* Today I popped up in a couple of interesting places on the Internet. For starters, there’s the new comic by me and Matt Rota that I mentioned earlier, now playing at Top Shelf 2.0.
* Next, I’m the subject of this week’s installment of Show Us Your Shelf Porn over at Robot 6. Feast your eyes, glut your soul. (God, I feel so naked.)
* While I’m busy talking about myself, I just want to remind everyone that I’ll be attending the New York Comic Con tomorrow afternoon and Saturday. You can catch me at the Twisted ToyFare Theater panel on Saturday at 5:30pm in room 1A17. Failing that, you can find me wandering around the floor with such comics-commentary luminaries as Josiah Leighton, Kiel Phegley, Ben Morse, Dave Paggi, TJ Dietsch, Rickey Purdin, Matt Powell and so on. I’m not sure what I’ll be wearing, but you shall know me by the David Bowie Sketchbook. (And my hair is bushy right now, unless I shave it overnight, which, who knows.)
* Speaking of Kiel Phegley, he’s launched a new interview and news blog called Four Color Forum. Here’s his mission statement. Go, read, as the fella says.
* The Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica is going to debut in an uncut/unrated DVD release on April 21 prior to its airing on TV. Weird, but nice, but also just a way to get you to buy it twice.
* Tom Spurgeon sings into the Miracle Machine and blasts the thoughtform of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis into oblivion. While it comes as no surprise that Tom didn’t care for the book–a story written by a person who believes in the concepts articulated in an interview like this is unlikely to speak to someone who believes those concepts to be “paper thin.” Similarly, it’s always tough for me to get much out of Spurgeon superhero criticism when it’s predicated on the notion that the superheroes in question have “no juice left at all to thrill or inspire or encourage”; I simply don’t see why that’s so, because in my experience it’s not. (That’s not to say I share Morrison’s belief in their near-messianic power and appeal; on the contrary, they’re just devices, like zombies or gangsters or egomaniacal doctors or sexy librarians or whatever. It’s all in the execution.) But Tom’s more specific lines of attack are very interesting: unpacking the differences between the use of jump cuts in Final Crisis vs. Jaime Hernandez’s “Tear It Up, Terry Downe,” critiquing the circular logic of Morrison’s notion that Superman and Batman always win because that’s what makes them Superman and Batman, noting the more challenging Jack Kirby conception of Anti-Life, and so on. It’s my favorite negative review of the book to date.
* Morrison himself still has plenty to say about the series and its tie-ins. The IGN interview with Morrison linked above is the longest so far, a rich blend of Morrison expounding upon his ideas and tooting his own horn; among the juicy tidbits is his clearest statement yet that the series was about DC office politics as much as anything else. Meanwhile, Newsarama has posted the second half of its “exit interview,” which is roughly half Morrison yakking in the same vein as the IGN interview and half explaining what happened in the comic to Matt Brady.
* I wasn’t going to link to the non-story about how They want Casino Royale director Martin Campbell to direct a prospective Green Lantern movie, but Rob Bricken at Topless Robot explains in a fun fashion why that idea is interesting even if the “news” angle is bullshit. He also points out that Campbell directed GoldenEye, too, which I did not know. That was a fun movie.
* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias reviews Velvet Goldmine, a movie that dramatically changed my life, as part of his delightful New Cult Canon series. No matter how angry Christian Bale gets, he’ll always be poor, meek Arthur Stewart from the ‘Erald to me.
* There are two great things about Kevin Lee’s review of Paul Verhoeven’s masterpiece Starship Troopers (I don’t know what else to call it–that film is freaking inspired): The part where he points out that part of the fun of the film is that it is not embarrassed of or condescending toward proficiency in straightforward genre/action-movie filmmaking, and the lengthy collection of reviews from contemporary critics who completely missed the fact that the film is a satire. (Via The House Next Door.)
*Paul Pope draws IG-88. That sentence is either completely meaningless to you, or completely awesome.
* I think you’ll agree that seeing Ben Jones art in three dimensions is pretty mind-blowing.
* Dan Nadel blogs about the Mat Brinkman/Melissa Brown art show he curated.
* Finally, the future of comics.
Man, that is some hardcore shelf-porn. I love how you pointed out your Jason stuff, too; I just dropped about 100.00 on my Jason collection and now have a nice fat slice of black spines on my shelf as well.
Whoa, that’s such a good idea, to turn some of the books face-out like that. I’m stealing that technique now, thanks…
Thank you, Seans!
It’s funny that you would use that quote because with that quote I’m suggesting my problem wasn’t that these icons have no more juice but with Morrison’s supreme confidence that they obviously have juice and what that does to the drama of the piece. In other words, I think it would have been far scarier and far more interesting for Morrison to question his own assumptions, dig a bit, rather than yet again build up a pair of odd monsters that crumble in the face of Batman and Superman’s respective, inherent awesomeness (with minor assists by Green Lantern’s and The Flash’s slightly less powerful awesomeness). That’s why they feel like empty suits to me. It’s like watching Morrison book the last two events of a 1980s Wrestlemania. If you’re going to have a crisis, shouldn’t there be some crisis to it?
Carnival of souls
* Plugs 4 Pals part one: Ben Morse will be editing War of Kings: Warriors, a digital comic tying in with Marvel’s space-opera event. Ben knows from Marvel’s space stuff, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing at…
Cheap tramadol.
Comparative potencies of opioids tramadol. Tramadol hcl. Tramadol.