Somewhere in Heaven, J.R.R. Tolkien talks to James Brown about what it’s like for everyone in a given field to owe absolutely everything to you.

* Jane Espenson talks to SciFi Wire about her script for the upcoming Battlestar Galactica TV movie The Plan. As SciFi Wire puts it:

Jane Espenson, who wrote the upcoming movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, said that the telefilm will retell the initial story of the SCI FI Channel series, but from the perspective of the Cylons, and that it will take advantage of revelations that will come in the upcoming new episodes of the show’s fourth and final season.

But you should read the whole thing because it’s interesting to hear her talk about the process, which heavily involved director and star Edward James Olmos.

* Clive Thompson offers the best explanation I’ve yet seen about the use of torture in World of Warcraft, and suggests how it could have been done better. Because I’m thick, I’m only now grokking that torture was mandatory across all character types, not just the “evil” ones. That seems pretty dopey to me. Regardless of its provenance in fantasy literature–Gandalf and Aragorn at the very least credibly threatened to torture Gollum for information–I think most of us look at torture in fiction differently than we might have decades ago. (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* I loved Tom Spurgeon’s review of Mesmo Delivery because it’s like a much more cogent and pleasantly written version of exactly what I said about Mesmo Delivery.

* Here’s a great photoparade from the Kramers Ergot 7 signing at Desert Island in Brooklyn. I actually did the responsible thing and canceled my pre-order in hopes that someone would get it for me for Christmas. Fingers crossed! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Brian Eno and Peter Jackson: two great tastes that taste great together. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Worn Free specializes in reproducing T-shirts worn by rock stars. I didn’t see anything that said “must buy!” to me, but I’d imagine some people reading this blog wouldn’t mind grabbing that Lester Bangs “FREEDOM OR DEATH” shirt.

* I remember reading textbooks that said “nobody knows why the dinosaurs died out.” Since then we’re now on our second prevailing theory: Looks like the asteroid idea is being phased out in favor of massive volcanic eruptions in India. Meanwhile, scientists in the Sahara have found the remnants of a prehistoric river chock full of fossils, including those of a 60-foot crocodile. Six-year-old “I Want to Be a Paleontologist When I Grow Up” Sean T. Collins is tickled pink by all of this. (Via HuffPo.)

* Here’s an insane CBS News story about a cult called SIST from a small town in Wisconsin and how they allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill 60 people in the town, including pretty much the entire local government. It sounds a little like the “hitman,” who was actually just a motorsports salesman who says he played along with the group for a while in order to recoup $100K they owed him, sort of entrapped them into the scheme. But even so, the group appears to be really nuts and the mayor has installed bulletproof glass on her door and the group’s lawyer wears a fedora and calls CBS a communist organization…it’s fantastic.

* Not to be confused with the star of Crank, Jason Stratham of The Cold Inclusive specializes in extremely detailed and bizarre accounts of fictional sexual encounters with celebrities. “The Very Last Fucking of Steven Tyler” has a dystopian science-fiction feel to it, for example, while “Everyone Says I Love You” contains the following passage:

So. You’re on top of [Drew Barrymore], “giving her one,” as they say in post-war British literature, and she stares right up at you and says “You like that? You like fucking People magazine’s most beautiful person?”

How to respond to a question like that?

After a yearlong hiatus, he’s returned with a little something entitled “Christmas in L.A. with Julia Roberts.”

Afterwards, lying on the bed, both catching your breath, Julia says “Whew! And…scene!” and laughs. That unashamed, open-mouthed laugh she has.

I wish I’d thought of this.

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar, writer

Kevin Brown, Gregory Budgett, Sean Carroll, Sue Cavey, R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Val Mayerik, Gerry Shamray, artists

Ballantine Books, August 2003

320 pages

$15.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

I find myself a bit stymied in trying to figure out how to kick off this review, since this material has already been digested and processed by so many people. I guess I’ll go with talking about R. Crumb’s art here. Obviously it’s the strongest of Pekar’s collaborators–I know, shocker, right? Indeed I’m a little surprised he could persuade other artists to take a crack at it. Befriending the foundational artist of alternative comics back before he was famous, becoming inspired to do comics in the first place because of that friendship, and then finagling a series of collaborations out of him–that’s the most auspicious comics career kick-off this side of Marc Silvestri and Michael Turner getting paying work out of their first ever comic-con visits. But while it’s easy to see that Crumb’s technique is superior to the other cartoony guys in the book, and that his more impressionistic approach is somehow more visually stimulating and rewarding than the photorealists, I liked his character designs the best. Crumb draws Harvey and his friends and coworkers like tiny little guys out of a fairy-tale world, only with collared shirts. Pekar is a slightly hunched-over, wild-eyed ogre or hermit, his pal Mr. Boats is a roly-poly sage or scribe of some kind–that kind of thing. No? But the caricatures lose none of the nuance needed to convey Pekar’s little insights and pet peeves regarding the workaday modern world. There’s a beautifully accurate bit of body language at one point where Crumb is listening to his visiting friend while leaning against a file cabinet, and the sneer shared by those two women in that strip where the guy tries to sell them okra cracked me up.

I suppose it’s details like that that I enjoyed the most, not just in the art, but in the writing. Pekar’s penchant for describing his life’s most mundane details in what you’d imagine to be a voice just a few decibels louder than comfortable conversational level is what provides these stories with the energy they need to keep from being soul-crushingly dull, but that energy doesn’t overwhelm his capacity for keen observations. For instance, there’s this passage from a strip about how Harvey’s failed second marriage actually taught him that he could, in fact, be happy given the right circumstances:

Yeah, I got what I thought I needed and it turned out it really was what I needed. What a wonderful feeling! It’s like, y’know, when you’re not used to building stuff, like you’re not mechanically inclined, and you put something together from instructions in a book and you think you’ve done it right, but still you have no confidence. So then you turn it on and it works. Boy, what a rush!

Folks, you should have seen how thrilled I was when I managed to properly install my TiVo on the very first try! I knew exactly what Pekar meant, and that thrill of recognition was another LOL moment for me.

I think that’s what I take away from this collection: It’s kinda cute! Pekar’s an irascible guy, obviously, with no shortage of qualities that might make him tough to take in real life, but there’s something about his extravagantly straight-faced presentation of himself that’s comical and adorable. Yeah, a lot of the art is stiff or unprofessional, and yeah, a lot of the stories end like one of Brak’s Tales of Suspense, but when faced with life’s vicissitudes, a storytelling approach that acknowledges how they can weigh on you but still makes them look slightly ridiculous strikes me as being a pretty healthy one.

* Happy birthday to the great Tom Spurgeon! (Via Peggy Burns.)

* My media discovery of the month: Mashed in Plastic: The David Lynch Mash-Up Album. It’s a seamlessly flowing collection of 18 mash-ups that draw from the soundtracks of David Lynch films and Twin Peaks, linked together and sprinkled throughout with astutely mixed audio clips from the movies. Before you say to yourself “That sounds kind of cheesy,” I simply advise you to take the couple minutes necessary to download the record and listen to either “The Voice of Love Is Crying” or “I’ll Be There in Twin Peaks”; if you are a David Lynch fan and you don’t get chills, I’ll eat my weight in garmonbozia. Production credits and videos are at the link as well. Be warned, though, that you might stand to see something spoilery if you’re not up to speed with all his movies. Twin Peaks virgins especially should proceed with caution. (Via Jason “Shaggy” Erwin.)

* Speaking of which: Fire Walk with Desaad. Thanks again, Rickey Purdin.

* I always wondered who all these people who supposedly fainted after hearing Chuck Palahniuk read the story “Guts” from his horror novel/anthology hybrid Haunted were. As it turns out, they’re a lot like FourFour’s Rich Juzwiak. Wow. It’s worth a read not just because it’s funny that the guy you’ve come to know and love through his cat videos or R&B reviews or ANTM recaps is part of a cult phenomenon, but because he also speaks to that same sense of “failure” as a fan of the extreme that I felt when I switched off Inside.

* Tor.com’s Douglas Cohen finishes off a series of posts on Robert E. Howard’s fab four sword’n’sorcery heroes with one on Bran Mak Morn.

* Stacie Ponder pays “a small tribute to that 80s horror trend where chicks wore sports jerseys as pajamas.” Jo Beth Willicious.

* Finally, John Cei Douglas sends Christmas greetings from Deadwood. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

(via)

* Here are six clips from the already much-maligned The Spirit, directed by Frank Miller. It looks pretty and fun to me. A lot of my friends are freaking the fuck out over this movie, but look, they can’t all be There Will Be Blood, and superhero movies could use a Road House/Speed Racer/Sin City hybrid. Hell, any genre of movies could use that. (Via AICN.)

* The Fantagraphics blog coughs up some deets on Fanta’s upcoming Hans Rickheit graphic novel. It’s called The Squirrel Machine and is slated for release in 2010. I’m a fairly outspoken Rickheit activist so this is really delightful to me.

* Kenneth Branagh is directing Thor. How about that, man. This brings the total number of superhero movie directors who have had sex with Helena Bonham-Carter to two. As far as we know.

* Lost Season Five will air uninterrupted, with the possible exception of a clipshow-augmented skip week prior to the finale. Nice. (via The Tail Section.)

* They’re remaking The Crow, They in this case being Stephen Norrington, the guy who did The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Blade. I would be lying if I said High School Sean T. Collins never dressed up like the Crow for Halloween then ended up not even going out, instead lurking around his parent’s house in pancake makeup and a black leather trenchcoat, so this news concerns that part of me. The graphic novel was actually rather good I always thought. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Marc-Oliver Frisch describes his requirements for how a superhero story would constitute good Art, and then runs down some prominent writers in terms of whether they make the grade. It’s good reading even if he uses the dreaded “transcend the genre” criterion–worth a read, particularly if you’re looking to better understand the kinds of folks who are smart, demanding readers but still stick primarily with superheroes for one reason or another.

* Speaking of whom, my pal Ben Morse, an indie comics tyro, gives Kazimir Strzepek’s world-building exercise The Mourning Star a go.

* Check out some panels from Dave Kiersh’s upcoming Xeric Grant-funded book.

* Thanks to Rich Johnston for correcting the record on a story he ran once about being banned from Wizard’s message board when I ran it. (He wasn’t.)

* Missed linking to this when it was initially reported, but the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report on America’s use of torture and abuse of prisoners has found Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials responsible.

* Finally, here’s a great description of Sid Vicious, from Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Evan Kindley in his review of Sid & Nancy:

here we have kind of a black hole at the center of all the frippery: Sid Vicious, whose very claim to fame was his nullity, his embodiment of the concept of “no future.”

Final Crisis is Twin Peaks with superheroes.

Slap Darkseid’s mug on this wanted poster and you’ve basically got it.

UPDATE:

THANK YOU RICKEY PURDIN

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!

Fletcher Hanks, writer/artist

Paul Karasik, editor, afterword writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2007

124 pages

$19.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Okay, so obviously the thing that strikes you initially is that these stories are completely insane. They treat the basic structure of superhero comics–“villain commits crime, hero captures villain,” as Karasik’s mother puts it in the afterword–like the bare necessities for a spirited game of Calvinball–all you need is Calvin, Hobbes, and a ball, and the rest is up to your imagination. And Fletcher Hanks’s imagination was twisted beyond description. It’s not just that the demises his godlike heroes Stardust and Fantomah cook up for their villainous prey are brutal, it’s that they’re needlessly baroque. So Stardust doesn’t just feed a racketeer to a giant golden octopus–He wraps up the bad guy in his giant flexible hand, whisks him away to a desert island that he first overwhelms with a tidal wave, then lifts up into the air, drops the guy onto, flips over, and puts back down, after which the guy is flushed through an underground lagoon onto the shore, and then and only then does the golden octopus eat him. Similarly, Fantomah doesn’t just toss a ring of diamond thieves to a pit of cobras–she whisks them away to the jungle pit of death, where she fuses them into one person, who is terrified by the creatures of an unfound world, flees up a mountain only to find a dead end, gets scared off the cliff by a giant floating paw, and gets caught by a whirlwind that blows him into a cave filled with giant albino cobras who kill him, after which Fantomah floats his body out into midair, where the unfound world creatures summon another disembodied hand from the cliff surface to grab it and drag it back into the cliff, where it presumably remains to this day. The picture of Hanks as a naive dispense of two-fisted justice doesn’t do justice to these comics at all. They have a stream of consciousness feel to them that makes Final Crisis seem straightforward and restrained. They’re more than just goofy and violent and mean, though they’re certainly all of those things–they’re unrestrained, unhinged.

But even more than that, they’re things of great beauty! I can’t stress that enough. Hanks may have been a lot of things, but he truly was a wonderful visual stylist. A favorite tactic involves suspending his various thugs, heroes, corpses, jungle creatures, weapons of mass destruction etc. in mid-air, an effect that is dynamic and still at the same time, suggestive of great power and great restraint simultaneously. There’s a lovely panel of multicolored planes dropping matching bombs, another of a red sky filled with the floating silhouettes of giant panthers. Indeed, any time Hanks gets to draw a lot of the same thing at once is a good time to be a comics reader. That aforementioned albino cobra pit, an army of giant disembodied flaming pink claws–they’re almost always beautifully arranged within their panels and dazzling in their multiplicity, a signature effect as recognizable as Kirby krackle or Ditko hands. Hanks wasn’t a perfect cartoonist by any stretch–anatomy, obviously, was not his strong suit, and it’s those goofy underbites and mircrocephalic heads that give him his Ed Wood rep–but what he did well, he really did well.

There are some promo pictures out now for the fifth season of Lost. I for one am very much looking forward to seeing Elizabeth Mitchell’s performances this season.

Yep, some great performances on the way.

Not to be all “the straight Jason Adams” or anything, but click to embiggen. For, you know, the performances.

* Rest in peace, Bettie Page. She was beautiful!

* I linked to this interview with Hans Rickheit a while ago, but since he’s long been my number-one “altcomix cartoonist who should be a bigger deal,” I really ought to emphasize that he’s apparently doing a graphic novel for Fantagraphics. Outstanding news.

* Doomsday: The Series? When was this announced? Was it announced? (Via Rickey Purdin.)

* The Battlestar Galactica webisodes start today!

* Final Crisis #5 was really good, and you can read annotations thereof by Douglas Wolk and David Uzumeri.

* Ben Morse Rickey Purdin suggests 10 things Hellboy and the BPRD could have done instead of what they did in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

* Quote of the day:

When you do a comic book that seems so easily translatable into film and television, the things film and television does very well begin to expose the comic as unsatisfactory when it comes to aping those elements….Actors have compensating virtues when it comes to suspension of belief. They’re real, they have a natural physicality, they bring an incalculable number of tics and idiosyncrasies to the table. This comic misses all of those things, and seems exposed for it.

—Tom Spurgeon on Boom!’s The Remnant. This passage struck me because it’s exactly what I thought about those first Joss Whedon-scripted issues of the Buffy Season Eight comic book.

* I could read Jon Hastings talk about different kinds of action movie filmmaking all the livelong day. I suppose I do have to say that I think that in both the nu-Bond and Bourne movies, I’m not seeing the lack of sense of spacial integrity/intelligibility that Jon is seeing. I don’t think I ever had a hard time figuring out who was who or what was happening where. Anyway. Where does Rambo fit in your taxonomy, Jon?

Maggots

Brian Chippendale, writer/artist

PictureBox, 2007

344 pages

$21.95

Buy it from PictureBox, pretty cheap in fact

Buy it from Amazon.com

Here’s a hard one to wrap your head around. Maggots is a book that almost prides itself on its insular incomprehensibility. Originally and infamously drawn over the pages of a Japanese book catalog, its panels are meant to be read in a chutes-and-ladders zig-zag that skips, stutters, and shifts direction entirely the second you finally feel like you have a handle on it. In a sense, the first effect you get from reading the book is to learn how to read it. Slowly, your eyes become better at detecting characters’ changes in direction, their movements up or down, how they sit down or stand up or lie down, how they eat or fuck or simply walk up to one another. Eventually these clues enable you to read enough panels in the proper order–or at the very least get some kind of overall sense of what’s happening on a page–so that you can understand what’s going on.

So what’s going on? Well, that’d be kind of difficult to grok even if the book weren’t constructed like a clue someone found in the Orchid Station on Lost. Basically, a bunch of little munchkiny guys run around (literally, a lot of the time) behaving in ways that frequently lead to violent confrontation, whether that involves giants, or rabbits with samurai swords, or people stealing each other’s eyeballs, or the victims of eyeball theft coming back to exact their revenge. The “story” isn’t so much a plot as it is a sense of ever-present danger, the idea that the cute li’l business we’re seeing involving eating raisins and sticking the container somewhere hard for someone else to get to afterwards could at any moment give way to a legion of attacking mice, or some sort of death-mask-wearing sorcerer, or some genuinely unpleasant knifework.

The tension is maintained by Chippendale’s art, which feels like a peak into a hermetically sealed limbo of endless black, occasionally interrupted by secret trapdoors, ladders, and at least one food stand. Panels are tiny, cramped, filled in as much as they can be, careening wildly from one end of the page to the other. Even the white space is busy, showing the text of the catalog underneath. No matter how much our hero Hot Potato and his comrades and enemies run, jump, climb, crawl, and even fly, there doesn’t seem to be any way out for them. Of course, this makes the moments when Chippendale pulls back for a dazzling spread–a field of flowers, the arrival of that sorcerer guy, a massive staircase–all the more impressive. That’s the oldest trick in the book, but there’s a reason for that: It works.

And so, in its weird way, does Maggots. This isn’t going to be launching a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-style wave of imitators anytime soon, even among the most Fort Thunder influenced cats around today–a 344-page experiment in graphic novel form? It’s a miracle this thing ever got published. And it’s certainly a challenging, at times frustrating read, with not a whole lot in terms of immediate satisfaction going for it. But once you get into that groove of letting your eyes weave back and forth across the pages, you just start appreciating the aesthetic qualities of the thing. Those chunky black panels. Chippendale’s Muybridge-like proficiency with breaking physical action down into its constituent beats. The character designs. The humor (“We have a no pants, no service policy.” “Do you have pants back there? I’ll take them.” “Sorry–no pants, no service”). The genuine, if raw, eroticism of all those bizarre sex scenes (I actually think this strange, avant garde comic captures the awkwardness and explosiveness of long-distance relationship reunions as well as any I’ve read). The random, astutely observed moments of quotidian business (there’s a great, two or three panel bit where Hot Potato scoops up a cat who was crawling around the sink that brought a smile of familiarity to my face). Even the sumptuous texture of the cover underneath the dust jacket. This is not a comic for everyone, duh, but if you’ve been interested in it in the past, I think you’ll find it interesting.

* MoCCA will be moving to the Armory at Lexington and 26th this year. As much as that early June weekend in the Puck Building has become a welcome fixture of my summer, I’m glad they’ve moved the festival to a bigger building–it seemed clear this year that the two-floor solution they’d worked out just wasn’t working out for the people on the second floor. It’s also nice to see them shifting to an equally old-timey building instead of convention rooms in a hotel or something.

* Tor.com’s Douglas Cohen continues his series of Robert E. Howard 101 posts with an entry on Solomon Kane.

* Did I say Nick Cave had the T-Shirt of the Week, in my recent return to T-shirt blogging? I stand corrected. Ladies and gents, I give you Mediocore’s The House That Romero Built. (Via Uncrate.)

* Here is a sculpture by Ludovic Levasseur called “Head.” The material it is made out of is nightmares. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Radically shifting gears (you’re welcome), here’s the poster for The Unborn, the upcoming horror movie written and directed by Dark Knight credit-holder/Blade III: Trinity impresario David S. Goyer and starring Odette Yustman’s pooper.

You know what the best thing about this poster is? Okay, fine, second-best thing? Well, you see that creepy ghost kid in the mirror? You know, the one mandated by the Osment Act of 1999, requiring the presence of at least one creepy kid in all supernatural horror movies? He’s a Holocaust victim! The word you’re looking for is “class.” (Via STYD.)

From there on out, Morrison’s rapidly intensifying crunch of information and characters starts making the book exciting in its rush forward. Ex-Monitor Nix Uotan is tossed in a room for being immune to Anti-Life, but his drawings of superhero characters remind us that even the worst revisions can be undone, and hope is possible! Two pages later a man solves a puzzle cube and villains’ skin vaporizes!

Wait – now Libra is killing people and commenting on sexual violence toward superheroines. Lex Luthor is pissed! Ok, now we’re in an evil throne room and dudes are spoiling the next issue of Batman and keeling over stone dead! That’s what you get! Shit! Now Darkseid is God! Oh fuck! Frankenstein’s quoting Milton! Wait! Now time is falling apart! The President of the United States has a gun! A hole in the sky at the hanging! Eyes in the night! Everyone on Earth is pumping their fists! Comics are suddenly flying at us and it’s like an evil version of JLA: World War III transforming into Flex Mentallo and a man has a liquid television cloud for a helmet and LIGHTNING FASTENING HIS JACKET!!

Whew! That’s the stuff right there! I mean, I’m probably setting myself up for a fall here, but now I hope this series continues to spasm inward and issue #6 is like some berserk DCU version of Poison River with scene transitions every panel, like random background characters from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #136 bursting in screaming “THE METABONDS HAVE UNTETHERED” followed by Guy Gardner in a time vortex going “hhn” then a close-up of Batman’s groin halfway across the globe followed by supervillain heads burning; it’ll be so compressed there won’t even be room for dialogue, just selected alphabetic characters, whisking us back to the primal force of phoneme like a word balloon Lettrism, at which point Kamandi initiates the chiselling phase of Darkseid’s face.

—Jog on Final Crisis #5. I lost it at “hhn.”

You really should read the whole review. It’s pretty much everything I’d say about the book and why it’s so good (even though that Green Lantern trial scene was bobbled pretty badly by Carlos Pacheco).

* Watchmen, Watchmen everywhere: Here’s that San Diego footage you ordered. (Via Tor.)

But even though the relevant image is in the above promo and several other trailers we’ve seen already, it wasn’t until I took a look at this reshuffled trailer (via AICN) that I realized something…

You know that shot of the police and reporters around the body of Dollar Bill, with his cape stuck in the revolving door so he got shot to death? It occurred to me that that’s the first time a lot of superhero-movie viewers are going to see anything even remotely like that. For the most part, superheroes in these movies don’t die, and when the villains die they bite it in the most dramatic fashion possible. I imagine seeing a costumed superhero lying unglamorously, unheroically dead on the ground Law & Order-style will be pretty striking for some people.

* Speaking of Tor (we were a few paragraphs ago), Douglas Cohen has posted a pair of Robert E. Howard 101 articles–one for Conan and one for Kull. Come the New Year, I think I’ll be reading fewer comics and more prose, and for the past several weeks the hunger for pulp has been growing in me, so these were welcome guides.

* Strange Ink’s Sean B. reviews [REC]. Ultimately I think he’s more into it than I ended up being. I did like that ending, definitely, but it’s not something I’ve found myself haunted by since watching it.

* Speaking of Sean B., he spotted Nick Cave in our T-Shirt of the Week:

* Whoa, dig Dustin Harbin’s Godfather comic.

* Finally, compare and contrast:

DD: Here’s the conundrum on this one. And this is reflective of the world that we live in now – the world of collected editions. The R.I.P. story was always meant to play through to the end of Final Crisis – always. The thing is, we had to come up with a very complete story in “Batman R.I.P.” as it existed in its title. The reality is that the “Batman R.I.P.” story does not conclude until Final Crisis #6. There are also issues #682 and #683 of Batman that feed directly into Final Crisis #6, and we’ll have a big finale to the Batman storyline. That’s how it plays out.

But as I said, because we live in the world of collected editions, we needed a conclusion in the Batman series, so that we could collect it properly within Batman, without having to bring in segments of Final Crisis to complete the story.

NRAMA: So – fundamentally, “Batman R.I.P” did not end in Batman #681?

DD: Correct. We have the two parts that we’re in the middle of now, and they lead us into Final Crisis #6 which gives us a definite conclusion to the Batman story. That’s how Grant designed the story from the start, and that’s how the story plays out. So, the people who are looking for the big finale, the stuff that Grant was talking about – he knows how big an ending he has, because he wrote it in Final Crisis #6. That story has been so planned out that it reflects events from the pages of Final Crisis #1 in order to pull it all together.

So the Batman story has been hinted at in Final Crisis #1 – we couldn’t allude to it, because we didn’t want to play our hand too early with that. The fascinating thing about what Grant has done is that he’s telling a major story in the life of Batman while he’s telling a major event across the DC Universe with Final Crisis. And the two are linked.

NRAMA: So Final Crisis #6 is like when you’re driving on, say, I-40 and it merges with another for a while, and you get the road signs telling you that you’re on two highways at the same time…and you follow another highway out other than the one you went in on.

DD: Exactly. And Batman #682 and #683 are reflective of things that took place earlier in Final Crisis as well.

—Dan DiDio,

HUMPHREY: All right, settle down. Settle down. Now, before I begin the lesson, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you write your letter home, if you’re not getting your hair cut, unless you’ve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after you’ve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down onto the lower peg for you. Now,–

WYMER: Sir?

HUMPHREY: Yes, Wymer?

WYMER: My younger brother’s going out with Dibble this weekend, sir, but I’m not having my hair cut today, sir.

PUPILS: [chuckling]

WYMER: So, do I move my clothes down, or–

HUMPHREY: I do wish you’d listen, Wymer. It’s perfectly simple. If you’re not getting your hair cut, you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes down to the lower peg. You simply collect his note before lunch, after you’ve done your scripture prep, when you’ve written your letter home, before rest, move your own clothes onto the lower peg, greet the visitors, and report to Mr. Viney that you’ve had your chit signed.

—Monty Python’s Meaning of Life

Hahaha, I kid, I kid. I’m actually enjoying Batman and Final Crisis as much as any superhero comics I can remember so this is no skin off my ass whatsoever, but I’d imagine these kinds of things are frustrating for a lot of readers–my pay Rob Bricken, for example.

Then again, perhaps it’s just an expectations game. Nobody throws their box set of Lost Season Four across the room in anger because it doesn’t wrap up the story–it’s part of an ongoing series. The degree to which the final issue of Batman: R.I.P. was billed as a landmark event probably hurt DC on that score, but with superhero comics in general and Grant Morrison DC superhero comics in particular, the train keeps a-rollin’ all night long, you know? Of course, maybe a better example is if the season finale of Lost Season Four felt more like just another episode. I dunno. I like these comics, I’m not complaining!

Real Stuff

Dennis P. Eichhorn, writer

∆, Rick Altergott, Peter Bagge, Jim Blanchard, Ariel Bordeaux, Rupert Bottenberg, Chester Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Howard Chackowicz, David Chelsea, Dan Clowes, David Collier, Dave Cooper, Robert L. Crabb, Lloyd Dangle, Julie Doucet, Michael Dougan, Gary Dumm, B.N. Duncan, Gene Fama, Mary Fleener, Drew Friedman, Renée French, Roberta Gregory, Sam Henderson, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Sean M. Hurley, Gerald Jablonski, Peter Kuper, Carol Lay, Jason Lutes, Kent Myers, Bernard Edward Mireault, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Terry Moore, Pat Moriarity, Joe Sacco, Seth, Leslie Sternbergh, Carol Swain, Holly Tuttle, Colin Upton, J.R. Williams, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, Mark Zingarelli, artists

Swifty Morales Press, 2004

208 pages

$19.95

Buy it used, and cheap, from Amazon.com

How is Denny Eichhorn not a major cult figure? I’m honestly curious, and maybe some of my older readers can fill me in, since obviously he was a big deal in ’90s altcomix culture. But I can’t remember ever discussing him or his work with any of my friends or peers; the few times I’ve brought him up in the context of being one of three writers who’s made a go of creating alternative comics without drawing them himself, alongside Alan Moore and Harvey Pekar, I’ve gotten funny looks. Heck, I didn’t even really know what I was talking about, not until I read this collection. And shit the bed, I sort of feel like I need to physically pass it around to all of my friends until they’re all on my wavelength. To quote The Big Lebowski, “I won’t say ‘a hero,’ ’cause what’s a hero?”–but Denny Eichhorn is a goddamn inspiration.

I think the great trick of this collection of some of Eichhorn’s sex/drugs/violence-soaked autobio strips–drawn by the above host of collaborators, all of whom seem perfectly at home with their material, which is really a testament to them and Eichhorn both–is editor and publisher Caleb Wright’s chronological arrangement of them. That way, we get to know Eichhorn as a child first, and by the time his most outré misadventures head our way, it’s too late to detach ourselves from him. So sure, it’s funny to watch Peter Bagge draw Eichhorn getting so freaked out by his first Mad magazine he pukes, or Pat Moriarty showing a mix-up at a pharmacy that leads to young Denny being sold a pack of condoms for a science project, or early-vintage Dave Cooper (already a dazzlingly slick illustrator) presenting the story of how the cops broke the crazy next-door neighbor’s dick free of the glass bottle it was struck in. (There will be blood.) Even in the first serious bouts of violence we see, teen- and college-age Eichhorn is in the right; when a double-page Joe Zabel/Gary Dumm spread shows us exactly what happens when Eichhorn smashes a glass bottle into the face of his attacker, or J.R. Williams shows the toe of Eichhorn’s boot literally splattered with the remains of his assailant’s eyeball, you almost can’t help but cheer even as you recoil, laugh with triumph even as you shake your head with disbelief. It’s like the autobiographical comics equivalent of the climax of Rambo.

So when you finally start seeing hints of how Eichhorn’s tendency toward illicit behavior can bring out the worst in other people, and vice versa, it becomes a lot harder to write him off. Yes, there’s a way of looking at things where tipping off the part-time prostitute who’s hosted a week-long gangbang of the entire freshman class of Eichhorn’s university that the cops were on to her was the right thing to do–but this more or less ensured a continued life of abusive neglect for the baby she plies with cola and calls “Shithead” when she’s not fingercuffing the football team. There’s no reason to believe that the string of sex workers with whom Eichhorn has off-the-books dalliances are anything but the carefree lust-for-life types they (and Eichhorn!) appear to be–until one turns out to be the accomplice of a pair of serial sex murderers (and a serial killer in her own right), and another sticks a gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger mere hours after sticking Denny’s cock in her mouth and pulling his. That last strip may contain the most memorable cartooning in the entire anthology, which is really saying something amid the Saccos and Colliers and Chelseas and Woodrings and Doucets: Carel Moiseiwitsch’s deep blacks and deranged linework evoke Rory Hayes as the soon-to-be-suicidal woman literally attacks Eichhorn’s genitals, and caps things off with the post-orgasmic entreaty “REMEMBER ME!”–no narrative caption set-up, no establishing shots, just the woman’s demonic face.

This is not to say that it’s all eye-gouging and self-destruction. A lot of Eichhorn’s doping, drinking, and fucking are perfectly delightful for everyone involved, and a lot more are embarrassing but hella funny in hindsight. You’ve gotta love a book that includes a story about a dominatrix that ends with the sentence “Then it hit me: I shoulda pissed on his head!” and whose genuine, if off-kilter, father-son bonding strip involves giving your dad weed. It’s the gestalt of the thing that makes it so memorable, and enough to put you off comics about the awkward night Brooklyn Hipster had that one time forever. It fits right in with Boy’s Club, the Manly Movie Mamajamas, and other vicarious portraits of the less savory side of masculinity pushed to its illogical conclusion. If I could get 20 copies of this I’d give them away as stocking stuffers.

1) Jenny stages a guerrilla fashion show at the funeral; models dance on the coffin

2) Rufus returns home from comforting the bereaved and strums a sensitive ballad on his acoustic guitar nevermind, that actually happened

2) Wallace Shawn kisses the bride to the tune of the Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire”

3) While snuggling with the unconscious Chuck, Blair whacks him off

Fantagraphics has posted a preview of The Comics Journal #295, featuring a cover interview with Brian K. Vaughan conducted by yours truly. I hope you purchase and enjoy it.

* A judge in Australia has ruled that Tijuana bible-style imagery involving the Simpsons kids constitutes child pornography. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) In light of the Christopher Handey case here in the States, it’s important to note and loudly decry these kinds of rulings–particularly since even in the comics commentariat there are prominent, impassioned, and woefully misguided voices who applaud such decisions and say they feel oppressed by those of us who rightly recognize them not just as the first step toward potential legal action against everything from A Child’s Life to A Contract with God to Blankets, but as bad, freedom-curtailing rulings in their own right.

* The live action film adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s excellent We3–a comic that had no small impact on my becoming a vegetarian–will be helmed by Kung Fu Panda director John Stevenson, according to produce/wheeler-dealer Don Murphy.

* A trailer has leaked for McG’s post-apocalyptic continuation of the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation, and for now you can still see it here. I had less than no interest in Terminator 3: This One Has Tits and even less interest in anything else McG has ever directed, but the second you throw Christian Bale and some Mad Max imagery into the fairly entertaining Terminator mythos, you’ve got my attention, I’ll admit.

* And if you’re willing to jump through some iTunes hoops, here’s the San Diego Comic Con Watchmen footage.

* Good reviews of good comics part one: Jog reviews Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal.

* Good reviews of good comics part two: Tom Spurgeon reviews Brian Ralph’s Daybreak.

The other day I praised Marvel for how together it is in terms of getting all its books on the same page for its meta-story-driving events. But as you might glean from posts like Marc-Oliver Frisch’s regarding the preview solicits for Dark Reign, the next big overarching plotline–or even, perhaps, from Marvel’s October sales chart–there are a couple of massive potential pitfalls to this storytelling model. First of all, as I alluded to earlier, the big story could be (and, for the most part, has been) stupid. Secondly, I think that as exciting as having one giant unified meta-story can be for fans, the problem lies where the rubber hits the road–when you need to take a million different characters and storylines and filter them through that giant unified meta-story.* Not every superhero concept, writer, or artist is a good fit with Skrulls doing the Cylon thing. And even when there’s not a direct Secret Invasion crossover going on, virtually everything Marvel publishes now reflects the Brian Michael Bendis brand of superheroics, i.e. superheroes as seen through the lens of crime, black ops, and/or the military-industrial complex. That’s gonna work fine with some characters and creators but less so with others. Even ones that do lend themselves to that tone are being potentially cut off from exploring other fruitful avenues. For example, right now New Avengers is prepping for a storyline involving the magical supervillain Dormammu, Doctor Strange’s archnemesis. This could be a psychedelic freakout like Promethea or Seven Soldiers: Zatanna, it could be Lovecraftian, it could be an old-school Ditko magic rumble, the narrative could be fractured and fractalled and messed with in a way appropriate to magic, but instead, I imagine will read like all the other down-and-dirty superhero comics Bendis has written, only with magic. I’m not sure that’s a great idea. It’s worth noting that Bendis, a Sean T. Collins fave who has written a solid shelf’s worth of very good superhero comics I’m happy to own, has already done a “down-and-dirty” magic story, Daredevil: Decalogue. That “magic via crime” spin led to some genuinely frightening, weird, and memorable comics. But the shock of the new is gone, replaced by the sense that it’s one way or the highway, and I think Marvel’s suffering for it.

* In a way, Marvel theoretically has a leg up on DC in this regard, for the same reason that Marvel’s Universe has always felt like a more cohesive, common-sense grouping than DC’s: Virtually every important Marvel character and concept was created by the same dozen or so guys–Golden/Silver Agers like Simon, Everett, Kirby, Lee, Ditko, and Romita Sr., plus a few later folks like Wein, Claremont, Miller, Bendis and so forth. By contrast, you could come up with at least that many names integral to the creation of the Big Seven Justice Leaguers alone! But that’s not to say that every character in the Marvel Universe can comfortably fit in the same story; when you look at it that way, I wonder if Marvel isn’t now experiencing in micro (characters from a recognizably uniform universe nonetheless suffering when forced into line up and march in unison) what the DCU has long exhibited in macro (characters from a huge number of writers, artists, and even companies pooled into the same sprawling universe and looking kind of weird next to each other oftentimes).

* Bettie Page is in a coma. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Page a while back and it’s one of the high points of my professional life. Not only was in-her-prime Bettie a contender for the title of “sexiest woman in human history,” but her sexiness was almost antithetical to the antiseptic, angry, emaciated “sexiness” that is today’s norm. I wish her nothing but health and happiness.

* They’re gonna make a Bourne sequel based on a non-Bourne Robert Ludlum novel, The Parsifal Mosaic. Based on the description, there are a couple of ways they could go with this, depending on what aspects of the set-up they choose to emphasize.

* Speaking of Bourne, Jon Hastings responds to my lengthy post comparing the Bourne and nu-Bond series. I find that even while I agree with many of his specific observations, the conclusions he draws from them–that the action scenes are hard to parse, that there’s no sense of space in them–are more or less the opposite of mine. But it’s a free country, no matter what those dastardly CIA types are up to. (Also, Rambo is my favorite movie of any kind so far this year, Jon.)

* This riff on the technologically ensured inescapability of bad news about the economy reminded me a lot of the bit in World War Z about “Land Warrior” communications link-ups between the soldiers and the effect that has on morale when your fellow soldiers start getting eaten by zombies. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)

* Speaking of Coates, he spots and participates in an ongoing multiblog debate regarding the use of torture in…World of Warcraft. I noticed this back when Bruce Baugh blogged about it–the deliberate slaughter of non-combatants, as well–but to me it just scanned as “well, yeah, you’re playing a member of an evil death cult.” Some players seem to hold that point of view as well, but others are upset about it on moral, storytelling, and/or gameplay grounds varyingly. Bruce?

* I think it’s pretty amusing that Rich Johnston is treating the fact that writers of event tie-in titles must conform to the wishes of the writer of the main event like it’s news, especially when his specific contentions regarding the difficulty therein are being expressly rejected. But at least he’s running the correction, which is more than he did with me when I was administrator of Wizard’s message board and he wrongfully accused us of banning him, then promised a retraction when I busted my hump figuring out why he couldn’t access the board and fixing the problem for him, a retraction he never issued.