Chance in Hell
Fantagraphics, September 2007
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
120 pages, hardcover
$16.95
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

Rough, rough stuff from the creator of Palomar. Hernandez is in the midst of creating graphic novels based on the B-movies that his Palomar-verse character Fritz starred in, but “B-movie” might give you the wrong impression here. This isn’t one of those howlers the bots made fun of on MST3K–it’s the kind of disturbing, unpleasant film starring and shot by unknowns that you might rent on a whim from the horror or European section of your old neighborhood video store, watch, and spend the rest of the evening worried about the mental health of cast and crew. The story concerns Empress, an orphaned toddler abandoned in a sprawling, dog-eat-dog garbage dump and raped so frequently that she doesn’t even seem to notice anymore. A farcical string of bloodily violent incidents leads her to a life as the unofficially adopted daughter of a poetry editor who claims to have come from the same circumstances, and then eventually to a second life as the wife of a young district attorney, but in both cases violence and squalor cling to her like a stench, to use a frequently invoked metaphor.

This is the angriest I can ever recall Gilbert’s art looking. That’s saying something: My wife, for example, finds his books almost difficult to look at–“His characters just look so hard,” she says, and they’ve never been harder than here. Right from the get-go his figures seem dashed off as in a white heat, while several early landscapes and backgrounds in the hellish dump look like the whole world is on fire. His almost supernaturally confident pacing of scenes and the cuts between them evoke in their matter-of-factness the acceptance of everyday brutality by the characters themselves. At times the jumpcuts can be quite funny, as when a scene between Empress and her adopted father consists solely of a pair of panels where they argue over whether a glass is half empty or half full; both Hernandez and his characters know how reductive this exchange is, yet also know it’s quite true to who they are.

But when that metronomic editing slows down, the effect is powerful, particularly because it is often done to draw out scenes of gutwrenching violence or tragedy. (The centerpiece scene in the brothel is as disturbing as the death squad attack in Gilbert’s masterpiece Poison River; there as here a knowing glance is all-important, but here it causes murder rather than prevents it.) The end of the book changes the pacing again, revving up the jumpcuts to suggest unsolved crime and unglued minds, and to be honest I’ve revisited it three or four times today and I’m still not sure what’s going on. Maybe that’s a problem, maybe it’s not. Since I see myself revisiting this book, a gruesome, enraged commentary on just how shitty things can be, many, many times in the future, I’m leaning toward “not a problem at all.”

* Chris Mautner has completed his two-part interview with Cold Heat‘s Frank Santoro.

* Stacie Ponder at Final Girl really liked 28 Weeks Later.

* Seeing the pair of images that cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier pulled to illustrate his post on No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood reminded me just how deeply indebted to horror both movies are.

* Rodents of unusual size? Turns out they exist after all, or at least they did 2-4 million years ago in Uruguay, where rats the size of cars roamed the earth. Loren Coleman has the scoop.

* Aeron at Monster Brains presents a gallery of images depicting the Harrowing of Hell, a fascinating medieval religious concept in which Jesus raided the inferno to rescue the righteous dead during the three days between his crucifixion and resurrection.

* Paul Pope quotes Carlos Clarens about the scare potential of dehumanization/automatonization in sci-fi/horror.

The trailer for Neil Marshall’s Doomsday is out. (Make sure to click on one of the hi-res quicktime links instead of watching the fuzzy streaming version.) Sadly, it’s not very good–over-narrated and edited for maximum blandness. However, you can dimly make out what looks to be a vastly more interesting and entertaining homage to John Carpenter than, say, Planet Terror, with the references to other ’80s post-apocalyptic classics like The Road Warrior, The Running Man, and even Aliens playing just as large a role as Escape from New York. Plus, Bob Hoskins and David O’Hara (the guy who played Frank Costello’s least-comprehensible Irish thug in The Departed). I’ll be there, but they really need to do better with the next trailer. (Via SciFi Wire.)

The Last Call Vol. 1

Oni Press, August 2007

Vasilis Lolos, writer/artist

144 pages

$11.95

Buy it from Oni

Buy it from Amazon.com

My favorite thing about The Last Call‘s debut volume is that it’s not at all what I thought it would be. I expected the kind of genre mash-up hipster-action/adventure/fantasy story we’ve seen in books like Scott Pilgrim, Multiple Warheads, East Coast Rising, and even Powr Mastrs to a certain extent. That’s where it seems like we’re going at first, as young metalheads Sam and Alec head out for a road trip blasting loud, evil music with hilariously Spinal Tap-esque lyrics that fill their car, and the panels, thanks to Lolos’s clever writing and lettering. Next thing you and they know, they get zapped into another dimension where they’re apparently on board an enormous train filled with monstrous beings who dress and act like characters from Murder on the Orient Express (an obvious influence, along with Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid, two works not often paired). Then you’ve got to muddle through some claustrophobic layouts, staccato pacing, an unclear sense of place, and a somewhat repetitive choice of facial expressions for poor stranded Sam, who soon becomes our main character. (You definitely miss the levity and variety brought to the table by Lolos’s vivaciously inventive color palette in his Pirates of Coney Island series with Rick Spears.) But just when you think you’ve got the book pegged, there’s a moment when Sam’s sitting down for lunch in the train’s palatial restaurant with an enormous bulldog-jowled, double-mandibled dowager when suddenly you realize that Lolos is tapping another vein of fantasy entirely: the episodic discovery-of-another-world story. Sure enough, charming, slightly menacing characters collide with Sam to his alternating delight and chagrin, like an Alice in Wonderland or an Abarat as drawn by a guy with a lot of tattoos. The pacing gets increasingly clever, the character design and body choreography increasingly expressive, the plot increasingly hooky, and the book increasingly enjoyable. Like his frequent collaborator and real-life S.O. Becky Cloonan, Lolos is an exciting artist who should be a blast to watch as he shakes free of his most direct influences; this book’s a good start in that regard.

* Did dozens of people in a Texas town see a UFO?

* Did decades of phantom radio broadcasts with no known origin taunting U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf culminate in the recent confrontation between the American and Iranian navies? (Via Bruce Baugh.)

* Former Nintendo Power subscribers rejoice: The complete Howard & Nester. (Via Gaming Today via Comics Reporter.)

http://idrinkyourmilkshake.ytmnd.com

Jason finds this poster for the film version of Scott Smith’s excellent novel The Ruins boring, but I think it’s pretty great. The figures are so un-posed it’s almost disconcerting, I’ll grant you that, but it’s a bit like a poster for Deliverance using a shot of the four guys on the raft during happier times. I think that’s a terrific idea.

Skyscrapers of the Midwest #4

AdHouse Books, October 2007

Joshua W. Cotter, writer/artist

56 pages

$5

Buy it from AdHouse

The fourth and final issue of Josh Cotter’s stunningly self-assured debut comic is kind of like the thesis statement of the series. The rich fantasy lives of the two little brothers, shaped almost completely by the kind of throwaway genre entertainment of the ’80s that proved almost despite itself to be richly resonant with we America’s nerds and losers, virtually replace their emotions rather than be shaped by them. The younger brother’s innocently violent He-Man drama of loss and recovery, the older brother’s violently sexualized late-Marvel drama of emasculation–both larger-than-life sequences all but spill out of their pages and overwhelm the usually staid visuals of the book. In this way they’re like the mystical flood that sweeps away the boys’ grandmother in the mysterious shared vision that gives the series its title. The choice offered to the older brother in this sequence, itself the apotheosis of the mystical realist epiphanies whose singular iconography has given the series much of its power, is to keep a part of himself locked away behind the helmet of his damned superhero idol or face life without that iron mask. As you might know if you’re reading this blog, this comic like all comics is part of an industry where major players profit quite directly from lingering emotional scars and not always in the most scrupulous of ways, so the theme hit me square in the gut. Skyscrapers #4 is both uncondescending and uncompromising in its depiction of how fantasy can be both pleasure and prison. It’s a hard and beautiful book, and aside from a slight misstep involving a too easily provoked and resolved fight between the brothers at the book’s end, which is the kind of thing I’m very forgiving about, it’s a fantastic book too.

Bruce Baugh drew my attention to this delightful Watchmen remix by Chip Zdarsky in which the end of the book is refashioned into a parody of the Spider-Man comic “One More Day” and the reaction to it. This inspired two thoughts:

1) Watchmen is a really good comic.

2) I’m really curious as to what the critical reception of the movie version will be. On the one hand it’s got the right politics and is sort of the apotheosis of the current pop-culture trend in favor of comics (“the Godfather of comic book movies” will be a hard pullquote to resist delivering; I predict Peter Travers will be the one to pull the trigger), but on the other there’s the Ron Rosenbaum-y “graphic novel” backlash and the fact that thanks to 300, critics feel obligated to hate Zack Snyder HARD. For example, in terms of the story’s politics, I’m guessing that contra 300 they will be correctly attributed to the source material’s creators and temporal context rather than incorrectly attributed to the movie’s, because to do otherwise would be a point in the movie’s favor, and we can’t have that. We shall see.

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks which horror-movie character we’d most want to be like, and which ones we think we’re actually the closest to.

In light of the release of the first trailer for George A. Romero’s contribution to the docu-horror genre, Diary of the Dead…

…Matt Maxwell’s post on his childhood experience of the proto-docuhorror flick The Legend of Boggy Creek will provide you with useful context.

(Trailer via Dread Central.)

Incredible Change-Bots

Top Shelf Productions, August 2007

Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist

144 pages

$15

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

The best gags in Jeffrey Brown’s loving, lushly colored Transformers parody feel like they didn’t necessarily have to be part of Jeffrey Brown’s loving, lushly colored Transformers parody. A Change-Bot describing, mid-fight and in overly verbose detail, the rigors he went through so as to enjoy pounding the shit out of his enemy…a leopard batting around an origami Change-Bot, then “trot trot trot”ting away with the crumpled bird-bot in its mouth…the evil leader blowing away his underling for the crime of having “perfect aim” that’s “not perfect enough”…all of these jokes play off the same sources of humor–inflated self-worth either rampaging unabated or getting pathetically deflated, imaginations shaped by exposure to genre fiction–present in many of Brown’s gag panels and short, funny stand-alone strips.

The story that links them all together is definitely best appreciated by Transformers fans, and I’d imagine Brown didn’t hope for anything more. That two factions of giant robots waging vindictive war against one another for eons might unwittingly cause massive destruction to themselves and their allies in the process is an idea that even kids could dimly make out beneath the surface of the concept, and Brown brings it to the fore entertainingly, maybe all the more so for its gentleness (Dan Clowes’s “On Sports” this isn’t). He also makes some hay out of the narrative loose ends endemic to these kinds of stories: robots yelling “I can explain!” and never doing so, doomsday buttons that may or may not have been pressed. If anything, I wish he’d laid into some of the Transformer mythos’ weirder elements–those five-headed floating robot tribunal guys, the giant planet-sized robot, the death and rebirth of the two leaders, and so on–but I suppose that would draw it away from the central “two equally stupid and destructive forces are arbitrarily slapped with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ tags and the audience is expected not to notice” thesis.

Ultimately Change-Bots is dumb fun, with the emphasis on both words: Practically every character is an idiot, which limits the book’s depth. But when combined with Brown’s solid character design, blockily effective action choreography, and vivid magic-marker palette, it’s certainly a pip to breeze through, even if I don’t see myself returning to it as often as I do to Brown’s autobiographies, or even most of his other, less franchise-specific humor and parody comics.

Here’s a fascinating little post from Siskoid on two of my favorite current superhero comics, Green Lantern and Immortal Iron Fist, and how their writers have created independent “bubble worlds” of their own within the larger shared universes they inhabit. This is certainly part of what has made them so appealing over the past year or so, and one of the reasons why I tend to mention them in the same breath. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

And here’s a post I don’t like at all from Reverse Shot on two of my favorite movies of the past year, 300 and 28 Weeks Later, tagging them as among the year’s worst films in an almost willfully ad hominem- and inaccuracy-laden fashion. Bonus points for the now de rigeur slogging of 300 director Zack Snyder’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, which they sneeringly attack for its proficiency with action in much the same way that previous gatekeepers of good taste sneeringly attacked horror films like the original Dawn for their proficiency with being scary and gross.

* Holy Motime–Dave Fiore, scholarly scourge of the primordial comics blogosphere, is back! Here he is arguing that “the liberation of the secret self” which I spy in the costumes and superpowers of superhero comics isn’t always so liberating. References to the bildungsroman abound, as they are wont to do when Dave’s on the scene.

* Speaking of triumphant returns to the fold, Johnny Bacardi is totally back too.

* Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder pays loving tribute to her VHS horror-movie collection. Normally I’m averse to these kinds of nostalgic attachments to outmoded media, but the thing that’s so endearing about a VHS fetish is that it’s impossible to make the usual pretentious arguments that they sound or look better than that cold newfangled digital stuff–they look and sound awful! It’s pure attachment to the objects and the experiences that surrounded them, which is adorable.

* Rich Juzwiak of FourFour hated The Orphanage. Paging Jason Adams!

* Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot has written a very good review of There Will Be Blood that begins with a description of the film’s final shot so you should by no means read it unless you’ve seen the movie, but if you’ve seen the movie you should read it.

* Famed horror artist Steve Bissette is a big-time Peaks Freak, and in this epic post he outlines the entire release history of Twin Peaks on home video/DVD/laserdisc, explaining just why the Definitive Gold Box Edition is the bee’s knees. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Finally, Glenn Kenny asks: Antonioni or Thunderbirds?

Multiple Warheads #1

Oni Press, July 2007

Brandon Graham, writer/artist

48 pages

$5.99

Buy it from Oni

(I hope you’ll pardon me for getting meta for a moment. Normally I think talking about trends when discussing a comic like this is just a substitute for actually discussing the comic, but in this case the meta takes us in a direction my mind’s been wandering in a lot lately anyway.)

I don’t know if it’s fair to credit Scott Pilgrim as throwing wide the doors for projects like these, or if it’s simply the highest-profile such project to pass through said doors regardless of who might have opened them. But at any rate, Multiple Warheads is one of those books like SP that makes you say “hey, this is an exciting time to read comics.” Like a growing number of projects–many from Oni–it’s the product of a North American artist who’s interested in action-based genre storytelling yet has no particular debt to superhero comics, a creature that until recently didn’t exist. In this case the artist is Brandon Graham, and he’s bringing to bear obvious interests in manga, European sci-fi comics, barbarian stories, and porn to create a fast, loose story of a waaaaay post-apocalyptic future where a va-va-voom young lady named Sexica smuggles super-powered organs around a walled-off city inhabited by aliens and werewolves and normal people too. It’s a pretty slight thing. Maybe that’s because the most obvious points of comparison–Scott Pilgrim, East Coast Rising, The Pirates of Coney Island–are all telling book-length stories while Graham’s going done-in-one (and at kind of a hefty price point). Or maybe it’s because the thin line, skewed proportions (everything seems both a bit narrow and a bit bowed), and acres of blank space in the word balloons give the art a tossed-off barely-there feel. Or maybe it’s because the story isn’t really a story per se, it’s more of a “day in the life” kind of thing that simply begins when it begins and ends where it ends, arc schmarc. But the end result of all that slightness is not unpleasant in the, well, slightest. It’s a breezy vibe for a breezy character. Indeed, breeziness is very serious for Sexica, almost a raison d’etre. She wants to go someplace nice, untouched by war, and she’s tried to get there, it seems, through means both intimate (sewing a smuggled wolf dick onto her boyfriend for some extra spark in the sack) and direct (taking advantage of a spaceship crash to get the hell out of Dodge). It’s a laid-back book, almost a stoned book, which makes sense given that Vaughn Bode is evident in Sexica’s every lovingly delineated curve. I enjoyed it, and I’m hoping that future issues will provide some muscular mind-expansion–something along the lines of the beautiful panel that communicates Sexica’s post-coital bliss at being surrounded by the comforts of home with a bed’s-eye-view of the bulbous light fixture on the ceiling above her–to deepen and enrich the pleasures of this installment’s lovely but fleeting buzz.

I watched There Will Be Blood last night, and it was excellent. That final scene really blasts it into the ionosphere, like Raging Bull. Which is appropriate, because between this and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Daniel Day-Lewis has somehow become the living incarnation of Robert DeNiro’s squandered talent. I think No Country for Old Men is a better film all things considered, but that’s really neither here nor there. (If I had to guess the subconscious trigger for critics picking this one over the Coens’ effort, it would be Jonny Greenwood’s landmark score, which to use the cliché is like the film’s fifth main character.) If Paul Thomas Anderson ever gives this kind of treatment to a character who’s less sympathetic, he may have the scariest movie ever made in him someplace, and I’m not just saying that because the most memorable shot in this movie is highly reminiscent of the most memorable shot in The Exorcist.

Anyway, the title of this post is a tribute to Jason Adams’ amazing insight into a certain scene in the film. Click here and scroll to the bottom to be flabbergasted.

* I’ve been a busy little bee lately: On Friday I reviewed C.F.’s Powr Mastrs Vol. 1 and yesterday I reviewed Josh Simmons’s Batman and in between I talked about Scott Smith’s The Ruins with Jim Treacher. I also spoke with Tom Spurgeon about the year in superhero comics. Finally, at this week’s Horror Roundtable, I reveal the horror projects I’m most excited about in 2008. (That list got longer with every single other response!)

* Dirk Deppey has created a colossal (seriously, it’s big, like the size of one of those Pitchfork Top 100 things) tribute to the 52 best comics of 2007. It’s heavy on manga, particularly scanlations.

* It’s official: The New York Times reports that violent movies reduce violent crime rates by keeping potentially violent people off the street and in the movie theater. (Via Jackie Danicki.)

* The article also contains a great plug for Kids in Mind, the excellent, non-judgmental website that catalogs violence, profanity, sexuality, and bathroom humor in films (ostensibly for parents to know what not to show their kids, though the Missus and I use it for its reliable indications of whether or not a given movie has vomiting in it).

* My kind of civil disobedience: South African teenagers make out in public in defiance of their country’s new “no PDA” law.

* I’ve really been digging the bite-size “Screening Log” movie write-ups at Not Coming to a Theater Near You lately. Here’s David Carter on the analog world-building of Flash Gordon, Rumsey Taylor on a payoff in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Carter on the lack of Coen-isms in No Country for Old Men, Taylor on humorlessness in For Your Consideration, and two one-sentence reactions from Taylor to Eraserhead and RoboCop 3.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRWM reviews Dan Simmons’s arctic horror novel The Terror, about which I know roughly as much as I did about The Ruins prior to reading that because I didn’t read the review. (Okay, I know a little more–the setting and time period.) I’m getting a similar vibe, though, so it seems like this will be the next book I take out of the library.

* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants wishes Jeremy Renner, a fine, fine actor and star of two of my favorite horror films ever, Dahmer and 28 Weeks Later, a happy 37th birthday.

* Jason’s also got his own massive, wide-ranging Best Of 2007 movie post, including invididual awards, his top 5 horror films, and his top 20 movies overall. He sees a lot of movies.

* Spinning off a New York Times piece, Clive Thompson examines the government’s crusade to be able to confiscate and examine your laptop at border crossings (I’ve also heard about this going down at airports) and potential technological workarounds for the intrusion.

* My friend and sometimes collaborator Matt Wiegle is holding in his hands his comic-book rendition of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for Barnes & Noble’s No Fear Shakespeare graphic novel line.

* Artist Robert Burden has posted pictures of a new pair of epic paintings of action figures, including my beloved Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line. (For scale, note the four framed Krang figures attached to the painting.)

* It took Southern classmates in college to turn me on to the genius of “y’all” as the English language’s second-person plural. Could “yo” be an equivalent innovation for the gender-neutral third-person singluar? (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* The Blot artist Tom Neely has released the soundtrack to his gallery show Self-Indulgent Werewolf. It looks pretty badass:

* Speaking of looking badass, dig this lovely series of mostly horror-based Che-style paintings by Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder.

* David Lynch has no love for watching movies on cellphones. There will always be something funny about watching Agent Gordon Cole curse. (Via Rue Morgue.)

The fact that it’s hilarious aside, this video actually raises similar issues to the recent snobby reactions against Amazon’s Kindle and other electronic book readers. But whereas those reactions are transparently dopey–print is print, and having a fancy-looking book is nice but it’s also its own separate experience from enjoying the writing, as anyone who’s read a beat-up dog-eared coverless copy of a much-loved book can tell you–Lynch’s makes sense because most films are meant to be seen on a much bigger screen.

* Ladies and gentlemen, “doppelganger by cake.” (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* Finally, I know that putting the characters of a great drama’s final season in a Last Supper pose has been done before, and I don’t care. This shot of the Battlestar Galactica cast from Entertainment Weekly is awesome. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

If you are interested in hearing my thoughts about how 2007 treated the Big Two superhero companies, as well as getting some general info about what makes me tick as a comics reader, Tom Spurgeon has posted a lengthy interview with me at the Comics Reporter that’ll fill you in.

Batman

self-published

Josh Simmons, writer/artist

16 pages

Read it for free at joshuahallsimmons.com

This haunting, completely unauthorized take on Batman begins with what may be the best first panel of a comic I’ve seen in the past year: A crazed jumble of a cityscape whose non-Euclidean geometry resembles something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari threatens to overwhelm the panel borders and spill out all over the reader, while a caption box identifies it, simply and confrontationally, as “Gotham City.” That sets the tone for what follows–a disturbing, uncomfortable response to the Batman concept. What really knocks me out is just how many different levels it works on. It could be a horror comic in about a human monster in the Henry/Buffalo Bill/Leatherface vein. It could be a blackly humorous, satirical pisstake on the Caped Crusader. It could be a vicious assault against the reactionary politics of the superhero. It could be an angry riposte to the ever-grittier direction superhero comics are headed in. It could be an exercise in drawing action and environments. Most amazingly, it could be a great Batman comic, period–Batman’s rooftop and skyscraper milieu is depicted with genuine awe, the physical particulars of his methods are choreographed impeccably (as good as any comic this side of Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100), and the story is totally convincing as an examination of what might happen if Batman, worn down by the weight of years of horror and toil–“I’ve been Batman for a long time,” he repeats–finally snapped. As in his horror graphic novel House, Simmons’ art excels in conveying the way the sheer size of environments both natural and manmade can be frightening, and as his inks shift back and forth from woodcut chunkiness to manic clarity, the effect is practically palpable. The pacing is ruminative but never plodding, lingering just a bit too long, making you feel like something is off but never tipping its hand till the story demands it. Clever bits of business involving Catwoman’s acrobatics and the passing of a nearby plane add pizzaz to an extremely dark affair. Even Simmons’ figures, never his strong suit, have the mitigating factor of masks and costumes working in their favor. And on a meta level, it’s just exciting to watch an artist steal a major corporate icon because he’s got something to say and needs him to say it. This is a hard comic to shake, so thank goodness I have no intentions of trying to do so.

At the unsolicited but welcome suggestion of my old pal Jim Treacher, I recently read The Ruins, the latest novel by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan. Literally all that I knew when opened the book and started the first page was that a) it was some kind of thriller; b) it was very, very good. Since I believe this is the ideal way to read any book, I recommend that those of you who haven’t read The Ruins go into it the exact same way–you’ll have a blast–and warn you that SPOILERS FOLLOW. However, we don’t give away the ending, so if you’re okay with knowing what the high concept is and getting some of the important details blown for you, I suppose you’re free to ignore my warning, although (as the events of the book demonstrate) that’s frequently a bad idea. I mostly recommend that if you’re at all interested in the kinds of things this blog frequently discusses, you skip this post and go and read this book at once.

Anyway, here is the email exchange between me and Jim.