* Today I made my debut as a permanent member of the Robot 6 blog’s roster. I kicked things off with an auspicious story: the 40th anniversary of Monty Python.
* Alan David Doane interviews two of the best/most important/my favoritest people in alternative comics, Tom Spurgeon and Eric Reynolds.
* Dash Shaw ponders the mainstream/alternative/genre/autobio/whatever divide which has been much discussed in these parts of late. I would say that a) I do indeed think genre work has more critical currency in alternative comics circles right now than it used to; b) there’s a difference between “indie” and “alternative” which plays into what I’m saying in (a); c) I don’t dig using altgenre/”new action” comics as a cudgel against autobiography or nongenre alternative comics any more than I enjoy using alternative or literary comics against genre or superheroes or whatever. If you must set up a conflict of that nature, use good comics against bad comics–there are plenty of both on every side of every divide.
* Oh wow, a Dragon Wars: D-War Rifftrax! This may give me the excuse I needed to get the D-War DVD…
* Where the Really Wild Things Are: Check out Josh Simmons’s too-hot-for-Vice WTWTA tribute comic.
* I love Dave Kiersh’s art.
* Seeing Nick Bertozzi draw naked ladies takes me back to my A&F Quarterly days.
* Dig the fancy new trade dress for Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s very good Invincible Iron Man, designed by Rian Hughes.
* Lego David Bowie, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s Dance era, by the looks of it.
* Looks like I’m gonna get to see Paranormal Activity in the theaters. Still torn about this whole pseudoviral thing, but kudos, it’s gotten the movie some attention, I suppose. The movie’s also playing along with a pretty awesomely diverse array of horror movies at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s third annual “Scary Movies” festival.
* By all means download Matthew Perpetua’s “Best of Ghostface Killah” mix. There’s just nothing else out there like Tony Starks.
Sean, nice to see someone else still feels there’s a distinction between “indie” and “alternative”. It seems lately that “indie” has become the catch-all term for “not mainstream” which I really sort of hate, mostly because it’s the mainstream market that determines the terms once they become interested in something.
My impression has always been that “indie” is a term that came from mainstream readers (and mainstream-focused comics media) who began to discover at some point that there are comics not published by the Big Two (or Four or whatever) that they felt were worth looking at. Usually it was genres they were already accustomed to (either from comics or other media). On a related note, whatever happened to “New Mainstream”?
But I’ve recently read about “indie comics legend Harvey Pekar”, The Surrogates “underground comic” the movie is based on and that new “indie comic” from Bongo, Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror. So, majority rules, right?