues of sex, community, and mortality, starring women who are the closest alternative comics have come to generating sex symbols, and utilizing striking black and white art and inventive, challenging pacing. If that's all you're going by (and granted, it's a lot!), then it's almost irresistible to point to an element you feel one brother has over the other--Jaime's incorporation of poster-ready design into his visual storytelling, say, or Gilbert's magical-realist literary panache--and call him the victor.
But a) much as we comics folks love looking at absolutely everything otherwise, it's really not a "who'd win in a fight" situation, and b) my re-read of Heartbreak Soup has me more convinced than other that the differences between Beto and Xaime are not differences of degree, but differences of kind.
Let's talk about the art first. This is the arena where Jaime is most frequently said to have it over Gilbert. And indeed, I can happily imagine a day spent doing nothing but looking at drawings of Terry Downe or Doyle Blackburn. That smooth line, those sumptuous, propulsive blacks, those enormously appealing and endearing character designs--it really is eye candy, in the best sense of that term. But a key goal of Jaime's art, besides being pleasant to look at, is pop. Not in the sense of "pop art," although I think that's a major element and not just due to the occasional overt Lichtenstein homage, but in the sense that they pop off the page. Those blacks fill in space in a way designed to sharply foreground the figures and objects Jaime wants you to focus on or remember, something his sharp, slick line abets. When I picture Jaime panels, I tend to picture the characters are arrayed in a line from left to right against some sort of horizontally oriented background like a car or a wall, like actors (or punk rockers) on a stage. Moreover, he tends to draw his characters in poses and facial expressions that come across as, well, poses--the precise moment at which whatever they're feeling or thinking or saying or doing is communicated most clearly, so that that thing pops off the page. The overall effect is that there's them in the spotlight, and then there's the other stuff against which that spotlight is defined.
By contrast, when I picture Beto panels, I picture someone more or less standing around, usually with one or more other characters milling around as well, with the house-lined streets and intersections of Palomar extending out to the back left and back right. The very setting of his stories is one through which his characters are constantly walking to get from one place to another; I couldn't draw you a map of Palomar or anything like that, but I feel like I've been walked through its streets much more than I can say that of Hoppers. Moreover there's a casual element to Gilbert's imagery that Jaime's more compositionally calibrated panels don't have. Beto's line is rubbery, and complimented not by masterful fields of smooth, clean black but by shading and stippling that feels almost dusty. His character designs famously overemphasize flaws and virtues alike, and have a uniformly heavy-lidded weight to them; my wife simply describes his characters as "hard." It's tough to imagine spending a pleasant few hours staring even at Tonantzin or Israel the way you might at Maggie or Rand Race. And when characters are depicted for maximum impact, it feels like it's being done through great force of effort on Gilbert's part rather than with the effortless, effervescent precision with which Jaime does it. It's also almost always either something the characters in question are doing on purpose to impress someone else, or a shot of them as seen by someone who they've impressed unwittingly. The overall effect feels calculated more for immersion than impact.
Then there are the stories and subject matter. One difference is obvious from the start: Jaime had a couple-issue jump on his brother in terms of beginning his magnum opus, but the delay gave Gilbert the opportunity to draw a bright line between his science-fiction work and his (occasionally magical) realist material. But beyond that, Gilbert very rapidly jumps his action forward about ten years or so from the first major story to the next, while Jaime's almost resolutely marches forward in sync with our own real-world timeline. Jaime presents material from the past largely in the context of memory and how it intrudes upon and influences us; arguably the past's on-again off-again love affair with the present is even more central to the Locas strips than Maggie and Hopey's. Gilbert, however, doesn't usually view stories from back in the day through that psychological lens. They tend to be presented as discreet tales, filling in backstory, spotlighting a character or a relationship, illuminating a part of Palomar we haven't seen, depicting someone or something lost to time. Jaime's interest in the past is primarily internal in its effect; Gilbert's is primarily epic.
Particularly in light of their recent work, there's another difference between Gilbert and Jaime worth pointing out. Jaime's work is studded with sit-up-and-take-notice stories, and his most harrowing stuff--"The Death of Speedy Ortiz," "Flies on the Ceiling," and now "Browntown/The Love Bunglers"--tends to be among them. But when you hit "The Death of Speedy," it's not as though it establishes the tone for the rest of the series. It's an exception, not a rule. "Locas" tends to be lighthearted even though what it's really about--friendship, sexuality, identity, adulthood--is actually quite serious.
By contrast, the harshness, seediness, and bleakness of the world of Palomar and of Gilbert's work generally--the love many of his characters feel for one another notwithstanding--tends to be what first comes to mind when I think of his comics. Yet Heatbreak Soup struck me for how good-natured it feels, up until the very end. Yes, sex is presented from the very first strip as a magnetic force with the potential for incalculable damage, and the book often does feel like "horniness punctuated by the occasional physical assault." But centering the material on good-hearted Heraclio, unpredictable Luba, and packs of sweetly belligerent little kids and teenagers goes a long way to making everything feel funny, even when you're not laughing. It's almost Pueblo Home Companion, you know what I mean?
It's only when you hit the final story in this collection, "Bullnecks and Bracelets," that things truly take a turn for the dark: Try as he might to bury himself in bodybuilding, drugs, love affairs, and hustling, Israel's whole life is defined by the disappearance of his twin sister during a solar eclipse when they were very young. No matter where he goes or what he does, he cannot escape that black sun. And this is where "Palomar" becomes what it is--where Gilbert becomes what he is--as surely as The Sopranos became what it was with "University" in Season Three. Whether in terms of family, sexuality, physicality, or deformity, biology is destiny for the people of Palomar, in a way that is almost never true for the Locas (Penny and H.R. excepted, perhaps--and a certain character in "Browntown"). And although biology is obviously among Beto's primary concerns, destiny is the operative word. I don't think the Palomarians have the ability to escape the way the Locas do. Not all of them need to escape, mind you--there's a lot of really warm and adorable and hilarious and awesome stuff going down in Palomar--but whatever walks alongside them in their lives is gonna walk alongside them till the very end.
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 28, 2010 at 3:47 PM|plink!
* Today on Robot 6: Kate Beaton on sexist "compliments." The great thing about this story is that you can make her feel less creeped out--at no cost to you!
* Robot 666, Robot 6's horror-themed Halloween-week special, rolls on. Keep your eyes on that tag for lots of fun creepy stuff. To wit:
* Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (and Tony Moore)'s The Walking Dead is going to be re-released in comic book form on a weekly basis starting with issue #1 in January. That seems like a wonderful idea to me, and the complaints you see about it in the comments seem totally wrongheaded, like saying the networks shouldn't syndicate series because it'd cannibalize DVD sales.
* This looks like a pretty interesting week for comics, with some major, unusual releases and some sturdy genre faves. Tom Spurgeon and Joe "Jog" McCulloch handicap the slate. Bonus points to Jog for some writing on the comics of Carol Swain for good measure.
* Behold: "Derezzed" by Daft Punk, from Tron: Legacy. It sounds pretty good. It also sounds like "Juke Joint Jezebel" by KMFDM, which I suppose is another way of saying "it sounds pretty good." That said, I'm having a really, really hard time getting worked up for this completely conventional-looking Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, with its unimaginative orange-and-blue color palette and the world's least convincing CGI de-aged Jeff Bridges. But hey, at least it features Daft Punk as themselves. Also, between this and the Twilight movies, Michael Sheen clearly cannot get enough of playing sinister, scenery-chewing dandies; I can't get enough of him playing sinister, scenery-chewing dandies either, so there's that. (Via Rob Bricken.)
* I guess that Battlestar Galactica prequel thing set in the First Cylon War is now a series. Like everyone else in the world, I'm finding it hard to get all that fired up about Caprica, so the thought of another BSG prequel series doesn't light my world on fire. Then again, unlike everyone else in the world, I am over the moon for the BSG finale, so I'm certainly open to getting excited about that universe again, in theory.
I don't know how anyone who cares about the integrity and moral standing of the United States can absorb the full details of this case and not be profoundly ashamed. To prosecute a child soldier, already nearly killed in battle, tortured and abused in custody, and to imprison him for this length of time and even now, convict him of charges for which there is next to no proof but his own coerced confessions...well, words fail.
And just in case they don't, the extremely graphic and disturbing picture that accompanies the piece is worth at least a thousand words anyway.
* New Girl Talk album on the way, hooray hooray. I get major relisten value on Feed the Animals; it's better than Night Ripper.
* Kiel Phegley talks to the great Frazer Irving about his Batman work with Grant Morrison, his upcoming Moz-related plans, the fate of his long-delayed Image series Gutsville, and more. Here he is on his stunning coloring:
Color is like everything to storytelling -- well, alongside form, composition, line and everything else. It's not just a way to say "this is a tree" or "this is skin!," it's as powerful as lots of speed lines or heavy shadows -- it says "this tree is warped" or "this man's skin is sickly for he is evil" etc. I like color that creates mood more than realism, and that's in the stuff I read as well as draw. It's a key part of pacing a story to allocate a basic hue to each scene, so that (ideally) one can see the pages at a glance and see how the pages group together in scenes dictated by overall color scheme, and if one is using a specific hue for a particular location, then the color alone should act as a subconscious visual cue for each time we visit that place.
Irving is one of the best.
* Welcome back to comics class with Frank Santoro: This time, Frank's tackling the nine-panel grid in Watchmen. He points out that the center panel on each page sort of "sums up" what's going on that page--a perfect visual anchor. He also notes that on the occasions when Moore and Gibbons abandon the nine-panel grid, there's still a "center" image where that central panel would go.
* Sleazy Slice is on sale cheap! If you've wanted to get your hands on hard copies of Josh Simmons mini-masterpieces like Cockbone and In a Land of Magic, this is your chance.
* I'm so smitten with the idea of using epic-fantasy orcs as horror-movie monsters in a contemporary setting that I'm actually pretty bummed that this movie Orcs! is playing the idea for laughs. I mean, can you imagine seeing just one of those ugly bastards baring its teeth and swinging a scimitar in your direction? A lot scarier than some mute dude in a hockey mask. Oh well, you take what you can get.
* Here's a very thorough and easy to understand summary of the issues surrounding the now-abandoned actors union boycott of The Hobbit, from a person whom I believe is a Kiwi actor herself. The gist is that the demand for negotiations made by the New Zealand branch of an Australian union, which precipitated the whole situation, was illegal under current NZ law due to actors' status as independent contractors rather than employees--an attempt at collective bargaining was therefore classified as a sort of price-fixing. So Peter Jackson legally couldn't meet to negotiate even if he'd wanted to, which apparently he really really didn't. It also seems like Jackson and The Hobbit were singled out precisely because they were an enormous production already offering generous terms to its performers and helmed by someone who clearly wanted to shoot in New Zealand: The union calculated that it could make a big splash by targeting a big name already known for being amenable to actors and who clearly wanted to stay in NZ. This backfired bigtime, obviously, because Jackson reacted very badly to being singled out like that. (Via Kristin Thompson, of course.)
* I spent a decent amount of time last week watching all 20 5-to-7 minute "micro-episodes" for the new cartoon series Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes!, then watching the hour-long series premiere. It was pretty darn good! Please keep in mind I have almost no background with the Avengers prior to Brian Michael Bendis's relaunch a few years back, and this is very much the classic pre-Bendis team and its pre-Bendis antagonists (although the opening storyline is loosely cribbed from Bendis's Breakout arc, and obviously the Iron Man characterization is very post-Downey). Yet the series' creators are obviously having so much fun trotting adamantly non-classic villains like Whirlwind across the screen in all their bizarrely designed glory that it's tough not to go along with it. I'm also the sort of geek who really likes the idea of a Marvel Universe in which Hydra were our World War II antagonists rather than Nazis, and where there are four supervillain prisons each with its own specific purview in terms of how the villains it houses got their powers, and where Ant-Man and Iron Man found the Avengers in large part to avoid becoming government thugs, and on and on. Fun stuff. You can watch every micro-episode here, and I think you can still watch the two-part premiere here. (Thanks to Rob Bricken for the recommendation.)
* Finally, my friend Chris Ward has posted DJ Daymage's Halloween mix for 2010, and it's wonderful. Eighty minutes of continuously mixed spookiness and sexiness, worth the price of admission for "Walk the Night" by the Skatt Bros. alone.
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 25, 2010 at 7:39 PM|plink!
Love and Rockets: New Stories #3
featuring "The Love Bunglers Part One," "Browntown," and "The Love Bunglers Part Two"
Jaime Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2010
104 pages
$14.99 Buy it from Fantagraphics Buy it from Amazon.com
If I had to sum up all of the post "Wigwam Bam/Chester Square/Bob Richardson" Locas stories in a phrase, it would be "coming to terms." With adulthood, with the death of punk, with a career, with the past, with reaching middle age, with falling in and out of love, with family and friends and heroes, with your limitations, even with really good things like your talents. (Heck, even this story reveals that Maggie's planning to open up her own garage, finally utilizing her long-dormant skills as a mechanic.) For the most part this has gone, if not smoothly, then at least pretty well in the end. Maggie and Hopey both seem less prone to disaster than ever before, as does Ray. Yes, Izzy had a fairly spectacular flame-out--literally!--but Ghost of Hoppers nonetheless ended on an optimistic note for her future. Put it this way: No, I wouldn't be surprised if that was the last we saw of her, if she were lost to mental illness and to us forever, but nor would I be surprised if she came back reunited with her man in Mexico, content and writing again. Penny sort of exploded her way out of the series too, depending on how much credence you give "Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34," but her story also ended on a note of hope for future reconciliation with her children and repentance for her life of fecklessness. A few years ago, Jaime ended Love and Rockets Mark II with two dueling stories of people making other people feel whole again by virtue of their very presence. What a kindly pair of comics," I said.
So much for kindness.
The suite of strips that Jaime contributed to this year's Love and Rockets: New Stories volume, which revolve around the long centerpiece "Browntown," comprise the cruelest and story he's ever told. Sadder than "The Death of Speedy," scarier than "Flies on the Ceiling," crueler than "Wigwam Bam." Jaime's line, which has been loosening somewhat over the course of the last few books (I first noticed it in "La Maggie La Loca"--a de-tightened approach to better accommodate Steve Weissman's colors), is as limber here as I've ever seen it, the closest perhaps he is capable to looking like he drew something in a white heat. In filling in one of the biggest remaining gaps in Maggie's backstory, the two years she spent living with her family away from Hoppers, Jaime reveals what seems like the key piece of the puzzle of Maggie's bad luck in love and her punk-era rebelliousness, and a sealed-off well of pain caused by her estrangement from her family. But worse--and I don't want to spoil anything here, so I'm not even going to say who I'm talking about--it introduces a character who, at long last, can't come to terms. What happened in this person's life, through no fault of anyone but the perpetrator but as a result of unwittingly malign neglect by everyone else, broke them, never to recover.
It's easy enough to tell that sort of story, I suppose, but difficult to make the reader feel an impact of discovery of this tragedy commensurate to what the characters themselves might feel. Jaime's genius is that he pulls it off, with an out-of-nowhere punch-to-the-gut revelation that literally made me gasp out loud. It's his "I did it thirty-five minutes ago." And ever since I read it, when I think of it, I just keep thinking to myself, "Poor [name]. Poor, poor [name]." It makes me want to cry! Cry for an imaginary person I'd never read about until a few pages earlier. (It's the flipside of feeling proud of the entirely imaginary Hopey Glass for becoming a teacher's assistant, I guess.) Such power! Between this and the not at all dissimilar ACME Novelty Library #20, this year has featured two of the most devastating--and I mean so sad it impacted me physically--comics I've ever read. I will never forget reading this book. Finally, I was there.
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 25, 2010 at 12:01 AM|plink!
I'm looking for good critical writing on World of Warcraft, along the lines of what Bruce Baugh does on the topic, or what Zak Smith/Sabbath does for D&D. I don't trust my comments to allow you to leave links, so if you know anything, please email me at sean at all too flat dot com. You could always try leaving a comment too, I guess. I mean, you only live once. Thank you in advance!
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 23, 2010 at 1:59 PM|plink!
* The Hobbit has been partially cast! Martin Freeman from the English Office as Bilbo, Richard Armitage as Thorin, and about two-thirds of the remaining Dwarves have been announced as well. The linked-to TORn post has a pretty thorough write-up for each actor, if your'e interested.
* I always get really excited when I discover that the military acknowledges paganism and Wicca, especially at the Air Force Academy, of all places. You pretty much turn into a Republican when you pass within a 20-mile radius of that place.
* More Real Life Horror: WikiLeaks' Iraq War doc dump has begun. The government lied when it said it didn't keep a body count for Iraqis: 109,000 deaths, including 66,801 civilians, by the government's own, likely woefully underestimated count. We also presided over a fairly extensive torture-murder regime by the Iraqi authorities that we did basically nothing to stop. Meanwhile, I hadn't thought of this for a while, but Saddam Hussein's personal pistol hangs in the George W. Bush Presidential Library:
I remember when I first learned that factoid, it literally took my breath away. It's the past decade's Rosebud. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Take it away, John:
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 22, 2010 at 7:04 PM|plink!
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This is going to sound a little weird, but one of my favorite things about the superhero flight of fancy with which Jaime inaugurated this third Love and Rockets series, now in bookstore-friendly post-altcomic squarebound format, is the fact that I was pronouncing the titular super-team's name wrong nearly the whole time. I was thinking "Tee-Girls"--maybe you can blame the aging super-version of Xochtil's resemblance to Maggie's Tia Vicki for putting that pronunciation in my head--when as it turns out its a play on "Tigers." And whaddayaknow, just like that, Jaime's imaginary team of misfit superheroines fits right into the very real and very long legacy of superhero characters and creators I've heard people completely mispronounce: Namor the Sub-Mariner, Magneto, Sienkiewicz, Quesada, Byrne--not to mention "Jamie" Hernandez himself. Probably just a fluke, I know, but somehow it feels more like attention to detail.
It's easy to dismiss "Ti-Girls Adventures Number 34" as precisely that sort of pleasant superhero-nostalgia diversion, a chance for Jaime to work directly in the idiom of one of his greatest but least frequently expressed influences. It's certainly difficult to square it with the Locas-verse as we know it. The wildest left-turn back into the fantastic that the "Locas" strips have taken in probably 20 years, it transforms Penny Century into the mad superhero she's always dreamed of becoming, reveals that Maggie's apartment-complex neighbors Alarma and Angel are secretly superheroes themselves (we'd already caught some glimpses of Alarma in costume, but that was in the storyline where we also saw the devil take the form of a levitating black dog, so, y'know, grain of salt), brings sundry superheroes mentioned in the imaginary comics Maggie reads to life (e.g. Cheetah Torpeda, herself the namesake of a strip club Ray D. frequents), features inexplicably aged versions of previously existing characters like Maggie's wrestler cousing Xochtil, posits the existence of a mutant-like female-only "gift" of superpowers, and ultimately reveals that Penny was never really real to begin with. "I've known Penny for quite a few years now," Maggie says, "and in all that time she never aged. Like, she was not regular flesh and blood, but like, this drawing that was clipped from a comic book and pasted down here on Earth." And here I'd thought she'd just used H.R. Costigan's billions to have a lot of work done!
And indeed, Jaime's art here is so zesty that maybe a chance to have fun with super-powered women in skimpy costumes really is the main point. (And frankly it'd be worth it if only for the debut of Alarma's glam-rock cut-off-tank-top villain look. Yowza.) The effect he achieves with his black-and-white-uniformed Amazons flying around or smacking each other around against the night sky or in the void of outer space is frequently breathtaking--my dream comic con panel is a "spot-black-off" between him and Mike Mignola. Meanwhile his action choreography is to die for. Witness the knockout wordless nine-panel-grid page in Part Two of the story, featuring a series of images in which Angel attempts to join the fight against an off-the-right-hand-side-of-each-panel Penny Century, only to be rebuffed at each stage by one of the uber-powerful popular girls of the superhero scene, the Fenomenons. In each panel there's a palpable drive from the left to the right, thanks to motion lines and those blacks, but there's always something stopping Angel from getting to that elusive border. I know I lecture superhero writers and artists all the time about how they should be doing their job, but, well, this is how they should be doing their job.
But there is more to "Ti-Girls" than meets the eye. Super-Penny turns heel not just because she's gone mad with power, but because those powers have caused her to lose two of her children; in order to thwart Penny, one of the Ti-Girls uses a ray-gun to zap another with a sample of Penny's "maternal instinct," which can be used as a homing device. I think this may be one of the most explicit explorations of motherhood ever for "Locas"; certainly Penny and Hopey's dueling pregnancies way back when weren't explored in terms of how the pair felt about the kids they had and/or didn't have. There's Tia Vicki's misery over her belief that Maggie resents her for how she raised her, too, but that didn't involve birth and babies and very young children like this storyline does. I wonder what it says about Maggie that this is all being processed in something very like a dream?
There's also an explicit feminist angle. Women are the only people capable of becoming super-powered naturally; they're born with "the gift," while men have to try to recreate it with lab accidents or magic meteors or what have you. Meanwhile, the entire history of female superheroes in this world is one of their management and exploitation by one Dr. Zolar--his crowning superheroine-team creation is an all-teen unit, the Runaways to his Kim Fowley. But perhaps most strikingly, certainly if you read regular superhero comics, is what a non-presence male superheroes are. None are drafted into the fight against Penny, and the few we meet are basically non-entities who exist to get thrashed by one of Penny's super-kids or to help out the Ti-Girls in locating them. The problems in the story--Penny's rampage, a breakout at a female supervillain penitentiary, a supervillainness out for vengeance, a Bizarro Ti-Girl--are all caused by women, addressed by women, solved by women, and have consequences felt by women. I actually think you might have a hard time getting this comic to pass a reverse Bechdel Rule, in fact. And that's enormously, enormously refreshing. If "Locas" has taught us anything, isn't it that women should be the stars and driving forces behind their own damn comic, even if they're dressing up in one-piece swimsuits and punching each other in the process?
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 22, 2010 at 12:01 AM|plink!
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* Today at Robot 6 I took a look at Marvel's incredible disappearing price cut for new titles in January. Actually it's not that simple, as some number-crunching I did with the help of JK Parkin and Kiel Phegley shows, but nor is it as simple as the across-the-board institution of $2.99 as the price point for new titles that Marvel sounded like it was promising the other week.
* Much ado about Hobbit, via the indispensable Frodo Franchise blog: Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh and New Line Cinema are all saying that they still may move production of the films out of New Zealand, the idea being that even if the actors-union boycott spurred by the New Zealand branch of the Australian actors union is now over, the damage is already done. In various interviews conducted in the already constructed sets for the films, Jackson, Walsh, and co-writer Philippa Boyens cast the situation largely in terms of a lack of confidence on Warner Bros.' part that the NZ film industry and its constituent organizations will be reliable partners on the production. The union obviously disputes the studio/filmmaker POV. The situation is such that New Zealand's government may literally rewrite the laws to make things more amenable to the studio.
* Here's a really fascinating panel report from the Daniel Clowes spotlight at APE, hosted by Dan Nadel. I really like the idea Clowes advances that he's shifted his characters away from interior monlogues and into publicly proclaiming their points of view because everyone can post their interior monologue on the internet now. And this quote is just murder:
"I realized at a certain point that the thing that keeps me drawing comics and the thing that has always moved me along is that comics history is really disappointing," Clowes responded. "It's not the same as the history of novels, history of art, history of movies, the body of work is pretty spotty. The things we imagined don't really exist. We imagine that Alex Toth did really amazing comics in the 50s that really worked, that were like Howard Hawk's movies, but he didn't do that. He never made a comic you could read. It's terrible, and I say that thinking that he was one of the greatest genius' of the 20th Century."
I'm sure any armchair therapist could have an interesting time with the book. With "AYC," and pretty much all of my previous work, everything was hidden behind a curtain of humor. There's no curtain in "Prison Pit."
* Heidi MacDonald notes that Wizard's ignominious retreat from the Con War continues, as they've moved their Big Apple and New England cons a month prior to NYCC, instead of on the weekends on either side of it as they were this year--which in turn was a retreat from scheduling Big Apple directly against NYCC. As I said last week, the Wizard-initiated phase of the Con War was probably the worst thing ever to happen to Wizard. It served as a focal point for years of resentment in the industry and gave folks cover to take that resentment public; it ensured the already de facto non-participation in any of Wizard's shows by any of the comics industry's major players; it gave huge-name creators and Senior Vice Presidents and such cover to badmouth the company publicly and presumably withhold support privately; it cemented the Wizard shows' reputation as a low-rent autograph mill rather than anything remotely comics centric and gave them an absolutely poisonous reputation among comics fans, and so on. Waving the white flag in terms of scheduling is really just the splatter from the gaping self-inflicted wound that taking on Reed gave the company--especially considering the hubris Wizard's honchos were displaying at the time, as Tom Spurgeon alludes to.
* I gasped aloud when I read this: Harvey Pekar died of an accidental overdose of prescription antidepressants. That's just awful. It was sad enough when you just thought, "Oh, okay, he was getting on in years I guess," but he clearly had so much work and advocacy left in him that to lose him prematurely (even at 70 years old) is really rotten.
*
"Can anyone tell me anything about this Hellraiser movie that doesn't have Doug Bradley as Pinhead in it? I haven't even been sent a script. But I suppose I'm irrelevant now....So this movie exists. It's finished? Well, for a title I suggest: HELLRAISER : FUCKED."
* Here are the details on Robyn's Body Talk Pt. 3, which is basically a compilation of five tracks each from Pts. 1 & 2 plus five new tracks. I'd have swapped out "Dancehall Queen" for "Cry When You Get Older," but oh well.
While we're on the subject of Sexy Star Wars, however, I want to take a moment to say something I've been stewing on for a few years now: "Slave Leia." Look, obviously Princess Leia's get-up in Jabba's palace is the hottest thing in human history. No one's disputing that. But for years, when I thought about it, which was often, I thought of it as "Princess Leia's metal bikini" or "Princess Leia's gold bikini" or something like that. The notion that she was a "slave" never entered into it. A prisoner, sure, but a slave? And then sexing up the slave aspect by making it the name of that awesome outfit? There's always been something creepy about that to me. Please allow me to enjoy the image that made me a man without bringing dubious gender-relational issues into it. Metal Bikini Forever!
Posted by Sean T. Collins on October 20, 2010 at 8:20 PM|plink!
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