…I generally believe that hate and vitriol should be reserved for people who deliberately try to do you harm, not people who try and sometimes fail to entertain you.

—Mark Waid

* STC news: Marvel is reviving its What The–?! title as a series of animated action-figure parodies, and I’m going to be helping to write it. But the main man in charge is the great animator and bon vivant Alex Kropinak, who I believe is the sole responsible party for the video below. The way he makes the “Bruce” non sequitur work for him is just killer.

* I’ve been known to blog about a variety of real-world horror-related topics, from cryptozoology to serial killers. Here are some updates from two of the least pleasant real-world horror subcategories.

* The state of the beast: I can’t decide which passage from this report about the chimpanzee who killed a friend of his owner before being shot to death by police is the more horrifying and heartbreaking–this one…

After a few minutes, the dispatcher asked if the chimp was still with Herold’s friend.

“He’s eating her,” Herold said.

…or this one…

At first, officers did not see the animal, Conklin said. The chimp returned and tried to get into one of the officer’s vehicles. The officer shot him several times at 2-foot range, and all of the shots landed in the animal’s upper torso, Larrabee said. One of its teeth was found near the car.

The wounded chimp fled, and police followed a blood trail to the rear of the house, where the animal had returned to its living quarters and died.

Via Bryan Alexander, who notes that the original link hosts an audio file of the 911 call from which its quotes are taken and which I can’t bear to listen to.

* Real-life torture porn: Army Spc. Brandon Neely offers first-hand testimony regarding prisoner abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan respond to this Charlie Savage New York Times piece on disturbing areas of continuity between Bush and Obama policies regarding the rights of detainees. Both argue against taking the most absolute pessimistic stance regarding the Obama administration’s actions thus far—I’ve learned first-hand that in some cases such pessimism stems from “nyah nyah told you so” agitation by the pro-torture right (in whose case it’s actually optimism), or by “nothing changes” cynics, or by go-along-to-get-along “centrist” D.C. CW mavens who perhaps believe that Obama’s acquiescence in these matters will lessen their own implication in their original Bush-era implementation—but they forcefully encourage vigilance rather than blind trust regarding such issues as rendition, indefinite detention, and state secrets.

* I think people who are upset at how goofy several of the recently released Watchmen clips look and sound are forgetting the fact that there’s a lot of goofy-looking and goofy-sounding shit in the original comic. That was sort of the point, in part. The question is whether Zack Snyder is onto that, or whether he’s bought into the SUPERHEROES IS SERIOUS BUSINESS mentality of the modern fanboy and is blissfully unaware of his own goofiness. U-DECIDE! Click the link for the footage, and keep in mind I’m the guy who defended The Spirit (but still hasn’t seen it–screw you, Loews).

* Speaking of Watchmen, there’s going to be a 3 hour 10 minute DVD director’s cut, which will include 44 minutes of scenes that didn’t make the theatrical cut, 15 minutes of the Tales of the Black Freighter cartoon, and 1 hour 12 minutes of slow motion.

* Tori Amos’s lamely titled upcoming album inspired my pal and ADDTF comment-thread regular Shaggy to create an obviously Photoshopped gag cover that duped Perez Hilton! I love the internet.

* Lord of the Rings cakes! Almost literally unbelievable. (Hat tip: The Missus.)

* Finally: Do you want to see more pictures of Kate Winslet? Sure, we all do!

Via the utterly indispensable Marilyn Loves Kate. If only someone would launch a Bowie Loves Beyoncé blog, I’d never turn my computer off. (Actually, you know what? Stay tuned.)

Mome Vol. 4: Spring/Summer 2006

Eric Reynolds & Gary Groth, editors

David B., R. Kikuo Johnson, Jeffrey Brown, Martin Cendreda, Sophie Crumb, Jonathan Bennett, Paul Hornschemeier, Gabrielle Bell, Anders Nilsen, David Heatley, John Pham, Kurt Wolfgang, writers/artists

Fantagraphics, 2006

136 pages

$14.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on July 23, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

I wouldn’t want Mome to be any better than it is. See, it’s taken me until the anthology’s fourth installment to realize this, but a goodly sized chunk of its appeal lies in the uneven quality of its contributors. One of the series’ stated goals was to provide readers with a venue in which they could watch a fixed assortment of young cartoonists grow and develop, the implication being that in Mome we could stack up a given creator’s contributions against themselves and see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe it should have been obvious to me–maybe it was to you–but equally inherent in the project’s set-up is the chance it affords us to stack up a given creator’s contributions against another’s. Pitting the great against the deeply so-so in a regularly scheduled cage match is an excellent way to teach readers what does and doesn’t make for good comics–to separate, in other words, a David B. from a Sophie C.

Let’s start with the latter end of the spectrum, then. It’s not that Sophie Crumb’s comics have nothing to recommend them, necessarily; they do have a free-spirited, effortlessly vulgar energy that’s rare in the higher echelons of altcomix these days (though not nearly so much if you step away from the big-name tables at an SPX or MoCCA and sniff through the equally undistinguished punk-rawk comics being churned out by kidz at a Kinko’s near you). It’s just that that’s really all they have. In “Be a Bum,” Crumb rails against the self-obsessed autobio stereotype–in fact, her cri de Coeur of “Don’t spend 10 pages going on and on about taking out the fukin’ garbage!” can only be interpreted as a potshot against fellow Mome contributor Jonathan Bennet, whose previous three offerings have followed a Bennett-esque protagonist as he took photographs, fed pigeons, and (yes) went through someone’s garbage respectively, and whose contribution to Vol. 4, “I Remember Crowning…” replaced the Bennett figure with a bald middle-aged guy but still reads like a parody of indie navel-gazing, the kind of strawman a guy like Scott Kurtz would construct when he gets upset that he can’t follow Jimmy Corrigan. But Crumb lacks the very rudimentary self-awareness necessary to realize that her own endless stories of gutterpunk slumming are just as solipsistic and bereft of larger meaning. Indeed, she touts her own superiority: “I’m too busy having an interesting life, and I don’t take enough time to write and draw!! I am not a bored suburbian loser! My life is so weird and crazy, I wouldn’t know where to start!!” My goodness, how did this salt-of-the-earth wild-woman got to the head of the altcomix class without any external privileges whatsoever? I couldn’t hazard a guess! The pot-kettle comparison is worsened in another of the strips in this volume, where she outdoes Bennett’s most quotidian contributions by recounting a pillow-talk conversation with her boyfriend and a bout of flatulence experienced by their dog. And in her “Smone Bean the Premature Teen,” which can’t seem to decide if it’s a lampoon of America’s sexualization of tweens or a gross-out incest gag comic, she doesn’t even accurately quote Kelis’s “Milkshake”! It’s maddeningly lackadaisical work, right down to the okay art–say what you will about Bennett, but at least that cat can draw.

But a slick line is no guarantor of success, and if Bennett is exhibit A, then Paul Hornshemeier can close the case. His ongoing “Life with Mr. Dangerous,” serialized throughout Mome’s volumes, is as beautifully rendered as any of his work, all bulbous curves and soft corners filled with the kind of perfect, muted colors that’ll land you a consolation-prize Eisner nomination. But. The. Story. Goes. Nowhere. Since it’s about a young woman whose life appears to be going nowhere, maybe that’s the point, but when you tackle a boring situation by creating boring art, the whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts. Martin Cendreda takes an opposite tact: He peppers his “La Brea Woman,” which chronicles a divorced father’s run-of-the-mill day with his young son, with captions imbuing every minor character they meet along the way with a meaning-laden backstory. This doesn’t work either. “Five years from now,” reads the box above the check-out woman at the grocery store, “Valeria’s only son is killed in Iraq.” Groan. (The moonlit concluding shot of the elephant replica is nice, though.) Somewhere in between is Gabrielle Bell, whose examination of a young woman’s lifelong love for a favorite band contains some perceptive moments (“Once I would’ve liked them. Once they would’ve made me cringe. Now I liked them again,” she says of one group) but overall displays the same static figure work and flat-affect tone that’s always left me cold on her comics. In Mome’s realist camp, it’s only R. Kikuo Johnson’s dazzling display of illustrative proficiency (and Louis Riel fandom), “John James Audubon in Pursuit of the Golden Eagle,” that makes an impact, as much from cannily eschewing lit-fic in favor of historical comics and examining man’s relationship with animals (something I’m noticing comics seem to do well) as from the power of the visuals (goddamn).

In the end it’s the surrealists who win the day. They’re led by the great David Heatley, whose lo-fi figure work is perfectly suited to the violent and sexual non sequiturs of the dream comics he contributes; I found myself wishing he didn’t say they were dream comics, though, as the disclaimer undercuts the power of the imagery. Anders Nilsen chips in a photograph-and-comic installation that, he says, served as a sort of rough draft for his graphic novel Dogs & Water, and it’s as alarmingly good as everything I’ve read from him. As with most of his comics, you don’t necessarily know what this collection of blurry landscapes and cut-and-pasted cartoons is about, but you can almost instantly grok what they’re about–I certainly challenge you not to feel a little more lonely and hopeless after reading it than you did before, whether or not you can make heads or tails of it. Somewhat less effective in its randomness is John Pham’s “221 Sycamore Ave.,” another ongoing story being serialized in the anthology. The dreams of its protagonists–a bitter old teacher and his housemate, a ghost of some sort–take the story on a turn for the weird, and while the sharp, blocky shapes that dominate the dream (an underground-manga feel can be detected) provide a memorable contrast with the rest of the tale, the cumulative effect of the two halves is a bit uncertain. More tonally assured is the philosophical horror-comic contribution of Jeffrey Brown, yet another of his hugely rewarding explorations of territory beyond his usual autobio and humor beats. Juxtaposing a Godzilla attack with thought captions like “Everyone is anonymous at the end of things” could be an exercise in irony in other hands, but a few small strokes of Brown’s thick, minimalist inks make it work as they evoke accumulated human endeavor swept away by sudden, thoughtless violence.

Violence is also at the heart of “The Veiled Prophet,” this issue’s contribution from David B. His gifts as a cartoonist and storyteller are so varied and subtle that reading his work is almost an unconscious process. One moment, you’re reading an historical account of an Arab religious cult; the next–without a single seam you can point to and say “right there, that’s where the change took place” you’re reading a horrific fairy tale about tsunami-like armies of corpses and a man whose face no one can look at and live. Throughout, insights into human nature–the link between religious fervor, tyranny, and sexual mania; the sinking feeling that defeat at the hands of such forces is inevitable–shine through like a searing peak through the prophet’s veil. B. doesn’t so much draw as weave–threading together spears, skeletons, strands of cloth, naked bodies to create panels whose indelibility as stand-alone images (nearly any one of them could have been isolated for the volume’s cover) is actually surpassed by their cumulative effect.

Basically, the guy is a genius.

Which is part of why putting B. in the anthology always seemed an odd choice. Not only is he older and from a different linguistic background than most of the other contributors, but he’s also so freaking good that putting him amongst up-and-comers (even the really good ones) feels almost like bullying. But perhaps the message sent by his membership in Mome is an important one: Whatever the qualitative differences between a David B. and a Sophie Crumb might be, they are both doing the same thing–making comics. With that in mind, both readers and the creators themselves have every right to demand that the work of the latter class live up to that of the former.

* It’s been a while!

* Fantagraphics is having a big clearance and closeout sale, and I insist that you purchase Dave Cooper’s outstanding, largely forgotten, and probably last-ever graphic novel Ripple for 1/3rd off cover price.

* All-time ADDTF hero Clive Barker is making the interview rounds big-time in support of today’s DVD release of the still-unseen-by-me Midnight Meat Train. Here’s a long one at Shock Till You Drop, another long one at Dread Central, and a slightly shorter but still interesting one at Fearnet.

* Chris Butcher, Tom Spurgeon, Brian Hibbs, and Tom Spurgeon again react to the news that monopoly direct-market comics distributor Diamond is permanently delisting about 1000 manga volumes from their Previews catalog as part of their recently announced cutbacks of low-selling items. The reason I don’t talk about business issues much anymore is because I am manifestly unqualified to do so, but I just can’t imagine how cutting off 1000 items from North America’s biggest comics publisher from a market entirely in thrall to such decisions is good for the long-term health of the industry. I think Tom raises an important point when he says that the way Diamond is sort of dropping these bombshells out there with little or no explanation of the thought process behind them, leaving it up to interested third parties to explain/excuse/defend these moves, is a strange way to go about making decisions that could effect the shape of the Direct Market forever.

* The cast of Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which already included Sly, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, and Jason Statham, now includes Eric Roberts…and Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is already the greatest movie ever made. Better than Crank, even.

* Michael Kupperman blogs! Look for previews of future Tales Designed to Thrizzle, deleted scenes from Cheers featuring Tobin Bell as SAW, and more.

* Kiel Phegley interviews Sammy Harkham about Kramers Ergot 7. It’s the full transcript of the interview that he conducted for his piece naming KE7 Wizard’s Indie of the Year.

* Josiah Leighton got a review of the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met in his NYCC con report! No, he got an NYCC con report in his review of the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met!

* The Gold In Us is back, pointing out the internal continuity of Grant Morrison’s many DC comics. I’d wondered about those little JLAers myself.

* Dave Ortega talks to Dave Kiersh, a longtime ADDTF fave and faithful chronicler of the teenage wasteland, about his books Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes, Never Land, and more, and I really just love a lot of what he says. Honestly, this sounds like I wrote it:

Well, I’m not so much a poetry reader in the traditional sense. I do however enjoy music, of course, which is closely related. My early comics were much shorter and with them, I was more concerned with conveying an emotion; story was not so important to me. Even with my longer stories, I have no aspiration for writing a sort of literary graphic novel. When I think of rock and roll songs I like, sometimes they tell a story. But more often what makes them memorable is that they possess a sort of compact nostalgic thrill. Just like an album has a theme that ties songs together, I wanted to create a book of short stories tied together with a common purpose. That’s what works for me now, rather than to write a long novel. It’s like asking a rock musician to write a song that is an hour long. In that way, it doesn’t make sense for me to make a 100 page novel. It has to be interesting for the reader and in doing so avoid repetition. My new book is five short stories not directly related to one another, but you could also view it as one story through the separate characters….For me, a picture story has to have this perfect balance balance between word and picture: that’s what keeps a child’s interest. I’m not exactly sure what keeps an adult’s interest but its similar to music; how I interpret music. Not like Classical music but like Rock and Roll… something that hits you immediately and hopefully sticks with you.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

* Curt Purcell reviews Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! Not only does he pull some of my favorite images from the book to illustrate the review, but he also articulates something I hadn’t been able to put my finger on, which is that the repetition in some of the images is almost evocative of mental illness.

* ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman’s review of the uncut-edition Friday the 13th DVD doubles as a brief and informative history lesson about the movie and its context in the slasher tradition.

* In another of his terrific posts on (mostly) ’90s superhero comics, Tim O’Neil explains DC and Marvel’s contrasting approaches to character retcons.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch reviews Ed Brubaker & Sean Philips’ Incognito. He feels that the series so far lacks a certain emotional heft that the pair’s previous hardboiled collaborations Sleeper and Criminal had. My feeling is that it’s just gonna take some time to get there since you’re dealing with bastards, but he’s not wrong for the moment.

* I think Beavis and Butt-Head is truly brilliant and just as funny now as it was when I was Beavis and Butt-Head’s age, so seeing a lengthy, thoughtful review of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follett was a real treat. Set your TiVos.

* Chris Butcher and friends (I think?) review Naoki Urasawa’s Monster now that it’s all over and done with. Chris says the review’s spoilery and I’m not even close to having read the whole thing so I’m just bookmarking it for the future, but if you’ve gone through the whole thing, by all means check it out.

* Of all the things to rip off from Alex Ross, you go with the sourceless white glow???

* Odd blogospheric convergence of the day: Andrew Sullivan reads the, oh, let’s call them tea leaves regarding Michael Phelps, millennials, and marijuana through a viewing of the Friday the 13th remake.

* Helena Christensen and Ed Westwick—Gossip Girl‘s Chuck Bass—in a photo shoot inspired by The Graduate? Sure, I’ll eat it.

Delicious. (Hat tip: The Missus.)

* Nine Inch Nails touring—and recording?—with the original line-up of Jane’s Addiction as a farewell to the live incarnation of the NIN brand? Sure, I’ll eat it—and come back for seconds! In all seriousness, whatever became of the NIN/Jane’s style of dark, sexual, vaguely sinister, yet still both extremely thoughtful and hook-oriented school of alternative rock?

* Finally, Frank Santoro is a shy and retiring guy.

Ween – Push Th’ Little Daisies Music Video

Girls in floral-print sundresses and chokers…oh, the early ’90s, how I miss you.

Sulk #2: Deadly Awesome

Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist

Top Shelf, December 2008

96 pages

$10

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

The first thing you have to do when you read Jeffrey Brown’s all-MMA issue of his new one-man anthology title is disabuse yourself of any preconceptions the phrase “86-page fight scene” may engender. I myself was picturing a lengthy Frank Milleresque wordless slobberknocker, a showcase of action choreography. Brown had other ideas, particularly on the “wordless” score: Nearly every panel of the three-round bout between the veteran thinking-man’s-fighter Haruki Rabasaku and the charismatic bruiser Eldark Garprub is captioned or ballooned with a breakdown of their thoughts, moves, or both. Instead of dazzling us with pyrotechnics–the closest he ends up getting to that is with the very idea of the book itself–Brown uses the constant narrative jibberjabber to a) impress us with his devotee’s understanding of MMA, and b) slow time to a crawl, making each round feel like an hour’s worth of battle to the combatants. It’s an interesting move that dovetails with the story’s occasionally ruminative feel, particularly the abrupt, downbeat ending and the sensitive treatment of the two fighters’ slightly cheesy but nevertheless sincerely articulated worldviews. Now that I think of it, the vibe given off is akin to arthouse wire-fu flicks like House of Flying Daggers, not with that level of beauty of course, but in the way physical combat is treated as something both impressive and sad.

Fans of my David Bowie sketchbook galleries would be well advised to check out my introductory post at the Savage Critics.

* Now it can be told: I’ve joined the Savage Critics! I’m part of a wave of new members that includes Tucker Stone, Dick Hyacinth, David Uzumeri, and Chris Eckert. Should be a pip. Thanks to Brian Hibbs for the opportunity!

* ShockTillYouDrop.com has been speaking to Clive Barker about Hellraiser remake helmer Pascal “Martyrs” Laugier, potential Pinhead redesigns, abandoned plans for a Midnight Meat Train film trilogy, a Hellraiser spanking the censors didn’t want you to see, and more.

* Josh Cotter: killin’ it.

SPOILERS SPOILERS

* Infodump! I thought it was pretty elegantly done for all that, though, because they couched it in compelling material. With Ellen, you had her panic and confusion and desperation upon waking up in the Cylon ship, rapidly replaced by an entirely new personality for that character–the real personality for that character, as it turns out. The frisson of this material, plus getting to see her duke it out intellectually with that candy-colored clown they call the sandman, Dean Stockwell, gave her and Cavil’s part of the infodump some real charge.

* It did feel a bit like Anders’s gunshot-driven revelations could have been better conveyed over a longer period of time, or visually rather than verbally. But I also understand what the show’s temporal and financial limitations are at this point, and once they waited this long their choices were few. As I’ve said a million times, I’m here for the human drama more than I’m here for some complex mythology–after all, when you start watching BSG, the complex mythology doesn’t even exist!–so all things considered I’m really glad they’ve spent this half-season dealing with things like the coup than with mysterious flashbacks to the earth-Cylons’ past or what have you. In a way, they tried to bridge that gap in the Anders segments, having his revelations come as a direct result of the wounds he incurred during the coup, and making the main conflict in his half of the episode be “Starbuck and the Cylons want to find out what the hell’s going on” vs. “Starbuck wants to help the man she loves.” Heh, that’s the main schism of Battlestar Galactica fandom in a nutshell!

* I think the best sign of the success of the infodumps here is that my two favorite BSG bloggers, Todd VanDerWerff and Jim Henley, each preferred a different one of the two approaches.

* VanDerWerff also accurately notes that we fans have wanted to know this information for so long that his episode had a lot of goodwill to coast on in order to reach its goal. Even though the mythology isn’t necessarily my thing, I can certainly confirm that–I was just so excited to hear the story come together in a way that made sense and had some emotional and thematic heft to it that they practically could have gotten away with having a character sit in front of the camera reading it from a book.

* Part of me is a little iffy about the idea that the Cylon nuclear holocaust wasn’t really all the humans’ fault in that they built the Cylons. I know you can trace it back thousands of years or whatever, but I’m with Tigh–the Five Cylons are to blame for the depredations of the Seven Known Models at least as much as humankind is, and I’m bummed about that. You lose some of that Frankenstein’s monster mojo if that’s the case.

* The rot in the bones of the Galactica is maybe the show’s most obvious metaphor to date, but this is the time in the series for obvious metaphors as far as I’m concerned.

Sulk Vol. 1: Bighead & Friends

Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist

Top Shelf, September 2008

64 pages

$7

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

For all its lo-fi provenance, Jeffrey Brown’s art has always felt rounded and tactile and full to me. His figures may have the disproportionately large heads and bendy arms of doodled cartoons, but they move around in environments you feel like you could swing through the panel into and explore; seeing one of his gridlike pages is like being presented with an array of tiny windows that way. Meanwhile there’s an emphasis on shading that reinforces the palpability of what he’s drawing. There really isn’t anything else, including (or perhaps especially) all the young cartoonists you see upon whom Brown is an obvious influence, that looks like it. It works a lot differently than, say, David Heatley’s stuff, despite the surface similarities you’d find between two guys who do lo-fi autobio comics with lots of little panels.

Bighead isn’t autobio, there aren’t a lot of little panels, and it’s only barely lo-fi, but all of the above still stands. In the past, this kind of parody work is the closest Brown has come to really showing off his chops, and that trend continues. All those penstroke shading lines frequently accrue into something rather lovely–the robotic arms of the Claw’s deathtrap, the darkness of “one of Chicago’s famous ‘indie rock’ shows,” the vortext that swallows the Author when he messes with reality a little too much.

Meanwhile the superhero parody gags made me laugh repeatedly, particularly the dialogue. Brown really nails overwrought, superhero house-style banter that makes it seem like its author doesn’t quite understand how to write. “This time you’ve gone too far, The Claw!” “I’m crazy? I’m crazy?! Don’t you know who you’re talking to? You’re talking to me!” There are equally effective sight gags, from the Superboy-like Little Bighead getting so emotional about the Pacifier’s rampage that he finally just breaks down and starts sucking on the vigilante’s rubber-nipple headgear to the opening splash page of Bighead crashing through a window with a caption reading “HOLY SHIT!” And then there’s the tragic tale of Beefy Hipster, driven to supercrime by his inability to fit into his favorite band’s American Peril t-shirts.

It’s a funny, intelligently drawn superhero humor comic, and usually you can only get one or the other, if anything, so if you want to laugh at superhero comics that actually are intriguing to look at, by all means check this out.

SPOILER SECURITY DEVICE

* This has already come up this season, but it bears repeating: It’s a lot tougher for the show to do “shapeless dread” now that we’ve met all the Others, and gotten a good look at the Smoke Monster, and learned that the Dharma Initiative was ultimately a bit on the ineffectual side, and discovered that it’s all part of some great game between Ben Linus and a British tycoon, and so on and so forth, than it was back in Season One when you had no idea what the fuck was going on. So this episode was an all-out effort to, in the words of “The Battle of Evermore,” bring it back. Smoke monster attacks, crazy Rousseau, “the sickness” turning out not to be the time-travel aneurysms at all, brainwashed Frenchmen, Christian/Jacob, the freaking Temple at long last, “This place is death!“…the aim was to freak you out with mystery and terror. It worked pretty well. It still wasn’t as scary as the show used to be (remember the hieroglyphics on the countdown clock, or when the pilot got snatched out of the plane, or “we’re gonna have to take the boy,” or “help…me…”)?–but maybe we’ll get there this season if and when Jacob starts playing a bigger role.

* In the latest of his unceasingly excellent weekly Lost reviews, Todd VanDerWerff points out that the absence of flashbacks and flashforwards removes some of the intra-episode narrative coherence from how the show tells its story. Instead of having a subplot with a beginning, middle, and ending within the hour even as the larger Island plot rolls on, now it’s all plot, which (as I said of the premiere) gives the episodes a slightly overstuffed feel at times. But the pace is so breakneck, and the movement toward a destination seemingly so assured, that it’s still really satisfying, I think.

* Gory, wasn’t it? Bone shards, fly-ridden corpses, dismembered arms–it was the Geoff Johns episode of Lost. Good for them! Lost at its best is full of pulp thrills.

* This is probably an awful thing to say, but I never found Rebecca “Charlotte” Mader attractive until she went nuts and started dying. Those crazy-eyes! Hubba hubba.

* You know what? I think that’s an okay thing to say. The attractiveness of its leads is a big part of Lost’s appeal, and not just for dudes–it’s the one show I can think of where female fans seem to be randier for the male cast than male fans are for the female cast. But seriously: Evangeline Lily, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emilie De Ravin, Maggie Grace, Yunjin Kim, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros, Sonya Walger? Damn. See what I mean? Pulp thrills.

* I chuckled at how in-your-face that cliffhanger ending was.

* Cold Heat has a blog? And Frank Santoro and BJ are doing something in Mome? Hot cha!

* So, looks like They might have approached the Wachowski Brothers about directing a Superman reboot trilogy. I can’t imagine that Warner Bros. is in a “let’s put a franchise in the hands of the Wachwoskis” mood after Speed Racer and The Matrix Revolutions, so in general I echo Rob Bricken’s call for calm, but for now I’ll play along because there’s a possibility this could end up being really cool. Speed Racer would be a terrific direction for a more science-fiction/fighting with Brainiac, Bizarro, and Darkseid Superman movie to go in visually, while the aerial battle between Neo and Smith at the end of the third Matrix flick was already the best Superman fight scene ever filmed.

* David Cronenberg directing Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in a Robert Ludlum adaptation? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* The Descent 2 trailer was up but is no longer. Oh well.

* I liked Dash Shaw’s Best Comics of 2008 list.

* Speaking of Dash, he’s finished Body World, which gives me a decent excuse to read it from start to finish.

* Something about this sentence cracked me up: “Like so many bloggers, I was a big fan of Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca’s 2004 series Street Angel.” Like so many bloggers and so few readers, alas. But it was a great comic and the short live-action film version of it looks pretty great.

* Eve Tushnet waxes enthusiastic about the Brian Michael Bendis/Michael Gaydos Alias reunion.

* Bruce Campbell says no to Evil Dead IV. This comes several years after I said no to Evil Dead IV.

* Finally, like everyone else on the comics Internet, I bow before the almighty majesty of Alvin Buenaventura’s star-studded Angouleme Festival flickr set.

Seeing R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes in the same picture makes my Bowie sketchbook ache. (Can you imagine how Crumb would react if I asked him for a drawing of Ziggy Stardust?)

* This sort of thing tickles me pink: Political bloggers Jonah Goldberg, Robert Farley, Spencer Ackerman, Robert Farley again, and Matthew Yglesias discuss recent developments in the world of Battlestar Galactica. There’s something really funny about people who normally write about the Middle East policy or the stimulus package addressing in-world politics like dudes in the Android’s Dungeon on New Comics Day arguing over whether or not Wolverine would really say that. The second Farley post in particular is gloriously nerdy in that regard. Also, this reminds me that I have a theory regarding the changes in behavior amongst the Cylons that I need to explore here on the blog at some point.

* For me, the appeal of a second Hobbit movie that fleshes out the stuff going on off-page during and after Bilbo Baggins’s journey There and Back Again centered largely on the image of the White Council–Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast, Galadriel, Celeborn, Elrond, and Cirdan, if I’m not mistaken–pulling a Magnificent Seven and kicking Sauron (then still known as the Necromancer) out of his Mirkwood stronghold, Dol Guldur, which is what Gandalf was busy doing for much of the time Bilbo and the Dwarves were mucking about with the Elves, the Lakemen, and Smaug iirc. With that in mind it’s a bummer to hear Christopher “Saruman” Lee say that his advanced age would probably prevent him from traveling to New Zealand to take part in the filming, should his character be required. I’m sure he’d like to portray Saruman’s last act of benevolence just as much as I’d like to see him do so. Still, maybe they could film him in London, as the interviewer suggests? (Via The One Ring.)

* Hey, it’s the teaser trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Yay, war crimes! (Via AICN.)

* Kiel Phegley talks to Ed Brubaker about that “Marvels Project” thing I mentioned the other day. Sounds like Bru and artist Steve Epting will more or less be doing exactly what they did with Captain America, only telling the full story of Cap and the Invaders back in the past. Sign me up.

* Becky Cloonan says that Tokyopop is more or less sitting on East Coast Rising Vol. 2. Travesty.

* Eric Reynolds laments Reed’s move to make Book Expo America a permanent NYC fixture, since that’s hella inconvenient and expensive for non-NYC-based (read: non-corporate) publishers.

* Back when I was at Wizard, one of my favorite tasks was helping to assemble a publication called PosterMania, which was nothing more or less than a collection of pullout poster versions of various covers and occasionally splash pages from various publishers. Comic Books! is essentially the exact same thing in tumblr form. Its taste and mine don’t line up perfectly, and it’s virtually all Big Two stuff, but frankly there are a lot of cool covers from those companies around, so this was quite a find for me. I’d imagine there are plenty of people reading this blog who would be perfectly happy if there only interaction with these properties were things like this Mark Chiarello Two-Face: Year One cover, for example. (Via Sean B.)

* Ladies and gentlemen, in honor of his uncredited cameo as General Zod in this week’s Pablo Raimondi-illustrated issue of Action Comics, a young Ian McShane. Break open the fuckin’ canned peaches indeed.

* Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman follow up on disturbing recent moves by the Obama administration regarding state secrets & extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention respectively.

* Finally, I support this idea of Heidi MacDonald’s:

* Fist bumping should replace handshakes as the official con greeting to slow spread of Con SARS.

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe

Bryan Lee O’Malley, writer/artist

Oni Press, February 2009

192 pages

$11.95

Buy it from Oni

Buy it from Amazon.com

The greatest trick Scott Pilgrim ever pulled was convincing you its conscience didn’t exist. For a long time, the series’ skeptics criticized the shortcomings of the characters as though their existence was a shortcoming of their creator–as though writer/artist O’Malley was unaware that Scott was kind of shiftless and feckless, or that Ramona Flowers was a little bit cruel and aloof, or that their group of friends was cliquey and catty. I definitely see where such critics are coming from, for a couple of reasons: first, that was pretty much my line of attack when I first read Jaime Hernandez’s Locas material (newsflash: Hopey’s a jerk and Maggie’s a mess!); second, I am now a 30-year-old married homeowner in Levittown, and the further I get from Scott’s situation, the harder it gets to relate to, or even in some ways really care about, his plight.

But over the past three volumes, O’Malley has slowly pulled back the operating curtain to reveal the beating heart of the series; if you’ll allow me to mix metaphors, what this means is that the chickens have been coming home to roost. It turns out that all those evil ex-boyfriends aren’t just plot devices, but people who’ve had a lasting effect on how Ramona lives. It turns out that Scott’s glibness both hurts his relationship(s) and enables him to see their potential when others can no longer do so. It turns out that Knives’s lasting crush on Scott isn’t just a funny recurring gag, but something that’s screwing up her life and causing her to screw up the lives of those around her. It turns out that all the “we suck”isms the band indulges in actually have power in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way. It turns out that supporting players have lives of their own and that they can really grow to dislike how oblivious the main characters are to that fact. And so on and so forth.

At the risk of saying what I say any time a new Scott Pilgrim comes out, the singular achievement of the series is conveying all this stuff through the visual language of video games, action comics, and shonen manga. By all means, let the evil ex-boyfriends whose attack finally splits up Scott and Ramona be Japanese hipster versions of Tomax and Xamot, the creepy Crimson Twins from G.I. Joe. Let the fact that Scott is going to have a very rough time in this volume be foreshadowed by not collecting any loot when he defeats a tiny robot at a party. Let the whole emotional tone of the book be telegraphed in a pair of anecdotes about ’80s Chris Claremont X-Men storylines. Let trying to figure out Ramona’s big secret be represented by having her inexplicably glow every once in a while–and then let that be conveyed in part through having a foil cover!

I’m not trying to make the case that Scott Pilgrim fleshes out its characters or connects emotionally the way a good Clowes or Burns or Tomine graphic novel about young people trying to form and maintain relationships does, or that addressing such people is completely unprecedented. It doesn’t and it obviously isn’t. It’s still as much or more about screwball comedy and banter and clever visual elements as all that. But it’s a really fun book, and a lovely-looking book, and ultimately, surprisingly, a complex book. Pretty sneaky, Scott.

* Austin English interviews Theo Ellsworth, author of Capacity, one of the very best comics of 2008. Dude draws 10-13 hours a day!

* Todd VanDerWerrf’s latest Battlestar Galactica review is must reading as always.

* Chris Butcher adds a little bit to his earlier thoughts on Diamond raising its order minimums, mainly regarding the notion that a cratering market forced Diamond’s hand on the move.

* Rickey Purdin presents a con report featuring pix of sketches, loot, panels, thank-yous, the usual fun con-report stuff.

* They’re fucking arresting people in the Michael Phelps “case.” This is Drug War madness at its absolute maddest. Arresting eight people because the greatest Olympic athlete of all time hit a bong! I guess he’s a huge threat to society, huh? At any rate, pleasure must be prosecuted at all costs. Fucking Anti-Life. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Finally, videogame characters that look like David Bowie. (Hat tip: Ryan “Agent M” Penagos.)

SPOILER TIME

* I really, really enjoyed this storyline. Like I’ve said, I was hoping that the discovery of Earth would really reveal major cracks in what’s left of the humans’ civil society, and this sort of thing was exactly what I meant. Zarek had been a terrorist long ago, but in this episode he seemed to be showing a level of barbarity that surprised even him–that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. It’s what I want from Battlestar Galactica.

* I don’t get the notion–which to be fair I’ve only seen expressed by other people who don’t get it–that the storyline is pointless and that the resolution we saw last night represents a return to the status quo ante. If Battlestar Galactica does anything well it’s showing how long-lasting the consequences of old storylines can be–I mean, half of the lead mutineers here were Pegasus refugees, Gaeta’s motivations can be traced back to New Caprica, and his relationship with Baltar is one of the oldest, if quietest, running gags on the show. I can’t imagine that at this stage in the game, a briefly successful coup that resulted in the death of virtually the entire government except a President who is herself dying is going to get swept under the rug.

* I like when the show does action and gives its action heroes action hero stuff to do, so seeing Starbuck and Apollo run around with guns like the old days was a real treat.

* On a related note, even though I wish the commercials hadn’t spoiled this for weeks, Roslin completely going nuts gave me chills like crazy. It was very very clever of Mary McDonnell to riff on Hillary Clinton’s trademark strident vocal pitch, but the way it seemed to vomit out of her, as opposed to Clinton’s rather robotic rallying cries, was really frightening. A great, show-defining moment.

* You know one thing that does bother me about the show? It’s never ever fleshed out the marines, or made them anything other than thugs. It’s a weird dropped ball.

* Attention to detail alert: the little puddles of water and urine beneath the urinals.

* Attention to Freud alert: Starbuck braining a dude as he’s draining the lizard.

* The scene between Baltar and Gaeta was one of my favorites in the entire history of the show. It gave James Callis more to do than he’s had to do in the season so far. It followed up on a long-established relationship that hadn’t been at the fore of the show in a long long time, which is the sort of thing I always appreciate in long-running serialized dramas. It was probably Alessandro Juliani’s finest few moments as an actor. I think there was something moving about how these two have sinned against so many people, and each other, and yet in that brief moment managed to forgive themselves and each other and take comfort in one another. As a Deadwood fan, I’m a sucker for when grown men cry because they love each other.

* Maybe even more moving? Zarek managing a smile for Felix, and Felix smiling back. They’re human, after all. Somehow, showing that made the show simultaneously more uplifting and more depressing. And again, that’s what I want from Battlestar Galactica.

* I suppose that if you held a gun to my head I’d have to tell you I thought that the itch in Gaeta’s stump going away right before he gets executed was a little much, but only if you held a gun to my head.

* I know people didn’t like the Chief’s tunnel-crawling, but I thought the endless nature of it all just showed how far he was willing to go for this. It helps that Aaron Douglas is sort of the heart of the show–it fits that his Chief saved the day.

* Ending the arc with the Chief discovering literal cracks in the heart of Galactica herself–well, that’s no accident.

* 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 all, you’d be wise to check it out.

* Plugs 4 Pals part two: Justin Aclin has launched a new blog to promote Hero House, his superhero graphic novel, due from Avatar in September. Justin knows from superhero comedy, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing at all, you’d be wise to check it out.

* Tom Spurgeon explains “why Diamond’s new minimums policy is wrong, and what they should do about it.” Like some other recent efforts of that sort, it recognizes the need to square the circle between what one assumes are Diamond’s concerns about getting weighted down with unprofessional product and the rest of the industry’s concerns about Diamond’s judgement in determining what constitutes “unprofessional product.” It also unpacks several business and financial assertions made by and on behalf of Diamond that don’t hold much water upon closer examination.

* Speaking of Spurge, in a comment downblog he corrects my mischaracterization of his position regarding Final Crisis and the big superheroes in general: It’s not that he thinks they have “no juice left at all to thrill or inspire or encourage,” but that Final Crisis would have been a better book had Morrison addressed that question head on rather than taking it as a given. And he’s right, you really don’t see Morrison questioning his own beliefs in his work all that often. They’re more an articulation of those beliefs, in fact; from interviews I’ve both read and conducted with Morrison, though, I do get the sense that a lot of his darker books arise from unrelated, IRL personal problems he’s had. In this case, the implication appears to be that the notion of drab, uninspiring superheroes is one he’s confronted behind the scenes rather than on the page.

* Tom also notes, both in that comment and in his original review, that Morrisonian victories just sort of happen. I see what he’s saying–the heroes win due to inherent qualities present within them all along rather than using some newly acquired internal strengths to effect their peripeteia (note: I’d been using that word incorrectly for about a decade so I’m breaking it out now that I know that it means “reversal of fortune”)–but it still seems kosher to me since it usually takes them a lot of blood, sweat, and tears until they’re in a position where they have the confidence, know-how, or freedom to act in this way. It’s a lot different than the work of former Morrison protege Mark Millar, wherein the protagonists always just start winning because it’s the point in the narrative where that’s supposed to happen, and there really wasn’t anything stopping them from winning before then aside from Millar’s rudimentary knowledge of Robert McKee.

* NYCC news, Brian Michael Bendis division, part four: There’s a new Michael Gaydos-drawn Alias miniseries on the way. (Good catch, Kevin Melrose.)

* NYCC news: Ed Brubaker and his Captain America collaborator Steve Epting are working on something called The Marvels Project, “which explores the origins of the Marvel Universe” and launches in June according to the meager info at the link. Anyone got more substantial stuff on that?

* NYCC news: Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers? I dunno if I’ll eat it, but I’ll think it’s a terrific idea for an image, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t it be rad if it were actually about animal rights in some semi-serious way? I’ll be over here holding my breath.

* Two new series from Naoki Urasawa debut today: Pluto and 20th Century Boys. I’m curious.

* So that’s what Mat Brinkman looks like. It’s kind of a bummer that we’ve lost him to the fine art world the way we lost Dave Cooper and Marc Bell, huh?

* Lux Interior died. I’m not going to lie and say I was a big Cramps listener, aside from the healthy appreciation held by anyone who came of age in that weird early-mid-’90s period when suddenly any vaguely outsiderish subculture could get purchase in the national media and suddenly psychobilly and other revivals of ’50s trash culture were a visible thing and Beavis and Butt-Head couldn’t get over how awesome the title “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” was. But one deep-seated belief I always had was that “Lux Interior” is the best, funniest nom de rock invented by anyone ever. And now, after seeing clips of the relevant show here and there around the internet, a belief that the band’s 1978 gig at California’s Napa State Mental Hospital is one of the most inspired and subversive ideas ever had by a rock band is gaining ground fast. I’ve spent a little more time in mental institutions than I ever anticipated or hoped to spend, and there’s this mix of rage and excitement and fear and crazy happiness you feel that is embodied pretty well by sticking a bunch of weirdos in the middle and letting them play down and dirty rock and roll.

* The Obama administration has decided to back the Bush administration’s use of extraordinary rendition as a backdoor to torture by officially declaring its belief that a lawsuit regarding the practice is off limits to the courts due to “state secrets.” The read seems to be that this is more an matter of the new administration attempting to keep the previous administration from being on the receiving end of legal action than with actually continuing the practice itself, but either way it’s scary. Glenn Greenwald has more.

* Finally, if you’ve never heard the story of the life and loves Genesis P-Orridge, coiner of the terms “industrial music” and “acid house” and one of my childhood heroes–particularly the part of the story about how he’s had extensive surgery, including breast implants, to make himself look more like his late wife–this profile of Gen is for you. (Via 33 1/3.)

Cry Yourself to Sleep

Jeremy Tinder, writer/artist

Top Shelf Productions, 2006

88 pages

$7

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on July 23, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

Try to contain your surprise: This book from Top Shelf contains cute, anthropomorphized animals! Gee, I hope you were sitting down. Ah, I kid because I love, of course. And while it is true that Top Shelf has returned to that Chunky Rice sweet spot many a time since Craig Thompson knocked one out of the park with it years ago, Jeremy Tinder’s Cry Yourself to Sleep distinguishes itself by, well, distinguishing itself. It doesn’t go in for the cute-overload of a Spiral-Bound, nor for the tremulous quasi-mysticism of a Pulpatoon Pilgrimage (the AdHouse Books effort that of all post-Chunky “Manimals’ Search for Meaning” books feels most like a Craig Thompson cover band). It mainly sets out to be funny, and quite happily, it succeeds.

It’s a slight volume with a slight plot: Over the course of a couple of days, three pretty much adorable characters intended as stand-ins for the book’s twentysomething target audience–a guy named Andy, a rabbit named Jim, and a robot named The Robot–struggle with three early-life crises–Andy’s novel is rejected by a publisher, Jim gets fired from his job, and The Robot realizes he’s a soulless jerk. A pair of pages in which three successive, nearly identical panels tie each of the characters’ stories together bookend the book. But to his credit, Tinder’s emphasis is not on setting up an overly neat ‘n’ sweet parallel structure, but on the comedic potential of how the individual stories ramble their way to their respective conclusions. Andy’s story in particular is peppered with amusing digressions: an interlude in which a little kid sports a fake handlebar moustache in an ill-fated attempt to browse the adult section in the video store where Andy works, another in which Andy’s friend Nate (who happens to be a little bear who wears glasses) advises him to spice up his novel by inserting a completely unrelated misadventure experienced by Nate’s menopausal mom. Sure, both scenes have that “well, this is my first graphic novel, and these are really funny, so I’m getting them in there come hell or high water” feeling to them–especially the menopause story, which is pitched to Andy for precisely that reason–but Tinder pulls it off with keen pacing and exceptional cartooning (his character designs are easily the strongest funny-animal work being done in this vein today–check out poor hot-flashing Joan Bear’s furrowed brow and preposterous hair). The fact that his jokes are actually funny is obviously key. Unemployed rabbit Jim gets the best of them when he’s fired from his job at a sandwich shop for getting fur in the subs, complains that the latex gloves he’s supposed to wear don’t fit him because he doesn’t have fingers, then gets reprimanded by his (human) father for “play[ing] the species card.” The Robot’s got some rock-solid moments as well. His entire quest to become as free as a (literal) bird reads like a good-natured roast of such alternative comics tropes, and in the lachrymose sequence that gives the book its title, you’ll notice that there’s no tears to be found on his metal face–robots can’t cry, duh. An occasional hint of mawkishness creeps may creep through now and then (that by-the-numbers romantic subplot at Andy’s video store, for example), but overall the saccharine level is refreshingly low. The goal of Cry is simple: to make you smile. Mission accomplished.

* NYCC news, Brian Michael Bendis division, part one: Ultimate Spider-Man is being cancelled and relaunched as Ultimate Comics Spider-Man. According to the interview with Bendis at the link, this entails a new #1 issue; a new artist, David Lafuente; a more shared-universe feel between UCSM and the rest of the rechristened Ultimate Comics line; a phasing-out of Spidey’s two biggest antagonists, the Green Goblin and the Kingpin; and most interestingly, if the interview is to be believed and depending on how you parse what is said, a new character as Spidey. There will also be a two-issue sign-off for the original series called Ultimate Spider-Man: Requiem, featuring Mark Bagley and Stuart Immonen.Ultimate Spider-Man has been a lot of fun for a lot of issues, so I’m quite interested in seeing how this pans out.

* NYCC news, Brian Michael Bendis division, part two: Powers is also being relaunched with a new #1 issue. Bendis blames its erratic shipping schedule, which he was “embarrassed” by, for the move, and says he and artist Michael Avon Oeming are stockpiling issues before restarting it. Powers, too, is a very good comic, but it’s hard for it to get traction in your head when it comes out so sporadically. I’d love for it to arrive on a consistent basis so that it gets a little more oomph.

* NYCC news, Brian Michael Bendis division, part three: Powers is headed for a TV adaptation on FX. Of course I’ve been hearing about live-action Powers adaptations all decade long, so I probably won’t be holding my breath, but it would be awfully nice if someone could pull off serialized live-action non-ridiculous superhero storytelling, wouldn’t it?

(Many of the above links via Kevin Melrose.)

* NYCC news: Geoff Johns is launching a new Adventure Comics series. It will feature the Legion of Super-Heroes–presumably the grown-up versions of the original Legion, whom we’ve seen in Johns’s Action Comics, Justice Society of America, and Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, as well as the Superman villains Lex Luthor, Bizarro, and Brainiac. In other words it’s a continuation of Johns’s excellent Action Comics run, more or less, so I’m excited about it.

* NYCC news: There’s a new Taiyo Matsumoto book called Gogo Monster on its way from Viz this November.

* NYCC news: Pixu II came out and I totally missed it, dammit.

* NYCC news: Kiel Phegley presents the best of the ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference. I think the most interesting exchange involves Marvel’s Executive VP – Global Digital Media Group Ira Rubenstein and what could charitably be described as a downplaying of fanfiction and, really surprisingly given his job, YouTube.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror has once again polled a variety of online horror commentary luminaries to create a list of the Top 20 Foreign Horror Films of All Time. Bucking the trend of the previous lists regarding the age-to-ranking ration, the number one film is also the most recent, Let the Right One In. My guess is that this is simply because it’s the one foreign horror film that nearly every horror blogger has seen.

* Fantagraphics is launching Johnny Ryan’s Blecky Yuckerella as a webcomic!

* I really liked my pal Sam Walker’s ideas for famous images she’d like to see reinterpreted by comics artists.

* Monster Brains T-shirts? Yes please.

* I’ll stop posting drawings by Jim Woodring when they stop looking like this.

* I’ll stop posting pictures of Kate Winslet when they stop looking like this.

* The one good thing about this Michael Phelps marijuana nonsense is how everyone who isn’t the news media or Phelps’s sponsors seems to realize that it is, in fact, nonsense. In a political culture given to fits of fact-free stupidity on a daily basis, reefer madness may well be the stupidest of it.

* Finally, my friend Sarah took some steps to protect her neighborhood this weekend.

Please read this before viewing the images below.

Done?

This plus this equals this:

(courtesy of the comic genius of Matt Wiegle)