This morning, after hearing about the appalling dual terroist attack in Istanbul today (the second such attack in a week, this one levelled against people guilty of being British as opposed to guilty of being Jewish), I was listening to the joint press conference being held by Bush and Blair, and this question stood out:

“What do you say to people who today conclude that British people have died and been maimed as a result of you appearing here today, shoulder-to-shoulder with a controversial American President?”

I’ll let Blair himself answer:

“What has caused the terrorist attack today in Turkey is not the President of the United States, is not the alliance between America and Britain. What is responsible for that terrorist attack is terrorism, are the terrorists. And our response has got to be to unify in that situation, to put the responsibility squarely on those who are killing and murdering innocent people, and to say, we are going to defeat you, and we’re not going to back down or flinch at all from this struggle.”

The fact that it is necessary for a major world leader to have to take the time to say something like that is disturbing to me. Unfortunately, the notion that we may now blame Bush/the U.S./the West/Jews for every terroist-attack death everywhere is becoming increasingly popular.

Fortunately, it’s an easy argument to defeat. Before 9/11, this cowboy president of ours had made it absolutely clear that he was planning on keeping his hands off of not just Iraq, but really every other country on the planet. Remember the whole “no nation building” thing? Back then, he was criticized as being too isolationist by the same people now convinced he’s out to conquer the world. What, then, prompted Islamist terrorists from atomizing 3,000 people that day? Bush’s interventist approach toward Texas?

Similarly, take a look at that MSBNC article about today’s attacks. It points out that up until today, the most deadly terrorist atrocity in Turkey’s history was a 1977 assault against leftists. Surely they weren’t advocating an imperialist oil war at the time.

And as Christopher Hitchens points out, one of the synagogues devastated last Saturday had already been the site of a terrorist attack, back when Reagan and Thatcher were in charge of the US and UK and Saddam was our friend. Unless those terrorists were time travellers, it’s difficult to understand how their actions were caused by the regime change policy.

It’s also difficult to understand the mentality that leads one to ask a question like that one from this morning’s press conference, but I’m trying. You can’t defeat what you don’t understand, after all.

Yesterday, in the parking lot at the train station, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “BUSH LIED – PEOPLE DIED.” I’ve often wondered why the anti-war movement (if a contingent that can only muster one-eighth the amount of protestors that took to the streets against a fox-hunting ban can be called a movement–I’m sorry, I should be above cheap shots, shouldn’t I?) have stuck so hard to these strident, all-caps claims of mendacity.

Then I listend to Bush’s speech at Whitehall Palace yesterday. Here was the most powerful man on the planet repudiating the realpolitik of decades past that saw the free world coddling Middle Eastern tyrants and thugocracies, repudiating ethnicist claims that Muslims are incapable of participating in democracy, calling for the establishment of an independent democractic Palestinian state, taking Israel to task for provocative and unjust policies yet defending its right to exist untrammelled by random violence, calling for an end to the rising tide of anti-Semitism, defending the removal of genocidal madmen in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, calling for the rights of women to be respected around the globe, demanding increased levels of freedom and tolerance from our so-called friends in the Muslim world, declaring that dictatorship is always harmful, asserting the need for freedom of speech, press, and religion, citing Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic internationalism as a good to be returned to, and generally declaring his intent to “raise up an ideal of democracy in every part of the world.”

This is the most radically liberal speech I’ve ever heard an American president give. It’s a tremendous break from years of “looking the other way” when it came to the behavior of friends and enemies alike in countries that contain one fifth of humankind. It advocated policies that have been close to my bleeding heart for years, policies I never thought I’d hear advocated by this or any President.

If I were the anti-war left, I’d be yelling “BUSH LIED!” too. The kind of cognitive dissonance a speech like that would engender in me would require nothing less than to deny that the man meant a single word he said.

“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy.”

–George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Holy Moses, was I ever right. I posted the hell out of myself today. There may be more to come–who knows?–but for now you’ve got:

(1) Gay marriage stuff

(2) Horror comics stuff

(3) General comics stuff

(4) Jim Treacher avenged

(5) Terror attack stuff

(6) Bush’s speech stuff

(7) Saddam/al Qaeda stuff

(8) Anti-war protestor stuff

(9) Smutty silliness

Fire at will!

Thanks to the generosity of John Jakala, I read the two-volume horror series Tomie, by manga creator Junji Ito, this week. To quote Lost Highway, “that is some seriously spooky shit, sir.” The very concept–human being as tumor–is one familiar to any fan of Anglosphere body horror–Cronenberg and Barker, for example. But here, it’s pursued with a mad capriciousness, fusing the tumor metaphor with the viral metaphor to produce something truly terrifying and seemingly everlasting. The imagery is as strong as you’re likely to come across in a comic; the carpet that gives birth to a horde of empty-socketed faces is a favorite of mine.

However, I wonder if I didn’t stumble across a big obstacle to the effectiveness of comic-book horror, something we’ve been talking about around these parts for ages: Later that night, as I lay me down to sleep, some of those horrifying images started filtering into my mind again. This tends to happen when I watch or read something really frightening–but unlike those peskily persistent pictures of the Shining twins or It‘s evil clown Pennywise, these mental images appeared complete with panel borders and folded-back page edges, as though I was looking not at the image itself (the “real thing”), but the book itself! It’s hard to be truly kept up at night by the recurring image of ink on a bunch of pieces of paper…

The friend of mine who pioneered the “Friendstering the Masthead” game has expanded upon it at Low Culture. Apparently I accidentally scooped him with my post on the topic. Whoops!

UPDATE: In the interest of full disclosure, before I de-Friendstered, the editorial staff at the publication I edit for was an embarrassing four for four.

The responses to yesterday’s plea for help getting into Love & Rockets continue to flow in. The leading candidates seem to be 1) Palomar 2) The Death of Speedy 3) Getting the hell off the Comics Journal message board before it saps your last bit of enthusiasm for great comics. I’ll probably be heeding all three bits of advice.

Ha ha, seriously folks, Palomar and The Death of Speedy are far and away the frontrunners for the best way to dive into the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez respectively; after trying those two, folks have suggested trying Gilbert’s Poison River next, followed by Chelo’s Burden, X, Flies on the Ceiling, Chester Square, and Wigwam Bam to varying degrees. In other words, I’ve got a nice plan of action, and as long as I can wean myself off of my chronological-order-of-release fixation, I should be all set. Thanks to everyone who’s written in or posted suggestions, and please keep those recommendations coming (especially folks who wrote in yesterday with ampersands, since my submission form ate whatever you tried to tell me!).

Also on the Hernandez beat is Eve Tushnet, who’s blogged her own recommendations, and Johnny Bacardi, who’s a rare dissenting voice in the chorus of praise for Palomar. Alan David Doane is representative of the majority opinion. (How often do you get to say that?)

Big Sunny D advances his theory that Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is a horror comic. Horrifying, I’ll grant him, but horror? I can’t buy it. I agree with pretty much everything he says, but I think horror is more than just a sense of despair and futility–much as we’re supposed to think they need to be subverted or destroyed if a given work is to be any good, genre conventions do count for something, and I think that certain conventions of structure, imagery, and message are what enable us to stop the slippery slope that leads us to label as “horror” anything that’s bleak or disturbing. On the other hand, Steve Bissette (scroll down) agrees with Mr. D; it’s definitely a topic worth examining. (I touched on it in a footnote in my senior essay on horror.)

Alan David Doane weighs in on the dangers of the (as Barton Fink might put it) “merely adequate.” I’m not terribly familiar with Geoff Johns’s work so I can’t comment there, but it’s certainly true that there’s more at stake when you buy something that’s “okay for what it was” than just that vague sense of let-down-ness you’re feeling.

Will Franklin find his findings to be factual in the future?

Shawn Fumo unearths a truly shocking statistic from a Time Magazine article on Borders Bookstores–female-centric shojo manga comprises fully 60% of their graphic-novel sales! Speaking anecdotally, I have yet to visit the graphic novel section of the local Borders without seeing books picked up for purchase by teenage girls or elementary-school-aged kids or both. Every single time, people. But surely this manga craze in my Borders is just a fluke–after all, Shonen Jump just won’t sell!

Bruce Baugh has some thoughts on the extent to which righteous anger is an integral part of fandom; he also counters the fandom-supported argument that change is inherently bad. He cites the case of Ang Lee’s Hulk, and he’s right–it’s not the fact that Lee changed the Hulk’s origin that was bad, it was the way he changed it. (That is, needlessly and incomprehensibly complicating it, thereby stripping it of its allegorical resonance. And oh yeah, who gave a damn about any of those characters? The fact is that any time the Hulk wasn’t on screen, or those panel-border dissolves weren’t being used, the movie was dull as hell, and making a dull movie out of the Incredible freaking Hulk is pretty inexcusable. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Note to John Jakala: Nuh-uh! (Translation: there’s an interesting debate going on in that post’s comments feature about the merits of Mark Millar and Brian Bendis.)

J.W. Hastings tries to find where comic books as containers of literature end and comic books as art objects begin. He’s not all that happy with the latter conception of the comic book, no sir. Frankly, I think he’s targeting the wrong book by the wrong publisher–Top Shelf has some vaguely design-y books, sure, but that most recent anthology isn’t really one of them, at least insofar as it garners praise from the artcomix crowd; it’s too hit-or-miss an affair. Most of Top Shelf’s best books are nice to look at but are ultimately valued for their content, not their design–the works of Alan Moore, Craig Thompson, and Jeffrey Brown come to mind. A far more artsy publisher would be Highwater (who, in fairness to JW, are distributed in some capacity or other by Top Shelf); it draws a lot of its energy from Fort Thunder alumni, and NON anthologizer Jordan Crane, who are all leading proponents of the comic-book-as-objet-d’art school. Frankly, I’m tickled if a book is as neat-looking as, say, the hand-silkscreened and die-cut NON #5, but I’m really interested in the comics themselves, you know? Which is good, because Highwater happens to publish some of the best comics made by anyone in the last few years (Teratoid Heights, Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, Skibber Bee-Bye, The Last Lonely Saturday, and yes, the much-maligned-by-JW Kramers Ergot 4. JW, take another look at Kramers–yes, the endless collages are pretty much pointless, but check out “Lonely Sailor” by editor Sammy Harkham, the Sisyphus stories by Anders Nilssen, “Don’t Look Them in the Eye” by Jeffrey Brown–those I remember off the top of my head, and they’re good comics any way you slice it.)

Eve Tushnet responds to David Fiore‘s call for an eye-level aesthetic, which she interprets to eschew both reverence and cynicism. Sounds good to me–reverence and cynicism tend to be totally subsumed into horror in the works I admire…

In a post script to something of a running debate on the potential ameliorative effects of manga on American comics, Dave Intermittent notes that two American-made manga-style books, the Sandman spin-off Death: At Death’s Door and a Lizzie McGuire tie-in, have done well enough at bookstores to suggest that the manga market will, in fact, buy American manga. In other words, it’s not just Japanophile fetishism. This bodes well.

More on manga (hey, isn’t there always?) from Ron Phillips, focusing on manga’s role as sequential-art training wheels for America’s little kids.

Jim Henley, you are not alone!

Jason Kimble points out that amidst all the recent furor about mediocre comics, no one seemed to remember that the crap: gold ratio in other media is just as bad. Hey, I remembered–you don’t see me renting Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle or running out to buy Britney Spears’s In the Zone today, do you?

Finally, in a recent message to his mailing list, Warren Ellis mentioned that he’d been surfing through “the comics blogosphere” the other day. While that explained the strange feeling I got a couple days ago that someone, somewhere, was exposing my dark American underbelly, it did more than that, too: it led Ellis, apparently, to give up on bitching about the state of the comics industry altogether, because it’s all been said before (by him, and now by the bloggers). Christopher Butcher is apparently going to follow suit. Though I wasn’t reading comics, let alone comics-related websites, when Ellis was at the height of his influence, it seems to me that his advice tends to be quite good; but there have been people saying there’s nothing new under the sun for as long as there have been people, if not as long as there’s been a sun. Personal Comics Burnout hits all of us at one time or another, and the joys of complaining are certainly susceptible to yielding diminishing returns, but don’t let’s mistake momentary fed-up-edness with unshakeable insight. If we don’t complain about the stupidities of this medium we love so much, who will? Not the people perpetrating the stupidities, I can assure you of that.

Here’s another comics-related anal-rententivity-inspired plea from me to you.

I have a hardcover copy of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan collection. Since this is one of my favorite books of all time, I like having a hardcover (a relatively rare thing in my collection). Essentially it was a gift from a friend who had an extra copy. The thing is, the cover is ripped along the spine in such a way that the printing and color is removed from an inch-long by half-inch-wide section of it and all you can see is the white of the paper. Think of what happens to wrapping paper when you rip the tape off and you’ll get the idea.

Anyway, this drives me nuts, and during the three or so years I’ve owned this book I’ve always considered it to not actually be in my collection, so flummoxed and flustered am I by that one tear on the spine. I know it’s crazy, but it’s true, just like getting lost between the moon and New York City.

Here is my offer: To the first person who sends me a nice pristine copy of the Jimmy Corrigan hardcover, I will send my own slightly-ripped-cover copy of that same hardcover, plus an undamaged, lovely hardcover copy of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl: The Beauty Supply District collection. How does that sound? I’ll even take care of shipping. How can you lose?

(You know, if you want to keep it simple and just want to trade Jimmy Corrigans, that’s fine too. But I thought I’d offer the Katchor book too.)

Go ahead and email me if you’re interested. (And I’ve been told the ampersand situation has been rectified, so don’t worry about that.)

Thank you, and goodnight!

You know what? Just go to Dirk’s today, okay? He’s got links to everything, and then some. Everyone else is just linking to those same things anyway, so I’m saving you the trouble. You’re welcome.

Long Island and its neighbors have been insane lately. The Missus has analysis, with particular emphasis on the troubling implications these stories have for criminal justice, high school culture, the eating disordered… fascinating reading.

Hey, it turns out that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were apparently connected up the wazoo.

What, did that not get mentioned on the morning news shows today? Why, it’s almost as though they don’t want you to know!

Jim Henley, meanwhile, has at the New York Times op-chart that offered an optimistic appraisal of the situation in Iraq, which I linked to the other day. Jim’s analysis looks astute, but most of it hinges on the fact that he’s shocked–shocked!–that the U.S. hasn’t been able to repair decades’ worth of damage, neglect, and murderousness within the space of three months. Go figure!

Finally, after spending the weekend watching the astounding making-of documentaries included in the extended-edition Two Towers DVD, I’ve come to the conclusion that Iraq must be transfered to the control of Peter Jackson as soon as possible.

Okay. So I picked up Music for Mechanix, Volume One of the Hernandez Brothers’ epochal altcomix series Love & Rockets, at SPX this summer. I’m stuck about a quarter of the way into it–it’s just not doing much for me. I understand that its quasi-parodic sci-fi soap-opera tone is very different from later, ostensibly better/richer/etc. L&R, but the problem is that I’m extremely anal-renentive and must read a series from its very beginning onward if I’m to read it at all, so I’m reluctant to skip ahead to the “good jumping-on points” volumes in the collection. On the other hand, I have little interest in slogging through a few volumes that won’t appeal to me, as though I was some four-year-old forcing himself to eat his broccoli so I can have ice cream for dessert. Also, I’d pick up Palomar, the big collection of Gilbert Hernandez’s South American L&R tales, which by all accounts is a tremendous masterpiece that presents those stories in the best possible manner, but a) I’d miss out on the Jaime/Mario stuff; b) again, I’ve just got to read things from the beginning; c) If I end up loving it, I’m just going to wind up buying the individual collections anyway, which will bring us back to Do.

So what should I do here? I ask because I totally believe everyone who says that L&R is indispensible, and I want to read it, but I’m just not sure how to approach it. What say you? Drop me an email line (UPDATE: please don’t use use ampersands in your email, because apparently the submission form cuts off everything after them! I can’t tell you how many responses i’ve gotten that read like “Regarding L”–and that’s it, because “&R, you should get Palomar” or whatever else the person wrote has disappeared!), or post your thoughts here, please!

ANOTHER UPDATE: It appears that the whole “Help me learn to like L&R” title is throwing people for a loop, to the point where the above-linked thread is attracting more sarcasm and abuse than John Byrne explaining why we need to show Superman more respect. Partially this is because message boards attract idiots, but it’s also because it’s an admittedly wonky title. It was intended as a joke, or at the very least a hyperbolic provocation, in the grand tradition of jokey/hyperbolically provocative thread titles. Really all I’m hoping for are some tips as to the best way to approach the material.

Yes, there is such a thing. It’s important to purge our pull-lists and buy-piles of mediocre, inconsequential piffle–important to our own wallets and sanity, if nothing else–but don’t let’s forget that some superhero books are still a hoot and a half. Newsarama has neato looks at upcoming projects from Brian Bendis and Mark Millar–the latter unreliable of late but quite good when he’s “on,” the former completely in the zone on Ultimate Spider-Man, Alias, Powers, Ultimate Six, and Daredevil. (Ultimate X-Men I’m not convinced he’s got a handle on yet, but he’s always rewarded my patience in the past.) Enjoy, and be not ashamed!

Never let it be said that I’m just some rah-rah-ing jingo: This CIA report, coupled with this analysis by Jim Henley of the potentially self-deluding glass-half-full mentality of the administration, do not bode well for Iraq. I still maintain that we did absolutely the right thing by invading the country and deposing the monsters who ran it, and that it will be a good thing for the country, the region, and the world in the long run–after all, bad news isn’t always the only news, as we should have learned by now. (For example, there’s this Gallup poll of Baghdadis that speaks tremendously well of the potential for genuine liberal democracy in Iraq; there’s also this chart from the New York Times (!) op-ed page (link courtesy Roger Simon), using a variety of indicators to show that things are actually trending to the positive in several important ways.) Moreover, generally speaking, the people who are saying “I told you so!” because of the bad news are doing so based on assumptions about the nature of America and/or the nature of Middle Easterners and/or the nature of man’s obligation to his fellow man that I find troubling, to say the least. But no one is well served by glossing over the negative, and the trends discussed in the links above ought to be addressed by hawks & doves alike–the whole aviary, in other words.

On a related note, I’d criticize the chickenhawk argument, but since I myself have never used the chickenhawk argument, I have no right to offer my opinions on it. (Seriously, enough with this idiocy already, okay? Roger Simon and Armed Liberal have beaten this fallacy to within an inch of its life–let’s not ever have to go through this again, shall we?)

I recently got off of Friendster, because seriously, enough already. But my coworkers have devised a delightful game to play with the service: Go to the “about the contributors” section of your favorite NYC-based lifestyle glossy (they’ve done New York and MTV’s magazine) and type in the names you find there–you’ll find an embarrassingly high percentage of them on Friendster, and an even more embarrassingly high percentage of them using the same photo on the website and in their magazines.

“It is a story that emits light and yellow and God and love.” –Rosie O’Donnell on her musical Taboo, during her post-suit courthouse-steps statement yesterday

“Rev. Al Sharpton: The Rolling Stone Interview” –on the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine

Also, Ted Rall is scum, but you knew that already.

How to de-mediocrify your comics-buying habits in several easy steps, by Derek Martinez. (Link courtesy ADD.)

The Comics Masochist’s Creed, by Chris Allen.

Must reads, esp. Allen’s.

By all accounts, James Sime is a terrific retailer, of the kind we all wish had a shop near us. He also promotes a form of “comics activism” the value of which I and several others find questionable. These are both topics one can discuss rationally, if one is so inclined.

But man OH man–with friends like these, does James Sime even need enemies?

I think it’s genuinely safe to declare the comics blogosphere “mature,” because in the last couple of weeks there have been about a half-dozen topics covered so completely that it makes MSNBC’s The Abrams Report‘s coverage of the Scott Peterson trial look perfunctory and half-hearted. Seriously, if people want saturation coverage of comics-related issues, then both of them should turn to the comicsphere, since that’s where it’s at. All this is perhaps a roundabout way of pointing out how good comicsphere kingpin Dirk Deppey is; a good many of the links below come courtesy of his indispensable site.

The most recent topic to draw forth the blogerati is really just a sentence, written by Christopher Butcher: “This week

Guess who owns the Extended Edition of The Two Towers, one week before it’s supposed to come out?

Ha ha!