* My pal TJ Dietsch has conducted an absolutely fascinating interview with Harold Ramis about Ghostbusters. It’s for ToyFare so he leads with a bunch of questions about the toys and video games, but stick with it for gems like this:

Have you seen any of the guys recently?

I talk to Dan a little bit, I’m in touch with Ernie, and Bill I have virtually no contact with. I just keep track of him through his brothers, who I’m still friends with, and other people. You know, he’s a mystery man.

And I’m not sure I knew this about the original premise for the first film:

…the script was pretty much unmakeable the way Dan conceived it. The Marshmallow Man, which is the large-scale effect that really pays off the whole movie, happened around page 50 in Dan’s original script, and things got bigger after that. So, not only was it impractical as a production, it sort of took it too far from the world of the mundane, which is where the comic edge was really vivid. Ivan and I had a similar thought independently. We thought the origin story would be really interesting, how the Ghostbusters came to be Ghostbusters, who were these guys, how did this happen, whereas Dan’s original script surpassed all that. He projected into a time in the future when ghost occurrences were common, when Ghostbusters were around pretty much like Orkin exterminators, that there were a bunch of teams around, and that the Ghostbusters in Dan’s script were just one of many teams of ghost exterminators in New York.

Sounds like a sequel waiting to happen, no?

* Speaking of juicy interviews, Chris Mautner speaks with PictureBox honcho Dan Nadel about adopting a pledge/preorder/subscription model for some of his books, the all-adventure-stories Art Out of Time 2, and more.

* The staff of Clive Barker’s official website Revelations has seen a 144-minute workprint of Nightbreed! And they say there’s even more footage out there. Pray to Eris that the Director’s Cut of this film happens. (Via Dread Central.)

* The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island has been making the rounds, and taking the horror sites by storm–if I had a nickel for every big gorehound site that said something to the effect of “I wasn’t sure whether or not to cover this movie until I saw this trailer” I’d have, I dunno, fifteen cents. Is it Marty’s Shining, or a second Cape Fear? Either way I’m sound as a pound.

* Battlestar Galactica‘s Ronald D. Moore has been speaking with SciFi Wire. First he sounds off on a variety of issues: fan reaction to the BSG finale (for the record: maybe the best series finale I’ve ever seen), the Caprica pilot’s DVD release (I still haven’t seen it!) and the current status of the series, and the revelation that they’ve brought in another writer to work on the prequel to The Thing he was writing the screenplay for. And here he is on the prospects for Virtuality, his new Fox movie/pilot, depending on whether you’re talking to Fox or to him.

* Torture Link of the Day: Andrew Sullivan traces the history of the word “torture” in The New York Times, noting how the paper once didn’t hesitate to refer to the techniques the Bush administration adopted as torture when done by other regimes, but switched to Newspeak when American torture enthusiasts began insisting these techniques weren’t torture.

* Now this is what I’m talking about: I Knew It Was You, a short documentary about the late great actor John Cazale, the man with the single greatest resume in the history of filmmaking.

* Drawn & Quarterly’s Jessica Campbell’s MoCCA photo parade includes a photo of yours truly with my David Bowie sketchbook in action, but I am not reposting it here because on this blog, at least, I can maintain control of my image and edit out unflattering views. (All that hair is already gone, by the way. Thanks, Armory–lesson learned!)

Time for the MoCCA 2009 edition of Sean’s David Bowie Sketchbook! Let’s get right into it:

Gabrielle Bell: Gabrielle took more time on her sketch than any other artist I’ve gotten a sketch from, I think. Time well spent. A young Mod Bowie, taking tea.

Ron Rege Jr.: A favorite of mine since my earliest days as a grown-up comics reader, Ron debated whether or not to use the photoref I had–he figured he could pull it off with the Ziggy mullet alone. He ultimately used the photo reference, but gave it a very mullet-centric spin. Ron also has the benefit of being a genuine rock star, which adds verisimilitude.

Nora Krug: I think Nora Krug had the shortest span of time of any artist in the book between my first becoming aware of her work and getting a sketch from her–a timespan of approximately one minute.

David Mack: David Mack based his sketch on one of Bowie’s painted self-portriats, but added the disembodied aspect and the flames. He’s alight with the flame of rock and roll, I think.

Kate Beaton: With her rich history of drawing dandies, I knew Kate Beaton would kill on this.

Tom Gauld: Hailing from the UK, Tom Gauld was a guy I was lucky to get, a real coup. Note the reappearance of the everpopular eyepatch.

Cliff Chiang: Cliff knew exactly what era of Bowie he wanted to draw. I think the vampire idea was given to him by an onlooker we were chatting with, though I forget how “vampire” came up in conversation. Either way, damn. Cliff is one of the most talented artists in mainstream comics right now–I’m really glad I nabbed him.

Randall Munroe: When I approached xkcd artist Randall Munroe for a sketch, I debated whether or not to hand him my photo reference books. I ultimately did, not wanting to be insulting. He looked at me and said, after a pregnant pause, “Nnnnnnnnaaaaaaaah, I don’t need photo reference. Good artists need photo reference, not me.” Note the Labyrinth reference and the clever solution to the problem of how to depict tight pants when you draw stick figures.

Hans Rickheit: Hans Rickheit is the guy I always name when asked for a cartoonist who deserves more attention than he gets. I can’t wait for his Fantagraphics book The Squirrel Machine to put him on more people’s radar. In the meantime he gave me this richly detailed rendition of Bowie in full “man’s dress” regalia–enacting one of my favorite idiomatic expressions (“you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a [noun] in here”) to boot.

Dave Kiersh: Dave K. is one of my big personal favorite cartoonists–I’ve loved his stuff ever since coming across it in Jordan Crane’s NON #5, one of the first big alternative comics I came across–and after an abortive attempt to get a sketch from him while he was waiting for his ride home on Saturday night, he hollered at me as I passed his table on Sunday and delivered this Mod-era rendition. Dave is a poet of teenage-dom, so teen Bowie is a delightful choice for him.

Lisa Hannawalt: Lisa was actually working at the Buenaventura booth when I asked her to do a sketch for me, so she ended up doing it while standing up and taking people’s money. She is not the first person of roughly my generation to draw a Bowie sketch emphasizing his Labyrinth-era bulge, and she will no doubt not be the last.

Seth: Was there any doubt which era Bowie Seth would pick? This is one of those sketches that makes people say “Whoa” in a hushed voice.

Geoff Grogan: Geoff, who came out of nowhere with one of my favorite comics of 2008, Look Out!! Monsters, really took his time with this sucker, and produced one of the few Bowie sketches I’ve gotten that emphasize David’s androgyny. I’m really fond of it.

Scott Campbell: Scott C. did that terrific "Building with the Bowies" drawing that went around the Internet a few weeks ago, so when I found out from my pal Rickey Purdin that he was at the show I got psyched to get a sketch from him–and when Scott found out from Rickey that I was at the show, he got psyched to give me one. Unfortunately this happened as I was on my way out the door on Saturday evening. But I ended up returning on Sunday and tracked him down toot sweet. Then, like a jerk, I rushed him so that I could get on line for David Mazzucchelli (who, it turns out, wasn’t doing sketches). He did a terrific job anyway.

BONUS SKETCH FROM NEW YORK COMIC CON 2009!

Ross Campbell: I originally used this sketch as my debut post over at Savage Critic(s), but of course I want to show it off over here too. I was very, very excited to get a Bowie sketch from Ross at NYCC, but not having anticipated the demand for sketching, he didn’t bring a pencil. I loaned him my pen, and he was concerned about not being able to make a mistake, but drew this anyway. This was done entirely without photo reference, which amazes me–he NAILED that Labyrinth hairstyle. As you can see, he wasn’t happy with the hand, but he’s being entirely too hard on himself.

* Tom Spurgeon’s latest post on MoCCA points out the dysfunctional aspect of comics culture whereby complaining about anything is seen as meritless whining that spoils everyone’s good time rather than an attempt to redress legitimate problems instead of simply saying “thank you sir, may I have another.” He also reprints a lulzy thank-you letter from MoCCA that seems to indicate that the organization doesn’t grok the seriousness of the problems with this year’s show even at this comparatively late date. Or maybe they just didn’t feel like the thank-you note was the appropriate place to address those problems, I dunno. It’s not a good look given the climate, I can tell you that.

* Jog has posted a nice long comics-centric MoCCA recap, if you’re looking for something on the upside.

* This may be the most insulting thing anyone has ever said about the work of Brian K. Vaughan:

[Shia] LaBeouf tells Wizard magazine that [BKV’s Y: The Last Man protagonist] Yorick is too similar to his “Transformers” role of Sam Witwicky.

“You take Sam and you put a monkey on his shoulder,” said LaBeouf of Yorick’s sidekick Ampersand. “I don’t know if it’s that big a differential. It seems like he’s the ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation again.”

This guy really is as big of a tool as he seems, huh? (Via Jason Adams.)

* These days it seems like if I wrote up every terrifying shooting by some thug with a deranged political agenda I’d be blogging about nothing else, but there’s something uniquely horrifying about a World War II veteran turned raving anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, and old-school Illuminati conspiracy theorizer murdering people at the Holocaust Museum.

* Torture Link of the Day: London cops are under investigation for waterboarding suspects in a marijuana case. Torturing people over pot. Western values!

* But you know what, let’s end on an up note with a gratuitous picture of young Patti Smith. Homina homina. Mapplethorpe wasn’t tough to look at either if that’s what you’re into. (Via Elvis Depressley.)

The Gigantic Robot

Tom Gauld, writer/artist

Buenaventura Press, June 2009

32 pages, hardcover/cardstock

$16.95

I bet you’ll be able to buy it from Buenaventura at some point

I bet you’ll be able to buy it from Amazon.com at some point, too

At first blush there’s a disconnect between The Gigantic Robot‘s content and its price point. I’m pretty sure that when I bought it at MoCCA, I was charged $20–which, hey, it’s a big hardcover book by Tom Gauld, a bargain at any price! As it turns out, however, it’s more a short story than a book, and the emphasis is on “short.” You get a splash-page single image on the right-hand page of each spread, and a brief (no more than seven words at any point) explanatory caption on the left-hand page. Gauld’s three-pager in Kramers Ergot 7 was heftier.

But look, essentially you’re paying for this like you would for a piece of original art, or at least that’s how I look at it. You’re not going to have many opportunities to buy a board book from a Kramers alum, right? And everything that Gauld’s work usually has to recommend it is present here in spades. The beautiful, densely shaded, cold black-and-white linework suggests Edward Gorey as replaced by a robot, while the story is Gauld’s purest distillation yet of his “Ozymandias”-like juxtaposition of immense man-made structures with the fleeting futility of human ambition. As always it’s reinforced by his unique character design, all massive torso with spindly legs and microcephalic heads, emphasizing raw size over any kind of reliable utility. You may quibble with this little parable’s punchline–having just read Ian Kershaw’s 1,000-page biography of Hitler, the post-war activities of the scientists who worked on the Reich’s “wonder weapons” are fresh in my mind, so the notion that a war machine with the potential for serious megadeaths would be allowed to lie fallow rings false to me. But the moral of the story is sound, and the pleasure of once again watching Gauld’s tiny lines coalesce into these massive monuments to hubris is undeniable.

* The Comics Blogosphere in two sentences:

The writer J. Caleb Mozzocco notes the wind-down of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe effort, and points to The Ultimates Volume Three as perhaps the worst comic book ever. He starts reviewing individual issues with #1.

* Corporate superhero comics in one sentence:

This summer Marvel Comics is in the process of ending their Ultimate line of comics, with the intention of relaunching the line as Ultimate Comics.

* I think Heidi MacDonald’s MoCCA wrap-up is particularly worth reading after Kiel Phegley’s report for CBR. Heidi’s welcome point is that the show had serious problems that need serious fixes. However, dig the quotes that Kiel collects from MoCCA museum director Karl Erickson on the show’s inability to open on time on Saturday:

“It was one of those crisis of being much more successful than we anticipated…A lot more exhibitors had shipped their books to us so it took a lot longer to load up the truck. And in a New York summer, there were all sorts of street festivals on our planned route here, so those two things combined [caused the delay].”

…and on the oppressive heat in the venue:

“We’re sorry about the heat as this happens in the city in the summer with thousands of people in one room.”

They seem to treat obvious facts of life for the show (it’s popular and it takes place in the summer in New York) as excuses for this year’s screw-ups rather than easily anticipatable and surmountable factors that should never have been allowed to become screw-ups in the first place. Now, these quotes were taken from day-of on-the-floor interviews as far as I know, so maybe MoCCA officials hadn’t gotten a sense of the big picture yet. And my guess is that after arguably the first bad post-show buzz MoCCA has ever experienced (because seriously, this show is usually MAGIC), Erickson and the other honchos will take a much closer look at things. But for now those quotes, and a similar vibe Heidi says she detected, don’t exactly inspire confidence.

* Tim O’Neil expands upon his previously stated fondness for the Star Wars prequels. You know, the more I think about this the more torn I feel. I don’t hate the movies at all, I enjoyed them all a lot (particularly Revenge of the Sith), I think they all have moments of great visual poetry and usually in that “spectacular representation of emotion” way I love so much, yet they seem to obviously lack a certain spark that the first three movies had no matter how much you can pick apart elements of the prequels for praise. I can say they’ve never made me regret getting that Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo back in ’97, though.

* Torture Links of the Day: The Lieberman-Graham legislation to permanently suppress the release of more detainee photos has been squashed, so Lieberman and Graham are threatening to shut down the Senate until it’s un-squashed. I guess that in much the same way as sex is something so dirty and sinful you should only do it with someone you love, “enhanced interrogation techniques” are so legal and effective and in tune with America’s values that we should never allow any evidence of them to see the light of day?

Jason’s Spider-Man story from Marvel’s Strange Tales MAX exclusively previewed…at the Fantagraphics blog.

* Now is the time where everyone links to everyone else’s MoCCA wrap-up reports.

* Tom Spurgeon compiles the most pertinent info and opinion, good bad and ugly, coupling it with a reminder that despite the good, the bad was probably actually bad and don’t let’s deny it. He notes something I’d meant to mention myself: there were actually empty tables this year, which seemed weird.

* On that point, he links to a comment from professional parade-rainer Evan Dorkin, who provides a useful rejoinder to the people who were saying “it wasn’t that hot in there” (I promise you, it was that hot in there) and makes mention of some perpetual problems I’d just taken for granted: how badly the festival is promoted on MoCCA’s website and how inaccurate and out-of-date the exhibitor list ended up being. (For example, if I had a nickel for everyone who came up to me desperately searching for Kate Beaton, I’d have two bits easy.) On the other hand I think it’s pretty churlish to compare the Armory to some personality-free high-school gymnasium.

* While we’re mining for comment-thread gold, here at ADDTF Cheese Hasselberger of House of Twelve notes that the early-bird price for a table at next year’s MoCCA will be a whopping $400; he can only speculate how much more exorbitant the full price will be. I can’t imagine how that doesn’t price most of the minicomics makers and self-publishers right out of the show, no? Couple that with all the administrative snafus and the potentially kiln-like venue and folks could stay away in droves, seriously. And that would be really sad because MoCCA done right instills confidence in comics as an art form like no other show.

* I enjoyed Heidi Mac’s Saturday-night report, which contained the interesting factoid that the more flush shows and events at the Armory rent ACs. I really can’t get over how MoCCA could book a venue with no air conditioning after several brutally hot years at the old location, including the immediately preceding year.

* I also liked Brian Heater’s extremely comprehensive report, maybe the most professional picture of the show this year.

* My report’s here, if you missed it. I want to state again for the record how much I prefer the “everything in one big room” model to the “everything in a labyrinthine combination of rooms” model.

* Of course, if you prefer your MoCCA reports to contain drawings of the Golden Age Nite Owl from Watchmen by Seth, look no further than Rickey Purdin’s!

* Speaking of, Tom Spurgeon interviews Seth. Douglas Wolk flagged a passage of great interest to me:

I’m a guy who has a fake name. I used to have long silver peroxide hair. I used to walk around in a judge’s robe and welders goggles. I now walk around in a gabardine overcoat and a fedora. I named my house. Clearly I am interested in persona and self-mythologizing.

I’ve never quite figured out how to square that aspect of Seth’s gestalt with his old-timey aesthetic, which seems to be as much about authenticity as anything else. Watching him draw live and in person was sort of revelatory–his line “makes sense” to me now in ways it didn’t before–so I’m going to try to delve into his work a bit more and see what I can come up with.

* Torture Links of the Day: American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee have been “convicted” of “spying” in a North Korean “court,” meaning they could be subjected to the very torture techniques American interrogators cribbed from NoKo and ChiCom torturers via our military’s SERE training. Elsewhere, ABC News interviews Lakhdar Boumediene, the Red Crescent worker captured, tortured, and held without charge by America for nearly eight years for the crime of…absolutely nothing. (Via Glenn Greenwald, who provides context in terms of how the fact that Guantanamo is full of innocent men like Boumediene is nearly always elided by both sides of the debate over detainee policy.)

* A Heavy Metal remake with segments directed by James Cameron, David Fincher, Gore Verbinski, Zack Snyder, and Jack Black & the guy who did Kung Fu Panda? As announced by Kevin Eastman to FilmSchoolRejects.com? Yeah, color me skeptical. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Finally, the new, needlessly-well-animated-by-Alex-Kropinak episode of Marvel Superheroes: What The–?! is up! I LOL’d, and not even at one of the gags I wrote.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3: Century #1: 1910

Alan Moore, writer

Kevin O’Neill, artist

Top Shelf/Knockabout, May 2009

80 pages

$7.95

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

Vastly more straightforward–and more like previous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes–than its predecessor Black Dossier, Century: 1910 is a funny, creepy, nasty piece of work that encapsulates and articulates many of Alan Moore’s most heartfelt themes as explicitly and entertainingly as any book he’s ever done. (And he’s usually pretty explicit about that sort of thing, so that’s really saying something!)

Taking the rejiggering of the League’s line-up that occurred during the centuries-long sweep of Black Dossier‘s meta-story as read, 1910 joins Mina Murray, the rejuvenated Allan Quartermain, and their new teammates–the immortal gender-bender Orlando (currently male and generally going by Lando, making me want to say “Hello, what have we here?”), the gentleman thief Raffles, and the psychic detective Carnacki–as they attempt to thwart…something. They’re not quite clear on what it is, and base their investigation on little more than Carnacki’s ominous visionary nightmares. It could have something to do with the female heir to Captain Nemo, or with Jack the Ripper/Mack the Knife, or with a cult run by the sinister magus Oliver Haddo–they just know it’s gonna be bloody. Given Moore’s frequent depiction of the early 20th Century as the birthing of the proverbial rough beast, you can be pretty sure it’s gonna be bloody too.

What’s neat about this issue is that it’s what we in the blog business refer to as a done-in-one; I assume all of the Century books will interlock to tell one long story, and indeed there are plenty of plot threads to pick up down the line, but this tells a pretty satisfying story all on its own. In a way, the set-up, or I suppose the execution, reminded me a bit of the aspect of Warren Ellis’s early Planetary issues that I liked, or of the ending to Watchmen: the League doesn’t figure out what’s going on until it’s all over but the shooting. Moore obviously doesn’t care much for heroism, and the League’s never really “saved the day” in the traditional sense, but here they almost may as well have not shown up. Meanwhile (here’s the explicit part) Moore uses one of his simplest plotlines in ages to establish a direct link between violent misogynist sexuality and the unbridled bloodlust that ended up consuming the entire world not once but twice in the ensuing decades. Vengeance is sweet for the character involved, and you can’t help but get a kick out of it alongside her, but it’s also pretty fucked up, and if anything the League (the male ones, at least–Mina manages herself okay) just make it worse.

Insofar as the climactic bloodbath is representative of the century to follow, this can be seen as pessimism or resignation–but we’ve read Black Dossier and seen Moore’s efforts to establish the League’s true “heroic” legacy as one of imagination and a way of life freed from the dour, anti-life conservatism of their military minders. The question, I suppose, is whether that hedonistic heroism will win out, or if it will only succeed by carving out a space for itself in the Blazing World beyond and allowing our world to head right down the terlet. I mean, I know how it worked out in reality, I’m just curious as to how Moore will slice it in this alternate one.

If that all sounds like really grim reading, I suppose it is, but like I said, it’s also quite a funny book. The constant foreshadowing of the final massacre is so ominous it actually makes you chuckle from time to time the way a scary movie would–not from comic relief, but just because on some level you know what’s coming and it’s kind of amusing how ugly you already know it’s going to get. On the League end of things, the ongoing “are they or aren’t they” business about the Mina/Quartermain/Orlando menage is a hoot, especially the almost Scott Pilgrim-y way it finally comes out into the open, with some angry words that leave half the group wondering what the hell just happened. Kevin O’Neill, whose work simply looks like nothing else on the racks, gets to cut loose with a dock’s worth of leering scoundrels and ne’er do wells, and later with their comeuppance. Moore even injects some meta right into the mainline, with a cameo character who correctly identifies everyone and everything in the book’s world as fictional–he refers to Haddo, an Aleister Crowley manqué, as “Crowley manqué,” and works in a reference to Harry Potter’s Platform 9 3/4 as the launching pad for “the Franchise Express.” The book ends with a visual gag that’s like a shot from The Birds as covered by Troma. I’ll admit to skipping the prose supplement as always (tl;dr), but for pete’s sake one of the characters in it captured Fletcher Hanks’s Stardust the Super-Wizard! The whole comic is entertaining as all get-out, and even if you suspect that things are ultimately going to end very badly for our heroes, or with them washing their hands of our sordid world and fucking each other in Never-Never Land for all eternity, you’ll want to stick around to see how they get there.

Bitching first:

* Why on earth would the MoCCA organizers book a venue with not just inadequate air conditioning, but no air conditioning? The number-one complaint (certainly my number-one complaint) about the old venue was that it was too hot, until they added the seventh floor, at which point the number-one complaint became how long the elevator took to get you up to the seventh floor, which was too hot. So they go through the trouble of moving the festival to a building with no air conditioning in New York City in June? So weird. It was seriously beastly in there, and I spoke with one big exhibitor who thought reports and/or experience of the heat on Saturday kept Sunday customers away. And as The Missus just put it to me, it could easily have been 100 degrees instead of 80 degrees this weekend, which would have made it probably literally unbearable for many potential customers. Why pay money to come and be uncomfortable when you can shop online? The word of mouth is going to be murder on this issue, so I really hope MoCCA does something different next year.

* Meanwhile Saturday morning was a big mess. It’s not just that MoCCA brought over a bunch of publishers’ books too late and had to postpone opening by an hour, leaving people on line in the hot sun (I had to wait on the line and I got there at 12:15!), it’s also that communication about this was so poor that people on the line barely had any idea why it was opening late, and I spoke with at least one exhibitor who didn’t even know the opening was delayed in the first place–he just thought it was really slow for that first hour! Then it screwed up all the panel times and the signage was inadequate about that. So yeah, overall, not a good year for MoCCA as an organization.

* That said, in theory I like the new place. It was a nice walk over from Penn Station, it’s still in a weird old building rather than a bland convention center or hotel, and having everything in one room improved navigability in much the same way that SPX’s similar move did.

* All the big publishers I spoke with said that sales on Saturday were phenomenal. Webcomics Row was always absurdly crowded too, and lines for guys like Adrian Tomine and David Mazzucchelli and the Humbug legends were of rock-star length. (Randall Munroe of xkcd fame didn’t have a line per se–he was simply constantly mobbed.)

* For the little guys, minicomics folks, self-publishers, that sort of thing, though, the folks I talked to said it was just alright. I think when you had big expensive books like You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation, Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Asterios Polyp, George Sprott and so on debuting, that’s where people’s money went and there was less to spread around.

* My spending was a little different than normal this year: I kind of knew going in I’d be buying a lot of things, and I pretty much walked right in and tracked all that stuff down immediately. The Hanks and Kupperman books from Fantagraphics, Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce and the new Frank Santoro/Lane Milburn Cold Heat Special from Picturebox, Tom Gauld’s The Gigantic Robot from Buenaventura, etc. This was probably stupid because I then had to lug those mothers around all day yesterday, but I wasn’t going to risk not getting them.

* On the other hand, there were a lot of books I was pleasantly surprised to see. Kaz Strzepek’s Mourning Star Vol. 2 from Bodega, Chrome Fetus #7 from Hans Rickheit, a bunch of new minis from Partyka, a five, five dollar, five dollar hardcover of abstract comics from Henrik Rehr called Reykjavik…plenty of happy discoveries along those lines.

* The European contingents could really eat your wallet right up, and there were more of them this year than ever before. Between Nora Krug’s cool-looking suite of Red Riding Hood Redux books and a thick black book of Lorenzo Mattotti sketches of couples in bed, for instance, I plunked down a lot of cash at the Bries table. I think the international flavor helps set MoCCA apart from the other indie/alt/small-press shows.

* Overall I spent more money here than I had at any MoCCA since that insane year when Blankets, Kramers Ergot 4, and The Frank Book debuted. Got more Bowie sketches than ever before, too, I think–more on those to come, of course!

* Somewhere there exists a photograph, taken by Tim Hodler, of me, Jog, and NeilAlien.

* MoCCA is always a highlight of my comics year, probably THE highlight of my comics year. I love it. Make sure to come next year!

* If you’re looking for me at MoCCA tomorrow, I will be wearing a red Partyka t-shirt and sporting longish hair that sorta curls outward on the sides like Pippi Longstocking. I’m also a bit on the beardy side at the moment, unless I get fed up and shave tomorrow morning.

* Of all today’s MoCCA previews and guides, I like Chris Mautner’s the best since it’s the most squarely focused on “books to buy/people to see.” The Panelists show at Giant Robot Saturday night also looks like it could be pretty sweet.

* I’m really glad Marvel has finally announced its long-gestating altcomix superhero series Strange Tales MAX. You’ll be seeing a lot more from me on that particular project.

* Hey, artist Sean Gordon Murphy’s art for the upcoming Grant Morrison Vertigo comic Joe the Barbarian. Looks like a Morrisonian take on Toyland is afoot.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Luba. ‘Nuff said.

* Edward James Olmos reminds us that Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is on its way in September. I kind of always thought it was weird that they’d release a two-hour movie after the series finale, doubly so after how final that finale ended up feeling.

* Matt Maxwell notes that Agents of Atlas sales increased for the series’ third issue according to Paul O’Brien’s Marvel month-to-month sales analysis for April. A welcome development following the cancellation of Captain Britain and MI-13.

* Tim O’Neil passionately defends the Star Wars prequels. There are a couple of great (though probably not likely to be Lucas-approved) bits in there if you’re like me and walked out of those movies thinking “I was supposed to hate these?”

* CRwM reviews the Battle Royale franchise’s every iteration, pretty much. I still have the complete set of the Tokyopop/Keith Giffen adaptation of the manga sitting around at least 50% unread. I’m gonna sit down and plow through them at some point–I remember them being enjoyable trash, Giffen’s tics notwithstanding. As for CRwM’s take on it, how’s this for a chilling aside in the post-Handley era?

In fact, there are several scenes that, given current US laws concerning the illegality of even drawn representations of explicit underage sex, make the book too questionable to risk owning, in my opinion.

* Torture Link of the Day: Looks like liberal House Democrats are blocking the passage of the Graham-Lieberman-sponsored, Obama-supported bill to permanently block the release of any more detainee-abuse photos.

* When I worked at Wizard there were entire areas of the office’s physical plant dedicated to nothing but the bizarre ephemera accumulated by the various magazines from their, uh, readers, I guess is the word? This bizarre letter was definitely a highlight.

This is my favorite live recording of any song, ever. As you’d expect, Bootsy Collins kills it on the bass, particularly toward the end, but the real star here is his brother Catfish and his astonishing guitar solo. I don’t want to oversell it, so just listen, and get back to me after the moment horns kick back in after the solo.

Batman and Robin #1

Grant Morrison, writer

Frank Quitely, artist

DC, June 2009

22 pages, $2.99

I wonder how long it will take everyone who complained about Morrison cramming so much information into Final Crisis and Batman R.I.P. that it went all the way back around again into vapidity to complain that nothing happens in this comic? (Answer: not long at all!) I’m a guy who loved how much shit was going on in any given issue of Final Crisis, a guy who very much bought into and enjoyed what Morrison was up to with his supercompressed storytelling techniques and the emotions and ideas they engendered, so on that level this comic’s a bit disappointing. You really can breeze through it in minutes, if you’re the sort of person who feels comfortable glazing over the art of Frank Quitely. But that of course is crazy, and that’s also the point of this comic–it reads to me like Grant Morrison’s reward to Quitely for sticking all the way through All Star Superman and delivering the Oscar-caliber character performances that 12-issue story required to get its point across. Here, Quitely just gets to run wild designing creepy new villains and a younger, fresher Dynamic Duo whose characteristic physical comportment and interactions he gets to invent out of whole cloth–a virtuoso performance of another sort entirely. His line is finer and scratchier than ever, no doubt a result of once again working without an inker enhanced by swapping his usual colorist Jamie Grant for Jim Lee’s go-to guy, Alex Sinclair. For his part, Sinclair gets to execute one of the book’s more amusing visual gags: The flying Batmobile that the megalomaniacal new Robin designed sure has a whole lot of red, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile we’re introduced to a trio of new bad guys: Morrison shifts from Lewis Caroll to another pillar of British children’s fiction about anthropomorphized animals to introduce the villainous Mr. Toad, there’s a new entrant into comics’ grand tradition of Head-On-Fire Guys, and the big bad, Professor Pyg, owes his look to a combo of Leatherface and Hostel with goons straight out of Alan Moore and Brian Bollan’s Killing Joke freakshow. Best of all, since they’re drawn by a stylist like Quitely, they’ve got a chance of sticking. On the hero side, Morrison pulls some neat tricks to show that Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne are on a learning curve–I particularly liked the bit where Damian dismissively refers to Alfred as “Pennyworth,” but then immediately adds a polite “Thank you” in the next word balloon: He may be an enfant terrible, but he’s trying. Elsewhere, under the ostensible cover of training Damian for the field, Morrison manages a dig at all the DC Comics where everyone calls each other by their first names as though every superhero battle is a high school reunion. To cap it off, Morrison and Quitely even crib from Geoff Johns’s delightful recent technique of adding a page or two of decontextualized images from future issues as a teaser for the rest of the run. This isn’t a book I instantly rushed to re-read like I would with each new issue of Final Crisis or R.I.P., but otherwise I think it’s safe to say that I’ve waited all my comics-reading, Batman-loving life for a monthly Batman comic that looks and feels like this.

* Dread Central presents a long, entertaining interview with Teri McMinn, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Pam. If, like me, you’ve seen that movie enough times to be able to appreciate questions about specific shots (and in McMinn’s case you know the ones I’m talking about), this is pure gold.

* Big news from PictureBox: Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce will be available at MoCCA! Full specs here. Brinkman is the author of one of my all-time favorite comics, Teratoid Heights, but he’s spent the last several years joining Dave Cooper and Marc Bell in the “great cartoonists we’ve lost to the goddamn art galleries” club, so a gigantic new Brinkman comic (of material serialized between 2000-2005, but still) is a thing of great joy.

* The two-hour pilot for Battlestar Galactica impresario Ronald D. Moore’s new Fox series Virtuality (ugh) has been consigned to the Friday Night Death Slot. Oh dear.

* My pal Kiel Phegley interviews Batman and Robin artist Frank Quitely. Meanwhile, Jog reviews Batman and Robin #1 and its fellow Grant Morrison comic Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye #3.

* MoCCA is this weekend! I haven’t missed one since the festival’s inception and this year will be no exception, though I will most likely waste at least part of it wandering around the empty halls of the Puck Building wondering where everyone went after heading down there on autopilot. (They’ve relocated the show to here.) I think I’ll have some comics available for purchase courtesy of the Partyka crew and Matt Rota. And if you see me, be sure to say hello–I’d tell you what my hair is going to look like but that’s anybody’s guess at this point.

* Also on the MoCCA beat: Tom Spurgeon suggests 25 things to do at the show, while local yokel Heidi MacDonald recommends some restaurants and bars in the new venue’s neighborhood.

* Clive Barker has a Twitter! On it, he breaks the news that Martyrs director Pascal Laugier is no longer attached to the Hellraiser remake. (This is the second time that the remake has lost the director of a high-profile extreme French horror movie–last time around it was Maury and Bustillo, the guys who did Inside.) He also complains about the obstinancy of Morgan Creek, the studio that cut Nightbreed, either lost or sat on the deleted material for years, and refuses to allow the creation of a Director’s Cut now that it’s been found: “NIGHTBREED will always be ‘that dumb movie where Barker tries to make the monsters the good guys because he’s queer.'”. Mostly, however, it’s a stream of awesomely Barkerian musings about the eroticism of his grandmother’s Bible and suchlike. Go, follow. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* Speaking of Barker, The Vault of Horror’s B-Sol shakes his fists at the heavens over the shoddy treatment Barker has gotten from Hollywood recently with projects like The Midnight Meat Train and the proposed Nightbreed Director’s Cut. Barker’s career is littered with similar coulda woulda shoulda incidents, from Nightbreed‘s original handling to the dissolution of the Abarat deal with Disney. I think the sad fact of the matter is that Hellraiser‘s modern-classic status and Stephen King’s endorsement notwithstanding, Barker is simply not a mainstream taste, even by horror standards. I’m sort of amazed his work has as large a following as it does.

* My pal Kiel Phegley speaks to Geoff Johns about Green Lantern and the upcoming event comic Blackest Night for Publishers Weekly. I really like the sell-out of all the various Lantern Corps t-shirts at New York Comic Con being used as a data point.

* Oh, terrific, They’re remaking Total Recall. Maybe they can make it less crazy! Wouldn’t that be nice! (Via Dread Central.)

* Paul Hornschemeier is taking commissions. Extremely reasonably priced commissions at that. I’ve got some ideas.

* Torture Link of the Day: Vice President Dick Cheney personally oversaw at least four congressional briefings on the torture of detainees. I’m sort of amazed at the extent to which he was really personally invested in and enthused about torturing people. (Via Marcy Wheeler.)

* Finally, I’m not nearly as hard on the Star Wars prequels as most people I know. I enjoyed all of them, I thought Revenge of the Sith was an honest-to-god great movie with tons of weird stuff going on, I think the duel at the end of The Phantom Menace is one of the all-time great movie fight scenes, etc. etc. etc. That said, there are any number of missed opportunities a hardcore Star Wars fan such as myself can point to without resorting to insulting George Lucas or Hayden Christensen or Jar-Jar Binks or whoever else you want to make into the heel. For example, the movies were set in a time where there weren’t just two or three living Jedi, but hundreds or thousands, so as a guy with a Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo on my right arm I can assure you that what people like me really wanted to see was a Braveheart-style battle of tons of lightsaber-wielding Jedi against either tons of lightsaber-wielding Sith or tons of jetpack-sporting Mandalorian knights (the Boba Fett guys). Instead there were fights with robots. This trailer for the upcoming Star Wars Old Republic MMORPG delivers something the movies could have and should have but didn’t. Which is awesome to see, finally, but a little heartbreaking that we’re seeing it for the first time in a commercial for a video game.

DOWNLOAD PART 1

Five Years / Changes / “Heroes” / Breaking Glass / Ziggy Stardust / Look Back in Anger / Fashion / Modern Love / Panic in Detroit / Rebel Rebel / China Girl / A New Career in a New Town / Life on Mars? / Beauty and the Beast / Sound and Vision / Let’s Dance / John, I’m Only Dancing (Saxophone Version) / Space Oddity / Ashes to Ashes / Subterraneans

DOWNLOAD PART 2

Station to Station / Under Pressure (w/Queen) / I’m Afraid of Americans (V1) (w/Nine Inch Nails) / Joe the Lion / Oh! You Pretty Things / Young Americans / Moonage Daydream / Blue Jean / Always Crashing in the Same Car / Be My Wife / Dead Man Walking / Time / Fame / 5:15 The Angels Have Gone / Suffragette City / Stay / Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide

Recently I discovered that a friend of mine who’d been enjoying the mixes I’d been posting had as close to zero exposure to or knowledge of David Bowie as you can get in contemporary society. I think the only Bowie song he knew that he knew (there are known knowns and unknown knowns, after all) was “Changes.” Per his request, and per my own Bowie fixation, I made the two-part mix you see above.

I’m not going to even pretend to be disinterested or objective or discerning when it comes to Bowie–I love virtually everything he’s ever done to pieces. So making a mix was tough, particularly because I couldn’t just take the big hits as read since my buddy had never heard them, or at least never put them all together with Bowie. But nor did I just want to reproduce the many Best Of collections that already exist. (I personally recommend the three-part series that spans 1969-1974, 1974-1979, and 1980-1987–strong selections and lovely art direction.) So this ended up being a combination of a goodly number of Bowie’s giant, monstrous, undeniable singles with a selection of my own personal favorites. It’s not a crate-diving project by any stretch of the imagination–no B-sides, no live recordings, a grand total of just four tracks post-Let’s Dance (including a paltry three from his immensely enjoyable ’90s/’00s altrock-god renaissance) and merely one pre-Hunky Dory, and no Tin Machine whatsoever–but I think it’s an enjoyable blend of rock-radio staples and interesting album cuts that will hopefully make my friend fall in love with David Bowie.

* There are a few interesting responses to my review of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible the other day. First up, in the comments, Tim O’Neil points out that many of the book’s virtues are shared (and pre-dated) by Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon–an excellent point that I thought of a few times while writing my review. In reply I point out that Savage Dragon is, according to Kirkman, a direct influence on Invincible.

* Next, Tom Spurgeon notes that a big reason the book clicks with fans is because of the unique spin it puts on traditional, familiar superhero tropes. That’s something I didn’t get into in my review, to its detriment–obviously that’s a huge part of the appeal, right from the book’s original “what’s it like to be the son of Superman?” high concept. In my defense, when I praised the book’s emphasis on ideas and storylines over attempts to create iconic moments, it was precisely the book’s ability to riff on hoary old superhero business in unexpected ways that I was thinking of–again, the way it’s zigged rather than zagged in terms of its treatment of its universe’s Krypton analogue, or how it’s dealt with antagonists like alien invaders or “archnemeses,” are the kinds of things it places front and center rather than crafting the perfect Invincible moment.

* Finally, here’s something I meant to include in my original review but forgot. A third big o’ blogging that informed my re-read was Curt Purcell’s pair of posts about the fallacies of “superhero deconstructionism” and “logical conclusions.” (My responses at the time are here and here.) Curt’s argument is that there’s nothing “logical” or “conclusive” in such stories as we generally understand those terms: Books like Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, and Brat Pack (to use the titles he and I mentioned back then) take the superhero unusually far in a particular direction, but there’s nothing inherent in the the genre that compelled that direction or the distance those books travelled down it. Curt uses the difference in the demeanor and conduct of Watchmen‘s godlike superbeing Dr. Manhattan and Squadron Supreme‘s godlike superbeing Hyperion as a pretty rock-solid case in point.

Though he never comes out and says it (and he can correct me if I’m wrong here) I believe Curt was trying to point out that there’s nothing about superhero stories that necessitates a less constrained, more “real world” treatment of the genre to wind up in the nightmarish territory that most deconstructionist superhero books explore–that the varyingly dystopian tone of Watchmen, Squadron Supreme, Rick Veitch’s ’80s books, Warren Ellis’s ’90s and ’00s books, even Frank Miller’s comparatively upbeat The Dark Knight Returns is a choice, not a revelation of something always present within the genre’s every example if we’d but had the courage to look.

I would agree, and I’d point to books like Invincible and Savage Dragon as counterexamples to those other titles. I don’t think anyone who’s read them would argue that those series are “deconstructionist” superhero books by any stretch of the imagination–they positively revel in traditional superheroics. However, they take them further than traditional, generally corporate-controlled, non-creator-owned books do. Alien invasions have lasting consequences, superhero battles greatly impact the lives and quality of life of the civilian population, the ramifications of supercrime and superlaw-enforcement are given freer reign to play out–all within the context of of story worlds that are neither dystopian nor utopian, but rather are recognizably related to the DC and Marvel Universes though far more volatile. This gets back to a point I made in that earlier discussion: stories that purport to be the “logical conclusion” of superhero comics may fail as regards the genre overall, but would almost certainly succeed if they were to take place within the big corporate superhero shared universes in that they break so many of those universes’ unwritten rules regarding the ramifications of the existence and actions of superpowered beings. Neither Savage Dragon nor Invincible would work in a shared-universe context either, since they break many of the same rules…but they also demonstrate that breaking those rules doesn’t necessarily take you into the realm of superhero-bred or superhero-led dystopia.

* Jaw-dropping news this afternoon on the horror front, especially for Clive Barker fans like me: The lost Nightbreed footage has been found! Barker’s film Nightbreed, his studio-made follow-up to Hellraiser, has long been known as an emblematic case of “what might have been” horror filmmaking thwarted by studio interference and ignorance. In a nutshell, the suits didn’t realize the monsters were the good guys in the movie until it was already in the process of being made–at which point they freaked. The end result was a compromised effort, one beloved by many for its bestiary, its visuals, its allegorical content (Barker once told me that the monster city of Midian is basically Boystown), and a chilling performance from David Cronenberg, but not what Barker had intended to end up on screen. Barker has long spoken of extra footage lost in Universal’s byzantine archives, and potentially consumed by a fire. Now, however, a friend of Barker’s named Mike Miller apparently made it his personal quest to unearth the footage–and he succeeded! He was told by someone at the studio that it’s there waiting to be used provided they get the green light from the higher-ups–but said higher-ups believe there’s no market for a Nightbreed Director’s Cut, or even a simple upgrade to Blu-Ray.

I love Nightbreed to pieces as-is–it was my first “real” horror-movie, back in my junior year of high school (I was a late bloomer!)–and there are people I’d murder to see a Director’s cut. If you feel like I do about it, click here to find out what you can do to help. (Via Dread Central.)

* As expected, it turns out the Alien “remake” is actually a prequel, to be produced by Los Bros Scott (Ridley and Tony) and directed by in-house helmer Carl Rinsch. (Via Arrow in the Head.)

* Torture Links of the Day: Major General Antonio Taguba denies earlier reports that he said the Obama-suppressed prisoner-abuse photos contain images of rape. Meanwhile, Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have introduced The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 for the express purpose of preventing the disclosure of any more detainee photos of any kind, apparently with express White House support. No word on who’s being protected by this Protection Act.