It looks like professional concerns will calm down a bit next week, so that will probably be the time where you’ll see some longer-form posts: the oft-promised defense of Velvet Goldmine, for example, as well as possible examinations of Bowie’s Berlin period and an excoriation of Loeb & Lee’s Batman run. Till then, it’s the usual calvacade of links (which inevitably turns out longer than a long-form piece would, but whatever).
First and foremost, a fond farewell to Alan David Doane, who’s calling it a day and ending his website and weblog. It’s funny: A year or two ago, I vaguely knew of ADD as a guy who usually was on the opposite side from me of various message-board arguments, but I’d never actually gotten into it with him. So I ended up getting to e-know him from the interaction of our weblogs, and lo and behold, I quite like him and his work. Funny how the Internet works: A guy I probably would have hated had I spoken with him in one format turns into a guy I admire and like because I spoke to him through another format. Alan is/was a fine example of Internet comics criticism, whose passion may have occasionally gotten the best of him but much more often than not led to revelatory writing on comics many people (myself included) might not have otherwise tried. Since that was his frequently stated goal, I congratulate him: Mission accomplished.
On the other side of the coin, there’s bad Internet comics criticism. And then, o my brothers, there’s so-bad-it’s-good Internet comics crticism. Enter Michael David Thomas’s hysterical (in both senses of the word), ad hominem-laden attack on Tom Spurgeon & Jordan Raphael’s biography of Stan Lee. I haven’t read the book, I must admit, so who knows? Maybe the book is as bad as this review says. (It would be hard pressed for the book to be as bad as the review itself.) I do happen to know from experience that Tom Spurgeon’s antipathy to superhero comics is unslakeable. But in reading this review you get the impression that any book about Stan Lee that didn’t use a ton of exclamation points an alliteration and refer to Lee as “Smilin’ Stan” would be not just unacceptable but borderline heretical. What can you say about a review that slags the book for being biased, then ends with a section titled “Still ‘The Man'”? You can say it’s dumb, is what you can say. (Thomas gets extra points for referring to the Comics Journal in much the same way that George Bush the First referred to the ACLU, or how that woman in the diner referred to Tippi Hendren in The Birds.)
What, they couldn’t come up with a fourth book for the Fantastic Four? C’mon, guys. Make the Newsarama headline writers’ jobs a little easier, okay? “Four on the Floor?” “Four for Four“? “Fantastic Four?” It’d practically write itself!
Great, lengthy Grant Morrison interview over at comic book resources. With each new story arc my conviction deepens that this will end up being pretty much the best run on a monthly superhero comic ever.
Also on the Morrison tip is Big Sunny D, weighing in with his fourth take on The Filth, this time emphasizing the fantastic covers. I reiterate the need for someone with design sense, like cover creator Carlos Segura, to have design control over whatever collected edition The Filth ends up in. Also, feel better, Sunny!
Johnny Bacardi has updated both his blogroll and his front page, adding a Dave Stevens pin-up that I remember very, very well from my youth. I remember seeing it in an issue of Femme Fatales magazine that I bought from my local comics shop, Gotham Manor, back in the ninth grade. Boy, did I like that tissue. Issue. Sorry.
(Why does Johnny B’s site always inspire me to comment on what bits of pop-culture cheesecake I, as a pre-Internet adolescent boy, relied upon for kicks? Beats me. I have no idea.)
CrossGendered Comics continues to snip away at its assets, including, apparently, artist George Perez. I never cared one way or the other about CrossGen, except insofar as they a) Seemed to have the right idea when it came to packaging their trade paperback collections; b) removed a lot of retro-flavored fanboy-favorite artists and writers from wider circulation with their exclusivity agreements. While they’ve been bleeding those guys for some time now (hence Mark Waid being on Fantastic Four in the first place), I’m most nervous about Perez leaving. I happen to like quite a bit of what he does artistically, but having this 80s stalwart treated as a superstar (as he no doubt will be, what with the furor the CG situation is creating and the heat on his JLA/Avengers crossover) will be a big aesthetic step backwards for the superhero industry, one that’s already indulging in 90s retro with the Jim Lee run on Batman and Rob Liefeld’s comeback on Youngblood, and the upcoming Lee run on Superman, Marc Silvestri run on New X-Men, and Rob Liefeld covers run on Cable/Deadpool.
Forager–who, in the style of Daredevil, Captain America, Professor X and Spider-Man, has outed his secret identity as one J.W. Hastings!–has a couple of great posts today. One is a rant inspired by Frederic Boilet‘s manga vs. bandes-desinees article, including a refutation of the (baseless, pretentious, elitist, etc.) assertion that real-life stories are automatically better and/or more worthwhile than fantasy-tinged stories, and an upbraiding of the artistically self-indulgent minicomics scene. It touches (though it doesn’t mention it by name) on the possible negative ramifications of Team Comix’s hip-hip-hooray-for-us spirit; it’s also relevant to the discussion of the altcomix anthology Kramers Ergot 4 going on at the Comics Journal messboard.
The second good Forager piece isn’t comics related, but here it is anyway–a description of Forager’s ideal cinema studies program. For what its worth, the film studies program from which I graduated (magna cum laude, phi beta kappa, highest average in the major, best senior thesis essay in the major, ahem ahem), at Yale, was actually quite similar to the one Forager advocates, at least in terms of the classes I chose to take. I guess that’s the idea, though: in most cinema studies departments/programs, people can coast through on a river of bullshit if they want. (Even at my own beloved alma mater, I know one guy who didn’t even bother watching the movie he chose to do his thesis on. People, that movie wasn’t Ivan or Empire or something like that. That movie was The Blues Brothers.) Interesting Forager-post crossover: The fantasy writer he cites in his comics post as the best novelist of the past 30 years, John Crowley, was the person who graded my senior thesis screenplay for film studies! (He gave me an A-.)
David Fiore continues to mine old Marvel comics for philosophical-slash-theological gold. And like me, he thought Marvels was overrated. (And yet, I liked Kingdom Come. To quote Dr. Channard, the mind is a labyrinth.)
Two Jim Henley notes. First, Jim links to this post from the site Lean Left, following up on several of Jim’s criticisms of retailers and claiming (accurately, I think) that emotion, rather than intelligence or even common sense, seems to play the biggest role in the various arguments about how the industry should be run.
Second, Jim counters my counterargument about the Dave Gibbons/Lee Weeks Captain America run. Jim, I think you misinterpreted my bit about you “getting it completely wrong,” which is understandable, because that phrase is extremely misinterpretable. Alls I meant was that the comic was good, you thought it was bad, and therefore, you were wrong. (Hey, it’s my blog, and you’re wrong if I want you to be.) Politics didn’t enter into it (except that I assumed that, in critiquing how superhero comics “used to be written,” you were talking about not just the prose style, but the we’re-right-they’re-wrong theme of many of the plots). I certainly wasn’t accusing you of being part of an “anti-American conspiracy,” or even thinking of you as such in jest. Believe me, as seriously as I take my own politics, I’ve got no plans to resort to that kind of horsepucky.
Good news: Eve Tushnet is blogging about comics again! Bad news: She’s not blogging about anything I’ve read.