Carnival of souls

* Hey, lookit this: In today’s Archive Spotlight at Top Shelf 2.0, you can relive the glory of me and Matt Wiegle’s action-adventure strip “Destructor Comes to Croc Town.” Watch one angry man in a suit of armor unmake a civilization!

* Discussion of Final Crisis #2 continues. Here’s Joe McCulloch wondering whether “good Grant Morrison superhero comic” and “good DC Comics event lynchpin thing” work at cross-purposes:

And then there’s that odd taste of self-awareness, even a little tiredness – Superman hoping the Martian Manhunter will be revived sometime in the future, Lex Luthor acting utterly bored at the death of some expendable superhero (in an Event comic! *yawn*). Like Didio implied, these characters have seen it all. Is it good for the health of DC comics, rather than the DC Universe? Hell, I don’t know. And while I’m aware that if things get so bad they board up the windows it’ll mean less chances for people like Grant Morrison to write comics, I still find it awfully tough to shift my focus onto what’s Good For the Industry when I’m trying to interface with a particular work – my problem, folks.

“Problem”?

* And in the comments at thishyere blog, Sean B. of the late, lamented Strange Ink addresses the nature of the threat presented by this series’ big bad guy, a Darkseid in human skin, as opposed to the traditional event-comic villainy:

It’s about the superfolk of DC coming to see that evil is not just the flaming spear flying into your Martian chest – beneath all their day-to-day conflicts with the various baddies of the physical world, the real battle has been fought and lost already. A crisis of faith – that what you do makes no difference at all when Secret Gods are pulling the strings. It’s almost Kirby by way of Lovecraft in a way?

That is dead-on and brilliant.

* Tom Spurgeon explains at length why the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne-era X-Men worked. Tom’s tolerance for superhero stories is pretty low, so watching him unpack why these superhero stories clicked on any number of levels is pretty compelling.

* Jim Treacher recommends some genre novels by erstwhile comics writers Duane Swierczynski and Charlie Huston.