Carnival of souls

* So like I said, I’ve been guestblogging over at Robot 6. My first post was on a little story you might have missed about Disney buying Marvel. Oh, hadn’t you heard?

* There have been a lot of silly reactions to the news, the most popular being the comment-thread favorite that Disney will somehow water down or neuter Marvel into a family-friendly affair. (Heaven forbid!) I think this is quite obviously nonsense, as the relatively (not completely, but relatively) untrammeled creative trajectories of Disney-owned ABC and Miramax and Hyperion (and even Pixar, in a way) would attest. A slightly more sophisticated and therefore even more baffling idea is that Disney’s going to come in and, necessarily, shake up a moribund superhero line–see Ben Schwartz at The Comics Reporter for one such argument. I just can’t figure out by what standards Marvel’s superhero line is in trouble. Sure, you may not like what Quesada, Bendis et al have done by tying the whole Marvel U. together with black-ops shenanigans, but look at how the comics sell! Particularly relative to the competition, by which I mean “the entire rest of the North American comics industry,” Marvel could barely be doing better. I’m all for a theoretical Marvel Comics that’s a mass-market juggernaut on par with Twilight or something, but for now Disney has a roc-sized bird in the hand–why go after the two in the bush?

* My second Robot 6 post was about the slightly more low-key story of PictureBox going digital via the iPhone comics app Panelfly. Honestly, this one was a big surprise to me too. I also took note of Nick Bertozzi’s adaptation of The Awakening by Kate Chopin and offered my comic picks of the week in the regular “Can’t Wait for Wednesday” column.

* Proof that God may exist after all: Rambo 5 has been greenlit. This sequel to my favorite movie of 2008 will see John Rambo doing battle with Mexican druglords and human traffickers in order to rescue a kidnapped young girl. The big question is which real-world issue Stallone will be gunning for here: illegal immigration, or the killing fields of Juarez? Given his apparent politics you might expect the former, but given Rambo I’m leaning toward the latter.

* I’m currently two videos deep into a five-part video essay called A Tale of Two Summers: The Evolution of the Modern Blockbuster. Analyzing the summer movies of the pivotal years 1984 and 1989, it’s written by Aaron Aradillas and edited by the great Matt Zoller Seitz. The first 1984 segment tackles the rise of MTV and music-video-style editing, the Reagan Era zeitgeist, and the birth of the new teen movie in Risky Business and Sixteen Candles. The second 1984 segment chronicles the birth of PG-13 and the concomitant rise of the “cynical spectacle” of “dark escapism” as Hollywood’s “summer blockbuster default mode” with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Dreamscape, Gremlins, and Red Dawn. I don’t think I’d ever seen or even heard of Dreamscape before, nor, for some reason, did I realize that Temple of Doom could just have easily been called Indiana Jones and a Series of Shots of People Falling from Great Heights. Lotsa lulz to be had in the editing, too–I particularly liked the juxtaposition of Prince’s “Dearly beloved” speech from Purple Rain with the gawking, apocalypse-fearing crowd surrounding Dana Barrett’s building at the start of the final act of Ghostbusters. 1989 promises to be juicy as heck.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Neverland by the under-read, underappreciated Dave Kiersh. Dave could easily be an altcomix hero for the Tumblr generation.

* Jeffrey Brown’s doing more cat books!

* Hans Rickheit is touring in support of The Squirrel Machine!

* Ceri B. keeps explaining to me what is up with World of Warcraft. As is frequently the case, the next big WoW thing solves a combination of in-world and real-world problems.

* Frank Santoro continues interviewing Ben Katchor. Well, he continued doing so in 1996, but here are the results.

* I enjoyed watching David Allison trip the light fantastic across Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter and one single splash page from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One, with some City of Glass and Criminal thrown in for good measure. I can’t wait for his copy of Asterios Polyp to arrive just to see what new heights of blogging-as-performance-art he’s inspired to aim for. I’m expecting animated gifs and embedded Basement Jaxx songs.

* I always marvel at Jog’s ability to keep his sentences under control when he writes long reviews–mine run me all over the place, like I’m trying to walk a manic Great Dane. Anyway, his review of Inglourious Basterds; if mine was about the film’s violence, his is about pretty much everything else. Indeed, the bipolar nature of the rough stuff in the film that so entranced me seems to have confounded him. See what you think.

* Jason Adams salutes Soldier of Orange, a Paul Verhoeven film from the long-ago year of 1977.