Archive for March 23, 2009

Comics Time: Ojingogo

March 23, 2009

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Ojingogo

Matthew Forsythe, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, September 2008

152 pages

$14.95

Buy it from D&Q

Buy it from Amazon.com

Ojingogo reminds me of the immersive, action-intensive creature comics of Fort Thunder alums Brian Ralph and Mat Brinkman released by Highwater Books earlier this decade, books like Cave-In and Teratoid Heights. Heck, you could lump Brian Chippendale’s Maggots in there too if you wanted. Little critter guys wander around meeting other weird critters who grow or shrink or try to eat them in various configurations. There’s some video game logic to it, some children’s book overtones too. It’s a fun template.

But where Matthew Forsythe falls short of the Fort Thunder gang is in creating interpretable, continuous environments in which these adventures take place. Teratoid Heights, for example, was rigorously laid out from panel to panel; no matter how odd the protagonists or how nightmarish or isolated the space in which they moved, you could easily see the continuity from one panel to the next, to the point where he could cut to another character for panels or pages at a time and the second he returned you to the original character you still knew where you were. In Cave-In, Ralph’s sumptuous, textural backgrounds provided a sense that you were moving through a concrete, cohesive space. Maggots‘s frequently blacked-out backgrounds removed that tool from Chippendale’s continuity-of-action arsenal but provided a strange sense of unity all their own, while his intuitive Chutes ‘n’ Ladders layouts literally forced you to increase your concentration on continuity.

Ojingogo offers no such aid. Cuts between characters are frequent and sudden, with little to indicate why we’re switching viewpoints or where we’re switching our viewpoint to. This in turn makes it difficult to string together behavioral causes-and-effects for the characters and what they do. I was frequently at a loss as to why characters who seemed friendly were now fighting or vice versa, or why characters who were together were now separate, and so on. And when you have that much trouble figuring out basic things like the relationships between the protagonists, the creature-feature flights of fancy–growing, shrinking, transforming, etc.–become even more difficult to contextualize. By the end of the book I was just kind of turning the pages and looking at the pictures as much as I was reading the comic. There are certainly pleasures to be had in reading the book that way: Forsythe’s Koreana (is there such a word?) character designs are delightful, his line and use of graytones are pretty much perfect for this kind of comic, he has a real knack for body language (there was one sequence in which a Brinkman-esque giant squatted down to take a look at something that really strcuk me), and there are occasional moments of humor that made me chuckle (like when a pair of characters set up one of those box/stick/string traps to try and capture another creature, but it turns out he’s now like five times as big as they are, and he bounds past them, and as they stand there stunned, the box-trap falls shut on nothing). But with so little in the way of continuity of action or imagery, it’s a lot like reading little vignettes at random–you just couldn’t immerse yourself in it if you wanted to. Maybe this is a function of the book’s original life as a webcomic, but it makes for a frustrating read as a graphic novel, because you know how well it could work.

Seanmix – Cigarettes, Ice Cream, Figurines of the Virgin Mary: A Personal Best of King Crimson

March 21, 2009

Emphasis on “personal best” this time, most definitely. This is by no means anything close to an authoritative Crimso mix–it simply contains songs from the four albums I own: In the Court of the Crimson King, which is the debut with the famous album cover everyone’s seen and features Greg Lake on vocals with lyrics by Peter Sinfield; and Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black, and Red, the three 1972-1974 albums featuring several configurations of musicians but all including the core lineup of KC mastermind Robert Fripp on vocals and keyboards, John Wetton on bass and vocals, and Bill Bruford on drums and percussion, with lyricist Richard Palmer-James and violinist David Cross. But while my overall knowledge of King Crimson may run an inch wide, my affection for this material is a mile deep. I listen to the tracks on this mix more than pretty much any other heavy guitar-based music I own. For some reason, when I’m feeling particularly charged up (especially with creative energy), this music is exactly what I want to hear. I think this is a solid (and brief–under an hour!) introduction to what makes the band’s material from this era so dynamic, intelligent, and lacerating.

Cigarettes, Ice Cream, Figurines of the Virgin Mary: A Personal Best of King Crimson

The Great Deceiver / Lament / Red / The Court of the Crimson King (Including The Return of the Fire Witch and The Dance of the Puppets) / Fallen Angel / 21st Century Schizoid Man (Including Mirrors) / Easy Money / Starless

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Not newsprint

March 21, 2009

Wednesday Comics isn’t going to be on newsprint, I’m told. Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat regrets the error.

Very, very brief Battlestar Galactica thoughts

March 20, 2009

SPOILERS

* Well. Well, well, well.

* A while ago I wondered aloud whether the final act of the show would end up having been about what happens to a society when it gives up. Turns out I was right, but not in the way I expected. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, I think.

* In general I think the show went with the ballsiest possible “out” for each of its central conundrums. The Colonials’ “Earth” wasn’t our “Earth”! They really were angels! Kara just disappears! The inevitable rapprochement between humans, rebel Cylons, and hardline Cylons is scuttled because of freaking Cally! Hera is only kinda sorta the key to survival, all the visions about the opera house were really just set-up to make sure that a bunch of people saved this kid’s life…but then as it turns out, she’s Eve! Tack on a good old-fashioned thought-provoking science-fiction ending and I’m sound as a pound.

* It was a very, very good decision to spend so much of the end focusing on Gaius, my favorite character and my favorite performance in the series. I found myself wishing a bit that he was given as much close-up time as he was during that episode a few seasons back where Adama tortured him, which was where I really fell in love with him, but what he did with what he had was just lovely. When he said “I know about farming” and cried, that’s when I finally teared up. I love that poor man.

* Other things I liked: Tory getting her comeuppance and the Chief’s lonely denouement in Scotland. Tigh saying if someone had done that to Ellen, he’d have done the same thing Chief did, when of course someone DID do that to Ellen–Tigh himself. (Ellen seemed to notice.) All the climactic battle stuff, particularly the fate of Racetrack and Skulls and the Centurion-on-Centurion violence. The whole cockamamie plan for the attack. Cavil’s last word. Anders’s fate. Apollo finally getting something of weight to do once again: a) guide the human and Cylon civilizations into a new dawn; b) see Kara off. Laura getting laid (HOT). Kara and Lee nearly doing it (also HOT, and also a callback to the fact that those two were never meant to wind up together, godsdammit). Seeing Bulldog (I think???) among the Marines boarding the Cylon Colony. Admiral Hoshi and President Lampkin, no matter how ridiculous that might have been. The fact that the Baltar Army subplot went nowhere except as a headfake. The randomness and camaraderie of the Apollo/Doc Cottle/Baltar/Hoshi/Tigh/Adama scouting party. Giving the last words to Head Six and Head Baltar.

* Unsolved mysteries: What happens to the hardline skinjob Cylons? What happens to the freed Centurions?

* And of course, “You know it doesn’t like that name.”

* Oh, Battlestar Galactica, I will miss you very much.

Carnival of souls: special “the fruit’s at the bottom” edition

March 20, 2009

* Here’s that follow-up Grant Morrison interview mentioned yesterday, and here’s what it says about his project with the Charlton characters, the same ones that inspired Watchmen:

I’ve just been doing an Earth Four book, which is the Charlton characters but I’ve decided to write it like ‘Watchmen.’ [laughs] So it’s written backwards and sideways and filled with all kinds of symbolism and because of that it’s taking quite a long time to write.

It sounds like it’s not a standalone book at all, but part of a larger series about the DC Multiverse. And that’s about the extent of what he says about the project–the interview is mostly about Seaguy Vol. 2…of which he says “This is my ‘Watchmen,’ really.” Sometimes I wonder why he doesn’t just build a house in Alan Moore’s backyard and make rude gestures at him over the fence.

* Speaking of which! Morrison’s seemingly abortive stab at the one-time Alan Moore series Wildcats is actually going to come out! This collaboration with creator Jim Lee managed to produce all of one issue before going dormant and basically taking the entire WildStorm Universe down with it; now it’s being prepped as a graphic novel that will be solicited upon completion. It beats having Lee do random covers, that’s for sure; I’ve read the pitch/outline and it sounds like the rest of the series will be a hoot.

* Also at that link there’s some info on DC’s next weekly comic, a 12-issue summer project called Wednesday Comics that will serialize 15 stories by various prominent creators one page per newsprint-broadsheet issue. On the one hand this is a really neat idea, especially since it’s going to contain a Paul Pope comic and that ridonkulously good-looking Kyle Baker Hawkman project, but on the other hand I remember how much I hate newspaper comic books–they’re chintzy and unpleasant to look at and touch. I can’t imagine collecting a book that looks like the Comic Shop News.

* Ed Brubaker is leaving Daredevil with issue #500; Andy Diggle is taking over. This robs the weekly comics reviewers of the world of the opportunity to call the book “solid” or “boring” once a month. (I was definitely on the “solid” side.) Brubaker seems to be paring down his projects somewhat–he obviously left Immortal Iron Fist a while ago and even before that Matt Fraction was really scripting it, he’s leaving Daredevil, and since I haven’t cared for his Uncanny X-Men work I haven’t been following it but I think he handed that book off to Fraction too. But man–Captain America, Daredevil, Immortal Iron Fist, and Criminal? That was a solid line-up, the best since Bendis’s Alias/Powers/Daredevil/Ultimate Spider-Man halcyon days.

* Tim O’Neil keeps on halving the infinite distance between him and a Kingdom Come review. This time around he provides a visual contrast between KC and Marvels‘ Alex Ross visuals what else you could find on the stands at the time, and it’s truly striking.

* In a mind-meld of wildly talented curmudgeons, Tom Spurgeon says he’s tempted to agree with Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell that the comics industry is a lost cause. I think that this stems at least in part from some disagreeable “Where has it gone, the beautiful music of our grandparents?” sentiments on the aesthetic end, and I’ve expounded upon that in the past to pretty much everyone’s chagrin, but Tom mainly focuses on the business end: How corporate executives essentially loot the creative legacies of an army of craftsmen and geniuses and are applauded for it, while striving to maximize short-term profits in a way that may have already sown the seeds of future irrelevancy or insolvency.

Since I returned to comics blogging I’ve tried to steer clear of these kinds of arguments, because I really don’t know what I’m talking about and lack the access and intelligence to learn. As a result, while I occasionally agitate about ethical matters and business matters that pertain directly to ease of access to good comics, it’s really that last point–access to good comics–that is all that matters to me. I tend to believe, for whatever reason, that good comics will continue to come out and I will continue to be able to read them.

However, looking around me right now, I see that we’re probably witnessing the death of the newspaper, and with it two historically prominent forms of comics: the funnies and editorial cartoons. This hasn’t fazed me all that much, because I haven’t read the funnies with any regularity ever, and not even semi-regularity since the end of The Far Side, really the only strip that was even close to “appointment reading” for me. Meanwhile, I actively dislike editorial cartooning as a discipline; I think it inherently dumbs down complex issues into strident preach-to-the-choir imagery in a way that is very bad for overall political intelligence, like Glenn Beck with crosshatching, and I think there have been maybe half a dozen consistent exceptions to that rule in the form’s entire history. But comic books and graphic novels are things I do care about. Now I see that something that once seemed untouchable can in fact be lost, and comic books haven’t seemed untouchable for decades. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize “wow, comics really were a lost cause, and now we’ve lost them.”

* Curt Purcell continues his own series of posts on superhero comics, this one examining the notion that deconstructionist superhero comics like Watchmen and Brat Pack take the genre to its “logical conclusions.” The thing is, I usually understand the use of that term in that context to refer to the in-story ramifications of the existence of superhumans, costumed vigilantes, super-science and the like. How would a group like the Justice League deal with quotidian social and political crises? How would godlike beings and scientific geniuses interact with the military or the automotive industry? So, you get books like Squadron Supreme and The Authority where the heroes just say “fuck it” and take over the world; you get books like Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan singlehandedly creates a viable electric-car industry. The ideas are what’s been taken to their “logical conclusions.” I think where people go wrong–creators and critics alike–is by conflating those conclusions with the idea that the genre itself reaches its “conclusion” with such stories. I believe the idea is that once we see what superheroes would “really” do, we can never go back; in reality, I think most readers made their peace with the idea that superheroes are an impossibility just like vampires or zombie apocalypses or alien invasions, so following the logical ramifications of their existence further down the track than we usually go doesn’t do anything that the standard suspension of disbelief we employ when we read superhero stories can’t undo the next time we want to read a more traditional super-tale. Of course, the big difference between superheroes and other fantastic fiction is that superheroes require a certain suspsension of disbelief not just in terms of what’s physically possible, but in terms of basic human behavior. There’s really nothing preventing someone from becoming Batman, for example, and yet nothing like that has ever happened in the entire course of human history. But generally speaking, that’s not what the books that take superheroes to their “logical conclusions” are usually addressing. Sometimes they take to task the kinds of personality traits that might lead one to wear a mask and assault strangers, but that’s not saying anything we don’t already know about people in positions of authority who use violence as part of their jobs–if you were to directly address the implausibility of the kind of costumed one-man-war-on-crime represented by Batman, you couldn’t actually do the comic.

…and the rest: Lost thoughts extra

March 20, 2009

During an email discussion with some friends about the most recent episode of Lost, someone brought up Rose, Bernard, and the rest of the surviving castaways, and how they’ve disappeared, and what happened to them. Some of my friends basically just said “jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.” Others said that their disappearance matters to them, because it ought to matter to the main characters. My pal Kiel Phegley put it like this:

…if Lindelof, Cuse and the rest want me to think that Jack and company are doing something of worth and are worth my support and investment, then I can’t just accept that the only people it’s important for them to save are the ones they’ve either slept with or who have mind powers.

This is really interesting to me.

Back in Season One, as it became apparent that of the 48 castaways we’d only ever be focusing on about a dozen or so, and as it became apparent that there was something really weird about the Island, and as certain characters like Locke argued that they were “meant to be here,” the question of why it was the above-the-credits cast that mattered and not the extras, aka redshirts, first popped into my head. Obviously, the real answer here is “because that’s how TV works,” but what diegetic explanation would the show concoct? The first time this was addressed in-show was with Dr. Arzt, who complained to Hurley or Charlie or whoever it was about the main characters’ “adventure club” or whatever he called it. I was fascinated that characters within the show’s world had realized that some of them were more important than others. At that point, though, we still didn’t really know why this was, or even IF it was actually true.

As the seasons progressed, the show began to reinforce the notion that these characters we’re following were in fact the most important ones, using various plot points to make this argument. They were the characters who had to press the button. They were the character’s on the list given to Michael. They were the characters giving birth to babies, or who had children with special powers. They were the characters on “Jacob’s list.” And so on and so forth. The reason we were following them rather than Scott, Steve, Frogurt and the other randies really WAS because they were more important, or at least seen as being more important by the Others and/or the Island itself.

By the time we’ve reached where we are now, that’s been taken even further. These are the characters who comprise the Oceanic Six. They’re the characters that Ben, Christian, and by extension Jacob INSIST must return to the Island in order to save it. They’re the only characters even CAPABLE of returning to the Island. They’re the characters that traveled through time and are therefore having double the impact on the Island’s history. By comparison, the redshirts mean less and less.

But here’s the thing. As we learn that they really don’t mean anything to the Island, they mean less and less within the world of the show; that is to say they mean less and less to the plot, they mean less and less as plot drivers. And therefore, the creators of the show seem to believe they mean less and less in terms of the audience’s emotional investment in them versus our emotional investment in the main characters, simply given the amount of relative screentime and story importance each group has been given.

However, main characters, and the audience, are NOT the Island. Whatever the redshirts’ lack of importance may be in terms of the Island and what its powers mean for those who try to harness them and for the world at large, we the audience understand on some level that they’re supposed to be actual, full human beings. We may not have seen Kate go swimming with them or Sawyer play golf with them or Jack treat their headaches and splinters and so on, but presumably that happened. Presumably they had campfire singalongs with Charlie, presumably they traded some notes with Hurley about who the hell Desmond and Juliet were, presumably they wondered whether Boone and Shannon were doing it and asked other characters if they thought they had a shot, and so on and so forth. And most importantly, presumably the recent actions of Locke, Jack, and Sawyer were intended to save these anonymous souls along with the main characters–heck, it seems like Sawyer spent three years organizing grid-pattern searches of the Island just to track them down.

Here’s my point: The Island is a harsh mistress and doesn’t care about any of that. It seems as though the show is training us not to care about it all that much either. But sometimes we can’t help but do so, and when that happens, it becomes weird to realize that the main characters apparently don’t. They’re supposed to be full human beings too.

Comics Time: Cold Heat #2 & 4

March 20, 2009

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Cold Heat #2 & 4

BJ and Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc., 2006/2007

24 pages each

$5 each

Read it for free at ColdHeatComics.com

Buy it from PictureBox

Originally written I don’t remember when for WizardUniverse.com’s Thursday Morning Quarterback feature

COLD HEAT #2

The deliberately crude art style of this indier-than-indie miniseries will no doubt turn many readers of Big Two comics off. That’s a damn shame, because BJ and Santoro have created a unique and addictive hybrid of thrilling sci-fi murder mystery and drugged-up punk-rock coming-of-age tale. Continuing the story of a high school girl named Castle who’s reeling from the death of the lead singer of her favorite band and from getting dumped and fired simultaneously by the CEO of the company she was interning at, this issue introduces the man who’ll doubtlessly be the series’ big bad: Senator Wastmor. In his crazed search for the ‘killer’ of his dirtbag son—i.e. whoever provided him the drugs he O.D.’d on, at a party where Castle was the last person to see him alive—he’s the perfect portrait of the power-crazed politician: He mouths platitudes about how ‘the war on illegal drugs and underage drinking is now at its own D-Day’ on TV, while spewing obscenities and violent threats against the kids of Castle’s hometown when the camera’s off. Meanwhile, the pink-and-blue art nails the feeling of being really, really messed up as Castle takes way too many pills and gets embroiled ever deeper in the strange events befalling her town. If you can put aside your preconceptions and track down this comic, you’re in for a treat.

COLD HEAT #4

Like a 6-year-old trying to describe the awesomeness of Space Mountain at Disney World, this indie tale of sex, drugs, rock, conspiracies and alien abductions draws its strength from the contrast between the epic nature of its subject matter and the childlike way it’s presented. With its simple pink and blue color scheme and deliberately lo-fi linework, this issue’s revelation of presumed-dead rock singer Joel Cannon’s ‘2001’-style contact with extraterrestrial beings has a purity that makes up for its lack of detail, making its mystical vistas as powerful as those of any mainstream artist.

Carnival of souls

March 19, 2009

* There isn’t much in this rather sycophantic Wired.com interview with Grant Morrison you haven’t heard the writer say before, but good gravy, take a look at the cover for the collected edition of Final Crisis by J.G. Jones.

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* Actually, he does say one thing that strikes me as being some serious horror blogosphere-bait:

Wired.com: Like continuity, is crisis itself becoming obsolete? Disaster scenarios seem to just get heavier and more mind-blowing, but they also are becoming more ubiquitous. Are we too inured to apocalypse and crisis these days to be scared of it anymore?

Morrison: I don’t know if we’re so much inured to apocalypse as almost sexually obsessed by it. We could only love apocalypse more if it had 4 liters of silicone in each tit. Think of all those videogames where the Earth’s overrun by insect-aliens or there’s been an atomic war and we’re stumbling in the ruins with a gun we stole from a zombie. We should be grateful that we live in a culture so insulated from true horror it can afford to play with fear as entertainment.

That’s a rather egregious misreading of the role and provenance of horror art and entertainment, no?

* Meanwhile, the pullquote from Morrison’s interview at Comic Book Resources isn’t from Morrison himself, but from the “tune in next time” text at the bottom:

Check back with CBR News on Friday for a new interview with Grant Morrison, where he discusses “Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye,” and some other projects he’s currently writing for DC Comics including one book about the Multiverse and a second in the vein of “Watchmen” featuring the heroes of Earth-Four, who are all former Charlton Comics characters.

Emphasis mine. The war of No-Beard against All-Beard continues!

* Speaking of Alan Moore, read this conversation between Carl Wilson and Peli Grietzer about Gossip Girl. (Seriously, it has something to do with Alan Moore, I promise. The thesis they tease out is that much of the “trash culture” you see enthusiastically consumed by, oh I don’t know, ex-Ivy League pop-culture bloggers–from Gossip Girl to Britney Spears’ recent albums–is actually produced with precisely that audience in mind, often by creators who come from that demographic themselves. Given my ambivalent feelings toward “poptimism,” this quote from Grietzer stuck me:

i guess my general thought here is that so much of what’s taken to be literati\hipsters\whatever breaking beyond taste-barriers [some but not all of what ‘poptism’ delineates] is more about a certain generation taking over the production of popular culture and catering to its own tastes rather than a generation shifting its tastes towards ‘the people’.

…as did this from Wilson:

There’s research on the reasons for the “omnivorism” shift among elite consumers, some of which credit it to globalization and multiculturalism – that in the post-industrial economic order, it’s more important to demonstrate your code-switching skills, and not to seem married to a single set of cultural markers.

I resemble that remark! This is part of why I was so taken aback by Alan Moore’s dismissive comments about Hollywood filmmaking, superhero comics, and the like–the bulk of my cultural consumption and conversation takes place in a space where the more voracious a polyglot you are, and the lower your barriers to low culture, the better. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* And speaking of Gossip Girl, I have my problems with Terry Richardson, but this is not one of them.

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* Tim O’Neil continues slouching toward a Kingdom Come review, this time by pinpointing the rise of Alex Ross as the moment where DC in particular began drinking the “heroes as icons” Kool-Aid. I think you continue to see that play out everywhere from Kurt Busiek’s approach to the Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman trifecta in Trinity to the company-wise fixation on “legacy heroes.”

* This new Vertigo series Sweet Tooth from Jeff Lemire seems interesting. It doesn’t like like An HBO Original Series at all.

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* Hey, here’s what Marc Bell looks like these days: A psychotic drifter! And Chris Oliveros looks like Gary Groth’s cousin as always.

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* What is wrong with people? Something is very wrong with people.

* Charles Manson, 2009.

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* Finally,

Lost thoughts

March 19, 2009

SPOILER ALERT – SORRY I FORGOT TO ADD IT LAST WEEK BUT I IMAGINE YOU ALL KNOW THE DRILL AT THIS POINT

* Another delightful episode. It literally filled me with delight. I can’t remember exactly when–I think it was when Sawyer told Jack, Kate, and Hurley “It’s 1977”–but at one point I just leaned back and laughed, I was having such a swell time.

* With that in mind, I wish the episode were twice as long as it was. As it stood, it was an unusual episode in that there were no big revelations or dramatic reversals or other big moments. It was more a series of necessary conversations and events to bring various characters up to speed and establish a new status quo among the various groups. What happens to Jack/Kate/Hurley? What happened to Sayid? How did the Ajira plane land? Where did Frank and Sun go? How did Ben get injured? How do Sawyer and Juliet react to the return of their previous love interests? How does Jin find out about Sun’s return, and what does he do about it? How does Miles handle it? Now we know the answers to all those questions and we can move on from there.

* The episode also threw in a bonus answer or semi-answer here and there for questions we weren’t expecting the answers to just yet. For example, we learn that Horace and Amy’s baby is everyone’s favorite doctor-slash-killing-machine, Ethan. This led to maybe one of the greatest moments in the history of the show, where Juliet finds this out and her “aww wook at the widdle baby” facial expression curdles as though she just realized she’s holding the world’s most adorable giant maggot.

* We also get some more hints as to the origin of the uber-important Pearl station, as the long-rumored Radzinsky (who made the blacklight map on the blast door in the Pearl hatch) appears and is revealed as a bit of a paranoid who is apparently responsible for designing the Pearl in the first place.

* And we also discover that Young Ben Linus is in fact roaming around Dharma Village during Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel’s back-in-time sojourn there–though that then raises the question of how the time-displaced characters have been handling that bit of awkwardness.

* And oh yeah, where’s Daniel at?

* This episode also deftly managed multiple tonal shifts. You had the light ’70s-spoof comedy that happens any time we go back to the Dharma days. You had the interpersonal drama of Our Heroes and Heroines meeting up once again. You had the Season Two/Three capture-and-interrogation throwback storyline with Sayid and Jin. You had the Season One throwback storyline with the new castaways in the present day (one assumes). You had Frank’s pulse-pounding and heroic Sully Sullenberger moment. You had some really creepy moments in abandoned New Otherton with Jack’s ghostly dad. You had Scheming Sun, which gave me another favorite moment–Sun braining Ben with a paddle in a long-overdue act of comeuppance. (I always love it when Ben gets caught with his pants down.) This show can do a lot of things well.

* As far as false notes go, the only one that stuck out to me was Sawyer’s sudden upbraiding of Jack during their brief conversation at the Sawyer/Juliet residence that night. I know Jack is overbearing (to say the least!), and I know his comment about reading a book was out of line, and I know that the two have a history of pissing contests, but a) we’ve just established that Sawyer is a much more mature and content guy, and seeing him revert to form so quickly felt wrong; b) poor Jack just went from pill-popping, banned-from-the-hospital mess to desperate rescue-mission organizer to time-traveling Dharma janitor in the space of a few days–cut him some slack, James!

* As far as I’m concerned, the Castaways straight-up murdered that co-pilot. They all got on the plane knowing what could happen, and his blood is on their hands. I hope the show directly addresses how many people have died so that these clowns could have their little adventures, and does so in a way where there are actual emotional consequences for that, rather than a lecture from a bad-guy character that can be quickly shaken off and forgotten.

* I hope we don’t see a whole lot of “John Connor sending his own father back in time to conceive him”-style time travel paradoxes, but after reading Todd VanDerWerff’s excellent-as-always review/recap, I wonder if Ben and the Others were building that runway in Season Three specifically so Frank could land on it in the future.

Comics Time: Cold Heat #1

March 18, 2009

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Cold Heat #1

BJ and Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc., 2006

24 pages

$5

Read it for free at ColdHeatComics.com

Buy it from PictureBox

Originally written on November 22, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

Cold Heat is a terrific comic for people who don’t think of their adolescence as having been particularly adolescent. That is to say, the prevailing approach toward reminiscing about one’s teenage years seems to be one of cringing embarrassment–no, actually, more one of condescension: “Ugh, what a little idiot I was then, I can’t believe I listened to Stone Temple Pilots,” etc. Writer-artists BJ (aka Ben Jones, he of those dog comics) and Frank Santoro say “fuck that noise” and instead choose to emphasize the rapturous beauty that adolescence’s grandiose melodrama and edge-of-disaster emotion constantly infuses into everyday life, particularly where music and romance are concerned. In doing so they craft a comic that is impossible not to compare to both arenas. Cold Heat‘s wispy, barely-there linework, the visual leitmotif of swirling and the rock-centric storyline–the events of the first issue revolve around our heroine Castle’s reaction to the fatal overdose of Joel Cannon, beloved lead singer of the noise band Chocolate Gun–don’t so much suggest as demand references to the blindingly happysad guitar maelstroms of Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and M83. Moreover, readers of a certain age will no doubt remember the whirlwind of emotion they were caught up in upon the death of Kurt Cobain, the likely inspiration here. I still remember storming away from the dinner table when my dad dared to agree with Andy Rooney’s “good riddance” assessment of Kurt’s passing; Cold Heat is a little like remembering that incident in comic book form. But the romance angle is important too. The book starts out with an almost anti-romantic vignette–Castle is callously informed by the CEO of the company at which she is an intern that the outfit has gone belly-up after just having had sex with him. “I forgot my CD player there,” she realizes after she leaves–one more regret. But soon the wide-eyed, upturned-face beauty of Jones and Santoro’s portraiture of Castle takes hold, suggesting a lo-fi–or more accurately, doodled-during-math-class–approximation of romance-era John Romita Sr. The simplistic pink, white and blue color scheme adds to the “just hadda get it down on paper before study hall ended” feel so effectively that you might not notice the subtlety with which a sort of crayon shading is used to evoke smoke-filled, drug-addled parties and the lonely, scary darkness of suburban nightfall. And the hints of craziness–a murder mystery, a potential World War III, a minotaur carrying a severed head–somehow combine to evoke teenagedom much more accurately than a strict slice-of-life comic would. Add in the slick cover stock, a letters page (called “Heat Waves!”), a letter from editor Dan Nadel that reads like liner notes from that old Temple of the Dog CD you’ve been meaning to rip to your iTunes and a short prose story by Timothy Hodler about falling in love with the office superhero fan, and you’ve got a comic that feels like a cable from a world where the only thing that exists is a dimly lit bedroom in which you’re wearing ripped jeans and you just keep listening to and rewinding “Teen Age Riot” over and over again. Outstanding.

Carnival of souls

March 17, 2009

* Boody Rogers’ Boody., Ivan Brunetti’s Ho!, the Greg Sadowski-edited Supermen!–that’s an impressive, and oddly punctuation-heavy, assortment of books now out from Fantagraphics.

* Real-world water monster update: Meet Predator X, a 50-foot prehistoric sea monster with four times the biting power of Tyrannosaurus rex–the most powerful jaws of any animal in the history of the planet.

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* Curt Purcell ponders cultists vs. critics, liking something vs. “getting” something, and other issues of fandom and buffdom and whatnot. I think this is the key paragraph:

The basis for this difference of experience comes down to different patterns of directing attention. Attention–both what it’s focused on and what is filtered out of it–makes all the difference. Where I, a fan, see a werewolf in a Paul Naschy movie, non-fans see a bad actor in bad makeup. Well, he is a bad actor in bad makeup, and I’m not surprised that’s where most people’s attention comes to focus. If I see him as a werewolf in these movies, it’s not because I think he’s a great actor in amazing makeup. And I haven’t adopted some weird critical standard whereby I pay the same attention as non-fans to his bad acting and cheap makeup, and declare it awesome anyway. What I do is focus my attention much more intensely than most on the werewolf he’s trying to depict, and filter out or disregard as much as I can of anything that would compromise or spoil that experience.

To what extent do you offer a work you like the benefit of the doubt? To what extent does offering it the benefit of the doubt determine whether or not you like it to begin with? That seems to be the chicken-and-egg question with which Curt and his interlocutor here, CRwM, appear to be grappling.

* This brief review of Watchmen by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Eva Holland, a total Watchmen virgin, is for some reason my favorite entry in that particular Watchmen review subgenre, for its brevity and its lack of concern with finding the “correct” opinion w/r/t the book or the movie.

* Troubling image of the day #1: A still from a film adaptation of Paul Hornschemeier’s Return of the Elephant, god help us.

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* Troubling image of the day #2: Renee French, ladies and gentlemen.

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* Delightful image of the day #1: Olga Kurylenko in Neil Marshall’s upcoming Picts. vs. Romans epic Centurion. (Via Jason Adams.)

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* Delightful image of the day #2: Kate Winslet, ladies and gentlemen.

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Gossip Girl thoughts

March 17, 2009

SPOILER WARNING–DON’T LET ME RUIN THE SHOW’S ELABORATE MYTHOLOGY FOR YOU

* Weaksauce. That episode felt like a contest to see which storyline could be the most boring.

* First of all, you return from this ungodly long hiatus, and your first episode back is the school play episode? Besides feeling ridiculous in that every character is required to perform in the school play, I just sort of liked it better when they did Hair on Head of the Class.

* Age of Innocence, yes, we get it.

* I don’t care if the pretentious artsy-fartsy director character was intended as the show’s self-parody of the pretentious artsy-fartsy visual artist from earlier in the season, he was still intolerable. During that conversation at lunch I actually had a Dr. Cox from Scrubs moment where I burst out yelling “OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE MOST BORING SCENE IN THE HISTORY OF RECORDED MEDIA.” The Missus turned to me and said, “Oh, I haven’t even been paying attention. Too long; didn’t read.”

* Also, you could see the stupid drama critic misinterpreting the crash-and-burning of the show, and the annoying director guy claiming it was deliberate, a MILE away.

* I did kind of like the nervous lesbian stage manager, though.

* When it finally cut over to Chuck I said “Meanwhile, on a better show…” but I’d forgotten that he was in the middle of a student production of his own, Eyes Wide Shut Jr., which ended as randomly and pointlessly and unimaginatively as it began.

* Was it me or did they keep on implying Dorota was leaking to Gossip Girl? Was that just a red herring? They seemed to resolve all that stuff by pinning it on Rachel. (I still think Dorota IS Gossip Girl.)

* Speaking of Rachel, the one bright spot in the show was the hotness of the Hot for Teacher storyline. Something about the girl they cast in that role is really realistically adorable, which makes it even hotter. I totally called “they’re gonna do it in the costume closet,” btw. Of course they then had to go and write her out of the show, when they easily could have begun a Blair/Rachel romance, goddamn them.

* Seeing the teaser for next week’s episode, I’m starting to wonder whether the show’s rapid cycling and recycling through all the possible main-cast pairings is actually the major structural problem we’ve all kind of joked that it might be. The more you mix and match Dan, Serena, Chuck, Blair, Nate, and Vanessa, and sometimes Jenny, the less rewarding it gets. (Unless you did something nutso like Chuck/Serena or Dan/Blair, which I would support fully and which I assume we’ll get to eventually.) Meanwhile, the show’s attempts to bring aboard outside love interests have been three-eps-and-done affairs from the get-go, whether lame (that horrible artist guy) or kinda awesome (Madchen Amick, Hot for Teacher). The outsiders can’t bring the weight that the main cast does, but the main cast can’t sustain the novelty that the outsiders bring, and around and around we go.

Carnival of souls

March 16, 2009

* Your first must-read of the day: Tom Spurgeon presents the best comics of 2008. It’s interesting to see how much emphasis Tom places on the importance of weighing works qualitatively against one another as a goal of criticism–I suppose that goes without saying when it comes to a year-end ranking, but even in that case, I tend not to place so much importance on qualitative distinctions myself. And again, it makes me wish I’d read as much about Acme Novelty Library #19 as I have about Final Crisis (which I liked!). Tom also takes his fellow critics to task for their lack of engagement with books like What It Is and Kramers Ergot 7, a bit unfairly if I recall correctly, but hey, it takes different strokes to move the world.

* Your second must-read of the day: At MCAD’s “MOMEntum” exhibition, the great Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics holds forth on the evolution of alternative comics from comic book to graphic novel, and what that means for young cartoonists like those in the audience. (As a side note, it always does my heart good to see Jordan Crane’s NON given credit alongside Sammy Harkham’s Kramers Ergot. Had more people been able to see it, I don’t doubt NON #5 could have had the impact of Kramers Ergot 4–it certainly did on me.) (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Speaking of Kramers, Dick Hyacinth reviews Kramers Ergot 7 practically story-by-story. I think my favorite thing about the review is the way his photos of the scanner-busting pages make everything look big enough to be hung on gallery walls. Elsewhere, Dick does the world the public service of creating an actual working Kramers Ergot 7 table of contents.

* Sopranos creator David Chase’s next project will be called A Ribbon of Dreams. It’s an HBO miniseries with a sweeping story about the rise and presumably fall of two producers from the dawn of Hollywood to the present day. Sold.

* Todd VanDerWerff all but takes a mulligan on critically evaluating the penultimate episode of Battlestar Galactica until he sees its concluding episode this week. Which, wow, that’s going to take some getting used to. Anyway, he tentatively likes what he saw this week, as did I. He also takes the time to unpack why Baltar’s cult/conversion storyline has been so frustrating, perhaps my biggest pet peeve of the show’s final two half-seasons.

* In the latest installment of his continuing, awesome series of posts on ’90s superhero comics, What Ifs?, and other extraordinarily geeky topics, Tim O’Neil explains the difference between the “alternate worlds” of What If? and the “analogue worlds” of Elseworlds. Some of you just shrugged your shoulders, and some of you aren’t even reading this sentence because you’ve already clicked over. He also continues to promise a review of Kingdom Come, which I’m looking forward to because I like that book.

* My pals at the Cool Kids Table throw decorum to the four winds and run down the Watchmen spinoffs, sequels, and prequels of their respective dreams.

* Speaking of Watchmen, will the film’s relative failure adversely affect the prospects for more full-frontal male nudity in Hollywood films? Given the really egregious and unnecessary Penis Panic that gripped critics both mainstream and geek-centric, to say nothing of modern geek culture’s bizarre, bullying hypermasculinity, my guess is that the answer is yes. What a country. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

* “Tom Neely sure can draw” update: Tom Neely sure can draw.

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* The last gasp of torture porn? Jason Adams gives pretty high marks to the remake of The Last House on the Left.

* Speaking of torture porn: Take some time, if you’re not some phony 24 tough guy and you don’t mind having your soul kicked repeatedly in its kidneys for a while, to read the International Committee for the Red Cross’s report on torture at America’s network of terror-war prison sites. It’s the involvement of doctors whose job it was to ensure that everyone was tortured just enough to not die (they weren’t always successful) that will be haunting me to my grave. And of course, the repulsive likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah–real-life horror stories themselves–never deserved the emotional martyrdom that their treatment now forces us to grant them.

* Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald wonders if the Obama Administration isn’t the new boss, same as the old boss in several important respects. Faith in good intentions, as we’ve learned (as I’ve certainly learned), is just not enough.

Comics Time: The Last Lonely Saturday

March 16, 2009

The Last Lonely Saturday

Jordan Crane, writer/artist

Red Ink, 2000

80 pages

$8, softcover or hardcover (!)

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Savage Critic(s).

“YES.”

March 16, 2009

Great day in the mornin’!

Seanmix – Let’s Go Dancing (On the Backs of the Bruised): Nine Inch Nails Dance Music

March 14, 2009

As promised last week, here’s a very different “best of Nine Inch Nails” mix. The inspiration here was a comment I remember Trent Reznor making regarding the song “Only,” which is a great big bass-slappin’ monster of a dance song–he said something to the effect that he had to work really hard to overcome being embarrassed about releasing a disco song. I instantly thought, “But you’ve recorded TONS of them! And they’re GOOD!” So here’s a collection of Trent at his toe-tapping, head-nodding, floor-filling, ass-shaking best. (Titular parentheses courtesy of Matthew Perpetua.)

Let’s Go Dancing (On the Backs of the Bruised): Nine Inch Nails Dance Music

The Hand That Feeds (DFA Remix) / Head Like a Hole / Only / The Perfect Drug / Heresy / The Hand That Feeds / Sin / Closer / Ruiner / Discipline / Complication / Down In It / God Given / Head Like a Hole (Opal) / Ringfinger / Let’s Hear It for Nine Inch Nails

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Originally I’d planned on including either more or perhaps different examples of his groove-oriented work–I was thinking of slower almost-funk songs like “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, “The Only Time,” “The Big Comedown,” “Capital G” and so on–but I couldn’t figure how to make it all work together, so I dropped that stuff with the exception of “Closer” (because, c’mon, it’s “Closer”). Also, I could have included a lot of remixes, but I decided to stick with internally produced work, so the only non-Trent-produced song on here is the DFA remix of “The Hand That Feeds” (because, c’mon, it’s the DFA).

I hope you like this side of Nine Inch Nails as much as these folks did!

Battlestar Galactica thoughts

March 13, 2009

I FORGOT TO ADD THE SPOILER WARNING LAST WEEK, BUT I REMEMBERED THIS WEEK

I thought that was a strong episode, a very strong episode in fact. I didn’t see the flashbacks coming at all, and it was a very smart idea, tying these characters back to all they’d lost. Not that they were all note-perfect, mind you–again, we’ve gone to the bottomless grief reservoir quite a few times so seeing Roslin fall apart in a public fountain lacked the impact it might have otherwise; Anders’s ode to physics seemed a bit on the nose, even if it is the kind of thing I can picture a smart jock saying in an interview with a female reporter while reclining naked in a tub. But seeing Roslin with family, and seeing Zack Adama again, and especially seeing Baltar with his father and all the levels of discomfort and embarrassment that that meeting exposed in Gaius and Julius and Six…wonderful stuff.

Speaking of Gaius, his long, weirdly underdeveloped religious-cult storyline finally felt like it had a point, which was that Gaius was spending that time falling bass-ackwards into power once again. He kept it up because it got him laid, it got him attention, he’s good at it, it was some kind of emotional outlet, and Head Six wanted him to, but in the end it was all leading to this pivotal juncture where he ends up basically the most powerful person in the fleet as everyone else goes off on the rescue mission. Callis, who over the years became one of the show’s great pleasures, played the entire episode with a look of “what the fuck, man?” in his eyes. I’m a little concerned that without an antagonist still in the fleet his storyline might feel flat, but we’ll see.

Which leads us to what will apparently be the series finale’s big leap of faith, which is that the Admiral and President and stand-in President of the fleet would allow however many hundreds of key military and political personnel to take however many military assets they need and fly off on a suicide mission into Cylon Central in the middle of an asteroid field right next to a black hole. On a narrative level, this is Gandalf’s gambit at the end of The Lord of the Rings, where he, and all the surviving members of the Fellowship who could give the game away if captured and tortured, and the King of Gondor and the King of Rohan and most of the leadership class, strolled up to the Black Gates to be slaughtered because they believed that something very important and transcendent required them to do so. The thing is, that’s a lot easier for the characters and the audience alike to swallow in a fantasy narrative than it is in a science fiction allegory where people drive cars and smoke cigarettes and pretty much behave like normal people except for a few fantastic elements. What the story is asking us to do is believe that at this point, the fantastic elements in these characters’ lives are, perhaps, all they have left to cling to, that all these hundreds of people are going to risk it all because to not do so will just mean floating around aimlessly in space for a few more decades until they die out. If Hera means something, they mean something, so they’re going for broke. It’s a gamble on the show’s part, and if I were coming to it cold I don’t know if I’d buy it, but the show has earned a lot of goodwill from me by being one of the highlights of my life for a few years now, so gods-speed, gang.

Carnival of souls

March 13, 2009

* Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely are doing a new series called Batman and Robin, have you heard? “It’s like David Lynch doing the Batman TV show,” says Morrison, which phrase is, I think, to the Internet what “ZUR-EN-ARRH” was to Bruce Wayne.

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* Look, normally I wouldn’t mind if They remade Stephen King’s It, because Tim Curry’s performance and make-up as Pennywise was literally the only thing the 1990 TV miniseries version got right. But then you hear that the new movie version is going to consolidate the 1958-to-1985 flashback/flashforward structure and all the ensuing and awesome period detail into the present day, and it’s like, fuck, why not just remake Killer Klowns from Outer Space instead? One day someone’s gonna take one of Stephen King’s really good books and make an HBO maxiseries out of it, complete with subterranean tween gangbang, and we can all be happy. Until then I’m going to want to throw my computer through the window on a regular basis.

* Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johansson as some Russian villain and the Black Widow in Iron Man 2? Well done, Marvel Studios. Everyone try not to stare at ScarJo’s Russian accent.

* Jog reviews Cold Heat #5/6.

* Jason’s Low Moon looks fantastic.

* John Hankiewicz can draw the bloody bejesus out of a sewing machine case.

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* Spurge:

But yeah, if you liked Watchmen, you might want to try some of the books that are like whatever the heck you liked about Watchmen, and DC has certainly published some of those books.

LOL

* In light of the Battlestar Galactica series finale, part one of which airs tonight, this has got to be the quote of the day:

On March 17, there will be a “Battlestar” retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as “human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith,” according to Sci Fi.

Actually, no, wait: This is the quote of the day:

The panel will be moderated by “Battlestar” fan Whoopi Goldberg.

(Via the utterly gobsmacked Topless Robot.)

Comics Time: Cold Heat #5/6

March 13, 2009

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Cold Heat #5/6

BJ & Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc.

48 pages

$20 (limited edition of 100 copies)

Buy it from PictureBox

Cold Heat was truly tailor-made for my enjoyment. Combining genre storytelling with avant garde art and layout, minimalist linework with maximalist psychedelia, shoegazey atmosphere with cotton-candy colors with Kurt Cobain and Ziggy Stardust references with teen-angsty sex, drugs, and violence…basically, even if Cold Heat didn’t exist, it would be necessary for me to invent it. I never thought I’d get the chance to hold a new single issue of Cold Heat in my hands again, so on that level alone, the existence of this comic book (a double-issue, technically, but who’s counting) is cause for rejoicing, regardless of the execution.

Fortunately, the execution is killer. I think the standout story element in this installment is just how far Jones and Santoro are willing to take the Senator Wastmor character in terms of making him an embodiment of elite-political culture at its most loathsome, a sort of fever dream of naked cruelty, avarice, rapaciousness, and hypocrisy, complete with Uzis, orgies, and shitting on prisoners. It’s reminiscent of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs in terms of imagining Power and those who master it as corrupt, violent, and disgusting.

Visually, the changes here are subtle but important. The introduction of purples to the pink/blue color scheme to flesh out and darken the world a bit. The replacement of the swirling motif with one of diamond-like patterns imposes a new level and form of visual power on the world of the comic. “There’s no turning back” reads a Castle thought-caption at the bottom of a page where this geometric device is at its most prominent, and such is its impact that we absolutely believe her.

This is not to say that it’s all gruesome abuse and overwhelming visuals. Wastmor and his schemes and depredations are an over-the-top goof, at varying times referencing classic abuse-of-authority touchstones from Salo to Illuminatus! to Twin Peaks to Eyes Wide Shut to Revenge of the Nerds; he conducts his final Uzi-toting rampage clad only in thong underwear. Meanwhile there’s a laugh-out-loud dialogue exchange between Castle and her martial-arts instructor, in which they fill each other in on their respective adventures, that revels in the story’s deadplan implausibility in a fashion reminiscent of a similar recent scene in Lost. Like Scott Pilgrim on haphazardly mixed cold meds and anti-depressants, Cold Heat is a true trip, a visionary experience in a medium that should be providing them by the bucketload. Please read it.

Comics Time: Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret

March 11, 2009

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Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret

Michael Kupperman, writer/artist

Harper Entertainment, 2000

128 pages

$14

Buy it from Amazon.com

Hmm, what’s my “in” here? I could start by saying that Kupperman is a kindred spirit to Terry Gilliam: Gilliam’s animation work for Monty Python repurposed the imagery of Victorian and Edwardian England for surrealist humor and sexual satire, while Kupperman similarly works with visuals from the pulp and adventure publications of pre- and post-War America for surrealist humor (again) and riffs on the absurdity and violence of that culture. I could also say that he draws everything much, much better than he needs to–it’s like if Charles Burns did a book full of super-dense gag strips. I could point out that unlike most of the funnies, these comics truly work as comics, with visuals and text constantly trading off in terms of what’s doing the heavy lifting in getting the jokes across. I could elaborate by saying he’ll go both elaborate and direct with both components–for example, the visual gag at the heart of “Dead End Alley” is unanticipatable and complex, while the punchline panel of “The Cowboy in the Dinner Roll” is exactly what you think it’s gonna be and hammers the laff home with the subtlety of Mjolnir; meanwhile, you get text-heavy pieces like “Murder Makes My Head Hurt” and “From ‘Lives of the Cartoonists'” that take a full page to unspool and reach their pinnacle, but you also get instant-crackup juxtapositions like “Swamp Blanket Bingo,” “Sex Blimps,” “Sherlockules,” and “I Am a Gamera.” I could say that the work he’s doing in Tales Designed to Thrizzle, despite simply being a continuation of everything you’re seeing here, is better overall, but somehow that only makes this book more fun as it becomes rewarding to see how he refines his approach and execution in the later books. But I think I’ll call Michael Kupperman a comic (and comics) genius and leave it at that.