Archive for October 19, 2007
This just occurred to me
October 19, 2007It’s well within Gary Groth’s power to solve his own problems with online critical discourse–that good criticism is hard and time-consuming to find, that it’s decentralized into different individual blogs, that it’s drowned out by millions of idiots, etc.–by rejiggering The Comics Journal‘s website into the kind of centralized, “destination” critical entity that would serve as the new-media analog to the print publications of yore that he lionizes. Or to The Comics Journal itself, for that matter. He’s certainly in a unique position to capitalize on TCJ’s brand recognition–as a name, if not always as an actual magazine, it remains revered among the kind of people who’d want to read the kind of criticism Gary supports, and hated among the kind of people Gary would want to be hated by. It’d certainly make it easier for him to find good criticism online if he published a lot of it on his own website. It doesn’t solve his problem with the Internet’s supposed inferiority to print generally, but there isn’t a print publication in the world that’s been able to thread that needle.
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 19
October 19, 2007Read: Wizard and Glass–“Susan” chapters 1-3
In which during an extended flashback, Roland’s first love Susan visits a witch…with sexy results! Yep, the second you saw your first reference to “a familiar heat in her belly” you knew you were in for some of King’s idiosyncratic, yet no less steamy for that, take on sex. That’s really the whole point of this section: how Susan ends up promised as some sort of sexual chattel/surrogate mother to the horndog mayor of her town, how Rhea the witch gets turned on by a magical glass (title character!) she’s been given as payment by the mayor’s goons and subsequently diddles poor Susan’s skittle during the course of examining her to ensure her virginity, how Susan and Mr. Underhill “Will Dearborn” meet and feel instant heat, mentally and physically. I found this last bit particularly convincing in its depiction of young love/lust, reminiscent of how I met my wife in fact, albeit with more horses.
In terms of the larger story, we discover that revolutionary warlord the Good Man, John Farson, is conducting his assault on the land of the gunslingers in the name of democracy and equality. Susan and “Will” treat this like lip service, and perhaps it is, but we’ve seen how deeply ingrained the aristocratic ways of this world are in its inhabitants. Maybe there’s more to the Good Man than his seeming status as another flunkie of the Beast that supposedly commands Marten, Walter, and Flagg. Or maybe democracy and equality as values have as little to do with The Dark Tower‘s conception of goodness as they do with The Lord of the Rings‘.
Quote of the day
October 19, 2007But here’s my argument: Jeremy Tinder should feel bad because he made a bad comic book.
He should feel good if he made a good comic, and bad if he made a bad one.
By this logic, should Abhay Khosla should feel bad because he wrote a bad review? Not “bad review” in the sense that it’s a review of a book he thinks is bad, but “bad review” in the sense that it starts with six paragraphs of self-congratulation for writing a bad review in that sense, then hides about two grafs’ worth of actual critique among hyperbolic invective, gibberish, more self-congratulation about daring to buck the critical consensus, and swipes at other critics?
Not for me to say. Just like Abhay, I don’t wanna be the bad guy here. And hey, those two grafs were pretty cogent…but what else was it that Abhay said?
If you have a pet dog, and the dog shits on your carpet, you don’t give it steak sandwich. Why? Because you don’t want dogshit all over your carpets. Ipso facto. Quo vadis.
Oh, right.
Echoes
October 18, 2007And as far as the comics themselves- one thing I really noticed this year was that most of the “new” comics were long on craft and short on narrative.
—Heidi MacDonald Frank “Cold Heat” Santoro
Click the link for Frank’s measured assessment of the pros and cons to this approach and its future prospects.
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 18
October 18, 2007Read: Wizard and Glass–the rest of “Riddles”
Time for another touchdown dance: We’re in Stand-world! Or at least I thought we were until the newspaper they found referred to President Reagan and Vice-President Bush. Weird, I thought. They crossed over into the world of the un-revised Stand? But I guess it’s not that either, not really–that version took place in 1980 and the revised one was 1990, but this is 1986. And we eventually discover slight but strange differences from the world we know: unknown fast food chains, car manufacturers, baseball teams and so on. The idea is that there are any number of different “levels” of reality, different worlds, all connected by the Dark Tower, and all breaking down. Things like The Stand‘s superflu can leak from one level to the next. It’s an amusingly diegetic way to explain the differences between the ultimate version, the original version, this version, and even “Night Surf,” the short story that contained the root of The Stand years ago.
It also strikes me as how King will justify the eventual revisions to The Gunslinger. Roland:
…in my world even the past is in motion, rearranging itself in many vital ways…
Okay. We’ll see.
Finally, it’s pretty rad that they’re (apparently) calling Flagg the Crimson King in this world.
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October-November 2007–Index
October 17, 2007Here you shall find links to all of the posts in my blogathon reading of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. This post will be updated with each new entry.
Day 3: The Drawing of the Three–Argument; “Prologue: The Sailor”; “The Prisoner”
Day 4: The Drawing of the Three–“Shuffle”; “The Lady of the Shadows”; “Re-Shuffle”
Day 5: The Drawing of the Three–“The Pusher”; “Final Shuffle”; Afterword
Day 6: Blogslinging clarification
Day 6: The Waste Lands–Argument; “Bear and Bone” parts 1-21
Day 7: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Bear and Bone”
Day 8: The Waste Lands–“Key and Rose” parts 1-16
Day 9: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Key and Rose”
Day 10: The Waste Lands–“Door and Demon”
Day 11: The Waste Lands–“Town and Ka-tet” parts 1-15
Day 12: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Town and Ka-tet“
Day 14: The Waste Lands–“Bridge and City” parts 1-15
Day 15: The Waste Lands–“Bridge and City” parts 16-22
Day 16: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Bridge and City”; “Riddle and Waste Lands”; Author’s Note
Day 17: Wizard and Glass–Arguement; “Prologue: Blaine”; “Riddles” chapters 1-3
Day 18: Wizard and Glass–the rest of “Riddles”
Day 19: Wizard and Glass–“Susan” chapters 1-3
Day 20: Wizard and Glass–“Susan” chapters 4 & 5
Day 21: Wizard and Glass–the rest of “Susan”
Day 22: Wizard and Glass–“Come, Reap” chapters 1-5
Day 23: Wizard and Glass–the rest of “Come, Reap”; “All God’s Chillun Got Shoes”; Afterword
Day 24: The Gunslinger (revised)–Introduction; Foreword
Day 25: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Gunslinger”
Day 26: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Way Station”
Day 27: Blogslinging bump in the road
Day 28: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Oracle and the Mountains”
Day 29: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Slow Mutants”; “The Gunslinger and the Man in Black”
Day 30: Wolves of the Calla–The Final Argument
Day 31: Wolves of the Calla–“Prologue: Roont”; “The Face on the Water”; “New York Groove”
Day 32: Wolves of the Calla–“Mia”; “Palaver”
Day 33: Wolves of the Calla–“Overholser”
Day 34: Wolves of the Calla–“The Way of the Eld”; “Todash”
Day 36: Wolves of the Calla–“Gran-Pere’s Tale”; “Nocturne, Hunger”
Day 38: Wolves of the Calla–“Secrets”; “The Dogan, Part 1”; “The Dogan, Part 2”; “The Pied Piper”
Day 40: Song of Susannah–“1st Stanza: Beamquake”
Day 42: Song of Susannah–“6th Stanza: The Castle Allure”; “7th Stanza: The Ambush”
Day 43: Song of Susannah–“8th Stanza: A Game of Toss”
Day 44: Song of Susannah–“9th Stanza: Eddie Bites His Tongue”
Day 47: The Dark Tower–“Callahan and the Vampires”; “Lifted on the Wave”; “Eddie Makes a Call”
Day 48: The Dark Tower–“Dan Tete”
Day 49: The Dark Tower–“In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle”
Day 50: The Dark Tower–“On Turtleback Lane”; “Reunion”; “The Devar-Tete”; “The Watcher”
Day 52: The Dark Tower–“Tracks on the Path”
Thought of the day
October 17, 2007People, including world class cartoonists, waste hours and hours fretting over the “novel” half of the term “graphic novel” because what about non-fiction or short story collections or non-narrative work or autobio or whatever, but no one cares how big your “mini-comic” is.
18 Thoughts on the Small Press Expo 2007
October 17, 2007(This post originally appeared at The Comics Reporter. Thanks again, Tom.)
1. I’d been to SPX only once before, in 2003, back when it was at its old “indie comics sleepaway camp” location in the Holiday Inn in Bethesda proper. At the time I was not super-crazy about the experience. This, on the other hand, was one of the best cons I’ve ever been to.
There are many reasons for that (you may have already seen one of them) but I have to think that the venue change played a big part. Now every single table and booth is all in one giant high-ceilinged room, which makes the convention floor feel more like an energetic marketplace of art and ideas and less like an estate sale, as one SPX staffer described the vibe at the old venue. There was also convenient access to a patio on which to sit and chill and smoke and talk on your cell and read, and a pretty terrific bar/restaurant. And to the extent that anything is convenient via the Metro, with its insanely vertiginous escalators and absurdly arcane payment system that I’m pretty sure involves the use of an abacus, the old downtown Bethesda restaurant area is still within easy reach.
2. I see that one of my complaints about SPX 2003 was a lack of compelling debuts. Boy, was that ever not the case here. I feel that there have been years within even my comparatively brief comics-reading memory where we’d have been lucky to see as many world-class comics appear within 12 months as went on sale for the first time at this one show, even with The full list (scroll down to the nominees for Outstanding Debut) isn’t even a full list when you factor in mini-comics and the like.
3. And holy moley, the mini-comics! In terms of their craft as objects, Jeffrey Brown observed that the number of minis with color, silk-screened, die-cut, or hand-sewn covers actually appeared to be greater than the black-and-white jobs. There certainly were some gorgeous and compelling comics available; it would have been quite easy to wipe out your spending budget at Shawn Cheng, Sara Edward-Corbett and Matt Wiegle‘s Partyka and Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing’s Little House tables alone. Trust me on that one.
4. Related: Most times I’ve been to a small-press convention, I’ve been excited to pick up new work from familiar artists but wary of diving into uncharted waters, and rarely have I seen previously unknown work capable of beguiling me into doing so. But there was an embarrassment of riches at SPX from artists I’d never heard of–and I like to think I’m a pretty savvy guy when it comes to these things. My poison included Matt Furie’s hilarious Boy’s Club from Buenaventura Press; Andres Vera Martinez’s Tejano Ghost Stories, drawn and designed in beautiful black and white; and the minicomics anthologies of the Closed Caption Comics collective, a group clearly influenced by that notorious cultural dead end Fort Thunder that had nearly everyone I talked to saying “Whoa, did you see those kids next to the Bodega table?” There were at least that many over again on which I could gladly have splurged.
5. Speaking of Bodega and Buenaventura, along with PictureBox Inc. they formed a new trifecta of alternative comics publishing to sit alongside Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, and Top Shelf. Watching not one, not two, but three companies produce and sell high-quality avant garde work centered on alumni of the Fort Thunder, Paper Rodeo, and Highwater scenes is astonishing and invigorating.
6. Top Shelf has an exceptionally solid crop of new-ish releases and creators right now, with strong and interesting titles from Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, and Andy Hartzell, all of whom were on hand.
7. Oni was a visible and ebullient presence at the show as well, the most notable comparatively mainstream outlet there. They seem to have really internalized what made Scott Pilgrim connect and are continuing to deliver what may be the first organic wave of manga-influenced but not manga-derivative work we’ve seen, from their comfy digest formats on down: Wet Moon, Last Call, Black Metal and so on.
8. Where were NBM and SLG? I didn’t just miss them, did I?
9. AdHouse could have gotten away with charging $50 for their latest James Jean Process Recess art collection at this show, which you could also have said for PulpHope at MoCCA. They’re mightily impressive books. And if they subsidize Skyscrapers of the Midwest, even better.
10. Fantagraphics sold out of Paul Karasik’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets Fletcher Hanks book again. Everyone loves this thing, from Comics Comics editor Dan Nadel to former Wizard Editor in Chief Pat McCallum. (You see what I mean? Everyone!)
11. The roster of creators on hand was extremely impressive, even just within the official guests of honor and panelist slots. As Heidi MacDonald pointed out to me, the line-up ran the gamut from Jeff Smith and Matt Wagner to Kim Dietch and Bill Griffith to Gilbert Hernandez to Nicholas Gurewitch to C.F., an accomplishment in itself. Moreover, the people responsible for fully six of my top 10 releases of the year — Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga, John Hankiewicz, Josh Cotter, Tom Neely, Gilbert Hernandez — were all present at the show. Had Nick Bertozzi made it (did he?), it would have been seven. Brian Ralph, Paul Karasik, Jeffrey Brown, and Nick Gurewitch would probably be in the top 15, too.
12. Speaking of Gurewitch, his tiny table could easily have been replaced by a giant throne made of candy and gold, such is his draw. I expect that whole webcomics corner of the floor to metastasize into a presence to rival any of the big altcomix publishers, and I’m a little surprised that hadn’t happened already.
13. In terms of the lines for their signings, Bone‘s Jeff Smith and Exit Wounds‘ Rutu Modan were the belles of the ball. This would seem to give lie to Heidi’s notion that storytelling isn’t valued by the snobs anymore.
14. The lines appeared to be shorter for the veterans like Beto and Deitch, but I’d guess that’s because they each signed for herculean stretches of time between the two days of the show. Please think about how awesome it is that you enjoy an art form where that happens. You can’t exactly count on having four hours to walk up and chat with, say, Bernard Sumner and Grace Slick at the same table in this world.
15. Speaking of the two days of the show, why are they Friday and Saturday? I asked around and found out that Sunday used to be a big hang-out day for the whole indie comics community (somewhere Gary Groth just spit on the floor and made the sign of the evil eye) involving a pig roast and a softball game against Diamond or something, but neither of these things happens anymore. Having 50% of your two-day show on a workday prevents people who would come from coming, period. This happened to my wife, and it cost all my former co-workers a day of show-going. I also heard complaints from creators that Friday’s late hours really screwed them up in terms of meals and sleep. Do a proper Saturday/Sunday show, for pete’s sake.
16. There was a panel on the State of Comics Criticism and I wrote about it here.
17. Much of crowd at this show was very attractive, a point that should be made often and loudly. This extends to many of the creators as well, both male and female, and not just in comparison to what most people in comics look like either. I don’t know how else to put this — whatever your preference, there was some grade-A tail on display, in extremely close proximity to social lubricants and hotel rooms, and you crazy kids should be out there ticklin’ and slappin’ and makin’ it happen.
18. I even enjoyed the five or so hours it took me to drive down from Long Island and back, despite the lack of vegetarian meal options at rest stops. I timed my departure and arrival to avoid the New York and Beltway rush hours and listened to a half dozen albums I haven’t had a chance to really dig into since I stopped commuting and lost my dedicated music-listening time. The new Radiohead‘s pretty good, huh? Best since Kid A. “All I Need” — holy moses.
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 17
October 17, 2007Read: Wizard and Glass–Arguement, “Prologue: Blaine,” “Riddles” chapters 1-3
Once again, a boatload of valuable information makes its debut not in the story, but in the “Arguement” (or “fancy-pants word for Introduction”) that precedes it. For example:
* The third person referred to by “the Drawing of the Three” is not one of Odetta’s alternate personalities, Susannah or Detta, as previously suggested, but Jake, who is only the third because Roland refused to draw Jack Mort.
* Walter, the man in black, possessed Jack Mort to make him kill Jake.
* Walter is only “half-human.”
That’s an awful lot of fudging of previously established facts for an intro. The fudging continues in the Prologue, “Blaine,” which is actually just the final chapter of The Waste Lands reprinted with slightly tweaked dialogue. I must admit I find this tendency to retcon previous books in the series on the fly worrying. Perhaps it’s meant to evoke the way reality itself is breaking down within Roland’s world, or maybe it’s just cheating.
Anyway, I enjoyed the resolution of Blaine’s riddle game. How could I not when riddles from The Hobbit actually showed up in a scene this heavily indebted to that one? Additional Tokienisms were invoked by the Falls of the Hounds, which read like a cross between the Argonath with a canine makeover and those sphinxes who guard the Southern Oracle in The Neverending Story.
One more thing: At least I don’t have to worry about the illustrations spoiling the book anymore, since it’s impossible to figure out what Dave McKean’s illos are supposed to represent anyway.
Quote of the day
October 17, 2007Jame Gumb is a mysogynist serial killer, fostering a brutal hatred of women. The character mocks both women and homosexuals, with his mockery of his captive Catherine (Brooke Smith) and his lisping whispers to his dog Precious; a film about homophobia doesn’t a homophobic film make.
—Stacie Ponder on The Silence of the Lambs
I agree completely.
Rimshot of the day
October 16, 2007It’s funny to have a movie “aimed squarely at [Americans] and our violence-saturated culture” by a German.
(Great movie, though! Question: Will the Funny Games remake get tagged as torture porn, or will it be okay because it was made by a European and can easily be read as an indictment of the kinds of things critics enjoy viewing indictments of?)
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 16
October 16, 2007Read: The Waste Lands–the rest of the book
Any reading experience that involves pumping your fists in the air and silently cheering (so as not to wake your wife, who went to sleep two hours ago) is probably a pretty good one. Such was my reaction to the return of your friend and his, Randall Flagg Richard Fannin, the highlight among highlights of the strongest section of this series yet.
You’ll recall that the whole reason I decided to read the Dark Tower series was for more Flagg, who I’d heard was the big bad. Obviously I was going to be pretty delighted by his big comeback no matter what. Plus, years of reading comics and consuming genre entertainment have me geared toward appreciating the frisson of continuity. (I think my favorite example of how much enjoyment you can get out of just a little reference to past adventures is from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “What’s that?” “The Ark of the Covenant.” “Are you sure?” “Pretty sure.”)
But it wasn’t just the button-pushing that had me that excited, it was how that button was pushed. First, after a couple hundred pages of deft back-and-forth between the equally compelling perspectives of the four main characters, King suddenly cuts away from the climax itself for a chapter starring a character named Andrew. Huh? Oh, okay, that’s the real name of the Tick-Tock Man, the Thor-like warlord who ran the Grays. (Funny that his opposite number on Pubes was a dwarf; funny also that his flashback to better times in his city involved the presence of a guy whose job was to beat another guy into doing his jobs. Things have been pretty profoundly wrong around here for a while.) And then, just as out of the blue, Flagg himself arrives, sounding and even dressing much like he did back in post-plague Las Vegas. The thing that really thunderstruck me is that after all this build-up of the Tick-Tock Man–the way that his minion Gasher is made to seem horrible in such a way as to make Tick-Tock seem all the more horrible as Gasher’s boss, his Conan/Lord Humungous-like bearing (complete with a leg thrown over the side of his thrown), his ability to out-kill even Roland–he’s just the Dark Tower’s answer to Lloyd Henreid or even the Trashcan Man. (I might have known from that moniker!) It’s a startlingly effective bit of writing.
So what else happens? Blaine isn’t a demon after all, not really. He’s HAL, a computer gone bad, only instead of operating a spaceship he operates the entire city, though he appears to be most deeply personified in the pink monorail (paging Dr. Freud!). In a way his set-up is similar to that of It‘s titular entity: A central consciousness located elsewhere with a sort of pseudopod/embodiment sent out to do dirty work, but if you kill the latter you kill the former too.
The waste lands themselves feel familiar too. And not just in terms of Mordor, to which in true King fashion Susannah directly compares it. If a character or circumstance in a King novel is reminiscent of something else from pop culture or literature, you can bet a character will say or think so; in fact, during this very book, both halves of my high concept description of Roland as “Conan starring Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name” are explicitly referenced as Eddie and Jake think about the gunslinger. But no, what the waste lands really reminded me of, with their misshapen bug- and bird-like beasts, is “The Mist.” I wonder if Project Arrowhead had anything to do with the technology that powers the Beam?
I can see why King’s fans wanted to pull a Misery on him upon reaching the end of this book, which doesn’t even bother pretending to offer a conclusion, even a “to be continued” conclusion like the previous two books. It basically just stops in the middle of a scene, like an even more cliffhangery Two Towers. I’m glad I don’t have to wait for Book 4, which I hope follows more in the mode of the second half of Book 3, “Lud,” than in that of the first half, “Jake.”
Mostly I wanna see the two hardcases throw down.
Andrew Sullivan uses the word “manga”
October 16, 2007Ten thoughts on the “State of Comics Criticism” panel at SPX
October 16, 2007(This post originally appeared at The Comics Reporter. Thanks, Tom.)
1) I was glad for the presence of Douglas Wolk. His experience with non-aficionado periodicals was useful in highlighting practical considerations regarding the dearth of considered long-form criticism in the mass media that Gary Groth, Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, and Bill Kartalopoulos (the editors of Will Eisner‘s later work is overrated.
3) I only ever hear complaints that the web has diffused informed opinion and is therefore inferior to the supposed centralization of print publications from people who work for print publications. In this panel the loudest voice on this point was Gary’s, who first said that it’s even hard to find good film criticism online. At first he said that this is because there wasn’t any, but then when called on it by Tim, he admitted that he just didn’t have the time to find it. Not to be all roll-over-Beethoven about it, but I can’t imagine it’s really any more difficult or time-consuming for me to have found Matt Zoller Seitz’s blog, or Joe McCulloch’s for that matter, than it was in Gary’s much-vaunted mid-century golden age of arts criticism for people to have first discovered Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, much less Gene Shalits of their day. I think it’s a safe bet that if the average reader of this blog asked her mom and dad who Pauline Kael was, they’d have no idea. As an audience member pointed out, criticism isn’t consumed by large numbers of people because most art isn’t consumed by large numbers of people in ways that would make them receptive to criticism. As she said, this is doubly true of comics, where large numbers of people aren’t consuming that art form at all, so yearning for a more vibrant critical milieu for comics is in some ways a fool’s errand. But while I could be wrong, I think it’s unlikely that this mass audience for criticism ever existed even for more popular art forms. If we instead mean a large audience of well-educated, well-informed cognoscenti, we should say so.
5) Doug advocated for the value of “bomb-throwing” — divisive pieces intended to provoke debate. I’m not crazy about this at all. For every act of bomb-throwing into which went a considerable amount of thought, like the Eisenstein or Bazin. As I tried to point out, I think the emergence of Comics Comics as an antipode to The Comics Journal — a voice seemingly less interested in combative “this is bullshit and this is emphatically not bullshit” throw-downs, seemingly more open to evaluating corporate genre work, seemingly more attuned to non-narrative sensibilities versus literary ones — is important, but as that diverse collection of attributes would suggest, this isn’t exactly a coherent philosophy. I tend to think coherent philosophies are wildly overrated at best and stultifying and poisonous at best, though, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
7) Tim pointed out that the Journal‘s combative posture is understandable given the climate in which it started, one in which Maus had to be defended versus lengthy examinations of Steve Gerber‘s oeuvre without worrying that this will be taken to mean the work is on the same level as Gary Panter‘s.
8) I wish it were pointed out more often that there’s really no such thing as “the Journal.” There’s Gary, and there’s whoever’s the editor, and then there’s a bunch of writers who submit reviews and essays with no editorial guidelines and no back-end content editing either. (At least in my experience.) I know what “the Journal” is supposed to mean, but in reality it means the opinions of R.C. Harvey, Noah Berlatsky, Joe McCulloch, Tim O’Neil, me, Chris Mautner, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and a couple dozen more all at once.
9) I wish the phrase “the dumbing down of American culture” were removed from this discussion. A look at the top-grossing films and best-selling books during the so-called Golden Age of Criticism indicates that America has always been pretty dumb, a state of affairs not at all unique to America, hey by the way.
10) Tim Hodler looks like Walter Becker from Steely Dan.
Quote of the day
October 16, 2007But I’m going to hazard a prediction that “Messiah Complex” will be The Crossover That Got It Right; quite possibly the first successful, well-written multi-series epic since “Age of Apocalypse”.
Aim high!
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 15
October 15, 2007Read: The Waste Lands–“Bridge and City,” parts 16-22
Hey, it’s still pretty good! Actually, it’s getting better as it goes. Already several of yesterday’s predictions regarding fun genre tropes have already come to pass. It’s tough to argue with the idea of a future civilization of mad urban warriors ritualistically killing someone every time the drumbeat from ZZ Top’s “Velcro Fly” is played on the city’s PA system, you know? It reminded me (I think I’ve mentioned this before) of the way the Eloi just calmly walked right into the Morlock’s lair and to their own deaths every time the air-raid sirens were switched on in The Time Machine, without a clue as to the meaning behind the sirens. In this case, though, the Pubes (the drumbeat-killers) believe the drums to be the work of demons, a non-trivial possibility in this world. Of course, it’s just the savvier Grays, who it seems should really have wiped these Pube clowns out by now.
While Eddie and Susannah deal with that, Jake continues his descent into the Grays’ labyrinth, in a journey that’s like a nightmare, child-abusing version of The Goonies. Gasher, his captor, is like the Pubes we meet an extremely believable villain. You don’t doubt for a second that he’s bad news through and through, but there’s a weight to his cartoonishness, expressed best through his gutter slang and his resigned, almost curious attitude toward both death and youth, that actually makes you feel that he arrived at his current evil state via a lifetime of conscious choices and victimizing circumstance, as opposed to just being conjured up to play the heavy by Steve-o.
Here are three things I want to see as this section progresses:
1) A talking train
2) Gasher getting killed
3) Oy surviving
Again, here’s hoping.
And here are two quotes I wanted to call out.
At some point the sound of the drums began. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and for Jake it was the final straw. He gave up hope and thought alike, and allowed himself to descend wholly into the nightmare.
Very Clive Barker!
He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble.
Sound like anyone we know? I’ll give you a hint:
There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her? — George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings — Buffalo Bill was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell.
Of course, that gentleman’s name was Mr. Robert Gray, not Winston, and it took a lot more than a shot from a Ruger to do away with him. Still, wheels within wheels, man.
Read me a story
October 15, 2007Today Heidi MacDonald–
Okay, wait. First I want to pause and reflect, because opening a post with those three words made me realize I really am back to blogging about comics. How about that? Alright, I’m all set now.
Today Heidi MacDonald replied to all the reactions, mostly hostile, to her post of the other day calling for a greater emphasis on storytelling and character in comics. Even if I’m still unsold on her argument, it helps clarify her stance on various artists and comics. She mentions my response specifically:
I’m especially sad that someone like Sean Collins think that I said this:
A conception of comics that invalidates Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset” or Anders Nilsen’s The End or John Hankiewicz’s Asthma is not a useful one to me, or probably to comics.
I haven’t read ASTHMA, but I’ve gone on record many times with my respect and enjoyment of Huizenga and Nilsen. But that’s because both of them do just was I was trying to encourage — they FILTER THEIR IDEAS THROUGH MADE UP CHARACTERS AND SITUATIONS. Nilsen can get a little haiku at times, but he also knows how to use thematic and story elements to construct a greater whole (DOGS AND WATER.) Huizenga is even more of a yarn spinner, although his concerns are philosophical.
I apologize for overstating Heidi’s objection to guys like Nilsen and Kevin H. My main point is that I like the times when Anders “gets a little haiku” just as much, actually probably more, than the more straightforward things, which is why I mentioned The End and not D&W or even Big Questions. Ditto Kevin H.’s real formalist freakouts, which again is why I called out “The Sunset” (my favorite short story in the history of comics) rather than “Jeepers Jacobs.” And Asthma is almost pure abstraction, though to be clearer I could have specifically mentioned that book’s “Jazz” as opposed to “Martha Gregory.” Point being, I don’t see any of that as requiring any kind of corrective measure in terms of demanding that they start liking more traditional comics more. But at the same time, nor do I see Usagi Yojimbo needing to read a little more like PaperRad. They can each do their own thing, and I’m hesitant to extrapolate any paradigms to fight against from either approach, which is where Heidi’s piece lost me.
But what it all boils down to for me is the part of the new post where Heidi boils it all down for herself:
What I don’t like is the trend of valuing expressionism, formalism and “comica verité” for their own sake at the expense of what I would call “mainstream fiction”, or formally conventional but narratively complex stories such as Love & Rockets, Exit Wounds, Ode to Kirihito, Ice Haven (Shock!!) or American Born Chinese.
Simply put, I am totally fine with that trend! I might be less okay with it if I really thought it were being done “at the expense of” other kinds of books, but I don’t think it is at all. This is what I was getting at when I said my problem with Heidi’s original piece was “more fundamental” than debating the applicability of specific examples she cited, or even attempting to determine whether comics were at this kind of crisis point. Even if they were, to me, it wouldn’t really be a crisis.
The state of the beast
October 15, 2007
“It was like ‘Jaws.'”
–Charter boat Capt. Robert Hill, quoted in “‘It was like ‘Jaws” — 844-pound shark caught; Catch off Florida Panhandle shatters record in decades-old contest,” AP, MSNBC.com. Photo by William Hatfield/AP.
It certainly serves the shark right for living in the ocean and being hungry.
Carnival of souls
October 15, 2007Eve Tushnet reviews two slasher movies! Terror Train and Black Christmas, to be precise, with her take on the latter uniquely Tushnetian.
Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder ponders Hellraiser.
Rob Humanick continues his 31 Days of Zombie! blogathon with a look at Lucio Fulci’s wildly overrated (by Rob and others) Zombi 2. Even if you, like me, believe there’s nothing to this film other than the astonishingly grotesque zombie effects and their spectacular presentation, it’s a review worth reading for its thoughts on that aspect.
Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Teddy Blanks continues that site’s 31 Days of Horror blogathon with a look at Brian DePalma’s wildly underrated Body Double. Quote of the day:
Body Double, though, is in its own universe, a sublimely ridiculous piece of schooled filmmaking that embraces the sheen and excess of cheap 80s Hollywood as a flashy new avant-garde.
That is exactly right.
Over at the Horror Roundtable, everybody hates these taffy/toffee Halloween candies in orange-and-black wrappers that I’ve never seen before in my life.
On a note related to that asinine Nikki Finke quote about torture porn from the other day, here’s a Jon Hastings post decrying another attempt to apply a “would you play it for your parents?” standard to art, this time to music. Shit, with a lot of music, not being able to comfortably play it for your parents is the whole point.
The Blogslinger: Blogging The Dark Tower, October 2007–Day 14
October 14, 2007Read: The Waste Lands–“Bridge and City,” parts 1-15
At first I was upset that I had to skip a day of this series, because that kind of lessens the integrity of the blogathon concept. Then I realized that the day I ended up skipping was unlucky Day 13, and it became clear that this was ka.
This was a pretty crackerjack section. Dig this killer opening sentence:
They came upon the downed airplane three days later.
Better yet, the airplane turns out to be a Nazi fighter, the swastika covered up by a picture of a fist gripping a lightning bolt. And it was piloted, back in the day, by an outlaw warlord the size of Andre the Giant. But besides just being a giant-cyborg-bear bit of coolness, it sparks a conversation between the characters that casts Roland’s world in a different light. Up until now I’d been assuming that this is our world in the distant future, but Eddie speculates that the plane could have literally flown right into this world from our own, during its World War II heyday, via a portal similar to the ones that he, Susannah, and Jake used. I don’t think that explains all the recognizable technology present in Roland’s world, but maybe things really aren’t just as simple as my ancient-ruin theory.
The centerpiece of the early part of this section is the group’s long conversation about riddles. Clearly this is going to be important later in the book, but even though this was maybe telegraphing that, it was interesting and entertaining enough in itself to merit the page space. If you’ve ever read The Hobbit, this read like an explanation of why Bilbo and Gollum took it all so seriously down there in the cave.
Next up is more world-building, or world-explaining, via some clumsy mutated white bees and their fucked-up hive. Once upon a time there was a nuclear apocalypse, and everything you see in Roland-world is what made it through the other side. The ancient-ruin theory makes a comeback.
Then there’s the passage of the bridge. This might have been the weakest point of this section, actually. I found King’s descriptions of the construction of the roads leading to the bridge and of the bridge itself difficult to follow and visualize; in this regard, Tolkien he ain’t. Also, there was pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between Eddie, his fear of heights, and Jake with Larry Underwood, his claustrophobia, and Rita Blakemoor. Been there, done that. However, having Jake fall in an attempt to save his animal companion sharpened things up a bit. I’m obviously a sucker for animals in peril, so there’s that, but the addition of the detail of Oy holding on for dear life by biting the shit out of Jake’s hand was vivid enough to shake me from the stupor induced by the Stand-induced déjà vu.
Finally there’s the syphilitic pirate guy with a grenade who pwns the whole gang. This made me happy for a variety of reasons, not least being that a syphilitic pirate guy with a grenade pwned the whole gang. That doesn’t happen nearly often enough in fiction these days. It also brings up happy associations with The Road Warrior and Escape from New York. King’s invented patois for the pirate is vivid and convincing and fun rather than jarring to read, a whole lot more so than your average sci-fi/fantasy made-up dialect. (Bruce Baugh mentioned this as well, and he’s right. Be warned, though, that that post is a little too spoilery for my tastes in terms of events in the revised Gunslinger that apparently become important by The Dark Tower itself.) But my favorite aspect was how he shows up right after the big climax of the attempt to cross the bridge, with virtually no respite between the heart-pounding stuff. Having them turn back around to keep going and see a crazy urban warrior with a hand grenade was pretty much the last thing I expected.
I have a feeling that the book could get very good from this point forward, as our heroes navigate the ruined city of Lud. I expect some evocative post-apocalyptic landscapes, ragged bands of bloodthirsty outlaws, endless dystopian warfare between two sides who no longer remember what they’re fighting about, striking and entertaining anachronisms like ZZ Top records used as a weapon of war, heroic pets, evil anthropomorphized trains, and other genre-tastic delights. Here’s hoping.