* Patrick Swayze died yesterday. He was the star of the movie Road House, the foundational text of the Manly Movie Mamajama and a favorite way for The Missus and I to while away a couple of leisurely hours on the weekends. As such it’s difficult to exaggerate the enjoyment he’s given me over the past four years or so. I’m really sorry he died.

* My fellow MMM attendees are also as upset as you’d imagine. Rickey Purdin is posting a Swayze sketch a day every day for the rest of the month, while if you read only one emotional tribute to the man and his movies, make it Chris Ward’s.

* Now that I’m done plugging my own appearances (I’m presenting an Ignatz Award too! Okay, now I’m done) I want to point out that SPX’s programming slate for this year boasts and more.

* Tom Spurgeon ponders the Disney/Marvel and WB/DC stories. A couple elements of his analysis stood out to me:

1) The idea that somewhere between Marvel’s current domination of the rump Direct Market and holding it to the sales standard of Stephenie Meyer or James Patterson there’s a middle ground in which it, and the DM overall, simply does a better job of getting comics to the kinds of people who are interested in buying comics. There probably are plenty of runners left on the bases, particularly in terms of Marvel’s book program. And this is really just a subset of larger point regarding the potential for major structural changes resulting from these moves, not just trying to push a little harder or stretch things out a little further in existing directions.

2) The speculation that Jim Lee may be named Publisher of DC. Why not!

* I can’t believe there are only six issues of Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris’s Ex Machina left! This was always my favorite of BKV’s creator-owned titles, though now I’m hopelessly far behind and am going to have to catch up in trade. In the back of my mind I always reminded myself that the series revealed it was going to have a down ending right on the first page of the first issue, and I’m excited to see what that down ending is.

* Paranormal Activity has a trailer and a sneak preview release date–September 25th at midnight, which means I won’t be going because I’m schlepping down to SPX the next morning. Rats.

* It only just occurred to me after reading his review of New Avengers #49 that Ninja author Brian Chippendale named his new blog Marvelous Coma because it’s going to be about Marvel comics. Holy smokes. Meanwhile, you can’t tell me that issue wouldn’t have been better if it had Chippendales suggested extra page in it.

* Johnny Ryan is working some rough, rough chuckles. Are these even jokes anymore?

* Dread Central has a couple clips from John Harrison’s film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood. It hits DVD September 22nd, and let’s face it, it’s gonna be months before I see the fucking thing because I’m so far behind on my movie-watching so this is kind of pathetic that I’m even acting like I’m all on top of this shit.

* For a long time I’ve thought about the kinds of superhero comics readers who follow characters rather than creators in terms I borrowed from Jerry Seinfeld’s routine about sports fans: Like people who love a player when he’s on “their” team but hate him after he leaves even though the only difference is the uniform, fans who’ll buy any goddamn Batman comic regardless of who’s writing or drawing him are, in essence, rooting for laundry. But I’d never thought of using this analogy in defense, or at least in explanation, of that weird completist behavior the way Tim O’Neil does in his latest X-Men essay. Tim likens fans who’ll buy the X-Men no matter what to fans of the Cubs or other perennial also-rans, where not only are you expected to stick with the team through thick and thin, the thin periods actually increase rather than decrease your devotion. Of course, I don’t like sports either. Anyway, Tim also advances an argument as to why the X-Men franchise cratered in the ’00s: He blames Grant Morrison, though not in the way you’re thinking. (My theory is that Marvel doesn’t really grok the outsider concept anymore, hence the mangling of the mutant-minority metaphor in House of M, but Tim’s got a point.)

* I stumbled across Chris Mautner’s review of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth #1 in my RSS reader today, and his throwaway line about the deus ex machina at the end of the issue got me thinking: The serialized comic book can be a real turkey of a format for long-form stories, can’t it? I thought the ending was by far the weakest and most pat thing about the issue, and it’s not hard to see how it was nothing more or less than an in-story solution to the logistical problem of having to stop the issue there instead of going on in the laconic fashion Lemire’s independent projects afford him. I actually think this hurts more in “serious” books like this than in superhero comics–with superheroes, you’ve sort of been raised to expect that cliffhanger. Here, it’s kind of like watching an hour-long drama that has to end with every commercial break and start up again four minutes later.

* If you can’t combine Tolkien with Lovecraft willy-nilly in your massively multiplayer online role-playing game, why even bother?

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