Red Riding Hood Redux (Red Riding Hood, The Wolf, The Grandmother, The Mother, and The Hunter)

Nora Krug, writer/artist

Bries, 2009

80 pages per volume

$5 individually, $20 for the set, if I recall correctly

Buy it from Bries

Visit Nora-Krug.com

I’m going to make Nora Krug’s multifaceted, wordless retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story sound dreary and depressing if I say that it’s about the ugly business of adult life: Grief, greed, alcoholism, joyless sex, irrevocable mistakes, brutal dominion over animals. The thing is, it’s not not about those things–they’re present in the five interlocking little volumes, each presenting not just the point of view but the literal eye-view (and sometimes mind’s-eye-view) of a different character in the story, that are bundled together with a rubber band to form the overall package. But Red Riding Hood Redux is also about vivid and skillful use of color, clever formal play, astute visual shorthand, baroque and virtuoso storytelling, funny comic business, and the sheer pleasure of telling a shaggy dog tale. Krug deftly reintroduces us to the specifics of the Red Riding Hood story, from the stuff we all remember (“What big ears you have!”) to the stuff we thought we’d forgotten (Grandma and Red filling the sleeping wolf’s belly up with rocks in order to dupe him into still feeling full after the hunter frees them). Oftentimes she presents us with only the half of key sequences and conversations that our current POV character can see, leaving us to fill in the blanks first mentally and then, with great pleasure, through the other side of the story when we get to the other characters’ versions. But just as much fun, if not more, are the aspects of the tale Krug concocts on her own. Maybe there really was a love triangle between Red’s mom, the hunter, and Red’s dad, who by the way was imprisoned for the accidental killing of Grandpa, but I sure never heard it in the versions of the story I was told; Krug imbues this whole bedroom drama with heart, laughs, and real regret. At other times she gets fanciful, creating a bizarre Journey to the Center of the Earth-style world-within-world inside the Wolf’s belly, and continuing the Wolf’s story post-mortem in a fashion that delighted this animal lover to no end. Krug’s simple line and deft coloring are both perfect fits for the project, keeping things childlike while still able to convey all kinds of information and emotional content within the sparse one-frame-per-page set-up she’s using. Heck, just the way she drew Grandma and Red’s views when they get drunk was worth the price of admission. If you can snag this, by all means do so.

This is easily, and I mean easily, the stupidest thing I’ve ever read about comics. Makes the douchebag in the yellow hat sound like Jeet Heer.

* Standing in the Strange Tales Spotlight today: Molly Crabapple.

* Your must-read of the day, Tom Spurgeon acts like human kryptonite to some pretty grotesque arguments being made about the Siegel family’s legal battle with DC over Superman.

* So it sounds like Bryan Singer will be re-remaking Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been friendly with frequent Singer collaborator Tom DeSanto for a long time, and the two of them have had their hearts set on this for at least that long. I’m as baffled as everyone else as to why Hollywood’s willing to take this chance, you all know how much I love the Moore/Eick BSG, I think it’ll be very different, but different doesn’t necessarily equal bad.

* You’ll be hearing more about this book from me in a few days, but for now you can check out a six-page preview of Jacque Tardi’s West Coast Blues at ICv2. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* Tom Spurgeon reviews the great Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce. Hopefully you’ll be hearing more about this book from me in a few days, too.

* And while we’re out there in the avant garde, Chris Mautner reviews the Andrei Molotiu-edited Abstract Comics anthology. Hopefully you’ll be hearing etc.

* I enjoyed the most recent installment of Jeff Lester and Graeme McMillan’s podcast, in which they discuss Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night in some detail. Mostly they mull over whether the Black Lanterns will be used as a specific exploration of death in superhero comics and how characters in that world might regard it, or whether they’ll sort of devolve into “big evil monster everyone has to fight.” They seem awfully hesitant to accept that all the other Lanterns will team up and Hal Jordan will become the White Lantern, though–folks, this has been crystal-clear since the last page of The Sinestro Corps War, if not before.

* Speaking of Blackest Night, the identity of the storyline’s big bad was recently revealed on the cover of an upcoming Previews catalog, and turns out my friend TJ Dietsch’s theory was right. Well done, Teej!

* Ben Morse’s Nova Sketchbook returns…

* I do not own Rock Band; can’t convince The Missus it’s a worthwhile investment. But looking at the complete track listing for The Beatles Rock Band, this may have to change. Getting a chance to shred on George’s “Taxman” solo or one of Ringo’s trademark “ba-DUM-bum, ba-DUM-ba-bum”s?

Do yourself a favor and watch The Nomi Song, the sad documentary about the beautiful singer Klaus Nomi, now streaming for one week only on Pitchfork.

Stuffed!

Glenn Eichler, writer

Nick Bertozzi, artist

First Second, 2009

128 pages

$17.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

While I can’t say I recommend this book without reservations, I also can’t say I’ve ready very many comics about the moral and ethical issues surrounding the depatriated, taxidermied body of an African. Along with Nick Bertozzi’s always elegant, full-of-life cartooning, it’s that subject matter that will get Stuffed! over with those for whom it’ll get over. In Colbert Report writer/Daria helmer Glenn Eichler’s story, two estranged brothers–happy, if harried, suburbanite Tim and acid casualty Free–come into the possession of the stuffed human remains of a man from Africa, who’d been displayed as a curio in their surly late father’s rinky-dink museum of weird stuff. Tim hooks up with Howard Bright, an African-American anthropologist at the Museum of Natural History, in hopes Bright and the other Museum staffers can help locate “The Savage”‘s country of origin and return him home. The quite contrary Free, who’s not all there, instead argues that the best way to honor the memory of both the African and their father is to keep the former on display. Various didactic contretemps ensue between Tim and Free, Howard and Free, Howard and his wife, Free and Howard’s wife, Howard and his son, Howard and other museum staffers, Tim and diplomats from a pair of African countries where the stuffed guy may have come from, and so on. Yeah, there are a lot of arguments in this book, the kind of arguments where conflicting worldviews are represented and, in the aftermath of one pivotal argument, catharsis is achieved. You may be tired of those kinds of arguments in dramas, and honestly I don’t blame you. But it’s tough to get tired of watching Bertozzi draw them. Despite occasionally acidic coloring by Bertozzi and Chris Sinderson, his figurework and body language looking more than ever like a down-and-dirty Will Eisner, rough-edged and inky where Eisner was smooth and cartoony. His characters seem to move around within their panels with real vitality, breathing breezy readability into what could have been tedious talking-head scenes in lesser hands. (It’s easy to spot the lingering influence of the Modernist painters he chronicled in The Salon, too.) And I have to say it’s rather refreshing to read a graphic novel in which every character is essentially working toward advancing basic human decency, even in misguided ways. And that’s the heart of Stuffed!–a legacy of tragedy and brutality has been reduced to kitsch, so how do we expand it back out of spearchucking stereotypes and past racism and oppression into the full-fledged humanity this person was entitled to? It’s a provocative and engrossing question, and your interest in the answer can get you past Stuffed!‘s shortcomings for the curios to be found inside.

* The great Nick Bertozzi posts some links and thoughts about his MODOK story in Marvel’s Strange Tales anthology.

* Clive Barker and the guys who wrote the last few Saw movies (and a screenplay for the Hellraiser remake) are collaborating on a TV series called Clive Barker’s Hotel. Not sure how I feel about that, not sure I should even be allowed to post the minutiae of Barker’s film career anymore given that I still haven’t fucking seen The Midnight Meat Train, but there you have it. Clive Barker’s Hotel: They have eternity to know your flesh, and you have until 11am to check out.

* Torture Links of the Day: Is Attorney General Holder going to prosecute torture-interrogators who went beyond the Bush Administration’s legally dubious guidelines, thus essentially giving a pass both to those who tortured by the book and those who wrote that book? (Via Spencer Ackerman.) Was a fraud suspect reditioned out of Afghanistan and tortured under the Obama administration? (Note that this isn’t an “extraordinary rendition” case involving us snapping up a suspect and dumping him in another country that can torture with impunity–the man was brought to Virginia–but still.)

* Up close and personal with The Squirrel Machine author and longtime ADDTF fave Hans Rickheit:

(Via Chris Mautner.)

Golly!

* Today’s Strange Tales spotlight Q&A is with Junko Mizuno.

* Discovery of the day (via Tom Spurgeon): Next Issue!, a new blog by Look Out!! Monsters author Geoff Grogan and Blurred Visions editor Kevin Mutch. As you might expect if you’ve read Grogan’s posts elsewhere, they come out swinging against the Kramers Ergot/PictureBox circle of artcomix makers and writers, though that doesn’t stop guys like Frank Santoro from contributing thoughtful comments. Thus far I recommend Mutch’s post on the “Stupidist” school of comic art and Geoff Grogan’s thoughts on Santoro’s “The Bridge Is Over” essay and the lack of anxiety of influence. Josiah Leighton, if you’re reading this blog, please click.

* Heidi MacDonald interviews the great Eric Reynolds about the state of Fantagraphics for Publishers Weekly. I think this exchange was much-needed:

PWCW: Who are some of the young cartoonists whose work you are most excited about?

ER: What is young? Unsurprisingly, many of my answers would be people from Mome. But that’s the great thing about comics unlike other art forms, you don’t need to be “young” to establish yourself if you have something to say.

(Via Kevin Melrose.)

* You’ve heard this everywhere now, but I’m linking to it anyway because just yesterday I was thinking how potentially wonderful this exact thing could be: AMC is making a tv series out of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s riveting zombie-survival horror comic The Walking Dead, with The Mist‘s Frank Darabont attached to write and direct the pilot.

* Speaking of stuff I was thinking about very recently, I’ve loved carnivorous plants ever since I first learned of their existence. Something about them is just so wrong–don’t plants know how the food chain is supposed to work? So I was delighted to hear of the discovery of a new species of giant pitcher plant that can eat rats atop a mountain in the Philippines. The same expedition spotted another species of pitcher plant that has been thought extinct for decades, and a brand new species of sundew, another variety of meat-eating plant. Poison Ivy, call your horticulturist. (Via Loren Coleman.)

* Jog reviews Johnny Ryan’s very good, very weird action comic Prison Pit.

* Tom Spurgeon picks The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book by Joe Daly out of Fantagraphics’ recent bounty.

* If you’re on the fence about picking up Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce, perhaps this gallery at Monster Brains will push you off?

* Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft has blown Fantagraphics’ collective mind, apparently.

* I enjoyed this detailed article about Shudder to Think frontman Craig Wedren and his long relationship (through childhood friendship, college, and even marriage) with The State and its members. He and David Wain have been friends since they were four! Also, “X-French Tee Shirt” continues to be an astonishing song.

* Carl Barks was a dark dude.

* Dick Smith was a talented dude.

* Ummm…

* Uhhhhhh….

So excited was I about the release of the oral history of Marvel Comics I put together for Maxim that I neglected to mention I also have a piece on Brian Azzarello and Victor Santos’s Filthy Rich in that very same issue. Come for the comics, stay for the campus cuties!

Ultimate Comics Avengers #1

Mark Millar, writer

Carlos Pacheco, artist

Marvel, August 2009

32 pages

$3.99

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1

Brian Michael Bendis, writer

David LaFuente, artist

Marvel, August 2009

32 pages

$3.99

I’m sorry, but there’s simply no way Mark Millar could open his return to the Ultimate Universe with Nick Fury saying “What the %@#&? I disappear for ten minutes and the whole place goes to hell” without intending it as autobiography. After essentially establishing the superheroes-as-paramilitary-unit tone that mainstream comics–certainly Marvel Comics–would have for the decade in The Ultimates, Millar left the franchise in the hands of Jeph Loeb for two arcs, the first of which sold pretty good but made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen look like Chinatown and had little if anything in common with the vibe and characterizations established by Millar, and the second of which never even came out. Instead, Loeb destroyed Manhattan in the event miniseries Ultimatum, then decamped for more buoyantly awful comic-making in the main Marvel line, leaving Millar and his fellow Ultimate-line pioneer Brian Bendis to pick up the pieces.

Of course, since establishing the Ultimate Universe, Millar and Bendis (who never left, though his Ultimate Spider-Man series has had arguably the lowest profile of any of his books over the past couple years) have been given free rein over the Marvel Universe proper, which as I’ve said before is probably a big reason why the Ultimate books lost their unique luster. So I imagine it’s a matter of pride for the pair to return to their rebooted books guns blazing, proving that what they can do here, they can’t do anyplace else.

Mission accomplished to an almost alarming degree, if you ask me. Ultimate Comics Avengers #1–retitled to capitalize on the still-stunning-to-me popularity of the main-line Marvel team upon which the book is based, said popularity owing to Bendis’s revamp of it and soon to lead to movie megastardom–reads like Millar is intent on doing everything he does best. So you have some of his irksome tics, like unnecessary commas between adjectives and Tony Stark holding forth while drunk and surrounded by strippers, but you also have the kind of rock-solid widescreen action that you’d think a decade of aping Hollywood blockbusters would have made more superhero writers better at by now. Honestly, Millar is aided immeasurably by the real star of the issue, Carlos Pacheco. I’ve long thought Pacheco could be a truly ideal superhero-slugfest artist–his layouts are dynamic and when he keeps them on-model, his squarejawed superheroes look like they’re just dying to pound the shit out of someone. Here, that’s exactly what they do, as Captain America gets his ass handed to him in midair by the Red Skull in panels so full-bleed they look like the edges were deliberately cropped–like the pages can’t handle combat this two-fisted. Pacheco did yeoman’s work as a Final Crisis fill-in, and he’s looked beautiful colored by Dave Stewart in Kurt Busiek collaborations like Arrowsmith and Superman, but this is so much better than anything I’ve seen from him before. It’s like the detail of Bryan Hitch combined with the oomph of John Romita Jr. It was gonna take a lot to get me back aboard the Ultimates bandwagon after Loeb, not to mention Millar’s own lackluster “second season” of the series, but hey how about this, I’m in. Amid all the superhero comics I’m reading because of their imaginative concepts or clever execution, surely there’s room for the equivalent of Invasion U.S.A..

Bendis didn’t have as tough an act to follow–he’s been writing Ultimate Spider-Man non-stop for, what, nine years, and his recent work with Stuart Immonen has been quite strong. But there’s always a risk of diminishing returns, and those did set in for a while in the late-double-digit issues. Plus, there was all that uncertainty over whether or not Ultimate Spidey would actually live be the star of his own book post-Ultimatum, though in the end his survival ended up revealed in a weird pair of “Requiem” issues that read more like a framing sequence surrounding inventory stories they needed to burn off. And no, this reboot issue isn’t entirely free of residual Ultimatum ickiness–it’s nice that the line has the freedom to kill everyone in Manhattan, but this isn’t the kind of franchise where the characters can adequately process a trauma of that magnitude or where the societal and economic ramifications of destroying the most important city on the planet can even be touched on, not by a longshot.

But that aside, this is prime Ultimate Spidey. And again, it’s a new artistic collaborator who really makes it shine. David LaFuente feels like a bionic Stuart Immonen–the character models are similar, particularly Peter Parker’s increasingly preposterous hair, but everything’s slicker, younger, shinier, at times looking like anime (not manga, anime). I’m not sure who’s responsible for the overall look, LaFuente or colorist Justin Ponsor, but I could really get used to it. There’s a moonlit make-out scene with a lovely looking Gwen Stacy that’s absolutely sumptuous. There’s a great opening splash page that twists into some comic business at a fast-food joint, there’s a USM-trademark scene where Spidey shows up late to a fight, and after yet another ludicrous explanation for how well-known murderer the Kingpin can come back to New York and carry on business-as-usual, someone kills him. (I hope it sticks!) I was entertained throughout and surprised at the end. Keep it coming.

* And the plugs just keep on coming: Check out an excerpt from my Comics Journal interview with Skyscrapers of the Midwest author Josh Cotter on TCJ.com, and my Strange Tales spotlight Q&A with Jason on Marvel.com. Yes, I interviewed Jason, Hey, Wait… Jason, for Marvel.

* If you’ve read Asterios Polyp, you owe it to yourself to read Ng Suat Tong’s review/reader’s guide over at The Comics Reporter. Tong pulls together a plethora of visual analyses by various critics (including yours truly) and adds his own extensive insights to the mix as well. But the most provocative part of the post is where he takes issue with the coat of unreality Mazzucchelli slathered across the story–ostentatiously naming characters after characters from The Odyssey or giving them monikers like Stiffly and Ursa Major, tons of easy-to-grok symbolism and layout tricks, etc. Tong argues that all the multiple layers of meaning and artifice Mazzucchelli freights his characters with prevents them from ever actually becoming people, as opposed to representations of ideas.

Now, a part of me is quite sympathetic to this line of attack; after all, I’ve gone on at tedious length about how much I dislike fiction that exists to be decoded rather than read or watched. On the other hand, you’re talking to a guy who listed Final Crisis as one of his favorite comics of the year. If watching concepts in human form slug it out in an impeccably thought-through Crisis of Infinite Metaphors isn’t a problem for me, what Mazzucchelli is up to in AP ain’t no thing either. Moreover, the thing’s just too breezily drawn and fun to read to make you feel like you’re sitting through an ARG, or a comic where once you solve the author’s equation, you need never think about it again. And contrary to Tong’s apparent reaction, I really was moved by a few of the squences. (I’ll grant him that it’s tough to get super-super-invested in the cartoonish Majors.) My beef with the book is how well-trod a path the story itself is, and I know that somewhere inside me is a review that tears the book to pieces on those grounds, but at some point early on I decided it would be more fun to like the thing.

* Even as the outraged response to that mean-spirited fanboy’s prank on Rob Liefeld continues to fill my heart with glee, my friend Chris Ward has posted the intro to a profile of Liefeld he worked on for Wizard before the mag spiked it out of fear of a lawsuit

* Goodness, the trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is like a steampunk Speed Racer. (Via Jason Adams.)

* And here’s a promo reel for George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. It’s very difficult to tell if this will be good or awful–memories of Diary of the Dead still haunt me–but it looks different than Romero’s past Dead movies, that’s for sure. (Also via Jason Adams.)

* One last Jason Adams link: His 150-word non-review of The Orphan has me both baffled and intrigued. Jiminy Christmas, I just saw Moon last night–how long is it gonna take me to go see this thing?

* If you can get past the schtick, and there’s a lot of schtick to get past, there’s some interesting stuff in Vice’s interview with Johnny Ryan about his new action comic Prison Pit. Ryan cites C.F.’s Powr Mastrs and Kazimir Strzepek’s The Mourning Star as influences and claims the book is irony-free. (Via Eric Reynolds.)

* New Nick Bertozzi comics are always a cause for celebration.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror issues an impassioned defense of Frank Darabont’s The Mist. Whom he’s defending it from, I’m not so sure. Apparently people really hate this movie? All I ever saw were people saying “It had its moments, but I didn’t like the ending/the CGI/Mrs. Carmody.” That was pretty much my take, though a) my problem with the ending wasn’t its existence but how quickly it seemed to come after the previous events–it felt unearned–and b) I thought the CGI was only crappy in the opening tentacle sequence, which is a shame since that’s the first effects sequence of the film and probably soured people on what came after–the creature designs were uniformly strong, though. Anyway, I think I’ve said this before, but of the trinity of monster-apocalypse movies that came out in the winter of 2007-2008, I initially preferred I Am Legend because Will Smith’s character and performance were so much stronger than anything comparable in Cloverfield and The Mist…but as time went by, IAL became my least favorite of the three because the monsters were just so, so weak. In that light, CRwM’s review of The Mist seems to me to have it about right: “honestly, the film would be better served by cutting it up in flick that ditched the preaching and emphasized the monsters.”

* Topless Rob Bricken is right: this montage of Batman’s takedowns in the upcoming video game Batman: Arkham Asylum really is pure porn for Bat-fans. It’s just Batman owning fools over and over again in quite Batman-specific ways, with Danny Elfman’s magnificent theme music as a soundtrack.

* Speaking of magnificent Batman-related music, today Matthew Perpetua takes a listen to Prince’s “Electric Chair.” Shit was hot.

You have no idea how happy I am to announce that in the new issue of Maxim (September 2009–Milla Jovovich is on the cover), you’ll find a hefty oral history of Marvel by yours truly. This sucker was the result of over a half-year of work, and comprises interviews with Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, Jim Shooter, Gary Groth, Walt Simonson, Louise Simonson, Frank Miller, John Romita Jr., Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Bob Harras, Tom DeFalco, Tom Brevoort, Sam Raimi, Louis Leterrier, Tom DeSanto, Joe Quesada, Bill Jemas, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, and Brian K. Vaughan. I haven’t had a chance to get a good luck at the final published version–my initial draft was 13,000 words long, so a lot of it had to end up on the cutting room floor–but I do know it has a pretty sweet original illustration by JRJR. I hope you enjoy it.

I finally saw Duncan Jones’s science-fiction character-piece-cum-thriller Moon, and was glad I braved the sweat-soaked journey down to the Landmark Sunshine to do so. Moon is very, very much a creature of its own influences, and owns up to this repeatedly–and wisely, I think. If you’re going to do a suspense story about a man stranded in a cabin-fever outer-space environment with a soft-spoken computer for company, what’s the sense of playing cat and mouse with Kubrick? Better to run at 2001 head on and smack people in the face with it so we can put it behind us. I think you also see elements of Battlestar Galactica‘s lived-in, clunky equipment, Alien‘s sinister Company, the instantly dated futurism of Epcot center (those fonts!), AI‘s pathos-inducing automatons (there’s a bit here that hit me as hard as any robot-driven emotional high point since the teddy bear handing the kid the lock of hair), and some fairly direct links with the first great science-fiction work of director Jones’s dad David Bowie, “Space Oddity.” (Which in turn was a fairly direct riff off of 2001—A Space Odyssey, duh–which will bring us back to Do.) By using all of this as visual shorthand (though to be fair it adds flourishes of his own, including all those gorgeous lunar landscapes and one really breathtaking shot of the Earth), Moon has the freedom to focus on Sam Rockwell’s compelling, bifurcated performance. I’d really rather not come right out and spoil the central conceit of the film, but it requires Rockwell to take his character, Sam Bell, in a couple of very different directions, both of which must remain true to what has gone before. He pulls it off, and when it dawns on you that it’s happening, it’s pretty magnificent.

At times, the movie was difficult for me to watch. It deals with death very directly, and not in a “BANG YOU’RE DEAD” way. The body breaks down as the mind’s comprehension of what is about to befall it grows, while others are helpless to do anything about it. I’ve gotten to know this feeling pretty well lately, and having the film hold up a mirror to me in that regard was…bracing, I guess is the word. Bracing and moving and good.

* My Strange Tales Spotlight series at Marvel.com keeps on truckin’, with interviews with Johnny Ryan and Peter Bagge.

* My friend Matthew Perpetua of music-blog juggernaut Fluxblog is looking for cartoonists to develop a graphic novel project with him. I’ve heard about this thing and it should be a hoot.

* The Charles Burns-edited Best American Comics 2009 anthology is a doozy. How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen C.F.?

* And as Tom Spurgeon points out, the overall comics publishing landscape for late 2009 is a doozy too. There is an actual Al Columbia book coming out. As a wise man once said, ’nuff said.

* It’s weird: There wasn’t a ton of news out of Wizard World Chicago Comic-ConFare this year, but what there was was almost all stuff from the corner of the Marvel Universe I’m interested in. To wit:

* Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk of the late, lamented Captain Britain & MI-13 are doing a Dark X-Men miniseries.

* Jeff Parker’s Agents of Atlas is doing a crossover miniseries with the X-Men, then becoming a back-up feature in the even better Incredible Hercules, then getting relaunched. Meanwhile, Herc writers Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente talk to CBR about “Assault on New Olympus,” the storyline into which the Agents of Atlas back-up will feature. Wow, Incredible Hercules just became the book no semi-mainstream comics blogger can do without.

* And finally, Atlas‘s Parker will be taking over Thunderbolts from incoming Daredevil writer Andy Diggle.

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken reviews G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra as only he and the voice in his head can.

* Dan Nadel waxes skeptical about Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter. That one Stark/Cooke scene comparison Dan pulls out is pretty rough.

* I enjoyed my fellow Savage Critic Graeme McMillan’s strip-by-strip review of Wednesday Comics. A lot of it seems really nice, but is there a there there?

* Speaking of the Savs, Jog’s review of several recent superhero comics brings our attention to Joe Casey and Nathan Fox’s stunning-looking Dark Reign: Zodiac. Where the hell did THIS come from?

* Curt Purcell bemoans how “bad-assedness often gets expressed as a certain jaded matter-of-factness about the supernatural” in genre stories with tough-girl heroines. Man, you think it’s bad in Anita Blake or whatnot, count yourself lucky you haven’t been immersed in superhero comics for the better part of a decade. There’s a prominent strain that seems geared to suck the wonder out of the whole shebang, with constant commentary from the characters about how blase they feel toward the amazing shit they’re doing.

* Elsewhere, Curt wonders, per some dismissive comments by Geoff Johns, if Blackest Night is really a horror-meets-superheroes affair after all. That’s certainly been the selling point DC has been using in promotional venues like Dan DiDio’s DC Nation column, Curt. My guess is that maybe Johns was trying to downplay it in his interview with Laura Hudson lest people think all the emotional-spectrum and death stuff isn’t Serious Business. A false dichotomy, I know, but you go to war with the Lantern Corps you have.

* My friend Ben Morse cracks open his Nova sketchbook. This Jim Lee “sketch” really is pretty impressive.

* Tons of preview pages from Lane Milburn’s Xeric application book, Death Trap, are over at the Closed Caption Comics blog.

* Please welcome Big Sunny David Allison back to the blogosphere!

* Gaze upon this gallery of Master of the Universe movie concept art and ponder what might have been. (I do remember the villain designs they ended up using being pretty good, though.) (Via Topless Robot.)

* Your Word of the Day, and my Word of My Life, is anagnorisis: “A revelation into the true nature of things, usually through tragedy.”

* OH JESUS CHRIST JIM WOODRING WHAT ARE YOU DOING

* It gives me a hope for our species I haven’t had in a long, long time to see that even on the Internet, people are naturally repulsed by the idea of being mean to a total stranger. Even when that total stranger is Rob Liefeld. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

Squadron Supreme

Mark Gruenwald, writer

Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, John Buscema, Paul Neary, artists

Marvel, 1985-1986 (my collected edition is dated 2003)

352 pages

$29.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

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

* Laura Hudson interviews Geoff Johns on Blackest Night for a good long while. Johns waxes philosophical about the Emotional Spectrum, the metaphorical import of the various Lantern Corps, the difference between Marvel and DC–basically a lot more than the usual promo-heavy interviews guys like Johns end up doing.

* Eric Heisserer wrote a multi-site web-fiction horror story called The Dionaea House that scared the shit out of me a few years back. Now I guess he’s a big-shot screenwriter who penned the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street and is rewriting Battlestar Galactica helmer Ronald D. Moore’s screenplay for the prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Heisserer talks about his Thing to Bloody Disgusting.

* Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente talk to CBR about their Tolkien-spoofing next arc of ADDTF fave Incredible Hercules.

* I’m several days late and dollars short on this, but it sounds like Robert Rodriguez really is making a movie out of his Grindhouse faux-trailer Machete. Unlike John Carter of Mars and Red Sonja and Barbarella, this one actually has more people in its officially announced cast than Rose McGowan, so I think it might actually happen. And seriously, the cast is ridonkulous: Robert DeNiro, Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan, Cheech Marin, Jeff Fahey, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, and Danny Trejo. This is giving Stallone’s Expendables a run for its money.

* Colin: A Zombie’s Tale is an independent horror film from the zombie’s perspective. Sure, I’ll eat it. (Pun not intended, per se, but it’s not like I scrapped it and wrote something else, is it.)

* A hearty congratulations to FourFour’s Rich Juzwiak on his forth blogiversary. It’s been a long, long time since I went in for blogger triumphalism, but I think the emergence of a writer who could speak equally eloquently on America’s Next Top Model, the state of contemporary R&B, adorable cat videos, and Cannibal Holocaust was exceedingly unlikely prior to the emergence of blogs, so thank goodness they gave us Rich Juzwiak.

* Tonight, at Portland’s Grass Hut Gallery, you can see a whole bunch of Tom Neely paintings like this one:

And a whole bunch of Hellen Jo paintings like this one:

And why wouldn’t you want to?

Ho!

Ivan Brunetti, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

112 pages, hardcover

$19.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

I didn’t laugh once while reading this book. Weird, right? The status of Brunetti’s previous gag-cartoon collections Haw! and Hee! (from which Ho! is largely compiled, though whether as a best-of or a complete collection is unclear to me) as trailblazers in the realm of going-way-too-far comic-book comedy is unquestioned; Brunetti made his bones while Johnny Ryan was picking up cheerleaders. And generally speaking, I’m down for the rough chuckles. In comics terms, I obviously really like Ryan and the astonishingly black comedy (or comic blackness) of Josh Simmons. Meanwhile, my favorite Monty Python movie is the nihilistic Meaning of Life, and among my favorite Tim & Eric sketches are the savagely misogynistic Carol & Mr. Henderson bits, Steve Mahanahan’s Child Clown Outlet, the Lynchian vignette where Casey Tatum gets kidnapped by Mahanahan and vomits in terror, and the “Business Hugs” video in which Leland Palmer instructs us on the best way to comfort a man after his wife suffers her third miscarriage. This shit should be right down my alley.

So what happened? It’s difficult to say why something you don’t find funny isn’t funny to you, particularly in a case like this, where Brunetti is intentionally working with material a lot of people would find anything but funny. But I’m not on their wavelength–it’s not the extreme nature of the gags (and they get fucking extreme) that’s turning me off. I suppose it’s the disconnect between the material and the execution? Brunetti’s impeccable line looks like it’d be more at home in the pages of The New Yorker than Sleazy Slice, which I imagine is the point, but for me at least, this just neuters all but the most vicious jokes–otherwise it’s just a litany of beautifully drawn dick/poop/pedo jokes. One that has likely been robbed of much of its power to shock and entertain by the similar work of Johnny Ryan, whose more buoyant, energetic line and use of the more expansive strip form rather than the one-panel cartoon gives his midnight-black gross-out stuff a brio Brunetti lacks.

To be sure, Brunetti occasionally serves up an amusing twist or wrinkle to the calvacade of horrors. I’m particularly smitten with the gag where a man’s wife walks in on him and the dog in flagrante delicto thanks to his strategic use of frosting; the guy’s sidelong glance and pause for thought before attempting to act shocked (“Um…Bad doggie! Bad doggie!”) is a hoot. The new comics Brunetti includes in the back of the book, drawn in his current, even more simplified style, are a fine show case of his geometric character designs, all round heads and curvilinear arms. For my money, the best jokes are barely jokes at all, but rather virtually unfiltered violence and rage: A man waving goodbye to his baby as he fills its bath with acid, another man shooting a woman in the head and barking “NOW you look sexy, whore,” a pair of men sitting in a bathtub filled with the blood of the dead woman hanging from a meathook above them and agreeing that this is better than sex. It’s enough to make you wonder if the gag cartoon’s potential for horror has ever been fully explored.

But in general? Eh!

* My Strange Tales Spotlight interview series at Marvel.com continues: Yesterday’s guests were Nick Bertozzi and his good friend MODOK; today, we heard from Dash Shaw and Doctor Strange. Meanwhile, Tom Spurgeon posts preview pages from Nick, Dash, Johnny Ryan, and Junko Mizuno.

* Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman pens a nice little paean to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as “the template for modern horror.” I think that’s true, Dawn of the Dead‘s recent rehabilitation notwithstanding. Romero’s a hipper name to drop than Hooper (not surprising given their comparative oeuvres), his films combined horror and social commentary in the more-or-less explicit fashion mainstream critics appreciate, and there simply couldn’t be a zombie craze without him; but while Dawn was more haunting and/or biting than actually scary, watching Texas Chain Saw for the first time leaves you feeling like you’ve been in a car accident–a feeling aimed for not just by torture-porn standards like Hostel, but everything from The Blair Witch Project to the French horror wave to the modern zombie movies themselves. Tonally, the opening segment of Zack Snyder’s Dawn remake, and the entirety of the two 28 Days movies, owe a lot more to Leatherface than Flyboy. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Jesus Christ, it’s probably been ten years since I last watched Mike Leigh’s Naked, the subject of Scott Tobias’s latest New Cult Canon column for the Onion AV Club. (I have, however, listened to David Thewlis’s tour-de-force apocalypse monologue courtesy of the Orb’s “S.A.L.T.” quite a few times in the interim.) What a movie that was! I feel like the ending in particular is still at work inside me. I wonder how I’d feel about it today.

* Holy shit Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club is so funny. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* It’s kind of a throwaway in an unrelated item, but Tom Spurgeon’s nutshell recommendation of the manga megahit Naruto as an action-driven cultural depth charge has me pretty intrigued.

* So does Hellbound Hearts, a(n occasionally illustrated) prose Clive Barker tribute collection featuring stories from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola, Steve Niles, Peter Atkins, Mick Garris, Richard Christian Matheson and more.

* Marvel Bromance…no more?

* Hey look, it’s the trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. Heavenly Creatures ahoy. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Hey look, it’s another astonishing horror-comic cover version by Tom Neely.

* Hey look, it’s a shot from the set of the Cold Heat movie.

* Curt Purcell takes aim at some of Blackest Night‘s weak spots so far.

* It’s past time I linked to Tom Spurgeon’s San Diego Comic-Con 2009 Collective Memory link index.

* Batman action-figure shelf porn! I don’t have much of an action-figure button, but this pretty much presses it.

Whiskey Jack & Kid Coyote Meet the King of Stink

Shawn Cheng, writer/artist

Partyka, June 2009

44 pages

$3

Buy it from Partyka

Monsters & Condiments

Matt Wiegle, writer/artist

Partyka, June 2009

16 pages

$1

Buy it from Partyka

I can’t pretend to be an unbiased observer of these comics. Matt and Shawn are friends of mine from my bright college years; I’ve collaborated/am planning to collaborate on comics with both of them; I’ve even worked the Partyka table at conventions (though I’ve far more often freeloaded off of them). But this pair of goofy minicomics is as good an excuse as any to explain what I like about their skills as cartoonists and as packagers of their cartoons.

Whiskey Jack is a prequel of sorts to Shawn’s The Would-Be Bridegrooms, which itself was kind of like Kevin Huizenga’s Fight or Run before Kevin Huizenga’s Fight or Run existed. Instead of fighting each other to win the hand of a fair maiden, this time around the titular pair of shapeshifting braggarts fight a giant skunk to save the fair maiden’s life. They make a hash of it and the fair maiden proves more capable than either of them, as you’d expect. Shawn’s a specialist in combat, as Bridegrooms and his collaborative fight comic On the Road of Knives would indicate, but that’s not really the point here–the goal of Whiskey Jack is pretty much to show a Godzilla-sized skunk running around making fart jokes. The pleasure of the thing stems from how well-drawn the fart jokes are–I could watch Shawn’s intricate use of zipatone and his fine geometric character designs play out all the live-long day. I suppose your mileage may vary with a hand-stitched minicomic that culminates in a gigantic shit explosion, but I got pretty far with it.

Matt Wiegle puts out one or two quick gag minis a year, and Monsters & Condiments is his latest. It’s a series of seven monster portraits, presented as dishes from the menu of one Hercule Van Helsing: “Nosferatu with dried bonito flakes over mayonnaise,” “Redcap Dwarfs with trio of dipping sauces,” “Eldritch Horror from Beyond with fresh guacamole,” etc. It’s a treat for all you fans of the creepy-cute out there, that’s for sure, and if Matt did webcomics it’d be highly meme-able–but Matt makes exquisite little minicomics with silkscreened covers instead, so it’s presented with po-faced grandiosity that makes the conceit all the funnier. He’s got a real way with monsters, too (which I’ve taken advantage of in my collaborations with him), and in particular his use of black in each portrait creates pleasing and impressive transitions as you flip back and forth. Stop by the Partyka table at any given small-press show and there are any number of similar pleasures to discover.