Wow, the author of the “WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?” entry at KnowYourMeme.com is passionately opposed to WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS?. Apparently the idea is that there’s some sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle attached to Internet nonsense, so that when I and others pointed out the memeworthiness of this phrase, we inherently delegitimized it. This is something up with which author Twyst will not put.

I’m not sure what’s my favorite part of the entry. Is it saying “Sean T. Collins decided of his own accord that this phrase should become a meme,” a move later characterized as “premature declaration”? Is it the assertion that “When fans of ‘Whose Responsible This’ tried to introduce it into the wild, it was killed on sight because of it’s declarative nature”? Is it the use of multiple charts and graphs? I think I’ll go with the repeated insinuation that this is some sort of concerted conspiracy by former Wizard employees. As commenter Chris Menning puts it, “‘Whose responsible this’ was a coordinated media effort.” Our responsible this.

Reykjavik

Henrik Rehr, writer/artist

Fahrenheit, June 2009

48 pages, hardcover

I got it for the low low price of $5 at MoCCA

Buy it from Fahrenheit…? I think?

FOOM! FWOOOSH! KRAKKA-DOOM! Abstract Comics contributor Henrik Rehr’s Fahrenheit is like the purely visual equivalent of a sound effect. Utilizing chops earned through years of more traditional cartooning, Rehr seizes the canvas of abstract comics with a vengeance, crafting a dynamic and frequently stunning–dare I say it?–page-turner, with nary a narrative element to be found.

Rehr is working in pure black and white, reproduced on a slick page stock that gives its expansive visuals a deep and expensive look. His “story” is structured primarily from spread to spread, and in each, one can detect a particular visual inspiration: the whorls of a fingerprint, the activity of unicellular organisms, waves, fire, smoke, a jungle, and in the book’s most memorable moment, a shattered pane of glass. There’s even one spread that looked like ghosts to me, though in that case and all the others, nothing is recognizable as such–Rehr deploys just enough visual cues to get the idea across before riffing off into the stratosphere with them. The emphasis throughout is on motion, with the eye pushed, pulled, and even thrown from one end of the spread to the next by wafting forms, exploding panels, or great ribbonlike curves. At times it looks like nothing so much as the stormy sky of a Dore print blown up to unrecognizable size. The context is gone, but the dynamism removes. This book really puts the “action” back in “abstraction,” and at five bucks–less than most minicomics!–it was an absolute steal. Snag it if you see it at a show.

See a preview below:

* Today on Robot 6 I shouted out new Nancy art from Seth and new monkey art from Frank Cho.

* Do you want to design the new mascot for Topless Robot? Sure, we all do!

* Vice magazine mustache enthusiast Nick Gazin’s mostly-altcomix review rampages tickled me. Writing like Hipster Runoff’s older brother on purpose gets a little old, but if you’re gonna bang out short lulzy attention-grabbing reviews of comics, at least do it with comics that might actually be worth your time. (Via Mike Baehr.)

* Mark Richardson asks the musical question: Is life really a beach?

* Today at Robot 6, it’s back to the front for another Con War dispatch.

* I also tip my hat to Maxim’s very funny list of superheroes who belong on the side of a ’70s van.

* Oh thank God, Stallone’s no longer doing that Rambo: Monster Hunter movie. He’s taking that idea and doing it with a different lead character–presumably a new one and not Cobra–and restoring the fifth Rambo movie to its original “Rambo goes to Ciudad Juarez” concept by the sound of it.

* Here’s the back half of my pal Kiel Phegley’s interview with Dan DiDio.

* Congratulatioins to Paul Pope upon his receipt of the Silver Dildo for Sexiest Art from Fleshbot. An honor just to be nominated, I’m sure.

* Normally I write these things more or less in chronological order. This is because I’ve taken to jotting down notes on each episode as I watch it. (The Missus: “Whatcha writin’?” Sean: “I’m taking notes for my Gossip Girl review.” The Missus: “And that is why this marriage works.”) But, I mean, c’mon, can’t do that this time. You know what you want.

* Now I know what I’m supposed to say: “You call that a threesome?!?! That ain’t a threesome–that’s a threesome” or some shit like that. But that’s not how I feel at all. (Although you should click the link for the awesome threesome comic I wrote.) I mean, realistically, what more would we have gotten on network television? Some nude backs and people kissing each other’s necks with their eyes closed and making moaning sounds? Unless we’re gonna see Hilary Duff’s nipples and Penn Badgley’s rhythmically flexing asscheeks, I am not interested.

* What we got instead was the most erotic part of this particular sexual encounter, and I think of many sexual encounters outside the context of a committed relationship (though more about that later): The moments when the involved parties consciously choose pleasure. Watching the Duffster’s eyes dart back and forth between Dan and Vanessa as she methodically kisses each of them was about a billion times hotter than whatever PG-13 sex scene we might have gotten out of the subsequent scenario. (Shit, I almost feel like they put us through the “OMG she did a sex scene in her vampire movie how can Dan STAND IT” nonsense a couple episodes back as an object lesson in how non-hot that kind of thing is.) Ditto however many years of will-they won’t-they tension between Vanessa and Dan dissolving in, essentially, a dare, in a thought process that would be something like “I love this person and care about them as a friend, but they’re also beautiful, so now we’re going to use each other’s beauty for our mutual enjoyment, and that’s fine.” That’s sexy!

* And of course there’s the added bonus that this went down as it has so many times in real life: In the context of relationships that will no doubt go down in fucking flames because of it. I don’t think Gossip Girl is the place to go for the eroticized misery that these sorts of collegiate affairs engender, I don’t think it’s going to end up being a super-realistic depiction of how the people who’ve given you orgasms often rip your guts out before or after or even during that particular procedure, but the teaser for next week makes it clear that it’s at least a catalyst for upending the Dan/Vanessa apple cart and causing mischief with Dan and Olivia. Should be a hoot to watch if nothing else.

* Okay, the rest of it:

* I don’t buy the suddenness and totality of Jenny’s transformation into Queen Bee of the Mean Girls.

* And yet I do buy the suddenness and totality of Chuck’s transformation into the mature voice of reason.

* Maybe it’s because the former development is annoying whereas the second is totally awesome? What else can you say about a guy acts more like Batman and dresses more like the Joker with each passing episode? His increasingly purple, sleepwear-based wardrobe is a joy to behold. And the second Serena and Blair got on the elevator, I knew he sabotaged it, I knew it! But the booze and cookies was a touch not even I anticipated. I guess that’s why I’m Sean Collins and he’s Chuck Bass. “If you two want to kiss, it won’t count as cheating.” Oh Chuck, you’re my hero.

* Hey, that reminds me, I believe this episode contained our first real, mutually satisfactory same-sex kiss, correct? I know it was in the context of a trendy threesome and everything, but I’m still down with it because I don’t think either girl was doing it for Dan’s benefit. So good for them. Still, and perhaps therefore, every scene with Erik and Jonathan just pissed me off all the more. Make out! Make out, goddamn you! I’m so sick of these chaste kiss-less network-tv gay relationships. I wanna see some dudes swap spit for Chrissakes. I want the slap and tickle.

* Speaking of Erik, while I do support an Erik/Blair alliance centered on blackmailing some kid about shenanigans after lights-out at camp, Erik’s behavior in this episode was even tougher to swallow than Jenny’s. His instantaneous recourse to lying to both the mousy girl and to Jenny during the whole escort situation was not only out of character, it was indicative of how overused that device is by the show’s writers. They do have the decency to expose the lies pretty quickly at this point–I don’t think the “I’ve already got a date” text-message ruse lasted longer than one commercial break–but it’s annoying and increasingly tough to swallow when even the good eggs start doing it as a matter of course.

* Regarding the escort, though, why is Nate such a coup? I love the kid, but did no one remember him publicly disgracing himself a week ago when he went on television and took the fall for attempting to rig a congressional election by staging a fake drowning on Election Day?

* What self-respecting male geek likes Twilight? You frakked up, writers.

* My favorite cut of the evening was from the nascent threesome to the Empire State Phallic Symbol.

* “Falafel at Mamoun’s”! There’s a Mamoun’s up where I went to school too, and whenever I think of it I remember the time when one of my roommates was wandering around drunk as a lord at 3am with a couple of other people when he got the munchies. They were passing by Mamoun’s and though it was dark, there was a light on in the back and the door was unlocked. Drunk enough to be undeterred by a closed sign, my buddy wanders through the darkened dining room and stumbles into the kitchen, where he sees a dude with slicked-back hair and a wife-beater, looking like a young Johnny Depp, counting out stacks of money. My friend apologizes for intruding and heads back out the way he came. “Hey!” yells the guy from the kitchen. “We have everything but falafel…” Just before my buddy can reply “Great–I’ll have some baba ganoush!”, his companions, who’ve by now come into the restaurant to retrieve him and realized just what kind of offer was being made here, thank the gentleman for his time and escort my friend out of the premises. Thus, when I heard Dan read this item from the list of things to do in college, I instinctively heard it with quotes around ‘falafel.’

Funny Misshapen Body

Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist

Touchstone, 2009

320 pages

$16

Buy it from Amazon.com

It’s a simple but effective tactic: Jeffrey Brown almost never draws his action straight-on. We see his autobiographical adventures at a three-quarter angle, or from slightly above and behind him, or with cuts to close-ups. When you factor in the seeming rapidity with which his tiny panels flash by, the effect, rather than one of sitting there watching actors, is like peering into a world, the space described with POV shifts and glimpses of corners and floors and rear walls and “extras.” I know I’m sounding like a broken record here–I’ve reviewed a lot of Jeffrey Brown comics and said this sort of thing in most of those reviews–but it just feels necessary to point out as often as possible that there’s a lot more going on, visually, than what’s let on by even the back-cover blurbs of his own books, let alone by people who’ve got a special monogrammed hatchet they break out in his honor.

As is usually the case with Brown’s nonfiction and memoir work, Funny Misshapen Body‘s carefully curated selection of topics and anecdotes belies the surface-level meandering and structurelessness of its narrative. Brown’s basically telling two stories here: the stories of his physical and artistic/intellectual development. That in itself is a revelation, because it’s not like the two intertwine or inform one another in any real way in the segments we see here. But to Brown, clearly his lifelong love of comics, his long and losing struggle to find a fulfilling artistic outlet, and the eureka moment(s) that bridged the two are just as fundamental to his physical existence as his Crohn’s disease, his physical fitness or lack thereof, even going through puberty. (I get the feeling the sex stuff in here would be much more fleshed out if he hadn’t already done several books on the topic.)

Maybe it’s this focus on the basics that enables him to depict the events of his life with such a winning blend of dispassion and good humor. Brown tackles a lot of material here–middle-school bullying, romantic obsessions, creative triumphs and rejections, the onset of sex as a going concern, inebriated and intoxicated collegiate shenanigans–that quite frankly loom on my own personal mental landscape like fucking Stonehenge. It’s almost bizarre to read a memoir that tackles these things from a seemingly undamaged place. But the two parallel narratives complement each other in such a way that it’s quite convincing. Brown’s story is one of seeking a compromise with the demands of his body and seeking no compromise with the demands of his art. He got to the finish line in both cases, and I guess I’d be pretty settled too, then. That it makes for perhaps his best book to date is just gravy.

* Take a gander at the art of Isaac Moylan. Isaac and I are working on a comics project that’s near and dear to my heart.

* Congratulations to my chum Kiel Phegley, who is the new News Editor of Comic Book Resources. Kiel kicks the gig off officially with a big interview with DC’s Dan DiDio.

* Loving Chris Mautner’s new “Comics Cavalcade” feature on Robot 6, and not just because the fucker originally stole my “Comics Time” title for it. It’s a regular-ish round-up of notable comic strips and stories posted online.

* Stephen King, you do not need to write another Dark Tower book, I promise you.

* Hey, there’s a new ToyFare out, and with it a new Twisted ToyFare Theatre comic strip, so check it out.

* Sean Belcher solved the mystery of that cool “frost kraken” image from yesterday for me: It’s by this fellow.

* I will probably like this Clash of the Titans remake. 300 with monsters? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* MY GOD IT’S FULL OF STARS

* Robot 6-in’: Brian Michael Bendis is teaching at Portland State University.

* Hey, Deadwood fans: Did you know that the great Todd VanDerWerff of The House Next Door’s Lost recaps spent all summer re-watching and reviewing Deadwood for the AV Club? Well break out the fuckin’ canned peaches and kiss your evening goodbye, because that’s what he did. For all eternity: Deadwood makes The Wire look like Hawaii 5-0.

* Tom Spurgeon loved Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. He also loved Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit Vol. 1. Make sure to take advantage of Tom’s return to reviewing, y’all.

* Jon “The Forager” Hastings has a new criticism blog and this post I’m linking to from it is very flattering.

* I haven’t been following the weekly-ish Amazing Spider-Man comic, although I gave it a shot circa the John Romita Jr.-illustrated New Ways to Die arc and will do so again next week as the umbrella-event-whatever onslaught of classic Spidey villains The Gauntlet begins. Therefore I enjoyed Matt Wilson’s lists of the 5 Best and 5 Worst Post-Brand New Day Spider-Man Villains at Topless Robot. The concepts are breezily hokey in the fashion of most of Spidey’s rogues gallery, and though they’re not all winners, they’ve at least showcased some gutsy design choices and lovely art by the likes of JRJR and Marcos Martin.

* Speaking of Topless Robot: You know, the end result of all the Watchmen DVD shenanigans is that I have yet to purchase Watchmen, a film I greatly enjoyed, on DVD, and don’t really have any plans to do so. Last time this happened was with Let the Right One In and its shoddy subtitles. Did the version with proper theatrical subs ever come out, by the way?

* He hasn’t posted one in a bit, but I just discovered Corey Blake’s weekly round-up of new-reader-friendly comics. Very nice idea.

* And speaking of weekly comics round-ups, I enjoyed Jog’s this week just as I tend do. As usual he sneaks a juicy digression or two in there, this time around a post-mortem on Grant Morrison and Gene Ha’s abortive Authority revival.

* Jason Adams presents five frames from Tim Burton’s Batman. I liked The Dark Knight but there’s still hardly anything in it that holds a candle to something like this:

* I love the metal-up-your-ass imagery of the tumblelog Obsidian Obelisk, but like many Tumblrs (including my own!) it frequently doesn’t credit the images it reposts. (I always used mine as basically a file folder you could display online.) So therefore I have no idea who created this wonderful image. Any help?

* As someone who’s long felt hugely popular pop music should look and sound more like Mechanical Animals-era Marilyn Manson, I fully support Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance.” This may be the moment where I became a GaGa Believer.

* Today on Robot 6 I became a one-man campaign for putting Geoff Johns on a He-Man comic and summarized some salient points from Brian Michael Bendis’s mass interview-by-Twitter over the weekend.

* Wow, that library worker who refused to allow a kid to check out Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Black Dossier was a grade-A asshole.

* My Twisted ToyFare Theater co-writers Justin Aclin, TJ Dietsch, Jon Gutierrez, and Rob “Topless Robot” Bricken were guests on the ISB’s War Rocket Ajax podcast. Go listen to them explain how to be funny.

Refresh, Refresh

Danica Novgorodoff, writer/artist

adapted from the screenplay by James Ponsoldt

based on the short story by Benjamin Pierce

First Second, 2009

144 pages

$17.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Beware of those epiphanies! They’ll get you every time. Like Novogorodoff’s previous book Slow Storm, Refresh Refresh creaks under the weight of meaning with which every scene is imbued. Every email from its latchkey-kid teenaged protagonist to his soldier father abroad is a poetic reverie about the emptiness of lives touched by war. Every conversation between his friend and his friend’s kid brother is an object lesson in how violence and hierarchical power relationships infect those raised around it. Every bully, every cute girl, every wild animal is a metaphor first and foremost. Once again, there’s a belief-beggaring twist involving violence that dances up to the edge of murderousness in a way that simply doesn’t flow from what has come before, and in this case is actually difficult to parse logistically. And once again, there’s one last desperate night where visions are had and this topsy-turvy world almost makes sense before it all fizzles out and fades away. By the end, I found I didn’t care whether the book’s trio of teen leads ever broke free of the stultifying pressures that were slowly crushing them, but I sure as heck wanted the author to!

That said, one thing that really surprised me about this book was the art. When I saw that Novgorodoff had (with the exception of one key sequence) subbed out her memorable gray watercolor washes for a more traditionally drawn style, complete with acidic colors by hired guns (“Color by Hilary Sycamore and Sky Blue Ink; lead colorist: Alex Campbell”), I shook my head in dismay. Here was the most distinctive thing about Novgorodoff’s earlier book, and now it’s gone? But Novgorodoff’s got the chops for her pencil-and-ink work to stand on its own without the more dramatic painted style supplementing it. It makes for a fluid read, and in such cases as the predatory Army recruiter who intersects with our trio of heroes at several key junctures, it’s a fine conveyor of character information.

I just wish it was being deployed in service of a story a little less beholden to the set-up of literary fiction at its most obligatorily portentous. You know what’s a good point of comparison here? Gipi’s Notes for a War Story. Both are bildungsromane about three teenage boys caught up in the moral, financial, and physical uncertainty of war. Both are drawn in a thin-line style that emphasizes the characters’ awkwardness and vulnerability, but also makes moments of violence that much more impactful. Both are published by First Second. But one feels like a comic, while the other feels like a short story with drawings. Perhaps it’s the “adaptation of an adaptation of a prose short story” set-up that’s the problem, I dunno, but I do know the problem’s there.

* Art-heavy day at Robot 6 yesterday, as I linked to Kevin Huizenga’s Sherlock Holmes…

…Jon Vermilyea’s He-Man…

…and Alvin Buenaventura’s Believer Art Issue.

* Eve Tushnet loved The Descent. It’s a lovable film!

* Let’s hear what Guillermo Del Toro has to say about designing the creatures of The Hobbit. All this “you’ve never seen a dragon like my Smaug design” stuff is making me nervous. There might be a good reason why!

Mome

Vol. 14: Spring 2009–Kaela Graham, Adam Grano, Derek Van Gieson, Laura Park, Olivier Schrauwen, Gilber Shelton, Pic, Dash Shaw, Ray Fenwick, Ben Jones, Frank Santoro, Jon Vermilyea, Sara Edward-Corbett, Conor O’Keefe, Emile Bravo, Lilli Carre, Hernan Migoya, Juaco Vizuete, Josh Simmons, writers/artists

Vol. 15: Summer 2009–Kaela Graham, Andrice Arp, Tim Hensley, Sara Edward-Corbett, Ray Fenwick, Conor O’Keefe, T. Edward Bak, Gilbert Shelton, Pic, Nathan Neal, Noah Van Sciver, Robert Goodin, Dash Shaw, Paul Hornschemeier, Max, writers/artists

Vol. 16: Fall 2009–Kaela Graham, Archer Prewitt, Ted Stearn, Dash Shaw, Lilli Carre, Conor O’Keefe, Ben Jones, Frank Santoro, Jon Vermilyea, Nicholas Mahler, Laura Park, Nate Neal, Renee French, Sara Edward-Corbett, T. Edward Bak, writers/artists

Eric Reynolds, Gary Groth, editors

Fantagraphics, 2009

Vol. 14: 120 pages

Vols. 15-16: 112 pages each

$14.99 each

Buy them from Fantagraphics

Buy them from Amazon.com

Things kinda went off the rails here, no?

Like, looking at that list of contributors, you can see some standouts: The Cold Heat material from Jones, Santoro, and Vermilyea is not the strongest Cold Heat material in the world but it’s imaginative and, particularly with Vermilyea at the drawing table, sharply delineated, as is Vermilyea’s delightfully sick solo material. Josh Simmons impresses with his blackly comic strips, particularly a memorable number involving homunculus-sized versions of Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox grinning soullessly at the assembled paparazzi. Tim Hensley kills it as always with the concluding chapters in his Wally Gropius saga, featuring peerlessly communicated body language perhaps the greatest anti-climax in comics history. I think this is some of the tightest material we’ve seen yet from Sara Edward-Corbett–I love her white-on-black trees and her Ice Haven-esque children-adults. Lilli Carre is alarmingly good at depicting male lust. Nate Neal’s not-so-instant-karma piece in Vol. 16 is explicit and haunting. Dash Shaw is a restless talent, albeit so restless he never seems to settle down even in the middle of any given strip.

But what is Mome at this point? Gone is the “recurring cast” model. Also gone is the Saturday Night Live style approach that replaced it–recurring cast featuring a couple of breakout stars with a celebrity guest each issue. Now it’s just all over the place. Here’s Gilbert Shelton’s unfunny rock epic, here’s Ray Fenwick and Archer Prewitt and Ted Stearn’s unfunny funny-animal things, here’s an astonishingly hamfisted political comic from Emile Bravo, here’s some comics from Spain that are stiff and disjointed, here’s some Conor O’Keefe stuff that’s gorgeously McKay-ian but sort of amorphous, here’s some awkwardly self-referential stuff from Laura Park and Nicholas Mahler, here’s a T. Edward Bak cover version of Dan Simmons’ The Terror and a Renee French piece that just get buried under the accumulated other, lesser contributions. I’m not sure what Mome is supposed to deliver anymore, and I’m not sure how receptive I am to whatever it is delivering.

* In the SPX Critics Roundtable transcript, when I wrote that Rob Clough and Chris Mautner’s last names are pronounced “Clow” and “Mowtner,” I meant that as in “rhymes with cow or Mao,” not “rhymes with glow or mow-the-lawn.” I’m gonna fix it so it’s even clearer, but I’ve heard enough excitement over people finally learning to properly pronounce those dudes’ names that I want to set the record straight.

* I have a Twitter account that you can follow: @theseantcollins.

* Just a couple of big Robot 6 posts and then I’m out for the day.

* First, I transcribed the Critics Roundtable panel from SPX. Get ready to wallow in the wisdom sprayed all over your computer monitor or iPod Touch screen by Rob Clough, Gary Groth, Bill Kartalopolous, Chris Mautner, Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, Douglas Wolk, and yours truly.

* And here’s an alarmingly comprehensive round-up of the past week’s Con War/Wizard/Gareb Shamus developments. You’re really gonna wanna follow the links on this one. Hours of entertainment.

Captain America: Reborn #4

Ed Brubaker, writer

Bryan Hitch, artist

Marvel, November 2009

40 pages

$3.99

In which we learn that Sharon Carter is not just the Billy Pilgriming Captain America’s “constant” in the Lost sense–she’s literally a Cap magnet, pulling him toward her through the timestream thanks to some nanotech in her blood. Ain’t Marvel Universe pseudoscience grand? That’s really all I need to get me over what reservations I had about injecting a time-displacement angle into Brubaker’s years-long top-drawer super-spy saga. And to be fair, the megastoryline kicked off with the Cosmic Cube, the wonkiest of all Marvel’s made-up tech/mystic mumbo jumbo, while one of its best scenes to date involved Bucky’s dismembered cybernetic arm springing to life and taking out a room full of SHIELD goons, so this is not without precedent. (There were some cool giant robots in there too, iirc.)

One of my favorite things about Brubaker’s run–and in this he’s been indispensably assisted by a solid stable of artists, led by Steve Epting and Mike Perkins and stood in for here by the slicker style and cantilevered action of Bryan Hitch, who in every other way is consistent with the established tone–is just how good he is at grouping various super-people together and having those groupings make visual and practical sense. Several times I’ve touted how he’s established this sort of underbelly to the Marvel Universe involving super-powered espionage-based characters: Steve Rogers, Bucky, Black Widow, Union Jack, Crossbones, Agent 13, Nick Fury and so on all look like people you really could believe take advantage of whatever relatively slight super powers they have, put on some form-fitting garb and skullcaps, and go out and assault people in classified military installations. In this issue you see some new combos in that regard, most notably a Bucky-Cap/Black Widow/Ronin trio, who are put through the paces by Hitch in a memorable hit-and-run attack in Marvel’s oft-destroyed Times Square. Elsewhere, Bru and Hitch take a trio of gaudier, more straightforwardly superheroic characters–Mister Fantastic, Hank Pym or whatever he’s calling himself now, and the Vision–and, despite this being the least naturally resonant area of the Marvel U. for Brubaker’s Cap, somehow make them click in that world as a braintrust tasked with cracking the enemy technology that’s brought Cap low.

But the best such scene–the scene that made me want to write the book in the first place–occurs when Homeland Security Commissar Norman “The Green Goblin” Osborn’s right-hand woman Victoria Hand (yup!) drags Sharon Carter, the brainwashed and disgraced Agent 13, in handcuffs into a secret lair. She looks down, and there looking back at her are Doctor Doom, the Red Skull (who’s now trapped in a robot body with a Red Skull mask and an SS uniform), racist luchadore Crossbones, Skull’s S&M daughter Sin, and the torso-themed robot Nazi mad scientist Doctor Arnim Zola. Sharon’s reaction is more bugged-out disbelief than anything else, and it’s entirely appropriate: As assembled by Brubaker, drawn by Hitch, and staged in a clever two-level set-up by the two of them, man oh man does this come across as a batshit-insane crew of lunatics. You really can’t even begin to imagine what kind of crazy horrorshow they’ve got in store for whoever’s unlucky to be dragged into that lab; it’s like the scene in Blue Velvet where Dennis Hopper forces Kyle MacLachlan into Dean Stockwell’s place, only with Doombots and time machines instead of overweight prostitutes and Roy Orbison songs.

And now that I’m writing about it, the scene reminds me in its weird, you-gotta-be-shitting-me way of a very different “here come the bad guys” reveal: that wonderful spread in the first issue of Geoff Johns and Phil Jimenez’s Infinite Crisis where you realize that Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters are about to get their collective bell rung by Bizarro, Zoom, Cheetah, Sinestro, Black Adam, Deathstroke, Dr. Light, Psycho-Pirate, and that DC Magneto guy Dr. Polaris–just about as fearsome an array of opposite-numbers and cool power-sets as DC can offer. But while that was prime momentism, this is like anti-momentism–the staging peels back the “whoa” factor and transforms it into a sort of wordless shudder. This is the kind of thing you want every superhero comic you read to be able to deliver.

* A pair of heavy-hitters in the Strange Tales Spotlight today, in honor of the third and final issue’s release: Paul Hornschemeier and Jeffrey Brown.

* Josh Simmons has changed my mind: Now I want someone to pay him six figures to adapt Stephen King’s It. (Sorry, Al–you snooze, you lose!)

* Wow, this Steven Grant essay about how we’ve entered the Disco Age of comics (meant pejoratively) is just super-duper wrong about both disco then and comics now. And frustratingly, he tosses in a bit about how people who weren’t around in the late ’70s don’t understand disco, so now I can’t explain why it’s wrong because I wasn’t around then and therefore don’t understand. Curses, foiled again!

* Tom Spurgeon really sinks his teeth into Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter. It is so good to have Tom reviewing again!

* I’m a few days late on this, but Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essay “Unreal Estate,” a compilation of establishing shots of various buildings where bad things end up happening in horror movies and other films, is his best video essay yet. I even did pretty good at ID’ing the films. Barton Fink was a very welcome inclusion.

* Speaking of both Seitz and scares, he’s a contributor to IFC’s fine list of the 25 Scariest Moments in Non-Horror Movies. Chances are that if it just sprung into your mind, it’s on the list. Seitz’s highest-ranking write-up happens to be the only act of violence in a film that made me cry.

* Jim Woodring updates us on his next two (!) Frank projects.

* The Weinsteins are really, seriously, they-mean-it gonna remake Hellraiser. They don’t know with whom, other than executive producer Clive Barker, but they’re gonna do it by god.

* Finally, rest in peace, San Diego Comic-Con founder Shel Dorf.

* My favorite line of the night actually came from the “previously on Gossip Girl” thing at the beginning of the episode, when Olivia said to Dan, “I lied because I care about you.” That’s Gossip Girl in a nutshell, this season more than ever. It should be tattooed on every character’s forehead.

* Actually, my real favorite line of the night wasn’t on the TV at all. It comes from The Missus, who when Dan and Olivia were snuggling in bed turned to me and asked “Do you think Dan’s morning breath has integrity?” You bet it does, honey.

* “Van der Bilt”? Uh, okay. Van der Woodsen too. Van der Bass? Van der Waldorf?

* I liked the line about a Rasmussen poll having a Democrat in the lead. This really is a fantasy world!

* I enjoyed the lame actor character. More people need to answer doors and attend parties in their boxer briefs.

* The funniest bit of the night is Blair telling Serena about “my best friend Brandeis,” whom she met that afternoon–perhaps the most literally childish thing Blair’s done in a season full of Blair doing childish things. Please tell me I wasn’t the only person who immediately thought of Eric Wareheim’s new best friend Raz and Tim Heidecker’s new best friend Tony…

Hey, who needs the hoes, right, Blair?

* I love that Blair was so mean to Serena, because the meanness was accurate. Serena is a slutty lush!

* Jimmy Fallon. Jesus Christ.

* Jenny looks cute with no make-up. She should get sick more often.

* I spent a long time baffled as to whether or not Nate actually did stage the drowning. I didn’t know what the hell was going on until we got some seemingly superfluous shots of Trip’s missus.

* Speaking of, how wonderful was her mustache-twirling exchange with Grandfather? Her: “This couldn’t have worked any better if it was planned.” Him: “You!” I like a good “you!”

* Lots of Benjamin Marra news today: He’s officially launched his renamed Traditional Comics publishing outfit’s new website and blog, done a new Super Satan comic for Vice, and gotten hisself interviewed by Vice’s Nick Gazin. Said interview containes such awesome statements as the following:

I think that Space Beaver comic has served as a template as far as the kind of comics I’d like to create.

…

Muscles are cool. They represent power and strength, which are cool qualities.

…

I’d like to see superhero comics return to the male power fantasy. And that just makes me think of having muscles that would allow me to decimate any adversary.

Indeed. Indeed.

* Hey, check out this unofficial teaser image for Brendan McCarthy’s upcoming Spider-Man/Doctor Strange: Fever. (Via Robot 6.) I’ll be over here, patting myself on the back.

* Jon Hastings is helping me work through some lingering questions I had about the relationship dynamic in Paranormal Activity in the comments for my review of that film. I think he’s pretty much spot-on with everything he’s saying.

* I’m not going to spoil it by posting the image because you really need to see them side by side, but Ilkka Sarpola’s cover version of the cover for Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For at the Covered blog is my favorite Covered cover version yet. You instantly picture a vastly more believable and disturbing story in your head looking at this thing.

* Spurge is right: By all means, go, look at the comics of Marguax Motin.

* Dirk is right: By all means, go, look at the pin-ups of Fernando Vicente.

* This sort of forward-thinking initiative is why Bloomberg’s gonna win in a walk today.

* Tim Hodler takes slacker linkbloggers to school.

* Ezra Klein takes priggish luddite fuddy-duddy know-it-alls to school.

* Finally, Jesus.

I want someone to pay Al Columbia six figures to adapt Stephen King’s It.