An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories Vol. 2

Ivan Brunetti, editor

Jessica Abel, Anonymous, Lynda Barry, Mark Beyer, Ariel Bordeaux, Chester Brown, Jeffrey Brown, Charles Burns, Martin Cendreda, C.F., Brian Chippendale, Daniel Clowes, David Collier, Robert Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Kim Deitch, Debbie Dreschler, Charles Forbell, Renée French, Drew Friedman, Phoebe Gloeckner, Leif Goldberg, Carrie Golus, Adam Gopnik, Bill Griffith, Milt Gross, John Hankiewicz, Fletcher Hanks, Sammy Harkham, David Heatley, Tim Hensley, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Bill Holman, Kevin Huizenga, Jess, Cole Johnson, J. Bradley Johnson, Ben Katchor, Kaz, Megan Kelso, Dave Kiersh, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Michael Kupperman, Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Matt, David Mazzuchelli, Winsor McKay, Richard McGuire, James McShane, Jerry Moriarty, Anders Nilsen, Diane Noomin, Elinore Norflus, Onsmith, Gary Panter, Paper Rad, Laura Park, Harvey Pekar, John Porcellino, Jayr Pulga, Archer Prewitt, Ron Regé Jr., Joe Sacco, Richard Sala, Souther Salazar, Frank Santoro, Kevin Scalzo, Seth, R. Sikoryak, Art Spiegfelman, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, Eugene Teal, Matthew Thurber, Adrian Tomine, H.J. Tuthill, Carol Tyler, Maurice Vellekoop, Chris Ware, Patrick W. Welch, Mack White, Karl Wirsum, Basil Wolverton, Jim Woodring, Dan Zettwoch, writers/artists

Yale University Press, November 2008

400 pages

$28

Buy it from Yale University Press

Buy it from Amazon.com

While not quite the world-beating effort that was its predecessor, this second Ivan Brunetti-edited anthology from Yale University Press still makes it difficult to imagine a more welcome addition to the bookshelf of a comics fan looking to expand her repertoire, or a non-comics fan looking to dive in head-first. If anything this installment casts an even wider net for contributions, roping in a greater number of cartoonists and even including such one-off, quasi- or literally anonymous outsiders as Elinore Norflus, Eugene Teal, and the author of Utility Sketchbook–the former pair being just two of a solid number of artists this particular comics buff had never even heard of. (At one point, after reading a sample strip from Charles Forbell’s old-time comic Naughty Pete for the first time ever, the obvious inspiration it afforded Chris Ware made me laugh out loud when I saw it was from Ware’s own collection.) In a way that offsets at least one complaint I’ve heard about the first volume, that its contents were too easy to duplicate in your own collection. But I think it also say something about the book’s mission–despite its impeccable “starter kit” credentials, it’s not necessarily intended to serve as a linear roadmap for your further comics purchasing and reading, because in comics there are plenty of dead ends worth exploring regardless.

If there’s a major problem with this volume, it’s not so much with the selections as with their arrangement. Volume 1 was ordered mostly by length, which led to an engrossing sense of flow yet also allowed Brunetti some leeway in terms of which strips he placed with which. Here, Brunetti reveals in his introduction, he’s just freestyling, which paradoxically gives a more rigid feel to some of the sections. My beef is primarily with the “slice of life” section, which begins on page 154 with James McShane’s “draw what you’re doing every ten minutes throughout the day” strip from Kramers Ergot 6 and continues for almost 100 pages before ending with Phoebe Gloeckner’s stone-classic “Minnie’s 3rd Love.” Those two strips alone indicate the range of artistic and narrative ambition and interest in this autobio-anthology-within-an-anthology, and much of the time the juxtaposition is not flattering to the navel-gazers. Perhaps it’s trite, but I can’t help but feel that the true-storytellers dealing with genuine trauma and tragedy here–Gloeckner, Anders Nilsen, Debbie Dreschler, Joe Sacco–have a major leg up on the “here’s how my day went one day” folks, a passion that somehow gets reflected in superior visuals, be they the impeccable draftsmanship of Gloeckner and Sacco, the four-color expressionism of Dreschler, or the things-fall-apart experiments of Nilsen. (Not all the people dealing with really rough stuff come out winners, however: Maybe I’m just fed up with anti-science from Left, Right, and Unclassifiable, but Chester Brown’s anti-psychiatry tract “My Mother Was a Schizophrenic” always strikes me as a sad indulgence along the lines of Neal Adams’s hollow-earth theory, Dave Sim’s Marxist/Feminist/Homosexualist axis, and Steve Ditko’s A=A screeds.) This is not to say that all of the more quotidian strips in this section fail. I think Dave Kiersh’s paean to suburban Long Island, Jeffrey Brown’s account of losing his virginity, and John Porcellino’s tribute to his late dog are all sweet, memorably drawn, and actually moving, for example, while the vicious lampooning of her own mother in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s strip almost must be seen to be believed. It’s just that…well, the Joe Matt material sucked the life out of me, I suppose, and a lot of the stuff that surrounded it didn’t help.

But most of the sections are quite strong. A series of newspaper strips into Harvey Kurtzman strips into Art Spiegelman’s tribute to Kurtzman into Spiegelman’s pastiches of old newspaper strips into Jess’s example of same two decades earlier ends up being fairly revelatory for each of its constituent parts. There’s a beautiful, art-driven sequence of blocky, washy markmakers including David Mazzuchelli, Jerry Moriarty, Ben Katchor, and Frank Santoro’s Storeyville. A sequence of R. Crumb/Harvey Pekar strips about blues and jazz records and record collecting ends up feeling like a complex and at times uncomfortable suite about race, sex, class, art, and modernity. And the sequence of strips that ends the book–Seth, Adrian Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, David Heatley–ends the book on a high note. And a funny one. I wonder if the recent kerfuffle over Heatley’s comics too completely overlooked the fact that his neurotic cataloguing of awkward events is almost always geared toward very funny punchlines? And I suppose it had been a while since I read Ice Haven, but man, that is some hot shit. In just the “Mr. & Mrs. Ames: Detectives for Hire” strip alone, the savage misanthropy (“It’s just another shithole, filled with worthless pigs”) had me losing my balance on my chair from laughing so hard, only to be completely and devastatingly upended by the desperate and true expression of love (“I said, ‘This world would be absolutely unbearable without you.'”) I closed the book feeling thrilled to have read it. Somebody told me that Brunetti doesn’t plan on doing any more volumes in this series. I’ll confess to being pretty upset about that. I almost want to break into his house and hang out in front of his bookshelves until he walks me through a third.

(via)

Robert Burden in action.

* My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity is but one of a horde of nerdy critics whose positive reviews for the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace I’ve spotted today. This is noteworthy because buzz for the film up until a couple of days ago had been pretty lukewarm. Now I’m excited for it all over again.

* Related: I’ve Netflixed all the Bourne movies, to which Quantum is said to be rather deeply indebted, and may get to watch some or even all of them before I finally hit the theaters for 007. I’ll keep you posted. (Aren’t you excited?)

* Also related: Quantum director Marc Forster has signed on to direct the adaptation of Max Brooks’s excellent zombie mock-oral-history World War Z, with a screenplay by not-excellent comics and Changeling writer J. Michael Straczynski. (I dunno, Supreme Power was good, so fingers crossed I guess. ) So now I’m invested in the success of Quantum even more deeply. (Via AICN.)

* Look, a new, short trailer for The Spirit! Looks fine. (Via Rick Marshall.)

* Haha, the star of Twilight calls the books out for their egregious Mary Sueishness. This to me is a far more acceptable framework for taking potshots at the series and its imminent film incarnation than the horror-site bog-standard “eww girls.”

* One thing I did not expect to find today was an in-depth examination of the Hellraiser series by comics blogger Tim O’Neil. Part one is an encomium to the Hellraiser concept, part two contains reviews of every theatrically released installment, and part three deals with the “apocrypha”–aka straight-to-video sequels. Sample quote:

Considering that this film was made for a reported $1 million dollars, it’s easily one of the best-looking “low budget” horror films ever made. Considering the Faustian bargain that Barker reportedly made in order to have the film made his way – signing over future franchise rights to New Line and agreeing to a paltry budget in exchange for the chance to direct his own book – the fact that it looks as good as it does is something of a minor miracle. Especially if you consider the fact that Barker was himself a novice filmmaker, with just two experimental shorts under his belt as a director. It’s a shame, in a way, that he’s not temperamentally suited to working in the film industry, because if he had chosen to focus his energies he probably could have been a director for the ages. As it is, he’s probably a better writer, but still, the prose world’s gain is film’s loss. (And the first person to mention Lord of Illusions in the comments gets bopped on the head.)

It’s true. There are images and sequences in Hellraiser that are stunning given the inexperience of its director, and frankly I think Nightbreed, despite the evident studio interference, is a pretty remarkable film at times too.

* Kramers Ergot 7 tourdates! One of the drawbacks of the emergence of Brooklyn as a hipster mecca is that now many comics events I might go to were they held in Manhattan end up in the borough of Kings, a paradoxically closer yet less accessible location relative to where I’m usually at.

* I realized while reading Bruce Baugh’s latest, picture-filled look at what’s going on in World of Warcraft right now that these posts are filling the role of “the new TV series I’m following this season” for me. Best of all? No commercials! WARNING: ADORABLE WALRUS GUY AHEAD

* When I step back and take a look at my tastes–in comics, in music, in film, and in literature–the former two appear to be much broader than the latter two. Provided a first-glance look at the art doesn’t make me want to close the book and not look again, I’ll read virtually any comic, I’m rather voracious about it, I enjoy the experience of reading a lot by a lot of people, etc. With music I’m almost obnoxiously eclectic, and while I’m not necessarily a first-adopter when it comes to new artists (particularly compared with dedicated music bloggers) I do indeed enjoy an enormously wide range. In neither case is this an “eat your vegetables” deal–I truly like a lot of different stuff.

But when you look at my film-viewing habits over the past year or two or perhaps even longer, I’m basically only ever watching and talking about genre films from major studios. That’s due in part to the parameters of this blog during its all-horror incarnation, and to the fact that I really do love horror and a lot of other genre entertainments, and to the fact that tracking down genuine independent and art-house fair involves an expenditure of time and money, but I don’t feel the movie-review sidebar of my blog is actually representative of what I’m interested in overall. I’m a little more expansive in what I’ve been reading prose-wise, but only a little. Again, this is striking me as odd. There’s probably no reason why my movie-watching and book-reading habits shouldn’t be as wide-ranging and reliant on independent outlets as are my music-listening and comics-reading habits.

* In a few weeks I will have spent a year reviewing three comics a week every week without fail. I’m proud of this achievement and I’ve gotten a lot out of it. I still have a bunch of Comics Journal backlog to post and a pile of review copies I really want to get to, so it may stretch into the New Year as well. But one thing that’s really fallen by the wayside, particularly as the year has gone on, is my prose reading. (Actually that’s probably a good reason why the books I’ve read haven’t been all over the map–I haven’t read enough one way or the other.) I think it would be a lot of fun to be reading prose at the rate I’ve been reading comics lately, or at least close to it. I sometimes sit around and think of how much fun it’ll be to finally read The Master and Margarita, or the two or three Chuck Palahniuk books I haven’t gotten to yet, or Moby-Dick, or maybe taking a crack at those George R.R. Martin fantasy novels HBO is going to adapt, or diving into Robert E. Howard because I feel like my pulp pump has been duly primed, or Nixonland, or the Stephen King short story collections that aren’t Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, or Four Past Midnight, or or or or or. Nearly all of my dedicated reading time is taken up by comics, though. Maybe I’ll change that in the New Year, despite how much I’ve dug my thrice weekly Comics Time.

* Oddly, I don’t feel like my writing time has been impacted nearly as much, even though I’ve spent more time on the blog than ever before. I think that’s because my writing habits have always been weird and dependent on long periods of simmering and stewing and mulling culminating in several-hour bursts of creativity, rinse, repeat. That’s an easy schedule to fit into existing frameworks. Meanwhile, having Murder come out scratched a big part of that itch to Be A Comics Writer, obviously. And I have two separate “graphic novels” (in this case meaning “book-length collections of interrelated short stories) largely in the hands of their artists right now, plus a separate short story or two, so I don’t feel like I’ve been slacking.

* One thing you will not see me do, no matter how much I blog enthusiastically about it, is start playing World of Warcraft or any other video game, because that would so clearly be a disaster for me it’s almost comical. There goes the little time I’m not spending at my day job, doing freelance work, doing personal writing and reading, or doing blog writing and reading–poof, gone. No can do!

Hellboy: Darkness Calls

Mike Mignola, writer

Duncan Fegredo, Mike Mignola, artists

Dark Horse, 2008

200 pages

$19.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

I think B.P.R.D. is better than Hellboy at this point, whether or not Mike Mignola himself is drawing either one. With John Arcudi as co-writer and Guy Davis on art, B.P.R.D. has that mix of action, horror, sly black humor, and quietly but genuinely unnerving fatalism that has long characterized Hellboy at its best, with art that is totally different than Mignola’s yet in many ways equally accomplished and evocative. But now it’s more grounded in things you can grasp and understand than Mignola’s increasingly unfettered “main” series–there are still recognizable human concerns, likable characters, and dramatic stakes at play, rather than Hellboy punching his way through esoteric world mythologies inhabited by an increasingly prodigious cast of hard-to-discern faerie-demon-god-witch-ghost things. I also think that of all Mignola’s recent artistic collaborators, Duncan Fegredo is doing my least favorite work; that’s a pretty faint damnation since it’s still pretty good, but there’s something about the way he apes Mignola but throws in more lines and details that just doesn’t satisfy the way the work of Mignola himself or the not-at-all-imitative work of Guy Davis does.

All that being said, you know what? I reread this graphic novel the other night and had a grand time with it. In large part, I think that’s because reading it all between the same set of covers in one sitting enabled me to finally figure out what the hell is going on! Basically, Hellboy’s living in the estate of a very old friend of his mentor’s. He goes out for a stroll and happens across a trio of weirdos who turn out to be the anthropomorphized familiars of medieval witches slain by a witchfinder-general type. They resurrect their old mistresses, but the witchfinder guy still haunts the area and attacks. The familiars split. Witchfinder-zombie kills two of the witch-zombies, but the third snags Hellboy and brings him to a big meeting of all of England’s witches. They’re seeking a new ruler, since the witch-queen Hecate was previously vanquished by Hellboy and was since unsuccessfully resurrected by a half-man half-devil named Igor Bromhead who tried and failed to take her powers for his own. They ask Hellboy to be their king, and he says no. A servant of HB’s old enemy, the Russian mythological baddie Baba Yaga, offers to take HB off their hands by way of vengeance for his spurning their offer, so that Baba Yaga–another HB vanquishee–can get her own revenge on him. They say yeah sure, so HB finds himself in the dreamworld-Russia of Baba Yaga, who sics an army of skeletons and an immortal warrior named Koschei the Deathless on him. She promises to let Koschei die if he kills Hellboy–she has possession of his soul–but I guess it turns out that Hellboy can’t be killed in this dimension either. (Or maybe not at all?) While Baba Yaga does manage to kill Perun, the pagan Russian god of the earth, her and Koschei keep coming up empty against Hellboy himself. With the help of a spirit of the forest, a little house-elf type guy, and a creepy little girl who once used a gift from Baba Yaga to kill her abusive step-family, Hellboy keeps schooling Koschei, who keeps getting revived by Baba Yaga, but each time she does so she throws more and more of her own power into him. Finally she runs out of juice (even tossing old Rasputin’s soul into the mix), but in one last-ditch effort she gets Koschei to lob a knife into Hellboy’s back. This still doesn’t work, but it makes HB drop a magic piece of paper the creepy girl gave him, which turns into an ocean and allows him to swim back to the real world. There he dispatches that witchfinder-zombie from earlier on. That guy’s sword is inscribed with the name of Igor Bromhead, the half-man reptile dude who we saw swing and miss in his attempt to take Hecate’s powers as his own. Turns out he’s been slithering around Italy eating sheep and things ever since. Hellboy kills him but not before he can get out a prophecy about HB leading Hell’s army, which after all is HB’s whole reason for being around. This ties into something one of Baba Yaga’s undead Russian comrades told her earlier–that Hellboy wasn’t “ready” to give her an eye in exchange for the one he poked out of her years ago, but the implication being he might one day. Meanwhile, as all this is going on with Hellboy, a little pig-guy named Gruagach has pitched the witches on resurrecting a mysterious “HER” to use as their new queen now that Hecate is out of commission and Hellboy is a non-starter. He and some minions find this big giant who’s in charge of keeping this mystery lady’s pieces in a box in a deep dungeon and explain that the witches want the box. The giant gives it to him but then crawls into the dungeon himself since he wants no part of the bad stuff that will go down once whatsername gets loose. On their way back to the witches Gruagach and his pals come across Dagda, who I think is king of the faeries or something and who doesn’t want them to open the box. One of the minions kills him and then feels terrible about it and kills himself. Gruagach proclaims to assembled faeriedom that whoever’s inside the box will now be their queen as well. Then there’s a pair of epilogues: In the first, the BPRD gets their first letter from Hellboy in six years, just a quick note telling them where he’s hanging out now. They realize that the old friend he’s been staying with has been dead for 24 years or so. Uh oh! In the second epilogue, an old witch-hunter-type guy we’ve seen mentioned here and there named Edward Grey does a seance with Hecate to ask her life story, and she explains that she once upon a time helped ruin the proto-kingdom of Hyperborea by delivering unto them promethean knowledge of the workings of the universe that she stole from the fallen angels its ruler had penned up. (It’s kind of a Sauron/Numenor deal.) She makes it sound like it’s going to be Grey’s mission to stop Hellboy from unleashing the apocalypse (her included), which she says Hellboy will not survive regardless. The end!

Okay, I got a few things out of writing down that summary. First, now I think I finally understand what happened. Second, it becomes obvious that this story is waaaaay too convoluted, even for Hellboy. There’s upward of a dozen factions at work, each trying to do something that’s a little ambiguous and mysterious to begin with. Put it all together and it’s borderline incomprehensible–you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and unless you sit and bang one out like I just did, none is forthcoming. Third, the art really doesn’t help. Fegredo’s spin on Mignola is already a little too manic and cluttered–he admits in the sketchbook section reprinted in the back that he’s not really adept at spotting blacks, certainly not on the level Mignola is–and a lot of it hits your eyes and brain as a wall of noise. Meanwhile, a lot of the different characters are pretty hard to tell apart–I thought the pig guy was part of the cat/frog/bird crew, i thought piggy’s minions were Baba Yaga’s minions, I thought the faeries were the witches, and on and on and on. Add these problems to the already murky plot, and whoo doggie.

But I mentioned the fatalism of the Hellboy books earlier, and I think that’s what comes through the strongest here for me. The Hellboy-proper comics have flirted with incomprehensibility for quite some time, so that’s really no surprise; what is sort of surprising to me, given how ongoing genre titles usually work, is that Hellboy and the BPRD seem to be headed for an unhappy ending. When you think about it, ever since Hellboy left the BPRD and struck out on his own, the status quo for both halves of the equation has actually gotten worse with the close of each new adventure. This story all but says that Hellboy, our cute sardonic two-fisted hero, will indeed become the Beast of the Apocalypse he was born to be. That’s what I take away from Darkness Calls–that underneath the sea of crazy that flows from humanity’s collective unconscious, underneath the haze of mythology and Lovecraft that Mignola is increasingly untethered in, something terrible is happening. That’s a fine, black beating heart for powering a mythos.

(courtesy of Gardner Linn)

Hi-def version here.

Eh, a lot of slow motion and superhero/trailer cliches, and they call the “team” “The Watchmen” which is like if someone sat around thinking up the best example of a dumb thing Hollywood would do. As the trailer began to load I suddenly realized I’m pretty bored with this movie already. My friends Rickey and Sam point out, however, that this could be a pretty exciting trailer for people who haven’t read the book, haven’t seen the first trailer (although thanks to The Dark Knight that doesn’t describe too many people), haven’t seen the San Diego footage, haven’t seen the Scream Awards teaser, haven’t seen the promo posters, and on and on and on…

* My pal Rachel Molino takes a look at Rafael Grampa’s Mesmo Delivery for Wizard.

* Dig AdHouse honcho Chris Pitzer’s eBay auctions, man. Lotsa good, often OOP stuff for cheap.

* Kevin Eastman says that David Fincher, Zack Snyder, and Gore Verbinski will be directing segments in the new Heavy Metal movie, and I totally believe every word he’s saying, don’t you? (Via Splash Page.)

* Bruce Baugh explains why he thinks World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King events are working so well: It’s optional, it’s containable, it’s graspable, and it makes it worth your while.

* Speaking of which, I know I’m spending an awful lot of blog time on something I don’t participate in in any way, but I could not help but dig the hell out of the cinematic intro to the Lich King expansion pack:

One thing Bruce has discussed in his “WoW for N00BS” posts is that the game has a zesty sense of scale, embiggening stuff to make it more awesome. Good! One of the advantages of doing something as unrepentantly nerdy as designing World of Warcraft is that you don’t need to be ad hoc apologists for your material, making sure it’s as realistic as a historical epic or as rooted in readily graspable allegory as possible. If you want to show a giant Sauron guy in skull armor and furry boots break free of a throne encased in a glacier and unleash a gigantic zombie dragon thing in order to psyche up your undead army over music that launches every salvo in the generic-fantasy-score arsenal and narration that’s one vowel away from namechecking the Forest of Lornadoon like it’s straight outta Bored of the Rings, you can knock yourself completely out with it. You can commit.

* In the comment thread downblog, Bruce, Tom Spurgeon, and Strange Ink’s Sean B. offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the soon-to-be-seen-on-not-TV-but-HBO fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Bruce and Sean are mostly pro, Tom mostly con.

* ReFlogging part one: Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit!

* ReFlogging part two: deeply delightful Hulk sequence!

To the extent that things like World War Hulk work, it’s because that angry, savage Hulk can be seen as a reaction against the world failing to work like it does for him in stories like this. The Hulk is both the world as it is and the world as it should be. Batman is the same way, I think, only in his angry version he’s trying to beat the world back into making a sense it fails to make in his non-angry version rather than lashing out against the world when its pre-fallen splendor is interrupted for him. In other words, Batman’s innocence aspect is without hope, while the Hulk’s experience aspect is without hope, if that makes sense.

* Why would you mess with Manuel? (Via Whitney Matheson.)

Let’s watch as all-time A-#1 Sean T. Collins style icon Gary Numan shows us how it’s done:

Jesus jumped-up Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar, that is essentially the coolest thing that ever happened in human history. Daft Punk and Beck need to be sending regular royalty checks.

That footage is from 1979, I believe. A couple of years later, having decided that his set’s Metropolis light towers were insufficiently gigantic and extravagant and his own personal mien was insufficiently supervillainous, Gary decided to revamp his performance of this song as follows:

The sort of complete commitment, totality of vision, and lack of fear or self-deprecating irony required to perform a song about androids whilst seated in a mobile throne you’re piloting around the stage is impressive beyond words to me. Great tune, too.

This is our bedroom. I’m told it’s rather Twin Peaks-y, and I can see it in this picture, sure.

* Apparently the next, possibly Danny Boyle-directed 28 Units of Time Later movie will not be called 28 Months Later. Once upon a time there was an idea for a prequel that took place before the bulk of the events in 28 Days Later—28 Hours Later, perhaps–and maybe that’s what’s going on here. (Via STYD.)

* My pal Rob Bricken, editor of Topless Robot, gets the interview treatment from Poe Ghostal.

* So it looks like They’re making “>an HBO series out of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, to be called Game of Thrones after the first novel in the series. My reaction maps to Rob’s in virtually every particular, including the whole “never read ’em” angle and the “fantasy give the HBO drama treatment could be pretty spectacular” vibe.

* Curt Purcell takes a swing at a pair of frequently voiced memes among horror fans: “it’s scarier because it could really happen” and “what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see.” I will say that I’ve found myself having more intense reactions to horror films in which the “monster” is a human, but I think that has more to do with me being frightened by human cruelty than with plausibility; perfectly plausible “nature gone wild” movies wouldn’t have the same effect.

* Finally, rest in noise, Mitch Mitchell.

I think that one of the reasons I’m writing so much about my decision to stop watching the film Inside because the killer was gonna kill a cat is because on some level I’m ashamed of that decision. As I described in my follow-up post yesterday, cruelty to animals isn’t something I’m phobic of. It’s not something that triggers an on/off switch where I just can’t bear the sight or thought of it. It’s not Room 101 for me. (Although if that’s what was waiting for me in Room 101 I would not like it AT ALL…but nor would I like watching someone be sliced to ribbons either, and obviously I can handle that in films just fine.) I think that for me, cruelty to animals does exist on some kind of overall cruelty continuum. And to the extent that I believe horror is about cruelty–to the extent that cruelty is the aspect of horror I find so compelling–then I feel like on some level I’ve failed by refusing to watch it.

Now, failed as what? A viewer, a critic, a genre buff, an artist, a student of the human condition, a blogger, a film lover, a former film student? I’m not sure I know. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that concern was going on internally, to the point where I immediately felt bad about sending the movie back to Netflix and will likely put it back on my queue and try it again soon. Maybe I’ll try to watch it during a time of day that’s less conducive to an immersive horror-movie experience–a day-lit lunchbreak instead of at night with the lights turned down alone in the house.

Keep in mind that this isn’t the only time I’ve been really upset by something only to want to try and “best it” with a rematch. Perhaps you recall that horrifying Coney Island ride I went on, the Topspinner? I guarantee you I go on one of those again to prove to myself that I didn’t need to be so scared the first time around.

Also keep in mind I’m talking about make-believe animal cruelty, not actual animal cruelty done for the purposes of entertainment a la Cannibal Holocaust. Fuck that with something hard and sandpapery.

Superman #677-680

James Robinson, writer

Renato Guedes, artist

DC Comics, 2008

32 pages each

$2.99 each

James Robinson’s still-young run on Superman, of which these issues comprise the opening arc, is an odd duck among my superhero-reading friends. As far as this group is concerned in today’s superhero-publishing climate, there’s usually a pretty clear consensus as to which titles are good and which ones aren’t. Allowing for outliers in terms of people who really like Jason Aaron or just can’t get into Grant Morrison or something like that, a real schism is rare. Superman has provoked just such a schism.

If you ask me to judge based on this storyline–okay, extended fight scene in the shape of a storyline–it’s pretty good! I can understand how some of the things Robinson is doing could throw some people. For instance, he’s writing this weirdo staccato dialogue, particularly in the first-issue conversations between Superman and Green Lantern and the various members of the Science Crimes Unit. It’s strange sub-Bendis pseudo-Mamet-noir stuff that neither sounds like how people actually talk nor makes up for that with sufficient style; you’d expect it out of a real newcomer, not a storied veteran of high-end superhero comics like Robinson.

But those hiccups sort of dwindle away after a while, and you’re left to focus on the things that work. Provided you’re like me and your ideal Superman comic is like if primary colors could punch each other, there’s plenty. I’ve been a fan of Renato Guedes’ open, strangely delicate linework and character designs back when he co-drew Geoff Johns and Kurt Busiek’s memorable “One Year Later” (remember that?) Superman/Action Comics arc Up, Up, and Away!–still one of the two or three best Superman stories I’ve ever read–and he’s in fine form here. His characters are warm and believable, yet he also cartoons, particularly in several fine combat sequences. Hi-Fi’s colors give the musclebound proceedings a purple-pink hue that suggests both vulnerability and tumescence, which is what I for one want out of my superhero slobberknockers.

Meanwhile, the whole idea of the story–big huge dude shows up, should be a standard “Superman vs. brick” battle that Superman wins handily, but it turns out he’s getting his ass handed to him and him and his friends have to figure out why before he gets killed–is a clever twist on the usual “Superman vs. villain of the month” stuff that I always thought was the lamest aspect of the modern-era version of the character, given that, y’know, he’s Superman and it’s tough to convince us he’s in danger very often. (Kudos on that score have to go to Johns, who’s been reliably tuning up Superman’s classic rogues gallery for quite a while now.)

Superman’s main antagonist in this story is the forgotten Jack Kirby creation Atlas. Naturally I’m in favor of bringing back any and all ’70s Kirby characters to the forefront of the line, especially in a way that sort of captures how powerfully written and drawn they all were by instantly making them major threats. That’s what Robinson and Guedes do here, including a shattered-memory origin sequence drawn in Kirby’s style; trying to figure out how Atlas went from heroic but rageful Kirby barbarian to single-minded heel turns out to be key to the story. If, like me, you had no idea who this Atlas guy was before seeing him here–I just thought he was an attempt to take the Atlas character from Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman and make him canon–you’ll enjoy him just fine anyway.

All things considered, I’m suddenly a lot more excited to see Robinson trade eights with Johns during the just-launched New Krypton Super-event. I’m really rather pleased with several of DC’s core properties at the moment, in fact; it’s just nice to see someone whose initials aren’t GJ or GM contributing.

* I know what I just said about cat-killing, and I know that a movie about a lady getting trapped in a house with a man-eating tiger can only end one of two ways, but still, Burning Bright is so crazy it just might work.

Someone’s been reading Stephen King’s “Here There Be Tygers,” huh?

* Lotta list-making and list-mulling going on in the horror blogosphere lately, inspired by B-Sol’s reprint of HMV’s top 50 horror films list. B-Sol’s in the process of compiling a list out of weighted submissions from all of us Tana Tea-swilling elitists. CRwM goes Nate Silver on the very idea of list-making drawn from polls. Curt Purcell hasn’t seen a lot of the “classics” you’d think he would have, including such films of bona fide groovy-age provenance as The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Masscare, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, etc etc. Stacie Ponder posts her personal top 10. FWIW I submitted my own Top 10 to B-Sol, and if he posts it I’ll link to it, but paring down the amorphous mass of my favorites to a ranked list of 10 was a pretty arbitrary process once you got past the first handful.

* My ongoing quest to reblog pretty much everything Bruce Baugh writes about World of Warcraft continues: First up, Bruce tells the story of another one of those in-game memorials for a player who died in the real world, in this case an 11 year old boy. But unlike that classic funeral raid, this one’s not blackly comic so much as out and out adorable–897 players decided to create minotaur-type characters who would run from the Tauren capital en masse in an attempt to sack the Alliance capital Stormwind in the kid’s honor. They crashed the server, but the idea, and the images captured before the thing went kablooey, is just as ridiculous and delightful as you’d expect.

* Next up, Bruce gives us a you-are-there view of the invasion of the Alliance and Horde capitals by the Lich King’s zombie dragon things. It’s fun to watch a game build a sense of anticipation for some upcoming super-duper-event via smaller but still holy-cow events like this. Somehow it feels less cynical than when comics do it.

In the comment thread for my post about Inside, Bruce Baugh writes:

I’ve thought for a while that the distance metaphors like “too far” don’t really serve. In my head there’s a taxonomy that builds on the image of pushes and shocks emerging from the zero point that is the movie, heading out in all directions. Things that could be measured, notionally, include the direction of the push, its speed, and its relentlessness – the difference between a single bottle being lobbed in the direction of someone’s head and a bulldozer blade crushing everything that might resist it.

Each of us in the audience rests behind a set of barriers that surrounds the movie point. In some places are barriers are close up to the point and flimsy, so that not much gets through – like you, I’m that way with cruelty to animals, and also with certain specific kinds of head and face deformities. (Which is why one part of the excellent Vanilla Sky was so grueling for me, and why I just can’t go see The Dark Knight at all.) In other places, our barriers are far back and well supported, so that we aren’t overwhelmed even by a lot of whatever it is.

I think Bruce is probably right about the utility of “too far.” It’s tough to argue that killing a cat is “further” than, I dunno, hanging a girl on a meathook while you dismember her boyfriend with a chainsaw, just to name the first example that comes to mind. (Although I’d imagine the cat was dispatched in a far more visually explicit fashion than either of those unfortunates from Texas Chain Saw ultimately were.)

Regarding Bruce’s notion of different barriers for different things, I’ve thought about that before in terms of phobic reactions, which to me are very different things than one’s usual gradated responses to various scary or disturbing or unpleasant things in horror movies. For example, my wife is emetophobic, so vomiting, gagging, dry-heaving, and certain kinds of throat-trauma, choking, or coughing just plain hit the panic switch in her brain. It’s not a question of the imagery being one level too extreme or too frightening for her to take, being just powerful enough to break through a given barrier–there is no barrier.

I am the same way, not quite as bad but getting worse even as she gets better with her phobia, about skin growths and growth-like structures, and to the extent that their bodies and multiplicity can evoke growths, bugs. Again, it’s not like there’s a level at which I can handle it that can be surpassed–I go from zero to curling up and shaking in a second. If it hits that anti-sweet spot for me, panic! Based on what Bruce is saying, I think that’s what’s going on for him with facial deformities, though I could be wrong.

On the other hand, I think there’s something different about animal cruelty, which you and I and my wife are all very sensitive about. My wife also has a real problem with people soiling themselves with fear. I’ve thought about this hard and I’m pretty sure that there’s something different going on here than there is with my phobia. It feels more thoughtful, more considered, more fleshed out a reaction to the stimulus than the reflex response of a phobia, you know? Like I said, I really do think there are contexts in which I’d be able to accept animal cruelty in film, because it’s happened with me before, though I would always find it very, very troubling. But there’s no context in which I’d be able to handle my phobia–if it’s triggered, it’s triggered. That to me says that there’s something different at play, even if my reaction when the animal-cruelty barrier is violated can be just as extreme and binary.

* Wolf Man and Rocketeer director Joe Johnston will apparently be handling the obnoxiously titled First Avenger: Captain America for Marvel Studios. I am filled with lack of feelings about this, although I will say that I remember his Jumanji being pretty effective in a “My First Movie About Uncontrollable Hordes of Hungry Things Trying to Eat People” sort of way.

* This strikes me as being pretty weak tea to actually be worth reporting, but for now at least, Danny Boyle himself may direct the sequel to 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. I have a bad feeling that this will set up a reductive and unhelpful “skip the second movie” sentiment somewhere down the line, but still, it’d be neat.

* I’m not going to read Jog’s review of The ACME Novelty Library #19 until I read the book itself, but for now I want to note that I like the Jog-suggested idea of being “that guy in the comics blogosphere who really loves animals.”

* Tim O’Shea interviews Frank Santoro of the mighty mighty Comics Comics and the anxiously awaited completion of Cold Heat. Tim also reveals that there’s a Cold Heat blog/webcomic on the horizon. Memo to my friend Josiah: help me out with this bit?

Comics, how they are composed, is like an architecture, right? Well, I’ve become obsessed with the structure of comics of how one reads comics and how comics spreads are composed. I’ve also come under the spell of Pythagorean Theory and how it applies to image making and Architecture. That all might sound really pretentious but it’s really the most un-pretentious approach to creating images ever. Basically, it’s all the perspective tricks that we all learned in 6th grade art class but way more complex than three point perspective. Pythagorean Theory and The Golden Section are the building blocks of Renaissance perspective. In oil painting all of these compositional techniques have been used for centuries. There are “harmonic points” on a canvas that can be used like one would use harmony in music. These points can be measured. In comics, these ideas are often used WITHIN the borders of each panel but the overall design of the page is often muddy and bottlenecked and this undercuts the power of the image inside the panel borders. The whole structure of the spread should be “in key” with the images. And, for the page or the whole two page spread (all comics are read as two page spreads when they are in a book) to “sing”, to really be clear, the structure has to be “open”, and have a symmetry that is dynamic as opposed to static. Again, it’s like Fractals. I’m writing a book on it for Picturebox. People go nuts, in a good way, when I show them how simple it is to do. It’s like comics are just figuring out certain approaches that Painting and Architecture have understood for centuries. It’s fun stuff, and I wished someone would have hepped me to it years ago. But, honestly, people just look right past it. Who needs to learn perspective when a digital camera and a illustrator program will do it all for you?

HALP!

* Monster mash: Stacie Ponder reviews The Mist and CRwM reviews The Cave.

* Why does Zack Snyder hate gigantic telepathic exploding squids?

How far is too far? At what point does a horror movie cease to be entertainingly disturbing and become just plain unpleasant and unenjoyable? I wondered this going into Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury’s Inside/À l’Intérieur, given that what little I knew about it was that it was a movie about some nut or nuts menacing a pregnant woman. The bloody scissors on the DVD itself, moreover, indicated it would be a movie about someone’s attempt to cut the baby out of the pregnant woman’s stomach. This is all, needless to say, rather difficult material to “enjoy,” but you know me, I’ve probably seen worse. Did I mention we had a miscarriage a couple months ago? God help me I actually thought I’d enjoy the movie more because of that. It’s a trauma I’m close to, and I come to horror for the trauma.

Anyway, given the air of menace that surrounded the very idea of the film for me–reminiscent of Hostel in that regard–I knew I’d be in for a rough evening, but like I said, that’s what I’m here for. And early on the movie didn’t disappoint. I mean, hey, it starts with a fetuscam view of a fatal car accident in which the pregnant star’s husband is killed. Then there’s some obligatory business at the hospital and with her mother and her editor (she’s a photojournalist) to show that she’s lost the lust for life. Then she goes home and someone starts menacing her, sure enough. There are the expected homages as one would find in pretty much any indie-ish horror movie these days–Aliens, Hellraiser, The Descent, Halloween. There’s the expected business with threatening the pregnant woman’s belly with sharp objects. It’s all pretty tense and engaging. Then it gets a little silly when some unexpected guests arrive, and things go down in sort of the most pat and/or over-the-top ways possible, but hey, lots of horror movies have missteps here and there. The gore is unflinching and, for the most part, not splattery but genuinely brutal; the score is creative and impressive, clearly building on John Carpenter but doing its own unexpected things with some frequency. Like all great kill-or-be-killed thrillers it seeds little clues here and there as to what will happen later in the film, and keeps you guessing as to which guns on the mantel will go off and which won’t. It makes you wonder what the killer’s connection to our heroine is and why she’s so nuts, and whether her vague ethnicity has something to do with the banlieu riots constantly being referenced by the news reports and the editor character or whether that’s just a headfake. In other words, it’s disturbing but in a good way.

Then the killer grabs the heroine’s cat.

Sorry, folks, that’s all she wrote for me! I’m not trying to make any kind of grand sweeping political statement about what’s okay to show in movies and what’s not. In the past I’ve enjoyed a decent number of movies in which pretty rotten things happen to animals–usually at the hands/paws/claws/teeth of other animals/dinosaurs/xenomorphs/whatever, but certainly not always, right, Christofuh and Cosette?–and I expect it can and will happen again. But no, no thanks, not for me, not in this movie, not when the point of the movie truly is to be maximally brutal and unpleasant about everything it touches. I mean, on one level it just reduces everything to a kind of bloody white noise, like an attempt to push every button and it all cancels each other out–you could object to it that way. On another level it seems like a bit of a gimmick, like “hey, this lady’s really awful, look, she’ll kill an innocent cat, what a psycho, look out for your unborn baby there, heroine!”, like cheesy. On still another level it was predictable in that gun-on-the-mantel way–I swear to god, the second the pregnant lady opened the door to her house and the little black cat meowed a greeting to her I said to myself “Oh Christ, they better not hurt the goddamn cat.”

You can object on all those levels. Maybe I object to it on all those levels! But really the only level I object to it on that matters is that I just don’t enjoy watching movies about people killing cats. Maybe, maybe if I felt like the movie was up to more than just trying to be really scary and brutal, maybe. I think there are horror movies that have Something To Say, and not just in the American Nightmare/George A. Romero way, I mean something to say about life, something to say about the real horror of life, the horror that strikes you at 1 in the morning or 1 in the afternoon and you look at the world and you imagine your life stretching in front of you like a gray ribbon into the future and all around you and all in front of you are death death death, that horror, I think there are horror movies that have Something To Say about that. And to those movies, I say, if you wanna kill a cat, I’m probably okay with it. I think Inside is a movie about how scary it is when psychos chase pregnant ladies with scissors, and I don’t want to watch them kill the cat. I turned it off without finishing it, without letting them finish, and I’m gonna send it back to Netflix and in my head, the cat’s still alive, Schrödinger be damned, the cat’s still alive.

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories

Ivan Brunetti, editor

Robert Armstrong, Peter Bagge, Lynda Barry, Gabrielle Bell, Marc Bell, Jonathan Bennett, Mark Beyer, Mat Brinkman, Chester Brown, Jeffrey Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, David Collier, Robert Crumb, Henry Darger, Gene Deitch, Kim Deitch, Julie Doucet, Michael Dougan, Debbie Dreschler, Lyonel Feininger, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, John Hankiewicz, Sammy Harkham, Rory Hayes, David Heatley, Sam Henderson, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Walt Holcombe, Kevin Huizenga, Crockett Johnson, J. Bradley Johnson, Ben Katchor, (pause for breath), Kaz, Frank King, James Kochalka, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman, Jason Lutes, Frans Masereel, Joe Matt, David Mazzuchelli, Richard McGuire, Tony Millionaire, Jerry Moriarty, Mark Newgarden, Onsmith, Gary Panter, Harvey Pekar, John Porcellino, Archer Prewitt, Daniel Raeburn, Ron Regé Jr., Joan Reidy, Joe Sacco, Richard Sala, Charles M. Schulz, Seth, R. Sikoryak, Otto Soglow, Art Spiegelman, Cliff Sterrett, James Sturm, Adrian Tomine, Carol Tyler, Chris Ware, Lauren R. Weinstein, Wayne White, Karl Wirsum, Jim Woodring, Terry Zwigoff, writers/artists

Yale University Press, 2006

400 pages

Price

Buy it from Yale University Press

Buy it from Amazon.com

I have to admit I’m a little tempted just to let the contributor list for this anthology serve as my review. I mean, look at that thing! And indeed I think I’d be somewhat justified in doing so. If the purpose of this anthology is to demonstrate the depth and breadth of style and effect possible in the comics medium as evinced by its best practitioners, well, the defense rests, you know? Provided your non-comics-reading buddy is a short-story guy rather than someone who needs a big long self-contained tale for their fiction fix, this book is an A-#1 Christmas gift.

But the strengths of this first volume in what I sincerely hope will be a long series of Ivan Brunetti-edited comics anthologies published by my alma mater go beyond the names in the table of contents. (Where they aren’t listed at all, now that I think of it–Onsmith provides an illustrated TOC featuring drawings of the main characters in each story or strip.) As a curator, Brunetti knows not just who to include, but nine times out of ten what to include from them. Therefore, your Jaime Hernandez story is his masterpiece, “Flies on the Ceiling.” Your Ron Regé Jr. contribution is drawn from his little seen, much loved, then-uncollected collection of haiku-like sex comics with Joan Reidy, Boys. Your Dan Clowes story is motherfucking “Gynecology.” Mark Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury.” Phoebe Gloeckner’s “Fun Things to Do with Little Girls.” Richard McGuire’s “Here,” an ass-kicker if ever there was one. Kevin Huizenga’s “A Sunset” (albeit just an excerpt, which sort of dilutes the power of what to me is the comic of the decade, but still!). The sense I get is of Brunetti in front of his bookcases, selecting what should go into the anthology based on which sections of which comics are the most dogeared, read and re-read, loaned out and repurchased. It’s like when your friends come over and you go “oh man, you’ve gotta read this one!”

But it’s not just a collection of shorts that run one into the next haphazardly–it’s like the really well-made mixtape of comics anthologies. I was intrigued to read in Brunetti’s introduction that he ordered the comics roughly by length, starting off with mostly gag-driven one-pagers and ending with long stories and excerpts. That’s a smart and engaging structure in that the books trains you to read it as you go along, starting simple and gradually growing more demanding. Within those overall parameters Brunetti frequently arranges his selections in noticeable sub-sections, determined either by subject matter or artistic style: there’s a crosshatcher’s club with Robert Crumb, Joe Sacco, and David Collier; a childhood trauma section with Justin Green, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Debbie Dreschler; the Three Amigos of Canadian Comics, Joe Matt, Chester Brown, and Seth; an outsider-influenced section kicking off with Henry Darger and Rory Hayes and continuing through Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Mark Beyer, and Mat Brinkman; a Jewish ghetto of Julius Knipl, Maus, Berlin, and The Golem’s Mighty Swing; and whether this is intentional or not, closing with Chris Ware and Dan Clowes seemed a deliberate crowning of those two artists as the giants of the modern era of comics, which I personally have always thought them to be. If I’m making this sound easy or rote, I don’t mean to at all, by the way. Discovering what section you’ve just read your way into is a lot of fun, a big part of the pleasure of the collection.

Now, to draw pleasure from the collection in the first place, it probably goes without saying that you must be capable of drawing pleasure from astute depictions of misery. I’m sure there are broadsides against this book out there from people who want a little less dreary awfulness in their funnybooks than you’re going to get from the contributors listed above. I think this complaint has some justification. The near-total lack of genre material of any kind, save only the horror-tinged monster-y comics of Jim Woodring, Mat Brinkman, Rory Hayes, and Charles Burns, offers a somewhat lopsided frame through which to view what people do with comics, narratively and emotionally. You’re basically dealing with sadness and black comedy, with the occasional gross-out gag and “gosh weren’t things beautiful in the olden times” nostalgia to leaven it a little. Of course, nostalgia and misery go hand-in-hand for many of these comics, particularly for the memoirists–between Seth, Crumb, Joe Matt, and several tributes to Peanuts, you will probably get tired of cartoonists complaining about how ugly and awful their lives are compared to their old clothes/houses/comics/records/etc. General self-pity is a running theme, too, and while the occasional cartoonist manages to convey it in a novel fashion–Ware’s flat-affect trip down memory lane, incongruously set to a mocked-up Golden Age superhero comic–there’s no way to get around the fact that you’re gonna see a lot of funny lookin’ dudes in glasses kvetching about themselves with a lot of exclamation points. I’ve never minded that tendency in the overall altcomix gestalt all that much, but when you put a lot of it between two covers, it gets harder to ignore and sometimes harder to take. And even when the nostalgic elements are presented as-is, those presentational choices can be a bit cloying. Most of the old-time newspaper strips we see, for example, are reproduced Chip Kidd-style as photos of the original pages rather than, you know, just taking the comics themselves and putting them on the page. Presenting old comics as fetish objects dulls their impact, whatever else doing so may have going for it–“Here’s a Chris Ware strip, here’s a Charles Burns strip, and here’s something I found in my grandpa’s attic.” Similar moves done to emphasize the unique publishing circumstances of more recent projects–throwing a photo of a Jonathan Bennett minicomic in front of the actual strip contained therein, reproducing Jeffrey Brown stuff by photocopying them straight from the tiny diary-like books he originally draws them in–are sort of haphazardly done and to minimal understandable effect.

But none of that really takes much away from the impact of the collection, for all of the above reasons and one more: Is there something to be gained from having so much work from so many different artists all in one place, even when many or even most of them already grace your bookshelves? Sure, and it’s gained through juxtaposition. I found myself noticing all kinds of things about work I already knew pretty well–Joe Sacco’s art runs full-bleed. R. Crumb’s “trademark” style shifts far more radically than I’d ever noticed. You really can see Hayes in Kominsky and Beyer. In all honesty I feel like I got as much out of this book as any newbie might. That’s the mark of a great anthology.