* Alan Moore hates Hollywood in general and the Watchmen adaptation in particular. I’m with Tom Spurgeon in that Moore should be applauded for his stance regarding his own shoddy treatment by his former publisher and the way his books have been dumbed down by the studios and filmmakers heretofore in charge of adapting them; moreover, I’d take Moore thumbing his nose at the whole Hollywood game over Mark Millar claiming to star opposite Megan Fox’s Lois Lane in the next Superman movie anyday. However, decrying Hollywood filmmaking in general–there’s no other way to put this–is ignorant and poseurish, like the people who sit around saying “oh, I don’t watch television” in this the New Golden Age of Television. There are plenty of shitty Hollywood movies, but there are plenty of shitty everything. There are plenty of shitty Alan Moore comics, in fact. But I’m not going to throw out the A Small Killing with the Violator anymore than I’m going to throw out, oh I don’t know, the Lord of the Rings with the Transformers. Alan Moore’s too smart to be as close-minded as he always comes across when he leaps from specifically commenting on his own misfortunes to a poorly thought through institutional critique. (Full disclosure: I liked Dawn of the Dead and 300 so I’m going to assume I’ll like Watchmen, too, but I’d say the same thing about Moore’s overall stance even if Joel Schumacher were in charge of the movie.)

* Grant Morrison lists his favorite Superman stories and moments. (Via Spurge.)

* One more Spurge-tastic link: Tom reviews the latest under-the-radar interesting Marvel comic, The Incredible Hercules.

* My friend Chris Ward at Joystick Division has a grand ol’ time making fun of a 1990s guide to how video games are made.

* Apparently this is the kind of thing you can find in Josh Cotter’s sketchbooks. Holy frijoles.

If someone did a Deadwood-style revisionist pirate television series, I would watch it.

Daredevil #110

Ed Brubaker & Greg Rucka, writers

Michael Lark & Stefano Gaudiano, artists

Marvel, September 2008

32 pages

$2.99

Since I last took a Comics Time look at this series, it’s remained the least attention-getting of Ed Brubaker’s Marvel titles, lacking the sales of Uncanny X-Men and Captain America and the buzz of Immortal Iron Fist and Criminal. In that time it’s become a Gotham Central reunion, too, with Greg Rucka joining the Brubaker/Lark/Gaudiano team. And it’s taken a big step away from constantly crescendoing turmoil for the life of its main character, which has been the series’ M.O. since Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev took it over, if not since Frank Miller established the template. What you’ve got instead feels more like a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, as Daredevil and his private investigator friend Dakota North pull a Stabler & Benson and try to figure out why the FBI is covering up the murder of children while framing a former super-thug. Turns out it’s a Lucky Luciano-style deal with one of Marvel’s stock gangland figures to keep an eye on the docks he runs, ensuring that no Latverian or Madripoorian terrorists sneak in.

In other words it’s nothing you haven’t seen before…yet there’s something enormously satisfying about that. As much fun as it can be to follow superheroes through a series of interconnected, constantly escalating crises, it can also be pretty exhausting. Stepping back from shadowy masterminds manipulating Matt Murdock’s life for pleasure and profit and simply having the guy break the fingers of crooked Feds to spring a character named Big Ben from jail has its own rewards. Meanwhile, if we must get macro about it, finally letting DD settle in to a status quo, however briefly, can only enhance the impact of his next world-turned-upside-down arc. God only knows who or what “Lady Bullseye” is and what or who she’ll be doing next issue, but I’m happy to have a potboiler breather before finding out.

* Jog reviews Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman #12, while Quitely talks to Newsarama about it. If you were wondering, and here be SPOILERS my first impression of the issue was that it was fine, but not the knockout blow I was hoping for and that Morrison is capable of delivering in his finales (see The Filth #12, Seven Soldiers of Victory #1, Seaguy #3). Maybe if it had ended with Superman inside the sun, I dunno. Maybe the big 2uperman symbol will click emotionally with me soon. I suppose that like Jog I was so convinced that Leo Quintum was Lex Luthor that I turned that last page expecting him to rip off his wig, and when it didn’t happen I was perplexed.

* M. Night Shyamalan and Samuel L. Jackson seem to be as open as I am to the possibility of an Unbreakable sequel, which is to say quite.

* The great Chester Brown is running for Canada’s Parliament on a Libertarian/pro-paying-for-sex platform or something. I hope he makes it happen!

* Aeron Alfrey at Monster Brains manages to read my mind and deliver a gallery of Masters of the Universe paintings.

* Finally, Yes H.P. Can!

* I wrote to Tom Spurgeon about the difference between Secret Invasion tie-ins and Final Crisis tie-ins and how that might affect their sales.

* Frank Quitely talks to CBR about All Star Superman now that the series’ 12th and final issue is on the stands.

* Your NERDS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS update for the day comes from Chris Cummins of Topless Robot:

…The Dark Knight made people forget all about Nicholson’s hammy Joker.

Certainly the last thing we’d want is for a killer clown to be over-the-top!

* Jon Hastings talks about the difference between criticism and “giving notes.”

* Like Chris Butcher I’m often baffled as to why it’s so hard to convince comics people to do the right thing, but here’s as good a reason as any: people often do the wrong thing simply because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing! In my experience in comics, the worst conduct is usually perpetrated by people in the process of running their businesses (and sometimes the businesses of others) into the ground. That’s not a coincidence! Can we at least agree that people who are serial ruiners-of-companies–these nightmarish Bizarro Mariano Rivieras who never fail to close down their own ventures, in the process lying and robbing and sucking up as much cash for themselves and their cronies as they can and leaving others holding the bag–are to be shunned, if not on moral grounds then just from the self-interested perspective of not wanting to do business with proven losers?

* Here’s Sir Ben Kingsley pretending to be Ian MacKaye performing the song “Minor Threat.” (Via Pitchfork.) You’re going to have to turn this opportunity yes.

Pocket Full of Rain and Other Stories

Jason, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

160 pages

$19.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Surely one of the great miracles of living in this, the New Golden Age of Comics, is that one can own in the neighborhood of a dozen different Jason books, in English. Perhaps the single strongest page in this entire collection is the final one, where the covers of nine of the great Scandinavian cartoonist’s other available works are arranged in a Watchmen-style grid. It makes you want to declare victory on behalf of comics and go home. Mission accomplished!

In the early days of Jason’s translation and introduction into the English-speaking altcomix world, I remember hearing complaints about how Fantagraphics was presenting only one side of a very multifaceted artist–the grim, silent side. Perhaps that was true at the time, but in setting up such an austere (and, lest we forget, extraordinarily impressive) foundation, Fanta only served to heighten the impact of each new release as it strayed into the unexplored territory of genre–comedy, horror, thrillers, science fiction, and more, each with Jason’s trademark ruminative, fatalistic edge.

Pocket Full of Rain represents the apotheosis of this trend, dipping into the artist’s rich back catalog to dredge up works that expand the boundaries of what constitutes a “Jason comic” not only narratively but artistically. Showcasing a variety of early art styles–realism, funnypages cartooniness, altcomix weirdness–outside of his usual anthropomorphism, it’s dazzling in how conclusive an argument it makes that Jason could have gone in any of those directions and been nearly as successful as he is today. The title story, an existential thriller in the mode of Why Are You Doing This? only with humans (and the occasional alien) in lieu of funny animals, sort of makes me wish I could dip into an alternate universe where Jason’s career doing Gilbert Hernandez-style magic-realist crime stories using Adrian Tomine-like figurework continues unabated. (The way he plays with the passage of time, metonymizing scenes into single panels, is particularly reminiscent of Los Bros’ skills in that area.) A handful of surreal stories about death toward the end of the collection reveal an artist who’s equally at home actually doing horror as he is riffing on it in books like The Living and the Dead. A sampling of gag strips involving a prisoner, a cactus, a ghost and other seemingly randomly selected images plucked from Jason’s subconscious might have blossomed into a hit webcomic in a different era. Yet despite dating back as long as 15 years ago, it’s all of a piece with Jason’s familiar and haunting obsession with the capricious nature of life, as represented by sudden violence, the non sequitur intrusion of pop culture icons and tropes, the random collection of moments that taken together constitute love or its loss. Either as an introduction to Jason’s work or a reward for those who’ve followed it all along, this book’s a gem.

* Cartoonists Jeffrey Brown, John Hankiewicz, Paul Hornschemeier, and Anders Nilsen are dissolving their online parternship, The Holy Consumption.

* Here’s a comparatively rare interview with “greatest of his generation”-bait cartoonist Kevin Huizenga. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Jon Favreau talks to SciFi wire about keeping the Iron Man franchise believable in the face of the Mandarin, Thor, and other perils of Marvel-based moviemaking.

* Jason Adams posts a screencap-laden tribute to Fear(s) of the Dark, the animated horror anthology film featuring Charles Burns, Blutch, Lorenzo Mattotti and more, by way of noting that the movie will start screening in NYC and on demand on October 24th.

* Nick Bertozzi has posted some preview pages from his upcoming graphic novel with Colbert Report writer Glenn Eichler, Stuffed!

* The L.A. Times posts some unused excerpts from their upcoming profile of Lost‘s perpetually erudite Michael Emerson, aka the best villain on television, Ben Linus. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* io9 interviews A+D, the mash-up producers and DJs behind indispensable mash-up site/club night/etc. Bootie.

* Hey, look, you can get a Gary Frank Christopher Reeve Superman statue!

* Yo, I totally agree that “Cobra Commander as disgruntled used car salesman” is as zany an idea in its own way as “Cobra Commander as Himalayan mutant-man.” That was my point! I’m just saying that it’s a mugs game to try to use something that self-evidently cockamamie as evidence that the G.I. Joe comics were far more mature than the kids’-stuff cartoons, which I’ve seen people do. (Via Leigh Walton.)

* Meet the Ant from Mars: Scientists have discovered a blind, subterranean, predatory species of ant in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. It is creepy. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

Now that we’re somewhat settled into our new home, The Missus and I finally set up our “music room,” with all of our CDs neatly arranged in a series of bookshelves. This gave me an excuse to go through them and rip a bunch to mp3, which led to me seriously listening to Primus for the first time in probably half a decade.

The early ’90s were a very strange, very wonderful time, insofar as that once Nirvana opened the door for outsider culture, anything and everything was welcomed through. Rockabilly? Great, c’mon in! Industrial? Nice to make your acquaintance! John Waters movies? Happy to have you! Piercings? Yes, please! Spoken word? Where do I sign up? I lived it, I took it for granted, I miss it even now. But of all the bizarre, how the hell did this happen manifestations of freakdom’s sudden and inexplicable supremacy during that era, I think that perhaps the strangest is that this band had a platinum, Top 10 record.

In America, in the ’90s, you could sing songs astutely chronicling the demimonde of degenerate meth-addicted blue-collar Diane Arbus rejects in a cartoon character voice while slapping your lead fretless bass guitar and repeatedly jerking your leg up and down and become a huge band capable of absolutely killing an audience of thousands and thousands of people.

Fun fact: Since the closest I ever got to the Long Island hardcore scene was making fun of it, it’s not like I’ve got a plethora of scary pit stories to recount, but to the extent that I do, the scariest pit I was ever in was during “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” at the Primus gig at Roseland. Each time he’d say “Go!”, it was like that scene in 28 Weeks Later where the infected get into the parking garage.

* I wasn’t going to say anything because I kinda get sick of chasing these rumors all around the Internet from initial leak through to DVD release, but Jason Adams posted on it, and that gives me permission to mention that maybe they’re going to make a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, presumably starring those ill-fated Norwegians. There, I mentioned it.

* I want to note that yes, I realize that when I post about movie biz rumors and remakes and so on I tend to say “they’re planning” or “they’re talking about” or “they’re going to make” rather than name the interested parties. This is because I see the kinds of Hollywood people who make these plans as an undifferentiated They–for what it’s worth, in my mind They wear jeans and nice shoes and dress shirts with the collar unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up, and they tend to have goatees. They sing along to “Opportunities” by the Pet Shop Boys and mean it.

* Speaking of Them, They have not yet told Edward Norton whether they want him to have anything to do with the Incredible Hulk sequel. He also kinda poo-poos the idea of an Avengers movie. All of this is a shame, because he’s good.

* Motions for new trials of the West Memphis Three, based on DNA evidence, have been denied. Accidentally stumbling across the HBO documentary about the case years ago, Paradise Lost, was one of my most memorable “sitting alone late at night at my folks’ house flipping through the channels” experiences ever. For those who are unfamiliar, three teenagers were convicted of the murder of three eight-year-old boys based on the “confession” of a kid with an IQ of 72 and rock-solid evidence that the three teenagers liked Aleister Crowley and heavy metal.

* Americans joins residents of Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, and Iran among the populations most likely to support torture. This includes nearly six in ten Southern evangelical Christians.

* Kevin Melrose spots a treat in Marvel’s December solicits: Incognito, a new superhero-noir series from the Criminal and Sleeper team, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Part of me hopes that this isn’t some sort of reflection on the nature of the demand for non-superhero genre titles in the Direct Market, but another part of me is just plain excited for another superhero book from the guys who did Criminal.

* Tom Spurgeon enjoyed Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds #1. With that, Geoff Johns’s critical rehabilitation is complete.

* Writer J.M DeMatteis blogs about the genesis of my favorite Spider-Man story, Kraven’s Last Hunt. It’s a pretty overbaked bit of reminiscing, but if you like the story you really oughta read it, if only to see the quirks of fate that prevented it from being a Wonder Man or Batman story. (Via Rick Marshall.)

* Would you like to know why I like He-Man? Here’s a for instance: The action figure for Mer-Man looked completely different than how he was depicted on the figure’s packaging, so in their new Masters of the Unvierse Classic series, Mattel will be releasing him with an extra head.

Meanwhile, click over to He-Man.org and scroll down to the September 11th post (no permalinks on Eternia!) and you’ll find this amazing passage in a post about whether or not the Classic series will retain the original’s action features–springing, spinning, extending, and so on:

To elaborate on the action features question, yes obviously Tri-Klops will have a spinning visor, Man-E-Faces will have a spinning head and Rio Blast would have pop out guns. (pending we can get to all of those great characters)

Where you won’t see action features is on mechanical features – ie: Snout Spout will likely not spit water, Sy-Klone will likely not have a spinning mechanism, Stinkor will likely not smell and Ram-Man would likely not have a pop out body.

But Extendar would extend, the Rock people would fold up and Scare Glow might even have glow in the dark paint if it works out.

Yes, obviously Tri-Klops will have a spinning visor. People, He-Man is so, so great. I’m not a toy collector anymore, but I have to admit that this MotUC thing, coupled with the existence in my new house of a “rumpus room” dedicated solely to my crap, has me sorely tempted. They go on sale starting this December. (All via Topless Robot.)

* Speaking of Topless Robot, Kevin J. Guhl presents The 8 Biggest Reasons the G.I. Joe Comic Kicks the Cartoon’s Ass. I was most definitely a Joe-cartoon kid rather than a Joe-comic one, so if nothing else this is a glimpse at what the comic kids found appealing about the surprisingly long-running series. (12 years! Longer than your childhood!) However, I could guess before getting any further than the headline that one of the reasons would involve making fun of Cobra-La, the crazy Himalayan race of mutant ur-humans, in whose number G.I. Joe: The Movie “revealed” that we could count none other than Cobra Commander. Sure enough, Guhl pisses all over this wonderfully nutso concept in favor of CC’s comic-book origin, which is that he was a used car salesman who got fed up with the system. I am totally not kidding. For some reason, this origin is supposed to mesh better with the notion that G.I. JOE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS. Go figure!

* This Space Ghost Coast to Coast segment (via–where else?–Topless Robot) pretty much encapsulates every thought College Sean had about the fundamental nature and awesomeness of Thom Yorke, Björk, Tricky, and Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

Rick Wright died today. Certainly the moment of his career that leaped out in my mind–and one of my favorite Pink Floyd moments of all–is this song from The Dark Side of the Moon. I’ve often thought that his piano work on this song is the most overlooked potential sample of all time. Its combination of gentleness and relentlessness, the sense that you’re quietly being pushed toward something potentially terrible or at the very least transformative, is haunting and difficult to shake. Of course it is in fact slowly propelling you toward Clare Torry’s tear-down-the-sky vocals, as chill-inducing a representation of man’s fear of mortality as rock music is likely to produce; but then it’s still there as the vocals slowly fades into a quiet, more contemplative mode, each chord reminding you that movement toward that final destination is inevitable, you can put it off for now, the moment has passed, but don’t worry, it’ll be right over here, waiting, it has all the time in the world.

If you have to be a member of one of the greatest bands ever, and you have to die, you could do a lot worse in terms of leaving behind work to be remembered by, and to remind people why your work mattered in the first place, than to have this song in your repertoire, that’s for goddamn sure.

New Avengers #44

Brian Michael Bendis, writer

Billy Tan, artist

Marvel, August 2008

32 pages

$2.99

I’ve been following Marvel’s Secret Invasion event somewhat with the half-hearted interest of someone who mainly wants to know what went wrong. The primary miniseries going under that title has seen six issues come and go, during which time virtually nothing has actually happened that can’t be described with the sentence “The Skrulls invade, but not hard enough.” Nick Fury and His Howling Characters No One Cares About have been battling the Skrulls’ Mighty Marvel Mash-Ups in New York City for what seems like three years, Avengers both New and Mighty gathered in the Savage Land for an inconsequential fight with an entire shipful of head-fake superhero impostors, Reed Richards got captured but now he’s free with his de-Skrulling gun that he made on the way back from Outer Space, Thor broke free from J. Michael Straczynski, and Bucky dropped in from a better comic. There you have it! It’s sort of the apotheosis of problematic Brian Bendis event comics, with lots of people and lots of people standing around and sounding kind of the same and kind of out of character, a lot of things happening but none of it really mattering, and in general all of it being far less successful than his more focused, solo-character-based superhero work, which treats the superhero idiom like the world’s strangest psychological coping mechanism and/or mental breakdown.

The real Secret Invasion action, in terms of enjoyable comics, has mostly come in the primary tie-ins, New Avengers and Mighty Avengers. This particular issue shows Bendis doing what he does best–“going there.” I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that when big-deal villains show up, they should always majorly fuck up the lives of the heroes they fight, every time. It should be a rule. Granted, the Skrulls we see at work here are doing what they’re doing to lab-grown clones of Reed Richards so as to probe his mind for secrets they need for their Invasion to be successful–it’s not Richards himself–but man oh man, do they ever show how far they’re willing to go in service of their plans. Instead of standing around and talking like the world’s most violent Scientologists, or dressing up like random assemblages of other Marvel characters and shooting Human Torch fire or Cyclops lasers outside the borders of their double-page spread, they’re systematically creating human life only to torture and destroy it. Now that’s the kind of villainy I can get behind! Take it together with the other issues in these ongoing series, which tend to focus on “what’s up with So-and-So and how did the Skrulls get to him/not get to him” questions with precision, perverse imagination, and unsparing ugliness, and you have to wonder if some of this material couldn’t have been present in the main mini. If you’d shoved aside all the explosions and summary executions, you could have made room for the serious-business character crises that made Bendis the superhero writer to read in the early part of this decade, and still make Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man among my favorite genre titles.

* Grant Morrison announces a new Vertigo series called Warcop, concerning a super-soldier and his hip teenage friend in the post-9/11 world and borrowing its title from a rejected Morrison/Madonna movie idea. How about them apples.

* Frank Miller reacts, pricelessly, to the All Star Batman & Robin c-bomb scandal:

I have no idea how this awful thing happened. It’s just one of those terrible and glorious things that happen time to time in publishing.

Italics Frank’s, apparently. You can practically hear the sneer! (Via everyone)

* Jon Favreau discusses the potential presence of War Machine, the Mandarin, Matt Fraction, and IMAX 3-D technology in Iron Man 2. Wouldn’t it be great if he made another really good Iron Man movie?

* I may not know toys, but I know what I like, and I totally disagree with Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken regarding the superiority of the redesigned Masters of the Universe toys to the originals–a hot topic given plans to release a line of new, more articulated figures based on the original look of He-Man and friends. It just seems like a case of surface “coolness” interfering with the simple purity of streamlined ridiculousness, and it reminds me of when grown-up fanboys take beloved childhood comics characters and try to make them seem more grown-up and mature and grim and such. It’s He-Man–isn’t raw nostalgia the whole point?

* Noel Troll’s friend Pumpskin creeps me out.

* Dan Nadel is a cat who just don’t give a fuck and that comes through entertainingly in this interview about his new Rory Hayes collection Where Demented Wented. (Via Tim Hodler.)

* I greatly enjoy Jon Hastings posts about works we both enjoy, and his recent-vintage reviews of Jason’s You Can’t Get There From Here and the Wachowski Bros.’ Speed Racer are cases in point. Money quotes from each:

Is there something about comics as a medium that encourages so many stories about loneliness and the (often futile) search for companionship? Is it something about cartoonists that they’re drawn to tell these kinds of stories? Is there some kind of Harold Bloomian agonistic anxiety of influence working on them so that they’re driven to revise and elaborate on Krazy Kat?

and

If the guiding principle of, say, Sin City is “use CGI to bring Frank Miller’s comics to ‘life'”, the guiding principle of Speed Racer is “use CGI to bring a world of computer-generated images to life”.

* Abhay Khosla hated Secret Invasion #6 nearly as much as he loves the sound of his own voice! I dunno, he’s probably a wonderful guy, and I don’t disagree with him here or on many other things, but whoo, it’s grating, I’m not the only one, right?

* David Bordwell waxes titular.

* The haunted house ride from Coney Island’s Astroland is up for sale. It really is over.

Bottomless Bellybutton

Dash Shaw, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

720 pages

$29.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

I finally got around to reading this Blankets-sized graphic novel over the past weekend. (Doing most of your reading on the commuter railroad disincentivizes taking a crack at really big books. Sorry, Bone. What is it with gigantic graphic novels that begin with the letter “B,” anyway?) It has more in common with Blankets than simply the initial and the size. They’re both works of great ambition from young authors–statements as much as stories–that tackle love, family, and the conflict between the two. They’re also both very, very successful.

The story takes place over the course of an awkward weekend-or-so at the home of the Loony family. The parents of adult children Dennis, Claire, and Peter have summoned their kids and their respective families or lack thereof to inform them of their impending divorce, after forty years of marriage. The set-up itself contains a rich vein to mine; as someone whose parents split up when I was an adult, I’ve never seen that uniquely pleasant situation this convincingly depicted, as once-intimate and effortless family dinners become merely cordial, well-worn anecdotes take on the feel of elegies, and being forced to think of your parents as full-fledged sexual, emotional, and psychological beings whose dreams have in some major way not ben fulfilled takes its toll.

Of course this could all be the territory of standard literary fiction, but to that sturdy framework Shaw harnesses any number of narrative digressions and artistic flights of fancy. A prologue section conveys its general point about the many facets of “family” and its specific expository information about the Loonys in the abstracted fashion of Shaw’s short comics. The book’s only nod to Shaw’s more surface-weird work–drawing youngest son, introverted loser Peter, as an anthropomorphized frog–is basically a multi-hundred-page set-up for a dramatic visual punchline that works so well it literally made me gasp. Meanwhile, each family member is given memorable mini-stories and scenes to play out, from Peter’s meet-cute with local beach bunny Kat to Claire’s drunken night out on the town with Dennis’s wife Aki to Claire’s daughter Jill’s disastrous rendezvous with a friend’s hilariously sleazy soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend (it’s complicated). This also means that Bottomless Bellybutton is several different kinds of comics at once; Peter’s story, for example, is at varying times a romance, a “my first time” erotic work, (briefly) a Christopher Guest-like send-up of indie filmmaking, and in one pulse-pounding sequence toward the end, something approaching Hitchcockian suspense. Yet the book never feels scattershot or random–it all quietly reinforces Shaw’s point that family means many different things to each of the many different people inside that unit, sometimes different things at different times and sometimes different things at once.

Perhaps the best illustration of this concept is the story of Dennis, the beloved eldest child. He takes his parents’ divorce much harder than Claire (herself a divorcée) or Peter (numbed to it by his distant relationship with a father who barely conceals his lack of feeling toward him, not to mention plenty of beer and weed), and begins a pretty literal quest to find the “reason” for the divorce, thereby becoming able to prevent it. This ends up involving secret passages, X-marks-the-spot maps, and notes between his parents’ younger selves, written in elaborate codes. As Dennis grows more and more insistent and angry about the divorce, his conviction that it can be “solved” like a Lost episode mounts as well, with Shaw playfully reinforcing this sense in the reader through those parlor-game clues and boy’s-adventure tropes–and also, though who knows if this is deliberate, making Dennis an insufferable Flat-Earther straight out of a Stephen King story. By the time Dennis’s quest ends in a heatstroke-induced “revelation” that turns out to be anything but the answer he sought, it’s clear that searching for any such answer to why life works the way it does is a mug’s game. That’s not to say that any of the other coping mechanisms adopted by the characters are superior–simply that rambling off into your own directions stands just as much of a chance at finding you what you want.

In pitching Bottomless Bellybutton to some friends who aren’t big alternative comics readers but who recently read and enjoyed Blankets, I said that the biggest difference between the two is the lack of Craig Thompson’s surface-pretty art. Shaw’s, by contrast, is deliberately uglified, particularly with those nothing-else-like-’em character designs. But I added that it’s an ugly that’s easily followed, and more to the point, easily understood. Both Blankets and Bottomless Bellybutton are about what happens when the idealized rapture of romance fades, but Bottomless takes place almost solely after the fade-out has already taken place. In this fallen world, Thompson’s vistas of snow and mandalas wouldn’t make a lot of sense. And while we do see one romance blossom, Shaw is intent on milking the tension between idealization and reality, starlit swims on the beach and premature ejaculation if you will. Impressive in the power of its gestalt, able to make judgments without seeming judgmental, and powerfully moving on more than one occasion, it’s a mature work from a young artist who with it comes fully into his own, and a deeply pleasurable, and rewarding, read.

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

I finally watched George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead. I wish I hadn’t. Holy cow, was this movie bad. Thrilless horror, laughless black comedy, toothless satire, pointless sociopolitical ruminations, directionless plotting, unlikable characters that make the Cloverfield gang seem deep, laughable dialogue filled with puns (fucking PUNS!), special effects that make you wonder why they couldn’t just hire Tom Savini and his squibs, a documentary conceit that adds nothing but an extra level of cheesy phoniness to the already cheesy and phony script, freshman-year baloney about the media and the camera eye and blah blah blah that you’ve heard a billion times before in much better movies…I’m honestly at a loss to try to describe just how many things Romero got wrong in making this movie, from doing a mockumentary without improvised dialogue on down. And that ending! Just coming right out and saying what Night had the balls to simply imply. Awful, stupid, shockingly tedious, not scary at all. Don’t buy it, don’t rent it, don’t watch it, don’t sully your feelings about the other Dead movies with it. Just…don’t.

PS: Post-movie conversation that was a million times more entertaining than anything in this nothing-to-say movie:

THE MISSUS (arrives home): What did I miss?

SEAN: I watched a terrible, terrible movie.

THE MISSUS: Oh yeah? What?

SEAN: Diary of the Dead.

THE MISSUS: Diarrhea of the Dead? Why would you think that’d be any good?

‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’

—–

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.

—–

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.

—–

This peculiar linking-together of opposites — knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism — is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

–George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

–from Children of Men, dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Pig by Roger Waters and Storm Thorgerson.

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow

Anders Nilsen, writer/artist

with Cheryl Weaver, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2006

86 pages

$14.95

Out of stock at D&Q

This book beggars review. It’s an account of the great young cartoonist Anders Nilsen’s relationship with his fiancee Cheryl Weaver, through a series of varyingly told vignettes about the trips they took together or apart. Postcards they sent to each other are reproduced; a long letter from Nilsen to his little sister recounting a disastrous camping trip the couple took is printed in its handwritten entirety; there’s a three-page interlude about the couple getting stranded in a New Jersey parking lot on Christmas and, one infers, getting engaged shortly thereafter; there’s a photo essay about their trip to the Angouleme festival in France and a humor comic about their ill-fated first attempt to get there. Then we discover from Nilsen’s illustrated journal that Cheryl has been diagnosed with cancer, and the true meaning of the book’s metaphorical title, cribbed from J.R.R. Tolkien, becomes all too apparent. The comic that concludes the volume, perhaps the loveliest Nilsen has ever drawn, offers the final proof that the titular request has been met in the heartbreaking negative.

On the strictly technical side of things, Nilsen is one of his generation’s finest cartoonists, so part of what is so impressive about the book is how much of his comics’ pointillist emotional power comes through even via mostly non-comics media. By selecting a rigid parameter for the material, “stories about problematic travel experiences” (a theme he reveals in an afterword to have planned to develop even prior to Cheryl’s illness and death), Nilsen paradoxically conveys a sense of the totality of the couple’s relationship: thoughtful, humorous, shot through with both the thrill of adventure and discovery and the longing for the comforts of home, and one another. While Nilsen’s companion Ignatz series The End deals more in the gargantuan, even frightening feeling of grief and desperation engendered by having his and Cheryl’s life together suddenly yanked away, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow‘s mood is gentler–more focused on love and how it changes when the loved one is gone–but no less profoundly moving.

Personally, the way I deal with death is to focus on the fact that the life I shared with that person was a good one, a happy one, and that while it is now over, that goodness and happiness remains in my memory. But what happens when that shared life was, by any reasonable standard, far too brief? What to do then? I don’t know. Recent events have forced me to confront this question and I still don’t know. Reading this book has helped, though, and I hope you’ll forgive me if really all I have to say about it is “thank you.”

What you want is in my David Bowie sketchbook!

A big reason I wanted to go to Comic-Con International in San Diego this year was solely for the Bowie sketchbook. While I’d hoped to get some superhero artists in the book for the first time, a combination of work duties keeping me away from their official signings and the fact that most of them charge an arm and a leg and have months-long wait-lists for commissions put the kibosh on that. But I did manage to round up a small but elite squad of altcomix luminaries to put their stamp on the wild-eyed boy from Freecloud. Let’s see how they did, shall we?

Mark Todd: Pirate Bowie makes a comeback! Whoever’s in charge of marketing Bowie’s iconography, please pay attention to how many hip young artists gravitate to this one-off look.

Jaime Hernandez: Ah yes, the one you’ve been waiting for.

Mario Hernandez: All three cartooning Hernandez Brothers are in my book! I’ll tell you this–from my position on the opposite side of the table, looking at this upside-down, it was really, really difficult to figure out what Mario was drawing until he finally flipped it over to draw the head.

Johnny Ryan: Lesser men of my acquaintance have been too timid to approach Johnny for their sketchbooks, given his usual MO. Look what you’re missing, wimps!

Jim Woodring: Another freaking giant of comics, another relentless self-deprecator. Man, you created Frank and your Bowie looks just fine. Go easy on yourself.

Jordan Crane: One of my oldest acquaintances in comics and the guy directly responsible in many ways for my involvement in them, Jordan represented two firsts for the sketchbook: He was the first to draw Bowie’s pre-stardom Mod look, and the first to shit-talk other sketches. Which ones? That’s a secret I’ll take to my grave.

Previous David Bowie Sketchbook showcases:

MoCCA 2007

SPX 2007

MoCCA 2008

To see the whole shebang as a Flickr set, click here.

* So they recalled All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder #10 because it dropped enough C-bombs to level Themiscyra. Frank Miller: Keeping Comics Evil!

* Alicia Ashby at Topless Robot gives the business to The 10 Most Annoying Post-Apocalyptic Worlds. Money quote:

Nuclear bombs can accomplish a lot of things, but exploding so hard that magic exists isn’t one of them.

* My bud Rick Marshall at MTV’s Splash Page talks with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator (and Xeric Foundation founder) Peter Laird about the possibility of new live-action/CGI Turtles movies. I don’t really care about that all that much, but I was interested in what Laird had to say about the original TMNT movie, quite the post-Burton-Batman cultural touchstone for yours truly. I haven’t watched it in ages but I remember it being a good-looking film for what it was, in terms of things like lighting and the costumes, and Laird echoes that.

* Also at Splash Page, Mike Mignola lets loose with a steady stream of guffawing backhanded compliments for Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy movies.

* Music writer par excellence Matthew Perpetua polishes off his “write about every single R.E.M. song ever” blog Pop Songs 07 (for now) with, appropriately enough, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”