* I think my favorite of all the bloggy Halloween festivities I’ve spotted today can be found at Jason Adams’s My New Plaid Pants, where he’s basically wallpapering the site with context-free horror:

* My pal “Beardy Kiel” Phegley’s trip down Halloween-costume memory lane was pretty neat too.

* So was Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s tribute to the best and worst covers, titles, and taglines from their monthlong look at VHS horror. Be sure to move your cursor over the box art!

* Midnight Meat Train is now available OnDemand! Something tells me this isn’t the Missus’s idea of Friday night viewing, but maybe I’ll be able to report back on Monday evening.

* I can’t decide what to go with here: “That’s no anthology–that’s a space station”? “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair”? “My God, it’s full of stars”?

* I thought CRwM was making a provocative, if ultimately unpersuasive, argument that horror critics need to see the Saw movies to be worth taking seriously and I responded to it as such, but apparently it was a joke? Dang.

* Plenty of interesting books to discover in Eric Reynolds’s belated SPX report.

* This font is getting a little overused on horror promos at this point, but I thought the poster for The Broken was quite striking, and not just because it’s of the gorgeous Lena Headey (well, part of her at least):

* Eerie work from Renee French. I know, shocking, right?

* This reel of sneak-attack murders from the video game Manhunt goes from disturbing to hilarious to appalling to even more hilarious and back again three or four times during the course of the clip. I wish the blood spurts were more realistic. (Via Joystick Division.)

It’s that time of year

Leave all our hopelessnesses aside (if just for a little while)

Tears stop right here

I know we’ve all had a bumpy ride (I’m secretly on your side)

Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby

Takashi Nemoto, writer/artist

PictureBox Inc, September 2008

200 pages

$19.95

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

What even to say about Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby? It’s the kind of book that sets up a “get it/don’t get it” dichotomy almost automatically. There’s very little in terms of traditional parameters against which you can weigh the endless parade of transgression and revulsion, the shit-eating and child rape, the cancer and mutilation, the squiggly, cluttered line and resolutely ugly characters and environments. Unlike Johnny Ryan’s work, it doesn’t use the gross-out constituent parts to build up jokes–and I’m not just talking Ryan’s more straightforward gag strips and funny stories, I mean it doesn’t even go in for the super-labrynthine, Pythonesque digression structure of some of Ryan’s recent-ish stuff–nor, of course, does it share Ryan’s lovely, classically influenced line. Unlike the work of Rory Hayes, it doesn’t convey that sense that you’re seeing someone’s searing, indelible, personal artistic vision–there’s no unique vocabulary of teddy bears and demons, no electrocuted lines that look like they radiated directly out of the artist’s brain.

Perhaps appropriately, what it most feels like to me is someone excreting their id all over the pages, paying virtually no attention to anything other than simply pooping out every horrible thought in his head. It’s like…if someone who was already kind of gross had their self-censoring mechanism surgically removed, and then did a week’s worth of 24-hour comics in a row. The initial suite of short stories–starring a man whose penis takes over his body, flipping it over so that the guy walks on his hands as his dick and balls take on the shape and skills of a face; an idiot-savant artist whose only subject is his penis, which he cuts off and sends to a girl he sees peeing as an attempt to mitigate her tragic penislessness; and “the world’s most mature baby,” who begins fucking his own mother while still in the womb–are somewhat disjointed in effect, eschewing storytelling rhythm for a pile-up of excess. The book’s epic centerpiece, the two-part “The World According to Takeo,” really is more in the vein of an improvised 24-hour comic–in an interview with PictureBox’s Dan Nadel included in the volume, Nemoto says he started the comic with a few simple themes and no idea of how it was going to proceed or end in mind. It meanders, escalates, and by its second part coheres into something more sophisticated than the rest of the material here: The presence of readily understandable themes like the relationship between sexual abuse and sex work, or the reveal of the main character, the sentient sperm Takeo, as a the pretty benighted but at least recognizable homosexual stereotype, give the formless outrageousness something to work against. Of course, you’re still talking about a comic co-starring a serial rapist who eventually dies of cock cancer.

This is not to say that there’s no legible philosophical content in here. Japan’s complex and at times disgraceful treatment of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their descendants is an obvious reference point. I certainly think it’s more powerfully dealt with here than in the staid Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. Since the book savages anything it touches, both the victim analogues and the society that shuns them are treated viciously; in that sense it not only critiques but embodies that problematic stance–that’s honesty, I suppose. You also can’t help but feel that Japanese society’s simultaneous prurience and prudery–sexualizing schoolgirls but never depicting penetration in pornography, for example–is the target of the extravagantly outré sexualized violence on display here.

But the question is, is being deliberately without virtue a virtue? At what point does artlessness become an art in itself, and at what point does it simply remain artlessness? Down at the bottom of my sidebar you’ll see the phrase “KEEP COMICS EVIL.” Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby certainly does that. Is it enough? I know that for me, sometimes simply being offensive, thumbing your nose at polite society, feels like a tremendous victory, a nihilistic triumph. Yet at other times it makes me want to ask, “Is that all there is?” Which is it? I…I give up.

* Say, this is neat: Tales from the Perilous Realm, a collection of all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s non-Middle-earth fantasy fiction, plus the poetry collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

* David Heatley responds to the recent Comics Comics Cage Match about his collection My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down and…it’s really not pretty. A lot of strawmen, back-patting, and ad hominem, all of which get called out pretty sharply in the comments by Tom Spurgeon and, when he’s not really living up to the Cage Match moniker, Frank Santoro. Eventually Tim Hodler and Lauren Weinstein plead for restraint, Noah Berlatsky makes conciliatory gestures (!), and Dan Nadel shuts the thing down. A smart con organizer would want to make a panel out of this.

* A slideshow of stuff from Johnny Ryan’s Blecky Yuckerella: Comics Are for Idiots! Alright!

* My pal Ben Morse takes a look at two high-quality Ed Brubaker series, Captain America and Daredevil.

* Anders Nilsen drawing Lucio Fulci’s Zombi? Yes, please.

* Matt Zoller Seitz pens a heartfelt tribute to the life and career of the late film and television critic Andrew Johnston. Seitz notes Johnston’s role in carving out critical space for such films as Donnie Darko, The Return of the King, and (one of my least favorite movies ever but I’m listing it just to break the nerdcurve) The Thin Red Line.

* I don’t know what it is about this image from some horror-comedy I’m never going to see that delights me so, but delight me it does. The world is a better place with images like this in it.

Amazing fan-made video from one of Big Willie Keith’s few post-Sex Style highlights. “You at your brother’s house? I don’t believe you.”

Yeah, I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge.

The kids are coming up from behind.

I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge

To the kids from SVA and from RISD.

But I was there.

I was there in 1968.

I was there for the first Zap issue in San Fran.

I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge

To the kids whose footsteps I hear when they do SPX.

I’m losing my edge

To the Internet seekers

Who can tell me every member of every good webcomics collective from 2002 to 2008.

I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge

To all the kids in Tokyo and L.A.

To the art-school Brooklynites with minicomics and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered nineties.

Yeah, I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge

But I was there.

I was there.

But I was there.

I’m losing my edge.

I’m losing my edge.

I can hear the footsteps every Wednesday on sale.

But I was there.

I was there in 1974 at Gary Panter’s studio in a loft in Los Angeles.

I was working on the Jimbo look with much patience.

I was there when Harvey Kurtzman started up his first MAD.

I told him, “Don’t do it that way. You’ll never make a dime.”

I was there.

I was the first guy showing Naruto to the X-kids.

I did it at SDCC.

Everybody thought I was crazy.

We all know.

I was there.

I was there.

I’ve never been wrong.

I used to work in the comic shop.

I had everything before anyone.

I was there on the Fort Thunder drum kit with Brian Chippendale.

I was there with L’Association during the great album clashes.

I woke up naked on the beach in San Diego in 1988.

But I’m losing my edge

To better-looking people

With better ideas and more talent.

And they’re actually really—they’re really nice!

I’m losing my edge.

I heard you have a compilation of every good comic ever done by anybody.

Every great book by Jack Kirby.

All the underground hits.

All of the Boody Rogers strips.

I heard you have a hardcover of every Tintin album on Belgian import.

I heard that you have an ashcan of every seminal Bill Sienkiewicz book – 1985, ’86, ’87.

I heard that you have a TPB compilation of every good ’60s strip and another HC from the ’70s.

I hear you’re buying a P.O. Box and a Kinko’s card and throwing your Diamond deal out the window because you want to make something real.

You want to make a King-Cat comic.

I hear that you and your friends have sold your Peanuts and bought manga.

I hear that you and your friends have sold your manga and bought Peanuts.

I hear everybody that you read is more relevant than everybody that I read.

But have you seen my comics?

Milt Gross, Steve Gerber, Chester Brown, Tsuge, Spain, Hal Foster, Mike Diana, King Terry, Lyn Ward, John Porcellino, Phoebe Gloeckner, Grant Morrison, Hergé, Junji Ito, Aline Kominsky, Jennifer Daydreamer, Rory Hayes, Osamu Tezuka, E.C. Segar, R. Crumb, Jules Feiffer, Herblock, Mark Beyer, George Herriman, Takashi Nemoto, L’Association, Ben Jones, Lynda Barry, Moebius, Justin Green, FC Ware, Charles Burns, Al Columbia, Frank King, Bernie Krigstein, Frank Miller (Goddamn Batman!), Will Elder, Art Spiegelman, Ernie Bushmiller, Julie Doucet, S! Clay! Wilson!, Jack Chick, Blutch, Mattotti, David Mazzuchelli, Los Bros Hernandez, Joost Swarte, Igort, Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

You don’t know what you really want.

Okay, stop.

* Mind-melting stuff in Bookslut’s interview with the great cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner regarding her contribution to Mia Kirshner’s project I Live Here. I’m just quoting it at length.

Well. A few weeks before I left for Mexico, I was hired to illustrate a book called The Many Joys of Sex Toys (by Anne Semans). I remember receiving a stack of documents from Amnesty Int’l about the murders of girls in Juárez the day I was beginning an illustration to accompany a chapter about “rectal plugs”—what they are and ways to use them. The text described preparing one’s body to accept larger “plugs” by beginning with the smallest available—they are available in sets of varying dimensions. Some people would insert them for the day, even carrying them inside the rectum while at work—an exercise for the anal sphincter muscle.

Anyway, my assignment was to make this and other practices easily understandable and to help remove any attached taboo with clear and warm, friendly drawings—to make people feel comfortable with a variety of sexual practices they may or may not have previously considered or tried.

The Amnesty documents described the forced anal intercourse and concurrent strangulation of victims. They described the insertion, per anum, of splintered, broken lengths of wood. One victim was impaled in this manner and apparently was left to slowly bleed to death.

I suppose it’s hard to describe the revulsion I felt after going to Mexico and then returning, two weeks later, to finish the sex book.

I really can’t speak highly enough of Phoebe Gloeckner’s work in A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl. I know there are some people who read this blog and actually heed my recommendations–I recommend those books as hard as than anything else I’ve ever recommended around here, I think. Shit, you can borrow them.

* It’s all official and stuff: Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle will be playing Tony Stark and James Rhodes in Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, while Jon Favreau is directing the Iron Man sequel and executive producing the big superhero team-up. I hope War Machine joins the Avengers, or gets his own movie based on Chuck Austen’s U.S. War Machine, complete with nudity and genocide and Dr. Doom. Meanwhile, IM2‘s action scenes will feature input from Genndy Tartakovsky. Haha, the dude from Swingers is like “get me the Samurai Jack guy!” and the giant corporations are like “sir yes sir!”

* Remember Nate Fisher, the teacher who lost his job over giving a ninth grader a copy of Eightball #22? He’s teaching again, thank goodness.

* Pascal Laugier supposedly will direct the Hellraiser remake, but given that this is a Clive Barker project and a horror movie in which the Weinsteins are involved, I wouldn’t bet money on it.

* PictureBox has an auction blog. This Dave Gibbons Watchmen cover portfolio and this Chris Ware McSweeney’s cover aren’t bad places to start.

* Bryan Alexander and his commenters have more on the World of Warcraft zombie plague, which appears to have emerged, as no doubt the homeland security threats of the future will emerge, from unguarded ports.

* I see as much Cenobite as Saw in the fashion of Kei Kagami, but then, I would, wouldn’t I.

* I’M WITH THE GIANT ALIEN SQUID

* If I were a Denny’s menu item, what would I be?

The Mage’s Tower

Lane Milburn, writer/artist

Closed Caption Comics, 2008

28 pages

$10

Buy it from Atomic Books

Horror comedies are often neither all that horrific nor all that comedic—and that’s just at the movies. “Funny” “horror” comics, the kinds of things that fill out the Previews section of many an Image Comics wannabe, are frequently among the most aggressively useless books on the stands. So The Mage’s Tower is sort of like rooting through your junk drawer and finding fifteen grand in crisp hundred-dollar bills. Lane Milburn not only has killer comedic timing, he also has great horrific timing, which is essentially the same thing–knowing just when to deploy a certain image to maximize its impact–but done in the service of the bizarre and disturbing.

This lovely-looking screen-printed minicomic contains three stories rooted in Milburn’s customary Black Sabbathy monsters and demons idiom. “Lugubrious Dunes” centers on the slacker son in a family of grotesques who embarks on a quest to kill some Gamorrean Guard types and get it on with a princess who has the head of a lizard–but it turns out this is all a fantasy, soon interrupted by his haranguing mother, who summons the kid to a “family dance meeting” that’s as ridiculous as it sounds. “Fisticuffs” is a page of just that, starring two creepy brutes with amusingly incongruous, slender swan heads as they duke it out in a fight that ends as rapidly as the one where Kimbo Slice got his ass handed to him in 20 seconds.

The third, final, centerpiece story, the one that really impresses you with the ingenuity of its concept and freshness of its execution, is “The Mage’s Tour.” The play-on-words in the title of the story compared to the title of the comic itself is really the big reveal–we follow two hooded and cloaked beings on what looks like an attempt to storm a villain’s fortress, but that fortress turns out to have been turned into a modern-day tourist trap by said villain, which is what the heroes have come to put a stop to. As the comic plays out, the battle between our heroes and the apostate they’ve come to thwart is intercut with reactions from a tour group who think it’s all part of the act. So as Milburn’s greasy line presents us with increasingly dynamic action and monstrous effects–like Mat Brinkman prints at their most heavy-metal–we keep getting the occasional cutaway to a guy trying to teach his wife how to use the cameraphone to take pictures of the battle and things like that. (“And then I download it?” “Umm…what do you mean?” It’s like a cameo from my mom!) There’s even a laugh-out-loud punchline that gets its own three-color splash page at the end of the book.

This cat’s good. Keep a close eye on him.

* Hot-cha! One of my favorite bloggers, Sean of Strange Ink, has returned to blogging.

* Ex-Wizardite-turned-nerd-blogger FIGHT! Wiz refugee Rob Bricken at Topless Robot calls out MTV’s Splash Page, administered by Wiz refugees Casey Seijas and Rick Marshall–swell fellas, all three–over rumormongering. Unlike the welcome demise of Fred Pierce, this is one thing we can’t all agree on I suppose. I’ll be over here with my popcorn.

* UPDATE: Rick Marshall replies with customary tact and restraint. (I kid because I love!)

* Two from Tor, part one: Heather Massey pitches Charles Burns’s exquisite teen erotic/horror graphic novel Black Hole to the sci-fi masses.

* Two from Tor, part two: Torie Atkinson takes us inside the mind of a World of Warcraft character facing down the zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile, in the comment thread, Bruce Baugh dissents on grounds that make a lot of sense if you’re coming from where Bruce is coming from regarding why games are played. From my outsider’s perspective, however, unpredictable awfulness should be as much of a factor in an RPG like this as it is in the real world–perhaps moreso, given that the real world isn’t in imminent danger of demonic invasion (spiritual warfare adherents excepted).

* Rick Trembles’ Motion Picture Purgatory comic review of Dawn of the Dead is (amusingly) much more review than comic. I appreciate the emphasis he places on the casting of the film and how nearly everything everyone remembers about the movie arises quite naturally from the characters and their situation.

* Fangoria interviews artist Dominic Harman about the set of new covers he’s created for Clive Barker’s books. The unused samples on display are a little too horror-y for my taste; I very much liked the editions that used relevant snippets from preexisting paintings.

* I have this same problem anytime I read about My Bloody Valentine, too. Only I tend to go “BOPBOPBOPBOP BRRRRREEEEEEEOOOOO BRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEOOOOWWWW BRRRRREEEEEEEEOOOOO BRRRREEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWW.” The difference is negligible.

* Terrible, hard-hitting news from The House Next Door: Longtime House contributor and fine film and television critic Andrew Johnston has died from cancer at the too young age of 40. My absolute best to those who cared about him.

* I think Brian Hibbs’s apples-to-apples comparison of the competing superhero event series Secret Invasion (Marvel) and Final Crisis (DC) is a pretty even-handed look at what’s up with the two books (even though I’m more of a fan of Final Crisis as a work than Hibbs is). It’s noteworthy that the problems he has with Secret Invasion are all intrinsic to the book itself while the problems with Final Crisis have nothing to do with the actual series and everything to do with how it’s been situated in relation to the rest of the titles in the line by DC. It’s also interesting to see another voice in favor of Brian Michael Bendis’s SI tie-in work in New Avengers and Mighty Avengers versus the comparatively lackluster Bendis-penned SI itself.

* This Entertainment Weekly list of the 20 Scariest Movies was rock solid. And yet I’m going to list enough “hmm, how about that”s that it’s going to look like I don’t like it, even though I do. Notes:

1) I could quibble with films like The Omen and Poltergeist, which have two or three terrifying moments surrounded by incoherent and derivative silliness.

2) No Blair Witch Project. That film is well on its way to critical reclamation but in terms of general-interest publications it seems it’s not quite there yet.

3) Looks like Shyamalan has fallen far enough out of favor that The Sixth Sense, the highest grossing horror movie ever, doesn’t even rate anymore.

4) No Saw or Hostel–torture porn of whatever stripe is out.

5) No foreign-language films.

6) Nothing older than Psycho, but I’m fine with that. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t find anything pre-Psycho genuinely frightening.

7) No The Descent. I thought that one might sneak in there.

8) Everything is pretty clearly a horror film. No David Lynch, no David Cronenberg, no curveballs like Un Chien Andalou or A Clockwork Orange or something like that.

9) I suppose the one obvious omission I can’t really understand is Alien.

10) I think that generally, these kinds of lists ought to consist of the canonical scary movies and this one does. I’d happily hand it to someone who asks “What are some scary movies I should see?”

* Quote of the day:

Is it just me or does it feel like we’re going through a slight FRIDAY THE 13TH craze? Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Actually I’m loving it. The new trailer hit the other day and it seems like every horror fan out there is talking about it. It’s not too often you see a teaser trailer get people talking like this one has.

—Jared Pacheco, Arrow in the Head. I certainly didn’t expect to be talking about it, that’s for sure.

* Gorilla vs. zombies. Thank you, World of Warcraft.

* Bruce Baugh advances several explanations for why online fandom is primarily a culture of complaint.

* No shortage of real-world horror stories today: the story of the slaying of Jennifer Hudson’s family grows ever more heartrendingly awful; what the Barack Obama assassination/anti-black killing spree plotters lacked in smarts and realistic expectations they made up for in gruesome imagination; and unknown assailants grabbed an Afghan farmer and gouged out his eyes in front of his family.

* Lane Milburn posts some images from Cold Heat Special #8.

* Matt Maxwell’s horror-Western comic Strangeways begins its serialization at Blog@Newsarama today. Neat.

* I’m still somewhat shaken from writing about all those terrible crimes. But even so, what am I, not going to post the picture of the slave Leia metal-bikini pillowfight? (Via Topless Robot.)

* Finally, good luck and good vibes to Steve Blackwell, Wizard’s longtime creative director and a really kind-hearted guy who is the latest casualty of the company’s long-running bloodbath. The day I was let go with two designers, Steve was visibly shaken by it, and his emotion and kindness that day meant so much to me. Every time a new issue of All Star Batman & Robin came out, I spent the day anxiously awaiting the moment he’d show up at my desk, so full of fury at my wrongness in loving it that he had a hard time getting going–but believe me, he would. I missed him when I wasn’t working there and I bet the company, which by my count has seen the loss of 26 of 43 full-time creative employees since mid-2007, will miss him too.

Daybreak Episode Three

Brian Ralph, writer/artist

Bodega Distribution, October 2008

52 pages

$10

Buy it from Bodega, eventually

The third and (for the moment) concluding volume of Brian Ralph’s unique, first-person post-apocalyptic zombie comic, Daybreak Episode Three is the series’ most Romero-indebted installment so far. Mad survivors desperately clinging to the literally decomposing remnants of their former life, elegiac post-bite journeys into that good night, “the humans are the real monsters”–this one hits all the classic grace notes, and in specific fashions that bring to mind not just Uncle George’s genre ur-texts but also the series most responsible for reviving its fortunes in comics, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. What keeps Daybreak from feeling even remotely by-the-numbers even so is Ralph’s joyous, textured cartooning, which lends every actor and environment the same ramshackle, palpable look and feel as his breakthrough caveman adventure Cave-In. You’re simply not going to sit there and sigh “I’ve seen this before,” even if technically you have, in the face of comics this fluid and thoughtfully designed. Just take the character designs as a for-instance: Their cutesy kids’-comics faces and bodies are varyingly employed to make their savage actions all the more disturbing and their sad fates all the more affecting. Placing them in a world as far gone past the point of no return as any this side of The Road is ironically rather fitting, since it suggests a frivolity to their struggles echoed in their just-for-fun appearances. You’ll want things to work out, especially after reading that delightful final page, but you won’t be holding your breath; maintaining that balance between bleakness and simple enjoyment of first-person-shooter shenanigans is quite an achievement.

* Top Shelf is prepping a 400-page alternative manga anthology. Oh boy! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* A team-up for the ages, courtesy of Jim Rugg and Copacetic Comics:

(Via JK Parkin.)

* The great Rich Juzwiak of FourFour sounds off on the Saw pandemic.

* Michael Koresky of Reverse Shot makes me even more anxious to see Fear(s) of the Dark and even more grumpy that I inevitably won’t do so while it’s in theaters.

* Reading the critical tea leaves, Marc-Oliver Frisch argues (twice) that much of the blame for Clint Eastwood’s poorly reviewed bit of Angelina Jolie Oscar bait Changeling lies with screenwriter and Spider-Man soiler J. Michael Straczynski. The insertion of a “MILF avatar” concept into the based-on-a-true-story tale was a dead giveaway.

* Your quote of the day comes from Ms. Bai Ling, in a post titled “I landed from the moon to seduce you……”:

Check out on IMDB now, enter my site headline on “Crank 2” news, they use my pictures there to promote the film, but the truth is my character she is so silly and stupid but at the same time she is so brilliantly sucking fantastic, she will make you laugh your nipples out so hard that you will ended up cry for 7days and 7 hours and 7 second……all year long and then you will forget all your misery then you will become her or me, then you will have a fantastic life from that point on, all you have to do is just to dance and laugh and showing your nipples and give joy to others, isn’t it our duty in life on earth just to give and make others happy? I am delightful to be that role and to be in service for you…….

Delightful indeed, Bai Ling. Delightful indeed.

Yes we can. (Via Rob Bricken)

Cold Heat Special #8

Frank Santoro & Lane Milburn, writers/artists

PictureBox, October 2008

12 pages

I don’t remember how much it cost

Buy it from PictureBox one day

As an object, the eighth* Cold Heat Special is I think the best-looking one yet. The vivid blue/pink/yellow screenprinted cover, with its slightly metal Cold Heat logo and geometric designs, was a real eye-catcher on the SPX show floor, and that’s saying something given the visual cacophony of the place. I enjoyed the story, such as it is, as well–as in previous CH Specials, our teenage leading lady Castle faces a frightening challenge, this time a pretty scary-looking bird-man who attacks her at sea. She manages to beat the beast, scoffing at him in retrospect while brushing her teeth in her underwear within the safety of her bathroom. But then some sort of incubus assaults her, leading to a bout of passion that Castle soon discovers was all in her head–she’s adrift and nearly drowning in the ocean we spotted her on in the beginning, and it takes all she can muster to drag herself to shore, shivering and alone. It’s all in the way you tell it, and if you’ve been following Frank Santoro’s work you know how good he is with layouts, picking just the right moment to show to convey the violence, rapture, and terror of whatever’s going on (it’s a little like All Star Superman in that regard); Milburn, meanwhile, is aces with monsters, imbuing them with a convincing, stocky physicality that also lends itself well to believable sex scenes. The combination of the two artists is memorable, and makes me wonder where the parallel (though disjointed) Cold Heat story being told through the Specials will head next.

* Actually, the 6th and 7th never came out, and The Chunky Gnars is kind of like Cold Heat Special #0.

* There’s a teaser trailer for Lost season five popping up here and there around the Internet. But ABC seems intent on preventing people from seeing it, since heaven forbid, so I don’t much feel like tracking it down. I did manage to watch it, though–would you believe it’s cryptic?

* Like I always say, I may not know World of Warcraft, but I know what I like, and a zombie epidemic that turns players’ characters into the undead–oh baby, that’s’a what I like!

* So excited for Fantagraphics’ book of VHS box art Portable Grindhouse. Get crackin’, Covey!

* Watching the full-fledged official teaser trailer (if a teaser can be called full-fledged) for the Friday the 13th remake, I’m definitely thinking this could be fun. I mean, it’s just a giant killing machine in a hockey mask–there’s no risk of dumbing that down, right? In fact, of the Michael/Freddy/Jason troika, I think the Jason concept is the best: like an armed, rampaging Frankenstein monster without the redeeming qualities. That’s tough to get wrong. (Note to self: Jason vs. Rambo?) And lo and behold, no wonder it looks so much like that Texas Chainsaw remake–they’re both directed by Marcus Nispel. (Via STYD.)

* Looks like The Madonna will be the next “Film of Blood” Clive Barker adaptation, after Dread (which is after Midnight Meat Train) and before Pig Blood Blues.

* My old Wizard compadre Alex Kropinak joins the Rowdy Schoolyard sketchblog with this. The creep can roll. Who knew?

* The latest Comics Comics Cage Match is up, in which Frank Santoro, Dan Nadel, and Tim Hodler slug it out over David Heatley’s My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down. (Dan and Tim are for it, Frank is agin it.) The comment thread features guest appearances by Tom Spurgeon, Dash Shaw, Heidi MacDonald, and yours truly, wherein I say the following:

I haven’t taken a look at my copy of the collection yet, though I was kind of gobsmacked to find out about the censoring of “My Sex History.” It seemed to me that the whole point of that strip was to be completely un-censored. It’s the sexual autobio equivalent of a real splatterfest like Dead Alive, where the constant, vulgar spectacle of it all takes a Louisville Slugger to your brain until it’s beaten into a new way of reacting to what you’re seeing. The over-the-top-ness is the point. Isn’t it?

I should also add that I always wished he didn’t label his dream comics as “dream comics.” They’d be much more interesting without that disclaimer.

* There’s a new Watchmen poster and a new Watchmen trailer. I will probably enjoy this film.

* Mikey Way gets it. And yes, I know it’s annoying when people put it that way.

* Runaways like Goonies for the superhero-movie era? Sure, I’ll eat it. There’s no reason why Nico or Gert or Karolena can’t be some kid’s first crush object a la my imaginary relationship with Andy. The Scott Pilgrim movie will probably blow this door open anyways.

* My experience with Friday the 13th is entirely limited to watching the “all the kills” montage, so I’m not attuned to whether the upcoming remake/reboot/reimagining/rewhatever whose trailer you can see here represents an affront to the original the way the Texas Chainsaw and Halloween remakes seemed to. Not an affront, that’s not the right word–just a needless modernization, I suppose. This appears to be shot in that same dreary hyperrealist style, to swipe an adjective from CRwM, but I don’t see why you can’t use a franchise whose only goal was to provide jumpscares and the dubious pleasures of gore and T&A and hypocritical moralism to do all of that over again but with the tools of the modern filmmaker at your disposal. (I think most of the other iconic horror films that have been remade thus far had a lot more going on that the Jason movies, you know?)

The Goddess of War, Volume One

Lauren R. Weinstein, writer/artist

PictureBox, June 2008

30 pages

$12.95 (they’re pretty big pages, to be fair)

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

The nice thing about The Goddess of War is that it feels very comic-booky. For one thing, the subject matter is a little purple–it’s about a valkyrie who was so good at her job that she was made the Goddess of War for all humanity, and when she’s not busy heeding the prayers of the violent and deranged and helping mankind reach ever higher and bloodier levels of slaughter, she’s getting drunk off the blood of virgins, mouthing off to her celestial overlords, or having sex with the famed Apache warlord Cochise, whose tragedy-of-errors war with American frontiersmen occupies about half the book. The stereotypical “New Yorker short story” it isn’t.

Then there’s the presentation, hefty 10″ x 15.5″ pages filled to bursting with Weinstein’s muscular character designs and rough-hewn line. Weinstein’s panel borders frequently slash upward or downward across the page, reinforcing the sense that there’s a massive expanse of comics in front of us and she’s filling every inch of it. And there’s something pulpy about the drab greens she’s using for color. Even when she pauses for several 19th-century-style illustrative etchings, the intensity and starkness of their comparatively fine linework just makes you think of an artist marking the hell out of a page. It’s like the whole comic rolls up its sleeves and gets down and dirty. That price point could still be daunting, of course, especially when you note that this is only “Volume One” of an I don’t know how long series, but I for one didn’t feel gypped–you’ve got fantasy, science fiction, erotica, history, war, humor, and drunk-hipster comics all in one big throbbing package.

* This long interview with the great Charles Burns promoting his contribution to the animated horror-anthology film Fear(s) of the Dark is full of fascinating bits–Burns comparing the narrative economies of film and comics, discussing the difficulties of translating two-dimensional comics to the three-dimensional Dog Boy shorts, revealing that his next project “deals with William Burroughs,” and confirming that Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary are no longer the writers for David Fincher’s Black Hole adaptation. Gaiman gives his side of the story here.

* Here is a two-part (so far) interview with Hobbit director and co-writer Guillermo Del Toro. It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty underwhelmed with the Del Toro I’ve seen so far, but reading him describe his work process with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens makes me excited about the possibilities for the Hobbit films for the first time in a long time. He also talks about the challenge of differentiating the 13 Dwarves without it being a “the fat one/the skinny one/the blonde one/the one with glasses/the stupid one”-type deal, and compares Smaug to Tony Montana. I guess I’ve got to start reading TheOneRing.net again, huh? Takin’ it back to 2000. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* The new Yale University Press-published Ivan Brunetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories Vol. 2 comes out today, and the story selection is full of some real all-time greats. Here’s a video Yale put together in which Brunetti explains his process for assembling the collection.

Ivan Brunetti on An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Vol. 2 from Yale University Press on Vimeo.

* They’re making a movie out of Chuck Palahniuk’s uneven horror novel/short-story-collection hybrid Haunted. It sounds like they’re focusing on the framing device, which would have worked as its own short story a lot better than it did as ersatz and unrealistic glue for a bunch of unrelated scary stories. (Via every horror blog.)

* So I guess Daniel Craig turned down the starring role in Thor. Woulda been nice–the guy looks like a Nordic nightmare. Fun fact: The Missus just does not see the appeal in Mr. Craig. Meanwhile I’m practically attracted to him. (Via Splash Page.)

* Speaking of missed opportunities, J.G. Jones is officially off the final issue of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, replaced by Doug Mahnke, who I honestly think would have been better for the project overall. It’s a shame that this kind of meta-story is going to obscure the fact that Final Crisis is a much more compelling comic than Secret Invasion, but maybe quality will out in the long run, I dunno.

* The Dowdle Bros., co-directors of the first-person zombie film/[REC] remake Quarantine and the first-person serial-killer/torture porn film The Poughkeepsie Tapes (did that ever actually get released?) have signed on to be part of some sort of M. Night Shyamalan-produced thriller trilogy with the characteristically humble title of The Night Chronicles. I don’t know what to make of this at all.

* Quote of the day:

BAD BEHAVIOUR ISN’T EXCUSED BY ITS FREQUENCY: IT’S STILL BAD BEHAVIOUR.

—Chris Butcher

* A long, long, long time ago, on Matt Wiegle’s drawing table…

* I thought this line in Tom Spurgeon’s review of Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s Joker was particularly brutal, and not just (not even primarily) regarding that specific book:

I’m not sure there were themes available to anyone that hadn’t already bought in to the basic set-up of Batman comic books, the endless battle between this set of things over here that Batman represents and that list of things over there embodied in the Joker.

Ouch. I think there’s a tendency among superhero writers and fans to oversell the Meaning of each hero and villain at the expense of crafting compelling stories involving them. Obviously this was pointed out by many critics of The Dark Knight (wherein it actually didn’t bother me all that much), but imagine if the next time the Joker’s a big villain in a Batman storyline, neither character articulates his view of the meaning or meaninglessness of life in the process of trying to beat each other up, shoehorning complex ideas into pretty rough metaphorical frameworks (and I say that as someone who thinks Batman and the Joker are the two best characters in superhero comics). I think I might be more interested in that kind of Batman storyline, simply because I’ll feel like more of the work is being left for me to do. After all, people puzzled this stuff out regarding the characters based on literally decades of comics where that kind of thing didn’t happen at all.

* Finally, I have a new hero: this wild-man hedge fund manager who made a fortune betting against the economic collapse, quit, and published this in his farewell letter:

Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won’t see it included in BP’s, “Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions,” television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM’s similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female.

The evil female plant – marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week.

It is simply insane that on my way home tonight I can legally buy a 24-pack of Schlitz but not a nickel bag of weed. Absolutely insane. My worst experience with booze was blacking out for a couple of hours and was eventually being found curled around a toilet on the floor of a dormitory bathroom by someone who’d waited in a five-person deep line to use it, then having to schelp to class the next day and leaving in the middle to shoot out both ends for half an hour. By contrast worst experience with pot was freaking out a bit while smoking half a J and watching an interview with Genesis P-Orridge and Robert Anton Wilson. Feeling good is very, very dangerous in a lot of people’s eyes, and for them, the ability to experience a consequence-free high of any kind–chemical, sexual, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual–must be stamped out at all costs. Fuck those people. Fuck Anti-Life. (Via every political blog.)

* I’m pleased to live up to my recent promise to put anything Boy’s Club above the fold by linking to Top Shelf co-honcho Brett Warnock’s enthusiastic review of Matt Furie’s wondrously funny comic.

* My pal TJ Dietsch provides a peek behind the curtain at our latest Manly Movie Mamajama. If anything I think he undersells how bad Slumber Party Massacre 2 was. Even in pure T&A and gore terms! I’m thinking we should have gone with the first in the series, which seemed to beat its successor out in the former category if Google Images is any indication. But then again, people could have just listened to me and thrown in Body Double…

* Terrence Howard’s expulsion from the warm bosom of Iron Man 2 in favor of Don Cheadle the other day was apparently news to Terrence Howard. It is also neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by Brandt Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige.

* CRwM reviews An American Crime, a film I have a hard time even thinking about watching.

* The Spurge kinda dug the Speed Racer.

* I did not see the end of Becky Cloonan’s team-up with Vladimir Putin coming.