Never Learn Anything from History

Kate Beaton, writer/artist

self-published, June 2009

68 pages

$18

Read some strips at Kate Beaton’s site

Buy the book from TopatoCo

Like Ditko Hands or Kirby Krackle, Kate Beaton Eyes are a signature achievement in cartooning. They widen, they narrow, they leer, they roll, and (god bless Tyra Banks for introducing this concept to the world) they even smile. If it’s possible to make eye contact with a comic, Beaton’s comics are prime candidates–you lock eyes with them and you’re instantly drawn in. If eyes are the window to the soul, then Beaton’s comics, like James Brown, have soul to burn.

Once you’re finished saying jeepers creepers over those peepers, the rest of her cartooning’s elegant gestalt has a chance to make an impression on you. Beaton’s line is loose, even rough at times, yet sinuous and whole–it’s like cursive handwriting. It feels both sketchy and deliberately fancy, really a perfect complement to her subject matter, which more often than not plays history’s great men and women (and the women and men in their lives) for laughs by feeding them through a precocious 14-year-old’s priorities, sense of humor, and keen observation of adult absurdities–the kinds of gags you might find passed back and forth in notes between smart kids during third period history. Fans of Shakesperean actor (and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin) Edwin Booth shriek and moan during Hamlet’s soliloquy like Twilight fans over Robert Pattinson taking his shirt off. Lord Byron is a slut. President James Monroe drops the Constitution, then bends over to pick it up, in order to show off his ass to an appreciative young lady. Rebels, revolutionaries, and rabblerousers from Robespierre to Louis Riel to Tadeusz Kosciuszko to Patrick Pearse to George Washington come across like the kind of bumbling heroes or simpering villains you’d find in a kid’s action-comedy superhero cartoon. She has a real knack for their body language, too, as they proclaim and lounge and get shot in the face by arrows and come onto each other and so forth–their movements and poses are nearly as distinctive as their eyes. (Her self-caricature is a real peach, too.) Meanwhile there’s something about Beaton’s dialogue delivery that really suits the Internet–the strips sort of slowly wind their way up to the joke, at which point lots of punchlines seem banged out in all caps with no punctuation by hysterical messageboard people who are all too aware of their own hysteria, if you follow me.

Not every joke is a winner, and even many of the best gags don’t really make you laugh out loud–I was already familiar with some of these strips from Beaton’s website, so I think that during this read-through, the only bit that made me LOL was this hilarious drawing of a drunken Santa Claus. And I have to assume that the Pythonesque history-major humor is an acquired taste. (I remember when I was a kid and first discovered Monty Python that I assumed all adults knew the ins and outs of the history of philosophy and made jokes about Kant all the time–this was the humor I pictured existing somewhere out of reach.) Some of the slowly accruing jokes never quite seem to accrue. But the gestalt is so good-natured that you don’t even mind the bits that are just semi-funny, and the cartooning is an absolute pleasure. Soak in it.

The Lagoon

Lilli Carre, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

pages

$14.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

I’m grateful for books like The Lagoon, where things happen without neat resonances with other things that happened, where you can’t always locate the part within the whole. The Lagoon is a horror story, if a low-key one; like much of the best horror it makes the connection between horror and the absurd. Whether you’re talking about a giant gorilla climbing the Empire State Building or a puzzle box that unleashes S&M demons, horror’s iconic images frequently boast a lack of inherent logic that rivals that of video games. Carre gently (and I do mean gently–don’t expect the surrealist nightmares of Tom Neely or Josh Simmons here) applies this throughout her story. The characters don’t appear to know where the creature who lurks in the titular waters came from or why it does the weird thing it does, and neither do we. Nor are we presented enough information to determine the true nature of the creature’s relationship with one member of the family at the center of the story. The context provided points to something illicit, but perhaps that’s just the lingering effect of the story’s eroticized, somnambulist qualities–so much takes place at night, in bedrooms, in still waters, against thick and sticky blacks…and heck, one character is an actual somnambulist. And finally, the story’s coda (more like its final third) doesn’t appear to directly address the preceding events in the way we’d expect. Carre’s sinuous, snaking treatment of sound provides a through-line; there are windows that get opened and shut and lied about; the characters are of course the same; but it still feels disconnected in ways that few writers today are gutsy enough to attempt. The overall effect is like Clive Barker fed through a twee filter. This’ll stick to you.

* Thank you to everyone for your well-wishes. It means a lot to us.

* Jeez, I have a lot of catching up to do!

* World War Z author Max Brooks tells Fangoria that the screenplay for the WWZ adaptation is now being written by Matthew Carnahan, best known for chin-scratching political thrillers (okay, “thrillers”) like The Kingdom, State of Play, and Lions for Lambs. Amazing Spider-Man writer/NorGwen StaceBorn shipper J. Michael Straczynski previously took a shot at the script. It’s worth nothing, however, that in Hollywood these days JMS is better known as the writer of Angelina Jolie’s Oscar-baiting Changeling than as a nerd guy, and obviously Carnahan plays to a tonier crowd as well. That’s great news as far as I’m concerned. The beauty of World War Z was that you could envision it being made into a Ken Burns documentary, and I’d really love to see a zombie movie with all of Hollywood’s resources behind it take a High Drama approach to the genre.

* Robin Hardy’s semi-sequel to The Wicker Man is a go again! Previously called Cowboys for Christ and shuttered for lack of funding, it’s now called The Wicker Tree and is currently filming in Edinburgh, Scotland.

* Because I was too busy having a heart attack when I linked to CBR’s coverage of the great Grant Morrison/Clive Barker mind-meld, I neglected to point out that Morrison apparently said he intends to write a Wonder Woman project, with the intent of ironing out some of the characters problematic aspects in terms of gender and sexuality. However, Dan DiDio doesn’t seem to be aware of those intentions–or if he is, he’s not talking.

* Happy Fifth Blogiversaries to two of my favorite cats on the comics internet, Joe “Jog” McCulloch and Matt Maxwell.

* John Harrison’s film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood will have a one-time-only theatrical screening during Comic Con on Friday night. Last year I think I blew off a similar screening of Midnight Meat Train to watch Jane Wiedlin make a Snakes on a Plane joke at the Eisners.

* Speaking of Harrison, he’ll be adapting Stephen King’s Cell as a TV miniseries, meaning that Eli Roth’s film version is dunzo, I guess.

* Here’s a terrific interview with Paper Rad’s Ben Jones that all the kids are talking about. Money quote:

Paper Rad isn’t a sexy story either. I’d like to be able to talk about it like a young New Yorker might talk about dance parties or graphitti or doing drugs, but when you ask me about Paper Rad I am going to have to tell you about how it was and is just a desperate vital exercise in finding meaning in life. The day to day was about trying not going crazy, about not giving up, it was about being happy. I am sure thats not what people want to hear. They want me to talk about neon jamz, cardboard robots, inflatable bears covering Boston songs, wearing 2 pairs of sunglasses, Volvo’s full of trolls, nintendo mind-melts, or the Doo-Man Group, but again, as someone who was creating the content that fueled the expression and celebration that surrounded Paper Rad, for me the experience isn’t summed up in a 3rd generation Dan Deconesque youtube video, or any superficial reduction or interpretation, the experience was an attempt at an honest and clear artistic expression. But I guess we package that expression in a candy coated outershell so its fair to react to the shell. But I insist that there is a deeper meaning beyond the clutter and noise and color on the outside. And that deeper meaning was “don’t worry, be happy”. Also don’t forget about the 20 foot Bart Simpson mural at Pace Wildenstien. I don’t know, I guess I am sad this week cause I lost my cat.

I feel you, BJ. (Via Dan Nadel.)

* Go see RiffTrax live! (Via Topless Robot.)

* Jason Adams posts three teaser posters for Let Me In, Matt Reeves’s dopily titled Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In. Trajan font, ho! (The nice thing about the Internet is that a blog like this can produce a Swedish-speaking commenter to debunk the studio’s suggestion that this is a more accurate translation of the title.) Jason also writes about the movies and the novel for The Film Experience. Still pretty conflicted about this.

* Jason also reminds us that Children of Men was a gorgeous film and puts together the screencap gallery to prove it.

* Tim O’Neil explains why decompressed superhero team books don’t work.

* I love Stephen King’s short story “The Raft.” When I was a kid my grandparents had a cabin near a lake, and there was a raft anchored out in the lake a ways just like there is in the story. It was a ton of fun to swim out there and jump off and such, but it was also a bit on the creepy side–fish would swim underneath and nibble at you, seaweed grew up the anchor lines, and of course if you jumped or dove in too deep you’d end up in the morass of vegetation on the lake floor, which was indescribably gross. So the setting for this story was instantly recognizable to me, and the horror of it instantly understandable. The story also features one of my favorite of King’s trademark “we’re probably going to be eaten by monsters soon, so why don’t we have some illicit sex to blow off some steam” scenes–quite a climax, too! Anyway, I bring all this up because there’s a miles-long blob of apparently organic mystery Arctic goo floating down the Alaskan shoreline, and at least one report of a seagull stripped to the bone by it. Maybe this is why Sarah Palin resigned? (Via Ryan Penagos.)

* Finally, boys and girls, action, na-na-na-na-eeeee…

I will not be going to San Diego Comic Con after all because my cat is very, very sick.

Without going into details, this has been a bad year.

Wednesday Comics #1

Brian Azzarello, Eduardo Risso, Dave Gibbons, Ryan Sook, John Arcudi, Lee Bermejo, Dave Bullock, Vinton Heuck, Kurt Busiek, Joe Quinones, Neil Gaiman, Mike Allred, Eddie Berganza, Sean Galloway, Paul Pope, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Dan DiDio, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Kevin Nowlan, Ben Caldwell, Adam Kubert, Joe Kubert, Karl Kerschl, Brendan Fletcher, Walt Simonson, Brian Stelfreeze, Kyle Baker, writers/artists

DC, July 2009

16 pages

$3.99

No sense beating around the bush: I don’t like newsprint. It’s flimsy and icky and doesn’t look nice. It doesn’t hold color well. You get a big fold-out broadsheet made of newsprint like this thing and fold and unfold it a couple of times and it becomes more messed-up and harder to do anything with each time. I don’t like it when newspapers use it, I don’t like it when PictureBox uses it, I don’t like it when Paper Rodeo uses it, I didn’t like it when that Comic Shop News thing they’d stick in the bag with your weekly pull list used it (they still around?). To paraphrase James Murphy, I don’t get the borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’30s. I don’t like paying $3.99 for a comic that self-consciously evokes its own disposability with the stuff it’s printed on, either. (Hell, I don’t like paying for a single issue of anything.) Basically this project is designed, aesthetically, to press a lot of buttons I don’t have.

That said, Wednesday Comics #1 works perfectly well as a sort of My First Kramers, an astutely curated experiment in what happens when you tell a bunch of auteurs to do they thing on a gigantic canvas. As with Kramers Ergot 7, you get a few different approaches to how to use all that space. Some of the creative teams, most notably the father-son team of Joe and Adam Kubert, just blow up a regular grid, resulting in an eye-arresting sequence of Nazis playing the captured Sgt. Rock a chin-music symphony and giving you that “Lily Tomlin holding a giant book” sense of the object’s sheer size. Others cram the page with extra information: Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman strip, a far less nostalgia-inclined affair than most in the book, is riddled with tiny panels and minute twists and turns, while Karl Kerschl and Ben Fletcher’s Flash effort takes a cue from the likes of Dan Clowes and tells its story through a pair of self-contained but interconnected funnies-style strips. Other creators tip their hats to the newspaper strips of yore as well: Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook’s Kamandi story is done Prince Valiant-style, while Paul Pope’s Adam Strange effort is a less direct but still recognizable homage to classic adventure strips and sci-fi pulps. Even the modern era earns some tips of the hat: Kurt Busiek and Joe Quinones’s Green Lantern strip references Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier in era, tone, look, and even a mention of its title, while the awe-inspiring naturalist Kyle Baker Hawkman art that took the internet by storm is employed in the service of a disappointingly direct and unfunny 300 parody. (He’s riffing on that long opening sequence from the comic version–“We march.”–that Zack Snyder didn’t use in the movie, so maybe people will miss it. I’m kind of jealous of those people.)

When you print comics this big you have a lot of space to fill, which draws your attention to coloring even more than normal, and in this case that can be a blessing and a curse. Trish Mulvihill escapes the dreaded Vertigo Brown with some lovely golden hues in the Brian Azzarello/Eduardo Risso Batman piece that opens the issue, Ryan Sook provides some interesting purple-orange sunset scenes for his Kamandi strip, Joe Kubert’s palette on the Sgt. Rock piece is refreshingly and effectively subdued, and Jose Villarubia’s gray skintone for Adam Strange meshes with his purple jumpsuit and bright blue enemies for an effect that looks appropriately aged and weathered. But I think in most other cases, the paper stock betrays the color work. You can practically feel Amanda Conner’s Supergirl wanting to be a bright red, blue, and blonde, Laura Allred’s normally radiant work looks in her husband Mike’s Metamorpho strip like you’re looking at it through sunglasses, Sean Galloway’s Teen Titans art is dialed way down (those graytone or nonexistent backgrounds don’t help)…even the great Dave Stewart is undone with colors for Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck’s Deadman strip that just don’t quite click.

As for the stories themselves, who can judge at this early stage? I suspect that for the most part, how you react to these meager one-page morsels at this stage in the game depends on your preexisting feelings about the characters and the contributors. (Spoiler alert–I’m excited about the Paul Pope strip!) I think Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman strip, which is so different both visually and narratively from what you’re used to seeing from DC with regards to this character–and from everything else in the comic–is the one that’s most likely to surprise in the long run, though for good or ill I don’t know. Also, clever of John Arcudi to open his Superman strip with Supes flying backwards at the audience, no? I do think it’s rather delightful that DC, or at least series editor Mark Chiarello, turned to a bunch of talented creators and told them to write about their respective characters in whichever way they chose rather than hewing to on-model continuity or overall vibe. (Hey, remember when Marvel did that more or less line-wide in 2000-2001 or so?) Of course, the thing about these kinds of non-continuity short-story “tone poems” in honor of this or that superhero character is that it’s hard to get them to stick, and harder still to get a sense of what you’ll get out of them in the end, other than “Hey, Metamorpho’s neat” or whatever.

That, I suppose, is the problem. Four bucks for 15 one-page slivers of story, 12 weeks in a row, is an awful big investment for an uncertain return. (And I’m already let down something awful by the Baker Hawkman thing.) This is why I think it’s fair to spend so much time kvetching about the paper stock, because Wednesday Comics isn’t a series, not really–it’s an object. The size, the format, and most especially the newsprint were selected to stand out, to impress the physicality of the object upon you. Seeing the burst of publicity for the book last week made it clear that this was a smart choice in some ways: Tying a high-profile comic book launch in this day and age to a way of doing comics that’s almost completely outmoded, with bonus points for resonating with the overall death of newspapers, was bound to attract the attention. Meanwhile, within the world of comics, this is the sort of project, and the sort of talent line-up, that’s bound to win plaudits from bloggers and award committees–if this thing doesn’t clean up at next year’s Eisner’s I’ll eat my hat. The point of Wednesday Comics is for you to note how different, how unique, how special it is. Which is well and good, but it’s all undercut if you just don’t like newsprint, you know?

OH MY GOD

This year’s San Diego Comic Con will be inundated with Twilight fans, mostly young girls, and the accepted fannish reaction to this demographic, almost entirely untapped by the North American comics industry, will be unremitting hostility.

Doom Force #1

Grant Morrison, writer

Keith Giffen, Mike Mignola, Steve Pugh, Ian Montgomery, Brad Vancata, Richard Case, Walt Simonson, Paris Cullins, Ray Kryssing, Duke Mighten, Mark McKenna, Ken Steacy, artists

DC Comics, 1992

64 pages

$2.95

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Obviously, this is an in-the-moment parody of the ever-more-extreme (with a capital “E,” at one point) superhero-team comics of Rob Liefeld and his peers and imitators. The gags are all a lot stronger than you’d think they might be, actually, which is surprising even given the talent of the writer. The Crying Boy’s nebulously defined bad-luck powers and emo demeanor, Flux’s girl-superpower of amorphousness and her sperm-covered form-fitting unitard, The Scratch’s corporate branding and badassness that passes fully into the realm of douchebaggery, etc etc etc.–I chuckled at each, and that’s even before you get to Shasta The Living Mountain or the list of trademarked names for characters who may appear in future volumes, which is really one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in a comic (Gridlock! Campfire! Timesheet!). But I think the most rewarding gags are the ones that tug things in either goofier or weirder directions than necessary. In the former category, there’s Shasta’s transformation into said Living Mountain–complete with not just a ski slope and chairlift, but actual skiers. In the latter category, there’s the way the comic pretty much stops short a couple of times so that the brother/sister villain team can get into uncomfortable shouting matches about proper feminine attire: “Every strong woman must feel free…to express her femininity by wearing exotic lingerie…” (You’ve got two guesses at to which sibling says that and the first guess doesn’t count.) As for the Liefeld-manque art, I never actually read (or even just bought) his comics so I can’t tell you how effective a lampoon it is. I do however remember Mark Millar’s much-repeated insistence that Kids Love Rob Liefeld, and it’s true that the cast of thousands assembled to knock Rob off here do a great job of conveying Liefeldian EXCITEMENT and VOLUME and BARELY CONCEALED NIPPLES AND LABIA at the expense of any vestige of storytelling coherence. Overall it’s a hoot that holds up well. I like it better than Batman: Gothic. PS: Mickey Eye cameo!

Click to embiggen and click here to maybe buy it as a T-shirt if you live in the UK or something, I don’t know, but it’s AWESOME

* Plug time: I don’t think there’s a single freelance assignment I do from which I get more enjoyment than writing for Twisted ToyFare Theater, so I’m super-psyched that Twisted ToyFare Theater Vol. 10 is now available. If you have a nerd-culture funnybone somewhere in your body, I really do think you’ll find it a hoot.

* San Diego Comic Con is coming up in less than two weeks, and while an almost comical amount of personal and professional stress has kept me from getting too excited about the fact that I’m now going to it, I’m starting to feel a few tinges. Anyway, the schedules for Thursday and Friday are up, though I haven’t looked at them yet, and apparently you can still get a room in a good hotel if you want. (Heh, I just clicked the schedule links to copy the URLs and seeing phrases like “Friday is Star Wars Day” gave me butterflies. Yep, starting to get excited.) As for me, I will be the Andy Samberg to Jonah Weiland’s T-Pain: I’m staying on the motherfucking boat!

* Speaking of cons I love, MoCCA’s Karl Erickson speaks with Robot 6’s Tim O’Shea about the festival’s problems and plans to solve them. I’m excited to see this being addressed so directly–to the point of moving the festival to the spring in an attempt to avoid heat problems entirely, no less. I also suspect that Erickson reveals the source of many of this year’s problems when he notes that there was virtually a 100% staff turnover prior to the show, forcing them to start from scratch in many ways. I wish them all the luck in the world getting things back on track for 2010 because MoCCA is my favorite show. (Good get for the Robot 6 gang, too!)

* Surprising no one, Warner Bros. is indeed preparing the real Director’s Cut of Watchmen for a holiday DVD release. Hilariously, this appears to hitting the news now only because a promotional flyer for the actual Director’s Cut that WB is including in the phony “Director’s Cut” coming out at the end of the month got leaked.

* I feel like a dope constantly posting updates about Clive Barker adaptations when I still haven’t seen The Midnight Meat Train, but here’s some new info and pics from Dread and here’s a red-band trailer for Book of Blood, which will be screening at Comic Con on Friday night.

* It’s always fun when a friend comes in cold to a comic series I really enjoy, and such is the case with my pal Ceri B.’s review of Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s Runaways.

* Another pair of worthwhile reviews: Jog takes a look at Wednesday Comics #1, while the AV Club’s Scott Tobias reviews one of my very favorite films of all time, Lost Highway, for his New Cult Canon series.

* Back when I worked at Wizard I helped create a hoax story about a direct-to-comics Goonies sequel written by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner. Click the link to let Ben Morse explain it all to you.

* Why do cartoon characters vomit up fish skeletons? Tim Hodler turns to Al Jaffee for answers.

* Jeffrey Brown draws the Hulk. Click already.

* Being Paul Pope is nice work if you can get it.

* Finally, do me a favor and give your pets a snuggle today, will ya?

Low Moon

Jason, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, June 2009

216 pages, hardcover

$24.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Tom Spurgeon’s recent review of this book centered on whether or not it was (apologies to Elaine Benes) spongeworthy. Of all the Jason books released by Fantagraphics, this short story collection is the first one to get the hardcover treatment, obviously due to the titular story’s serialization in The New York Times–but does it really deserve the extra frou-frou and increased price point? Does the format flatter the work? With all due respect to the Spurge, shit yeah. And I say that as someone who casually dislikes hardcovers as a rule. But you could do much, much, much, much, much, much worse than to spend 25 bucks and an inch on your bookshelf on yet agoddamnnother collection of murderously bleak and astonishingly well-executed high-concept existentialism, drawn with an unimpeachable clean line and colored like unto a thing of beauty. Time and time again during these five stories I was almost physically impacted by Jason’s skill as a storyteller: A character spits a mouthful of something spoilery into a sink in “Emily Says Hello,” relationships are established and upended with the tiniest possible handful of panels in “Low Moon,” petty and heinous crimes are paralleled Crimes & Misdemeanors-style with chilling results in “&,” another mouthful of something spoilery is forcibly ejected in “Proto Film Noir,” a strange plant fires spores into the sky indifferent to the plight of an observer in “You Are Here”…his skill and his bravado left me shaking my head with amusement and/or amazement time and time again. He’s one of the best, as is this book.

UPDATE: Spurge corrects my interpretation of his review in the comments.

Wednesday Comics is printed on newsprint after all. Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat regrets regretting the error.

* Here’s a nice little suite of action-movie reviews that are well worth your time (both the action movies and the reviews):

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Cullen Gallagher reviews George P. Cosmatos’s Rambo: First Blood Part II. Gallagher plays it straight, which I think is a pretty rewarding way to engage the problematic yet hugely bizarre and entertaining shoot-’em-ups of the ’80s.

* Meanwhile, fellow NCtaTNY critic Leo Goldsmith reviews Joseph Zito’s Invasion U.S.A. Goldsmith does not play it straight, but hey, with scenes like this, it’s tough to blame him. It’s still a fun review, and let’s face it, Chuck Norris’s Matt Hunter does not invite the level of commentary that does John J. Rambo, Sylvester Stallone’s Vietnam Frankenstein. Points for locating the film within the Golan-Globus oeuvre.

* Finally, The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias reviews Sam Raimi’s Darkman. For young teens searching desperately for a post-Burton-Batman live-action superhero fix, this one was tough to beat; Raimi’s made three Spider-Man and still has yet to do so.

* Here’s a quartet of interesting posts from the Comics Comics/PictureBox crew:

* Frank Santoro sings the praises of Mat Brinkman’s recently collected Multiforce. I do hope Frank will take a closer look at Teratoid Heights while he’s at it; as I’ve tried to argue, there’s emotional content aplenty in that book beyond the “look at the purty pictures” aspect.

* Next, Dan Nadel takes a look at Grant Morrison’s Batman run, specifically Batman & Robin (which he likes) and Batman R.I.P. (which he doesn’t). Like many readers, Dan blames the discrepancy in art, here between the great Frank Quitely and the, well, less great Tony Daniel, for the discrepancy in quality. I’ve defended Daniel’s work on R.I.P. before and will do so again–no, he isn’t Quitely, but not many artists in the history of superhero comics are, and I think the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh was quite obviously intended as a riff on the “extreme” Image heroes whose artists are a clear influence on Daniel. (Actually, now that I think of it, TBoZEA functions a lot like Image’s similarly decrepit, in-house Image parody character, the Maxx.)

* Back on the Frank Santoro beat, keep your eyes peeled for Cold Heat Special #9 by Santoro and Closed Caption Comics’ awesome Lane Milburn.

* Finally, Santoro’s new blog presents highlights from his comics collection, which often end up for sale at the PictureBox table at conventions.

* NeilAlien goes buck-wild on Brian Bendis et al’s recent dethroning of Doctor Strange as Sorcerer Supreme.

* Speaking of Bendis, Powers is returning. I’m looking forward to it.

* I finally got a chance to read Graeme McMillan’s interview with Grant Morrison I linked to the other day, and here’s the part that stood out to me the most:

Watching a billionaire Batman disarm poorly-trained, poverty-stricken muggers effortlessly or beating up skinny junkies might be fun for a scene or two but does tend to raise thorny issues of class and privilege that the basic adventure hero concept is not necessarily equipped to deal with adequately.

Morrison says this by way of explaining why he’s focused on Batman’s weird/super adversaries rather than doing street-level stuff. It reminds me a lot of what I was talking about earlier regarding superheroes and torture. I think there are several perfectly legitimate approaches to dealing with these sorts of unpleasant situations, and while heightening the contradictions”by doing one of those “logical conclusions”-type stories is one, simply bailing and addressing some other aspect of the genre seems valid to me as well.

* I’ve been trying to stay as spoiler-free about The Descent 2 as possible–y’know, beyond the spoiler inherent in the existence of the film itself–but here’s a big gallery of Descent 2 stills to whet your appetite if you’re in that market.

* David Wain, who once ran from The Missus and I when we recognized him in the Museum of Natural History as though he were Princess Diana fleeing the paparazzi, is holding a copy of The State: The Complete Series DVD box set in his hot little hands. I’m still not convinced it’s not an elaborate put-on, but I’ve got the thing pre-ordered on Amazon, so we shall see.

* I’m glad they’ve instituted Supergirl’s bike shorts as her official under-skirt covering, because besides being exponentially less loathsome than showing her panties all the damn time–let alone comics superstar Jeph Loeb’s decision to reintroduce this underage character into the DCU by way of a protracted nude scene–it’s actually fairly realistic. I’ve spent my fair share of time around Catholic high school girls in my day, and they almost always wore boxers under their skirts (in large part, let’s be honest, because of spending their fair share of time around Catholic high school boys like me).

* Brian K. Vaughan is off Lost. The fanboy in me always reacts to announcements like this by thinking “B-b-b-b-but doesn’t he want to stick around till the end?!?!?”

* Guillermo Del Toro talks about a bunch of things, including trying to carve out a new filmic identity for The Hobbit versus The Lord of the Rings. I maintain that Del Toro is overrated, so I view this with the usual blend of excitement and skepticism.

* Damn Data and Bryan Alexander both take a closer look at that horrendous-looking viral-video North Carolina sewer lifeform than I’m willing to do.

* Apparently the comics internet was always a horrible, horrible place.

I suppose there’s a degree to which we must give superheroes beating criminals for information a pass just by the nature of the genre, the same way we give their vigilantism a pass but probably wouldn’t approve of anyone in real life kidnapping a criminal, pounding the shit out of them, and hanging them unconscious from a lamppost outside One Police Plaza. But I think that a good writer, on some level or other, owns up to the ickiness of this behavior. After all, superheroes routinely do things to criminals in their power that we would classify as war crimes if the Bush Administration did them. Far be it from me to impose a political litmus test on fiction regarding this or any issue, but I like to assume that thinking people who make up stories for a living have given this topic some thought (hopefully even before America started routinely doing this), and thus if a writer doesn’t comment in some way on how profoundly fucked-up this aspect of superheroic behavior is, it’s on them.

A case in point is Justice League: Cry for Justice #1. For real, there was a major, major disconnect between how awesome Ryan Choi kept saying Ray Palmer was in the comic, and how awesome writer James Robinson kept saying Ray Palmer was in the supplemental material, and the fact that his main action beat in this issue was torturing Killer Moth. That’s not awesome!

I often think of the scene in The Dark Knight Returns where Batman throws a guy through a window, informs him that he’s bleeding out, and the only way Batman will bring him to a hospital is if he coughs up info. Miller’s writing is such that even though we’re obviously supposed to see Batman as a hero, we are also to understand that he is a dangerous, disturbed man, and that this conduct is not particularly honorable–it’s something his demons have driven him to do.

Another case: recently Ed Brubaker had a scene where Daredevil tortured some nigh-invulnerable supervillain by lighting him on fire or something like that. Now it turned out that he wasn’t actually doing this–I forget how it worked, but I think it was one of those “power of suggestion” deals, like how you read about in frat initiations when they tell the initiate that they’re going to be branded but then touch them with an ice cube, the burn mark appears anyway. But still, Brubaker wrote the scene in such a way that there was no doubt that what Daredevil was doing was a seriously messed-up act by a seriously messed-up man.

And of course there are any number of similar examples, from Rorschach even to that horrible, horrible JMS Spider-Man storyline after Aunt May got shot where he was like “no more Mr. Nice Spidey, I’m going to break fingers and make deals with devils and abandon my marriage every day until I get my octogenarian aunt back.”

The Atom’s conduct in this issue, on the other hand, was just gross–extra gross, given his torture technique’s resonance with his and his wife’s own history, as a friend of mine pointed out.

At any rate, isn’t torture what bad guys do?

Then there’s the whole issue of the unreliability of information extracted through torture, which no one seems to want to address in comics or anywhere else. But that’s another story, I suppose.

“Starlight” by Muse…in a higher key!!!

Mike Nelson. Joel McHale. Red Dawn. RiffTrax. Happy Birthday, America!

OH MY GOD

* Here are a couple of video interviews with Grant Morrison I haven’t had a chance to watch yet. (Via JK Parkin.)

* Here’s an audio interview with Jordan Crane I haven’t had a chance to listen to yet. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* Here’s a Gilbert Hernandez superheroine comic I haven’t had a chance to read yet. (Also via Mike Baehr.)

* B-Sol at Vault of Horror notes the locations of Deadgirl theatrical screenings across the country on July 24th and 25th at midnight. They shoulda thrown San Diego in there.

* I really don’t care if Let Me In is “a more accurate English-language translation” of the title of the novel upon which Let the Right One In was based–it’s not as good a title, and it’s silly that that’s what They’re calling the Hollywood remake. (Via Jason Adams.)

* I have no dog in this race at all, so I’ll simply say that Tom Spurgeon’s argument for pulling the plug on the Harveys has me mentally singing its central proposition to the tune of “Pulling the Plug on the Party,” which is awesome.

* Yes, by all means, please collect David Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blanket so I can finally read the damn thing.

* Can’t remember if I’ve seen this before or not, but the Clive Barker adaptation Book of Blood hits DVD on September 29th.

* My pal Ben Morse makes the case for his definitive Batman stories.

* My pal Ceri B. takes a look at a pair of horror-ish comics that were part of what was once known as “the New Mainstream,” The Light Brigade and various 30 Days of Night books.

* Wow: Scientists have discovered a single, massive ant mega-colony spread across Europe, the U.S., and Japan. (Via Thoreau.)

* Torture links of the day: We tortured multiple prisoners to death. Shouldn’t that be a bigger deal, especially given how the torture debate has come to center not on the morality of abuse generally, but whether the way we abused people wasn’t that severe?

* Adorable, animated-style Battlestar Galactica figures are pretty hilarious in the context of the series’ final episodes. Speaking of, it’s kind of adorable that the upcoming tv movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is pretty explicitly devoted to tying up plot points they never got around to covering in the series itself.