Action Comics #870

Geoff Johns, writer

Gary Frank, artist

DC Comics, October 2008

32 pages

$2.99

This issue got a lot of attention for (to paraphrase the advertising cliché) killing Pa Kent again, for the first time. I suppose that’s notable, but the Kents were one part of the Superman mythos I never really saw as integral to the whole once they took li’l Kal-El out of the rocketship. (For me the much bigger change to the Superman gestalt came earlier in the arc, when Brainiac revealed that Krypton’s destruction was his doing.) What I took from this issue instead is further appreciation for Geoff Johns’s growth as a writer, and further reinforcement that that growth has been spurred by his close working relationship with Grant Morrison. The multi-page sequence that leads up to Pa Kent’s death is largely silent and rapidly edited, as we follow the separate, desperate actions of Pa, Ma, Superman, Supergirl, Brainiac, Lois Lane, the staff of the Daily Planet, and Brainiac’s missiles, one after the other. It’s the kind of disorienting juxtaposition you find throughout contemporary Morrisonia, if not quite pared down to his level of contextual minimalism (or reliant on his seemingly boundless faith in the intelligence of his audience) then certainly more daring and less ham-fisted than what you’d see in a comparable scene by the vast majority of other popular superhero writers today. The effect both ratchets up the thrill level and heightens the emotional impact–we know we’re seeing something important, but we’re also seeing something exciting. In the context of a superhero comic, it’s basically how death should be done: not by playing to the rafters or the gutters, but by trying to make it pop as brightly as anything else in a superhero comic, if to different effect. In this sense Gary Frank is just the artist for this gig–a kindred spirit to Frank Quitely, replacing Quitely’s Euroisms with a bug-eyed, held-in ferocity that suggests American superhero artists gone slightly psychotic. If you enjoy Superman, this is a run I recommend.

Johnny wants the David Bowie Sketchbook!

My Bowie book and I attended the Small Press Expo a few weekends ago with visions of Ben Katchor and Joost Swarte dancing in our heads. Alas, they go into the “ones that got away” file, but I was really pleased with the sketches I ended up scoring…

Nate Powell: I really like the idea of Bowie’s singing radiating outward from his mouth like a mutant’s sonic superpower or something.

Tom Scioli: As the artist of Godland and The Myth of 8-Opus, Tom is really the first full-time superhero artist from whom I’ve gotten a Bowie sketch. The best part? When I asked him about it, he actually said “I’ve always wanted to draw David Bowie but the opportunity never presented itself.” Yes, sadly, Bowie is not ACTUALLY a Kirbyesque cosmic entity, though he plays one on stage.

Lilli Carré: Lilli was maybe the most relentlessly (and needlessly) self-effacing artist in my Bowie sketchbook to date, as you can see from the disclaimer she felt it necessary to include. But gosh, look at that hair! She’s my favorite hair artist in comics.

Lauren Weinstein: Lauren was super gung-ho about drawing Bowie, and about the drawing she eventually came up with in particular. “This is the best thing I’ve ever drawn,” she insisted. “No, really, this is the best thing I’ve ever drawn.”

Matt Wiegle: The “I’m Afraid of Americans” video comes to life! I’ve known Matt for a long time so maybe he recalled that I’ve been a huge Nine Inch Nails fan for a long time, and that in fact it was Trent Reznor’s enthusiasm for David Bowie that got me to buy my first Bowie record, Earthling, back in college. Or maybe he’s just awesome.

Dustin Harbin: Dustin seemed to treat drawing in the Bowie sketchbook like some kind of honor. I think he lived up to it!

Jim Rugg: Jim was maybe the most in-demand artist at the show–when I initially approached him to do a Bowie sketch he had a queue of three other sketchbooks to go through first–and I’m really grateful he took the time for me. The most androgynous and sexy Bowie yet? And yet another appearance of the ever-popular “pirate Bowie” look, which actual Bowie sported during a grand total of ONE photo session. (He had pinkeye or something.) I’ve since discovered that much of the Bowie-centric episode of Flight of the Conchords revolves around Bowie’s enthusiasm for eyepatch use, so maybe that explains it.

* It’s quasi-official: The Road has most likely been moved to 2009, which will take it out of the Oscar running and deny it the attendant exposure and revenue.

* The new He-Man/Masters of the Universe movie has been scrapped by Warner Bros. due to personnel shuffling and an inability to find an A-list director willing to take on the project. (Via Beaks at AICN, who seems a lot more skeptical about the supposedly awesome screenplay than others have been, which makes me feel not so bad about this turn of events.)

* The latest Clive Barker Books of Blood adaptation Dread has been casting people and is now shooting.

* Speaking of Barker, the Hellraiser remake might have a new director–Pascal Laugier.

* The Zach Snyder-supervised blockbuster-scale zombie movie Army of the Dead is, um, well, I’m not sure. I guess the point is that it’s still a going concern.

* Despite a post-pilot-episode level of involvement with the show that does not appear to exceed watching the program on his TiVo, Lost co-creator/absentee parent J.J. Abrams is now talking about the possibility of a Lost theatrical movie enabled by the series’ firmly set endpoint, though he does dismiss it as a remote one.

* Nerd-movie hack Paul W.S. Anderson is doing a remake of The Long Good Friday set in Miami, for God’s sake. (Via Dread Central.)

* Grant Morrison talks about his screenplay for the video game adaptation Area 51.

* Here’s a list of theaters and release dates for the limited release of Let the Right One In.

* Missed this when it was first posted because NeilAlien’s syndication feed takes weeks before updating, but I rather like how the ur-comics blogger characterizes M. Night Shyamalan’s recently expressed desire to finally do an Unbreakable sequel.

Neilalien’s a big fan of the film- but for the director who once thought that Unbreakable was taking “so many incredible risks”, this sounds like a bad-idea grasp for safety and former glory after a string of bombs.

* My brother in themed-sketchbook arms, Fantagraphics’ Mike Baehr, talks to StarWars.com about his enormously impressive Yoda sketchbook.

* Hubba hubba part one: Dave Kiersh!

* Hubba hubba part two: Jaime Hernandez! For a good cause!

A new, Octoberrific Manly Movie Mamajama!

MMM THE 13TH: SUFFERING IN SUFFERN

37. The Lost Boys

38. Slumber Party Massacre II

39. Dead Alive

Fight or Run: Shadow of the Chopper

Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist

Buenaventura Press, October 2008

32 pages

$3.95

Buy it from Buenaventura, I’ll bet

Anyone who read Kevin Huizenga’s hilariously accurate description of the plot of a made-up video game in Ganges #2 knew he’d have a heckuva video game comic in him somewhere, and Fight or Run is that comic. The structure, which we’ve seen him take stabs at a few times in the past, is simple: Two little dudes from a selection of about two-dozen entertainingly designed and named characters–a flying Illuminati eye-in-pyramid named Pronouncement, a little Pac-Man ghost/blob hybrid named Bernini, a guy with a hand for a head named Hander, etc.–face off, one of the critters decides whether to Fight or Run, and it’s game time! The appeal of this comic lies in how Huizenga recognizes that the comfortingly familiar and repetitive parametric structure of video games and works based on them–beat this guy, acquire that object, solve a puzzle, beat a level, repeat–enables visual and logical flights of fancy that would make a blockbuster all-ages starter game like (say) Super Mario Bros. look like a work of ostentatious avant-gardism in any other narrative medium. So here, Huizenga again gets to indulge his inner Powr Mastrs superfan with those character names and designs, while devising increasingly baroque and entertaining ways for the characters to battle, to the point where it’s (duh) much less about the fighting and much more about the fun things you can do with lines on paper, paring certain elements back as far as they can go: a Duck vs. Rabbit fight in which the two characters are distinguishable only by where the handful of lines that connote their beak and/or ears fall on their round, one-eyed heads; a logic diagram that shows the Fight or Run concept, for all its internal variations, has only six possible outcomes. Of course, you can then also ring humor out of unexpected variations on these very simple constituent parts, like Huizenga does with McSkulls, a female fighter who beats her opponents by doing girly things like beating them with her purse, hitting them with a rainbow, riding away on a unicorn or a dolphin, or going out with them and then dumping them (the only time a <3 is used in lieu of an F or an R to connote the choice made by the combatants). There's also something being said here about the folly of ambition in the person of Chopper, the character who participates in the greatest number of F/R contests. He tends to lose because of trying to hard to win in showy ways, like self-dividing until he collapses or skating away on replicas of his own head that are easily transmogrified into giant eyeballs by his ocularly-themed opponent. In the final strip, Chopper runs from the sinister Kid Torcher (aka Kid President, aka Kidder/Torturer (so dubbed in front of an American flag background, no less (I think you get the drift))) and ends up winning his fight only by living his entire life and then dying of what must in the Fight or Run world be natural causes. I'd read an entire collection of comics this deceptively simple and sharp if I could.

* From now on, writing about Matt Furie’s brilliantly funny Boy’s Club guarantees you a top slot in the Carnival of Souls. Our first recipient of said largesse: Tom Spurgeon.

* Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the basis for Robert DeNiro’s character Sam “Ace” Rothstein in my favorite Martin Scorsese film Casino, has died. Is this one of the all-time great mobster photos or what?

* The final section of the final season of Battlestar Galactica debuts on January 16th. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* The adaptation of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Sleeper has a writer and the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has a (maybe majorly) delayed release date.

* In praising the apparently simple pleasures of Quarantine, Horror Hacker’s Grady Hendrix manages to articulate a problem I had with the film it’s based on, [REC], that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until now:

The original Rec was a low budget affair with one single goal: To make the audience jump. And it worked; it’s a movie that has you springing out of your seat like a Mexican jumping bean.

That was the goal alright, and it definitely worked. I’m not convinced there’s any more to it than that, I guess.

* Also at Horror Hacker, Charles Burns talks about the animated horror-anthology feature Fear(s) of the Dark and David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of Black Hole, which it doesn’t sound like Neil Gaiman is writing anymore. I have to say, gorgeous as Burns’s art is, I don’t want to see a Sin City style digital recreation of it onscreen for the Black Hole movie. That’s a story that can and should stand on its own through a translated tone, not panel-by-panel recreations. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Rumsey Taylor on the genius of Jaws.

* Jog reviews Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s Joker graphic novel. Leaching the subversive, camp, performative aspects out of the Joker and just making him a torture-porn tough guy with a fucked-up face starring in a macho crime caper seems singularly unappealing to me, but maybe I’m missing something?

* Here’s a good-lookin’ trailer for the good-lookin’ vampire film Let the Right One In.

* He’s the one-man army, Ason: an enterprising World of Warcraft player plays 36 separate accounts at once so that he can go on raids all by himself. I hope he kicks ass. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Rickey Purdin’s daily horror drawings: still killin’ it.

* Monster Brains presents a demonic Swipe File–if you like this, wait till you get a load of the paintings it was copied from…

* Meat is torture.

* Torture of the human variety has the Presidential seal of approval.

* Finally (via Pitchfork), I say again, Chinese Fucking Democracy.

People are making fun of how he looks in this picture:

But clearly he’s just in the middle of doing the Ed Lover Dance:

Kick-Ass #1-4

Mark Millar, writer

John Romita Jr., artist

Marvel/Icon, 2008

32 pages each

$2.99 each

The first four issues of Mark Millar’s John Romita Jr.-drawn creator-owned series leave me with two dominant impressions: 1) JRJR’s work is so pretty! 2) I don’t think I’ve ever read a comic so terrified of homosexuals. It honestly could be entered into a court case as proof positive of the “gay panic” defense. Good guys, bad guys, and neutral characters alike drop homophobic epithets like they were going out of style (which they are!), and the main character spends about twice as much page time tearing himself up for allowing the girl he likes to believe he’s gay than he does recovering from watching people get horribly slaughtered in front of him. So far no actual homosexuals have been sexually assaulted or murdered, which in a Mark Millar comic is saying something, but the uptick in “black characters used as cannon fodder” is significant even in Millar’s racially dubious oeuvre, so it’s sort of a wash.

The story is actually a comparatively subdued variation on Millar’s standard routine of adding ultraviolence and a few nods at “realism” to the superhero genre (cf. Ultimates, Wanted, The Authority, War Heroes). This time out, a middle-school (I think) loser, baffled that no one in the world has ever thrown on a mask and costume and gone out to fight crime, up and does so. The gimmick is that when he does so, he gets his ass kicked in spectacularly bloody fashion, over and over, even when he comes out the victor. That’s kind of a funny idea, and Millar (relatively speaking) undersells it, eschewing his usual trick of having the characters tell the reader exactly how awesome they are and dialing the braggadocio down to believably adolescent-male levels.

What it’s mainly good for is allowing Romita to cut lose with all his quirks: wrinkly clothes and finely delineated hair, fights that are a ballet of blocky bodies twisting through the air and torrents of blood gushing like one of those fancy fountains that can spell out words and make pictures of dolphins in whatnot that they have in Asian commerce centers, cute little details (a t-shirt reading “WHATEVER IT IS, AMAGANSETT”–a pop-culture gag whose idiosyncracy stands out in a comic written by a guy who’s still doing Paris Hilton references). Dean White, the sensational colorist find of the past couple years, gives JRJR’s art a milky warmth unique enough to actually say something about the spectacular art it’s supporting. By the time the ten-year-old little-girl ninja shows up and starts slicing up gangstas while calling them “cunts” you realize what a waste of Romita’s capital-A Art it all is, but only homos would complain, and you’re not a homo, right?

* Remember how the rumor that maybe Paul Andrew Williams was gonna maybe direct a maybe sequel to 28 Days/Weeks Later that was gonna maybe be called 28 Months Later was maybe debunked? The official word from 28…Later producer Andrew Macdonald is that Williams was working on a prequel, but it didn’t work out, and that Days director and Weeks honcho Danny Boyle is developing an idea for a third film. Bring it on says I. Days and Weeks stand up there with Night and Dawn. (Via STYD.)

* No rumor this: Terrence Howard, whose drunken explanation of the Air Force’s bond of brotherhood was just stupidly great in the original Iron Man, has been replaced by Don Cheadle for the role of James “War Machine” Rhodes in Iron Man 2, due to what sounds like a money dispute with attendant “creative differences” issues to me. On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, Don Cheadle!

* I’ve heard some good things about Quarantine, the English-language [REC] remake apparently responsible for that film’s suppression on the Stateside DVD market, but Rick Trembles of Motion Picture Purgatory fame (have those things been collected anywhere?) sure wasn’t crazy about it, and the way he describes it makes me wonder if it’ll irk me too.

* Discovered today: the new-ish (to me, at least) blog of composer Eric Whitacre. Here he is discussing what it’s like for him to watch performances of “When David Heard,” the astonishing song I posted earlier today.

* Renee French posts haunting drawings on her blog every day, you know. Here’s the latest:

* Since Eve Tushnet’s fangirl blogging should be incentivized, here’s links to her review of Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows and an assortment of other comics, including Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men.

* You know what I wanna hear, right?

* Finally, new Beyoncé! <3 <3 <3 Words fail.

When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept. And thus he said: “My son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee!”

This is the saddest song I’ve ever heard. The first time I listened to it, I sat down and cried for about ten minutes afterward. There’s a moment deep into the song that you will see coming from far away and that will devastate you nonetheless; it just made me cry sitting here at my desk. Utterly, exquisitely painful and beautiful.

* I’d love to hear more about the specifics if only to determine how best to fight back, but this report of a man named Christopher Handley being prosecuted for the possession of obscene manga is as chilling as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s involvement on his behalf is welcome. Extra disturbing: Handley was literally followed home from the post office by law enforcement after picking up the books in question, which allegedly depict sexual activity involving minors. I have a pretty brightline approach to this particular area–if it’s not an actual photograph it shouldn’t be illegal to possess–and I hope this outlook is upheld.

* Bruce Baugh’s Shift-T is a new blog dedicated to chronicling Bruce’s experiences playing World of Warcraft. I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about why he’s worth reading on this subject even if (like me) you don’t play WoW–why he’s worth reading if the only things you have in common with him is indulging in a hobby, any hobby, and having some desire to think about what you get out of that hobby. But if you’re not sold on those high-falutin’ grounds, he does post on why it’s fun to go into battle with an angry gorilla by your side.

*The minicomics clearinghouse known as Global Hobo has relaunced under new management with a new blog and some of the great USS Catastrophe site’s backstock. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Heroes loses AICN’s Hercules. This is like when Cronkite declared Vietnam unwinnable.

* My pal Rickey Purdin’s Octoberfest of horror sketches is getting more and more fun:

Altcomix fans, can you identify the unfortunate soul in that last illo?

* An exclusive, limited-edition Marc Bell book? Drawn & Quarterly people, you’ve got my mailing address, right?

* I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but the decidedly post-apocalyptic treatment given to Venom in the new video game Spider-Man: League of Shadows looks like imaginative fun if this trailer is any indication. It also occurs to me now that superhero-comic-based video games have been a pretty conservative lot in terms of their plotlines, as best I can tell, but the medium lends itself just as readily to more expansive, quasi-Elseworlds narratives like this one.

* ZOMG LIBRARY PR0N (via everyone):

* If you’d like to feel your own sanity slip a bit, read the repeated pleas of a U.S. military officer on behalf of a captive American citizen and “illegal enemy combatant” who literally was being driven insane by his treatment in a Navy brig in Charleston. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Finally, I repeat, Chinese Fucking Democracy.

Or Else #5

Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, October 2008

40 pages

$4.95

Buy it from D&Q if they get it in stock

Or Else #5 is one of Kevin Huizenga’s least showy comics in recent memory, as well as one of his most openly autobiographical; all of that is true despite it mostly being about living in a war-ravaged post-apocalyptic dystopia. The centerpiece story, “Rumbling,” is based on a prose work by writer Giorgio Manganelli, and sees Huizengan everyman Glenn Ganges inserted into a Handmaid’s Tale-esque scenario of warring religious factions as an ambassador from a country “where wars of religion are not waged.” (Amusingly, Ganges later reveals that his homeland fights scientifically rigorous wars of atheism instead. Bill Maher Is Watching You!) I think you can see a little bit of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs (Huizenga’s a fan) sneaking in here, with the strips emphasis on the lavishly constructed uniforms of the various factions’ soldiery and its relatively straightforward pacing and use of genre. The autobio elements slip in through a pair of strips about animal intrusions into the Huizenga/Ganges household–first a turtle in a strip that (I think) openly stars Huizenga rather than his stand-in, then a longer strip about various spiders and wasps that have infested and done battle in Ganges’s house, where the long, lighter-colored hair Ganges is sporting makes him look more like the cartoonist himself than ever. The back-cover photograph of one of the bug battles depicted in the comic adds another real-world/fiction crossover element. The package is rounded out by several strips that focus on picayune details–sentence diagramming, “How Are We Spending Our Tuesday?”, the structure of a conversation between two people represented solely in gibberish, and so on–to such a degree that their meaning is all but lost, like a word repeated into incomprehensibility. Need I mention the effortless cartooning–a loosening line used to connote flashbacks, the military precision with which Huizenga uses grays? It’s not the knockout blow that some previous Or Else issues have been, but as an exercise in Huizenga’s trademark juxtaposition of the quotidian with the universal (and frequently the philosophically troubling), it’s solid; as a unit, though, I’m not sure why it begins and ends where it does and contains what it does.

One obstacle all first-person horror movies must overcome is the need to justify why somebody on the run from horrible life-threatening monsters would continue to keep the goddamn camera running. Usually the (real-world) filmmakers try to do it with two different stock responses: 1) The camera, some angry other character informs us, makes the cameraperson feel safe, removed, like this isn’t real; 2) People, the cameraperson informs us, just “need to know” what happened. In both cases this usually comes across like sophomore-year media-studies bullshit (nowhere more so than George A. Romero’s depressingly awful Diary of the Dead). While a particularly strong film can add emotional resonance that makes these excuses work by setting up the continued use of the camera a sort of life-preserver for characters on the verge of completely losing it (The Blair Witch Project, for example), you usually just need to think about the camera’s presence the same way you think about hearing explosions in space–you suspend your disbelief in favor of the way it enhances the drama.

[REC] is different, and clever as the dickens. Our in-movie filmmakers aren’t pretentious film students with Marshall McLuhan on the brain or vapid exemplars of the YouTube generation. They’re journalists–puff-piece specialists, yeah, but journalists all the same. Reporter Angela and her cameraman Pablo head out on a ride-along with a couple of firemen for their Insomniac-style human-interest show, so at first their filming is justified by their jobs. Next, they end up locked in a quarantined apartment building by the authorities, despite the presence of several ill and injured people who badly need medical attention; now the filming is a matter of evidence-gathering, a public service on behalf of the frightened and ailing people in the building and a rebuke to the security and health officials who deprive them of both freedom and information. As the horrors mount and filming becomes increasingly impractical in real-world terms, the camera is used as a light source. When the light is broken, the characters navigate via its night vision. At every turn, there’s a reason the camera needs to stay on.

I bring all this up because, as my wife pointed out when I described it to her, that’s a lot more thought and effort on behalf of making the subgenre’s central conceit work than most films of its ilk display. So good for directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza and their co-writer Luis Berdejo! But I also mention it because this subterranean current of logic throughout the film is key to the success of its final act, when it hits you with a tidal wave of weird for which you are almost entirely unprepared. All of a sudden, a movie that had been a pretty straightforward, well-acted, effective mash-up of Blair Witch and 28 Days Later or Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead takes a sharp left-turn into Creepyland, somewhere between the farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the collected works of Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. It blindsides you and discomfits you mightily, picking up on elements from throughout the entire film in terms of astutely utilizing the first-person camerawork and shoddy lighting to suggest as much as it shows, but blasting those elements right into overdrive. I’ve seen scarier neo-zombie movies, but in terms of sheer narrative smarts, this one’s right up there.

Travel

Yuichi Yokoyama, writer/artist

PictureBox, October 2008

202 pages

$19.95

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

I love traveling by train, which is good because I’ve done a lot of it over the years: commuting to work from Long Island to Manhattan, traveling up to college in New Haven or down to visit my then-girlfriend in Delaware. Perhaps it’s just these positive associations that feed my affinity for the rails, but thinking about it, I get something out of the journey beyond the destination. A train is an interstitial space, where you can sit for hours in one spot but you’re not actually anyplace, where you move but stand still, where you see parts of the landscape normally as hidden as what you see when you turn your head around on a Disney World attraction to watch the animatronics reset and redeploy for others. Trains are magical.

So is Travel, PictureBox’s second release from Yuichi Yokoyama. I actually like this one better than New Engineering, much better, even. Not because New Engineering wasn’t quite good, because it was–maybe just because what I saw in New Engineering was alien, while Travel, for all its hyperstylization and hilariously deadpan spectacle, is something I can point to and say, “I know this.”

The idea of the book couldn’t be simpler: Three guys get on a train, ride it for a while, then get off. And yes, you read that page count correctly–you’re basically looking at around 180 pages of guys riding on a train. But as with Kevin Huizenga’s Fight or Run, that pared-down parameter gives Yokoyama free reign to indulge in some of the most dynamically staged and inventively drawn comics you’re gonna see all year. The 45 pages or so (!) the guys spend walking through the train to find a seat actually had me laughing out loud after a while, as each fellow passenger they pass looks more and more hysterically taciturn despite their outlandishly detailed clothing and hairstyles, and each attempt to squeeze through a crowded aisle or purchase something in the concession car is depicted from an angle that makes it look like something out of the Wachowski Bros.’ Speed Racer. (That’s a compliment.) When they finally do take their seats, we’re then treated to a tour de force recreation of nearly every possible thing you can see through your window on a train–cities and fields, sun glare and rivulets of rain, parallel trains and passing traffic, our reflection in the window and our reflection in the windows of buildings outside–or inside the train car itself–other passengers walking by, clouds of smoke from cigarettes, another traveler pulling a book out of his jacket to read in a manner so dramatically presented you expect him to whip out a gun and start shooting Colin Ferguson-style.

That something so plotless can remain so gripping for so long is a testament to Yokoyama’s ability to pick unexpected ways to show us everyday things, from the subtle effects of perspective and distortion he can ring out of his simple line to astute use of repetition and slight variation to convey passage through space and time. It’s early yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this near the top of my eventual Best Comics of the Year list. I certainly look forward to rereading it on the train.

* My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity presents an extravagantly detailed recap of the half-hour of Watchmen footage recently screened for members of the press who aren’t me.

* Speaking of Watchmen, actor Matthew “Ozymandias” Goode continues his streak of being amusingly forthright about his role, adding “possible closeted homosexual” to “child of Nazis” among his personal additions to the character. I’m trying to think if there’s any other effete-villain clichés he can throw in there…any thoughts?

* David Cronenberg may be doing another thriller–a Robert Ludlum adaptation starring Denzel Washington. I am totally in support of this. (Via AICN.)

* Jon Hastings takes a look at the Luna Brothers’ Ultra and the perils of superhero niche marketing.

* In a “short post” that is longer than virtually every comics review I’ve ever written for this site, Jog casts a slightly skeptical eye on Rafael Grampá’s action-horror fantasia Mesmo Delivery.

* As part of a month-long horror-movie sketchathon, my buddy Rickey Purdin has got to be fucking kidding me:

Look Out!! Monsters #1

Geoff Grogan, writer/artist

self-published, September 2008

32 pages

$9.95

Buy it from Geoff Grogan

Where did this thing come from? I was handed a copy of Look Out!! Monsters by creator Geoff Grogan’s wife at SPX, and they seemed like friendly, unassuming folks–certainly not the hipstery enfants terribles you might expect to be behind a comic like this. Meanwhile, Google tells me that Geoff Grogan is a cartoonist behind a Rat Pack pastiche called Nice Work, a Xeric Grant recipient for this very comic, and a writer-about-comics who penned this interesting essay challenging the artcomics approach of Kramers Ergot. As it turns out, his work in Look Out!! Monsters would fit nicely next to the Kramers volumes on your bookshelf. Like the best stuff in that anthology series, its art–painted over collaged pieces of The New York Times–calls attention to its own construction but is nevertheless harnessed to an emotionally rich narrative. It’s really impressive.

The nuts and bolts of the book feature Frankenstein’s monster appearing in the smoking crater left behind by an airstrike during what looks like World War I. The Monster assaults a trench full of soldiers in a thrillingly staged fight that evokes both Jack Kirby and David Mazzuchelli, before a cleverly constructed transition suddenly finds both us and the Monster whisked away to a Gothic cathedral. There things take a turn for the creepy, with the Monster mimicking a gargoyle’s disgorgement of water, before the comic gets all non-narrative on us, with huge splash pages and spreads of Frankensteinian lab equipment, Lee/Kirby unstable-molecule pseudo-scientific dot-printed epiphanies, images of unspecified violence and romance, the return of the Monster to assault a hapless victim, and finally the collapse of the Twin Towers. Beneath it all–literally, since the canvas consists of newspaper snippets–are hints of the chaos unleashed by that catastrophic attack, as terrifying and unpredictable as the creation of Frankenstein and the Fantastic Four, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. It’s beautiful to look at and very hard to shake; concept and execution are both very successful on a variety of levels. Do look out for it.

* M. Night Shyamalan is all gung ho about doing an Unbreakable sequel, which was the original plan before audience reaction proved lukewarm compared to The Sixth Sense. Of course we’ve now seen that some lukewarm audience reactions to post-Sixth Sense Shyamalan films are more lukewarm than others, so Unbreakable 2 is suddenly a lot more feasible, especially given the ever-increasing mania for superheroes and what you have to imagine will be an increased willingness on the part of post-Hancock Hollywood to try superheroes without comic-book bonafides.

* Remember yesterday when I said there’s maybe going to be a sequel to 28 Days/Weeks Later that was maybe gonna be called 28 Months Later and maybe directed by Paul Andrew Wiliams? Well now that last part has maybe been debunked, but we can add “it’s maybe set in Russia” to the maybe-facts we know about the movie, maybe. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* The concluding volume of Brian Ralph’s first-person zombie thriller Daybreak came out at SPX: you can see the final installment online here and read the “script” for the last 20 pages here.

* Here’s that SPX 2008 report I did again.

* Dave Kiersh rules.

* So does Paul Pope.

My SPX 2008 con report is up at Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter. I hope you enjoy it!

* SPX was this weekend! It was fun. Jog, Chris Mautner, and Rickey Purdin have all blogged at length about it, and I mention them specifically because they mentioned me specifically in their reports, which is really all it takes. In terms of individual selling points for those reports, Rickey includes a list of everything he got which should give you a sense of how much appealing stuff was on sale, Chris includes photos which show you what the experience was like, and Jog goes in-depth on the panels he participated in as well as offering a summary of the comics internet and how it’s changed by way of digression.

* My own SPX report will go up at Tom Spurgeon’s site sometime soon. And yes, There Will Be Bowie Sketches here soon as well.

* There’s definitely a new George A. Romero Dead movie on the way, and it’s probably not a direct sequel to the truly terrible Diary of the Dead thank god, and it’s maybe called Island of the Dead. I think that covers it.

* There’s also maybe a third 28/Later movie on the way, and it’s maybe called 28 Months Later, and it’s maybe directed by Paul Andrew Williams. I think that covers it.

* For some reason, Roger Ebert talks to the Wachowski Brothers about Gordon Willis’s cinematography as seen in the new remastered edition of The Godfather. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* I’m sure the Siegels are indeed genuinely grateful for the money writer Brad Meltzer raised to save Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel’s childhood home, the birthplace of Superman. I’m sure Meltzer is totally sincere in doing this, on-sale book about Siegel or no. It’s a nice thing to have done, a mitzvah for a family who could use one these days. But it leaves a funny taste in my mouth given that at this very moment, the publisher at which Meltzer is a huge deal is engaged in a legal battle against the Siegel family over Siegel’s creations. Maybe it’s just seeing these stories appear on the same on the same day that’s making me scratch my head, but surely there are more meaningful, dare I say vitally important, ways to honor the creation of Superman by Jerry Siegel in terms of systemic reform for which high-profile writers and artists could publicly agitate than by refurbishing a house. Tom Spurgeon is right (see item #16): at a certain point it comes down not to high-falutin’ ethics, but to our common self-respect.

* UPDATE: Kiel Phegley offers an interesting counterpoint.