* Two big posts on Robot 6 from me today. First, it’s the new batch of MoCCA 2010 sketches in my David Bowie sketchbook!

* And here’s my MoCCA haul!

* Also on the MoCCA beat:

* Tom Spurgeon smacks around that superhero panel featuring Jaime Hernandez, Frank Miller, Dean Haspiel, Paul Pope, and Kyle Baker. I think there were a few problems here: First, you had a few different “one of these things is not like the other” panelists in there, depending on which direction you wanna go in; second of all that’s too many people on a panel for cartoonists of most of their magnitude, all of whom could have easily held down a panel on their own–poor Xaime couldn’t get a word in edgewise; and thirdly, I’d rather hear those particular cartoonists talk about anything but superheroes, and I really like superheroes!

* Rob Clough’s MoCCA con report is indeed as good as Tom says, comprehensive in scope and laser-focused in its observations and recommendations. The show can and should improve.

* Secret Acres was really unhappy with MoCCA this year. Leon and Barry voice a complaint I’ve also heard from a prominent retailer who attended the show: Individual artists have basically been priced out of tables entirely. That shouldn’t happen for all the obvious reasons, but after seeing all the empty space at this year’s show, it seems it also shouldn’t happen for revenue’s sake. The SA guys suggest a sliding scale for table rates, free admission, and a better system for awarding choice locations to earlier purchasers. Plus, they’ve placed an open call for minicomics submissions they can host at their own table next year.

* I’m flat-out amazed by the brutal drubbings Gareb Shamus’s Wizard World comic cons, specifically its Chicago show, are receiving in the local press on the eve of Reed’s rival C2E2 show this weekend — and Wizard’s own Anaheim Comic Con, debuting this weekend as well. I’ve said for a while now that given the stigma attached to Wizard within the industry (especially after the showdown with Reed began), Shamus’s strategy, to the extent one can be discerned, was to first to glom off the positive public awareness of the phrase “Comic Con” (taking a page from Reed’s playbook in fact), and then to take advantage of the credulity and ignorance of local and mainstream coverage of comics to land fluff pieces during all his shows. But it turns out that model couldn’t withstand the very first Wizard/Reed head-to-head match-up. There’s nothing so vapidly fluffy you can’t land it safely into the New York Times‘ comics coverage, so who knows, but that aside, this can’t augur well for the Big Apple/NYCC showdown this fall. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Back to Robot 6: This Mark Millar kerfuffle about Marvel ripping off his vampire mutant storyline is the funniest comics story in I don’t know how long. (Marc-Oliver Frisch has his number, methinks.)

* My pal TJ Dietsch’s account of being seduced by Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges, one of the first alternative comics he ever read, is fascinating to me. That’s really strong material and I’d imagine it could have this effect on a lot of people. Also, I’m glad to hear someone else say that the first issue is the least impressive of the three.

* Geoff Johns answers questions about Brightest Day, The Flash, and Green Lantern. I’m looking forward to it all.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost round-up makes me glad I stopped reading Alan Sepinwall’s coverage of the show a few years back when it became apparent he was waiting to not be entertained, and makes me nervous that something I really want to happen isn’t going to happen.

* Rest in peace, Peter Steele. I can’t pretend to have been a huge Type O Negative fan, but the deluxe edition of Bloody Kisses is really something special–gigantic songs drenched in doomed glamour and leavened with just enough tongue-in-cheek humor to let you know Pete and the gang were in on the joke. Just ask Trent Reznor, whose three tweets on Pete’s passing were exactly the kind of eulogy I was looking for. I mean, really–being a goth is funny! Steele got that, even as he got the power of all the sex’n’death’n’outcast stuff that made the lifestyle appealing in the first place. He knew it went hand in hand. That’s why I love “Christian Woman” so much: It’s a nine-minute, three-part epic about a religious woman masturbating to the crucified Jesus Christ on her wall, and they understand that this is both sad and pathetic and loathsome and touching and funny and angry and sexy and creepy all at once. I saw Type O at Ozzfest one year, and they were super-heavy and super-hilarious, ending the set with a joke as memorable as the songs. Godspeed doesn’t seem to be the right word to use, but oh well.

Here’s the missing line from yesterday’s Carnival of souls:

* I really appreciated Stuart Berman’s review of the newly remastered rereleases of Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, insofar as it saved me some ducats by explaining why it doesn’t really stack up against the infamous 1997 “this goes to 11” in-the-red remastering.

There you have it!

* Things are cookin’ in this week’s Lost thoughts discussion. Check it out!

* Frank Miller isn’t doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore. Rats!

* J.H. Williams III drawing and writing the new Batwoman ongoing series? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Tom Spurgeon laments the dawn of the $3.99 For Monthly Comics Age. Personally I thought the $2.99 price point was ridiculous, too. A 22-page sliver of a story with virtually zero re-read value on its own? No thanks. As I told Geoff Grogan at MoCCA, a choice between dropping four bones on some random Avengers issue or dropping it on something like Pood is no choice at all. I can’t even get into the spirit of buying stuff from Frank Santoro’s lonboxes, much as I tell myself I’ll give it a shot virtually every time I go to a show. I can’t get past “I’m not getting a whole thing, I’m just getting a part of a thing.”

* Peggy Burns presents maybe my favorite MoCCA photo parade ever. Funny from the very first joke.

* I’d forgotten to keep track since you can’t get a separate RSS feed for it, but Zak Smith’s I Hit It With My Axe is up to its fifth episode. Turns out it really is fun to watch a bunch of weirdo friends jackass around playing D&D in efficiently edited installments–having briefly spent time in such a group of weirdo friends jackassing around, albeit not an efficiently edited one, I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.

* New Kevin Huizenga comics!

* New John Hankiewicz sketches!

* New Afrodisiac t-shirt!

SPOILERS ON THE WAY SO LOOK OUT

* Now this is podracing!

* Alright, so what did we have in this episode. We had cameos from Michael and, extensively, from Libby. These are the kinds of cameos that I personally really love on this show–not Arzt or whoever, not even various Others types, but the characters who really mattered back in Seasons One and Two, before (I think) the game plan for the remainder of the series was fully firmed up. It’s important to me to feel like those characters and their plights matter as much in the world of the show as they mattered to me as a viewer, you know?

* And even beyond that, I was always awfully fond of Michael, whose downfall was one of the first signs we got, along perhaps with Locke’s devolution from Jungle Wolverine to neurotic button-pusher, that the show was willing to really sully its heroes, however temporarily.

* I also liked Libby. We’ve still got a few more feet of Libby mystery to dig through, of course–we have no idea why she was in the mental hospital in the “real” universe, or whether it was really just coincidence that she bumped into Desmond and gave him a boat. I always assumed she was one of Widmore’s agents, like Abbadon or perhaps Mrs. Hawking. But this gave us some cross-dimensional closure on her and Hurley’s truncated love affair, which was one of the show’s least convincing and therefore somehow most convincing romances. And Cynthia Watros, who should wear sundresses as often as possible, gave a bedraggled, barely-keeping-it-together performance that was touchingly optimistic despite it all. I really wanted things to work out for her here, you know? I’m glad they did, more or less.

* So what else did we have? We had Ilana blowing the fuck up! Hahahaha! I can’t believe they went to the “old dynamite from the Black Rock blowing someone the fuck up unexpectedly” well once again, and that it worked as well as it did. My jaw dropped like a cartoon character’s. Again, I assume we’ll get a little more detail on Ilana at some point, but Ben’s assessment seemed accurate: The Island was done with her. I still wonder if “the Island” is a separate entity, in terms of exerting influence on what happens, from Jacob and the Man in Black, but I take his point. Anyway, good, I wasn’t much of an Ilana fan, and I think giving her this kind of ending gives her more oomph than she otherwise had.

* We had a full-fledged, no messing around, seriously guys on the Internet we’re making this as clear as we possibly can ANSWER! The whispers are dead people stuck on the Island. So it turns out is really is purgatory, for some people at least. Let me know when Lostpedia is finished going through all the whispers’ appearances and figures out who was probably whispering in each one and why. This explanation works fine for me, if you were wondering, though I imagine “ghosts” will be unacceptable to the LOST IS SERIOUS BIZNESS crowd.

* We had Fake Locke tossing Desmond down a well! Hahahahaha! Poor guy. Somehow I think things will work out for him anyway. I know this wasn’t the same well Locke went down couple seasons ago, but given all the tunnels and passageways under the Island, I wonder if Desmond can turn the donkey wheel without being teleported?

* We had Ultimate Richard/Ben/Miles team-up! Can’t wait for the walking-through-the-jungle banter that combo will serve up.

* Crap, I feel like I’m missing some more stuff I was really excited about! Dammit.

* No bad guy in Hurley’s flashsideways, did you notice? Unless you count Chang/Candle/Halliwax.

* Jack’s resignation of the presidency went down a little more smoothly than I’d worried it would with me. I don’t wanna see him turn into the happy wanderer, that’s my concern about a Jack who can let go, but I’m glad they’re directly addressing that failure has consequences, and his change of behavior makes sense.

* The owner of a fried chicken fast-food chain sponsoring the humane society? Yeah, right.

* Desmond’s a GQMF in addition to being a timecop. It was fun watching him traipse around the flashsideways, all blithely bringing people to consciousness and shit–but it was even more fun watching that get flipped on its head when he ran over a man in a wheelchair. He’s being positively Jacobian in his serene weirdness in both worlds.

* Haha, I take a contrarian’s pleasure in watching Desmond a) get tossed down a well, and b) run over a cripple.

* Dr. Linus on perv patrol. Love it.

* I found the swagger of Fake Locke and the silence of Dark Sayid good and sinister in this episode. I particularly like how Sayid’s now all but an extension of Fake Locke, answering only to him, even speaking only to him.

* Basically, what I want to communicate is that a lot happened in this episode! It was all over the place, fast and furious, and at nearly every pre-commercial cliffhanger, since I was watching it via TiVo and fastforwarding through the commercials, I worried that was the end of the show, since they’d packed so much in. They even added an “extra” flashsideways segment, if you will. Last week I expressed skepticism that the Desmond episode meant we’d arrived at the “okay, it’s on now” segment of the season, but I stand corrected, apparently! Edge of your seat stuff.

* The Diary of a Teenage Girl: The Play is extending its run through May 1st. If you live in or near the city you should see it.

* Brian Chippendale on Captain America and the teabaggers. ‘Nuff said, to coin a phrase.

* My buddy Rickey Purdin went to MoCCA and all he got was like a million comics.

* Tom Spurgeon on Todd Hignite & Jordan Crane on Jaime Hernandez.

* Gorgeous retro-paperback comic cover designs from Fonografiks.

* I love that A Game of Thrones has a “language creator” on staff.

* Oh yeah, had I not mentioned Spinoff Online?

* Lost tonight! Give last week’s Lost thoughts one more once-over, then come by later for this week’s discussion!

* My MoCCA report is up at Robot 6. I’d gotten really excited for this show for no discernible reason–it was quite aside from selling my own comics there, honestly–and though I know others might have had different expectations and results, I personally was not disappointed. I had a lovely time.

* Frank Santoro found the show nice, nice, not thrilling, but nice.

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan broke it down in terms of the CCS style vs. Fort Thunder, with extra observations on the Scandinavians and the “new action”eers. (Isaac, “the New Action” was a Bill Kartalopoulos coinage.)

* My chum TJ Dietsch approaches the show from the valuable perspective of a genre-comics reader using the festival as an excuse to dip his toes into the wilder and woolier material.

* Tom Spurgeon had a good post rounding up reaction from afar.

* Strange Tales 2 is a go! Hornschemeier, Gurewitch, Brown, Cloonan, Kupperman, Santoro, presumably many more, all of whom I will likely interview.

* Marvel has dropped Diamond as its book market distributor and signed up with Hachette instead. Another large publisher’s move to a bona-fide book distributor was described to me by someone who would know as akin to “backing the money truck up to the doors and dumping piles of cash in,” so I’d imagine this will do good things for Marvel’s heretofore anemic bookstore sales. Spurge has analysis. Because I am an asshole, I would also like to take this opportunity to say “toldja.”

* Heidi Mac scanned the promo for Charles Burns’s upcoming book X’ed Out. How do you follow up a beast of a book like Black Hole?

* Read Soldier X online for free! Seriously, do it.

* They’ve enlisted the Predators reboot writers to write a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe screenplay. (Via Jason Adams.) My fellow He-Fan Rob Bricken has further thoughts. There’s no way a live-action He-Man movie captures the wonder of He-Man unless They go back in time and have the Wachowski Brothers do it instead of Speed Racer.

* Paul Cornell, author of the late, lamented Captain Britain and MI-13, will be writing Action Comics. He takes over from Marc Guggenheim, whose run on the Superman title is exactly zero issues long.

* Eve Tushnet on The Lost Boys. That was my first R-rated movie too! Holds up. “I’ll pray…I never need to call you.”

* Whoa, Marc-Oliver Frisch makes this Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange comic sound pretty good. Frazer Irving!

* Real Life Horror: Connecticut’s Roman Catholic bishops want to cover up child rape and they need your help!

* The life lesson I learned during the one (awesome) campaign of D&D I played years ago? Never trust a Mind Flayer.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat is now Attentiondeficitdisorderly. I figured I’d make it easier for the publishers of the world to use quotes from my reviews as back-cover blurbs–“Attentiondeficitdisorderly” has a nice pithy ring to it, while “Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat” sounds like something someone would say during an Ambien hallucination.

Coverage of Lost, Tom Neely, and Clive Barker will continue as scheduled. Thank you!

Visit the Partyka table at MoCCA tomorrow–underneath the big clock on the back wall opposite the entrance, right across the table from Sparkplug–for not one, not two, but THREE Sean T. Collins minicomics:

SURPRISE ADDITION! HOT OFF THE PRESS! It’s CAGE VARIATIONS VOL. 1, three interlocking tales of unspeakable depravity and unshakeable despair, featuring the art of Matt Rota!

This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll, this is THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THE COCAINE–it’s David Bowie drug abuse, occult imagery, and Nazi dilettantism as you like it, featuring the art of Isaac Moylan!

And of course the classic MURDER, an anthology of space-age adventure, suburban ennui, and serial killing featuring the art of Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, and Josiah Leighton!

Supplies are super-duper limited, so act fast!

Looks like I will have not one but two new minis at MoCCA. Look for a surprise on Saturday afternoon!

* Secret Acres has a blog! At the link you’ll find their plans for MoCCA and the whole rest of the year. (Via Theo Ellsworth.)

* Isaac Moylan has a blog! At the link you’ll find a page from his strange, NSFW superhero-ish comic.

* I’ll tell you what: If this weren’t MoCCA weekend, I’d be sorely tempted to hoof it northward for the Boston Comic Con. Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Michael Golden, Mike Mignola, Eric Powell, Joe Quinones, Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Starlin, Cameron Stewart, Ben Templesmith, and J.H. Williams III could put a real hurting on my Bowie sketchbook.

* I forgot all about the Thirty Days Gallery curated by the Family Bookstore of Sammy Harkham fame. Maybe I’ll check it out this weekend. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are performing there tomorrow!

* Tom Spurgeon has updated his post on the 2010 Eisner nominees with his thoughts on them. Since it perhaps behooves me to elaborate on what I thought rather than chiming in with a douchey one-liner, I’ll say this: You probably don’t need me to tell you how frustrating I find the year-to-year prominence of adequate-to-good front-of-Previews titles versus the actual best comics of the year. That’s the same complaint everyone has about every award show every year–well, the Oscars at least, and the Emmys to an extent; no one’s cared about the Grammys since at least as long ago as Metallica and Guns n’ Roses lost to Jethro Tull.

But I think what’s uniquely flummoxing about this year’s nominees is that it’s pretty easy for all of us to put together a list of Eisner-bait DC/Marvel/Dark Horse books from the year that was, based on the typical Eisner nomination pattern. A few squeaked in there–J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart got individual nods for their Detective Comics stuff, there’s the usual slew of Vertigo books and big-name artists who mostly do covers rather than interiors, The Walking Dead made it in there, Ed Brubaker appears to have joined the “what he does gets nominated” pantheon, etc. But so many of the obvious “Eisner books”–and regardless of their actual merits I think Batman and Robin, Wednesday Comics, Ex Machina, Strange Tales, Invincible Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror are very much “Eisner books”–were passed over in favor of comics regarded as junk even by junk fans, or as popcorn fare at best. It sort of rips the band-aid off of how arbitrary the process is even at the best of times, how non-rigorous the standards being applied are.

Here are some of the books I used for research for the David Bowie bio-comic I did with Isaac Moylan. It’ll be on sale tomorrow at MoCCA at the Partyka table–cheap!

—

Blake, Mark et al, eds. Mojo: David Bowie Special Edition. London: EMAP, 2003.

Bowie, David. Station to Station. EMI, 1976, remastered 1999. Compact disc.

____________. Young Americans. EMI, 1975, remastered 1999. Compact disc.

Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin, 1999.

Crowe, Cameron. “Bowie to Tour: ‘No Gimmickry.'” In Rolling Stone, January 15th, 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

______________. “David Bowie: A candid conversation with the actor, rock singer and sexual switch-hitter.” In Playboy, September 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

______________. “David Bowie: Ground Control to Davy Jones.” In Rolling Stone, February 12th, 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

Hoskyns, Barney. Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution. New York: Pocket, 1998.

Paytress, Mark and Steve Pafford. Bowiestyle. London: Ominubs, 2000.

Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2000.

Rock, Mick. Blood and Glitter. London: Vision On, 2001.

Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. London: Little Brown, 1996.

Welch, Chris. We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song 1970-1980. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1999.

Spider-Man: Fever #1

Brendan McCarthy, writer/artist

Marvel, April 2009

21 story pages

$2.99

(UPDATE: Now with fewer hideous mixed metaphors)

I went into Spider-Man: Fever with absolutely no brief with Brendan McCarthy, not even his Solo issue a few years back. All I knew is I liked the looks of the preview images floating around the Internet–I mean, I would–and wanted to see more. See more I did: McCarthy’s scribbled psychedelia, powerfully augmented by his and Steve Cook’s woozy glowy neon colors is a thing of gooey beauty. He’s even calling the style “glo-fi,” much to my delight!

Would that the surrounding comic were equally delightful, but it’s a pretty perfunctory rehash of Bronze Age rehashes of Silver Age storytelling. An avalanche of knowingly stiff dialogue, which turns out to be as numbing as the unknowing variety, crushes whatever action hasn’t already been flattened by the surprisingly inert physicality McCarthy cooks up for Steve Ditko mainstays Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. (Nice-looking Vulture, though.) There’s even some embarrassingly cringeworthy African-American dialect, for that true late-’70s feel. I’m as happy as anyone to have a Spider-Man comic featuring a mystical poetry-reciting dog-god named Pugly, but when it comes to reading the thing instead of just looking at it, turns out I oughtn’t have gone beyond those preview images for the glo-fi thrill I wanted.

(Interview link via Jog.)

* Happy 20th Birthday, Twin Peaks.

* Best of luck to Malcolm McLaren as he joins the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle in the Sky.

* Congratulations to this year’s Eisner nominees, apparently selected by pulling names out of a hat. (No offense to the worthy ones–you know who they are.)

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Tom Neely’s Vegan Police t-shirt;

* Siobhan Magnus’s Edward Gorey tattoo;

* and Ty Mattson’s Lost posters.

* More new Dave Kiersh!

* I always look forward to visiting the PictureBox table at MoCCA.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost follow-up keeps things relatively meaty this week, most notably with a fans-vs.-creators concept.

Isaac Moylan and I will be selling copies of our David Bowie bio-comic The Side Effects of the Cocaine at the Partyka table at this weekend’s MoCCA Festival. And I will generally be prowling around, Bowie sketchbook in tow. If you see me, please say hello!

* Calling all Lost commenters: This week’s thread is right here. Sorry for the mental hiccup!

* Congratulations to Matt Maxwell, Gervasio, and Jok on the completion of Strangeways: The Thirsty. This comic was a pleasure to read.

* Matt’s almost always worth reading when he’s writing about comics-related issues at length, and over the past day or so he’s served up a couple of doozies. First, here he is on comics and the iPad. Among many other things he, like many other folks I’ve read, take Joe Quesada to task over his claim that the increased accessibility of digital comics via Marvel’s iPad app will drive more people to comic stores. To me it’s pretty clear that Quesada’s saying this because he has to in order to placate his understandably nervous retailers. Direct Market retailers are vital to comics, don’t get me wrong, and I want them to weather the storm. But with the exceptions we all know and love, they are a reactionary group at the best of times, and I’m sure this vocal constituency has equally strong advocates within Marvel. They have to be the only thing that’s kept Marvel and the rest of the comics companies from jumping into the digital world with the same totality as, say, music companies and iTunes. He’s gotta make the right noises.

* And here’s Matt on Greg Rucka’s departure from DC and Batwoman. I’m positive Rucka’s being honest when he says he’s fired up and ready to go vis a vis getting back into creator-owned work again, and that’s awesome. But as Matt puts it:

Looking at this, it’s clear that Batwoman was his baby (if you’ll pardon the double entendre) and for him to simply walk away, drama or no drama, is not a small deal (even if [he’s] insisting that it’s not a big one).

*Anyway, over at Comics Alliance you can read the entire transcript of Rucka’s WonderCon panel, where this bomb was dropped, to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

* My Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson is all over all the MoCCA announcements and debuts and panels and parties and whatnot. Just click the MoCCA tag and keep scrolling. In terms of stuff that’s caught mine eye, Fantagraphics is packing in a lot of guests and new books.

* Speaking of conventions, it seems pretty clear that the plan behind Wizard’s relentless con expansion is to piggyback off the goodwill and audience interest generated by larger, better comic cons (the rebranding from “Wizard World” to “Comic Con” wasn’t a coincidence), and then to piggyback again off the press generated by those shows among reporters who don’t know any better (this LA Times article being a case in point), all through a series of local con-promoter proxies at minimal cost to Wizard proper. You, dedicated comics fans, are not the target, unless you’re in a market that doesn’t have recourse to those other shows, in which case the hope is that you’ll grin and bear it.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Mike Mignola about the next two Hellboy stories, The Storm and The Fury, which will apparently be to Hellboy what King of Fear is to the B.P.R.D.

* Dan Nadel’s Art in Time is out! Yay!

* Tom Brevoort’s X-Men preferences strike me as eminently reasonable.

* Real-Life Horror: We murdered Iraqis and reporters and Rob Humanick picking up the “Links for the Day” torch that The House Next Door appears to have permanently and regrettably dropped.

* Speaking of THND, founder emeritus Matt Zoller Seitz serves up another of his trademark video essays, this one a 25-minute pondering of Dennis Hopper. Click the link for Seitz’s introduction, then take a little time to watch the video. What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say–he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bull-SHIT, man!

* Your quote of the day:

We are born into structures of law and tradition which were invented by men who were dead long before we were born. All our lives, we struggle against their vast, ubiquitous and posthumous powers.

—Zak Smith, Playing D&D with Porn Stars

* Your entire post of the day: “Proud of Being Ignorant” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I am linking to that post as hard as I possibly can.

SPOILER WARNING

* I like Desmond; I’ve never loved Desmond. Despite a consistently warm and compelling performance from Henry Ian Cusick, one of the seemingly countless casting coups that I think really saved the show’s bacon once things started getting truly baroque, Desmond’s the kind of character I’d call “Internet-beloved” and mean it as a sneer, I’m afraid. He strikes me as what people who hate Jack wanted Jack to be: A hero. Desmond will never let anyone down, which is what makes him much less interesting to me than Jack. I’m glad he’s in love, but that doesn’t really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with umpteen million star-crossed couples; I’m glad he can time-travel and dimension-shift with greater ease than the rest of the cast, but that also doesn’t really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with smoke monsters and psychic children and immortals and people who see dead people. I liked Desmond best in Season Two, when he was the crazy Scotsman in the Hatch injecting himself with drugs, listening to Mama Cass, and trying and failing to escape the Island where he’d lived a hallucinatory hermetic life as the only thing keeping the world from ending.

* So I don’t dread Desmond episodes; I dread the aftermath of Desmond episodes. I’m just not fully on board with the rapturous reception all his episodes get–at least two of them are usually held up as potential “Best. Episode. EVER”s, and I’m not feeling it. My quick, dismissive post last night was just an attempt to dodge the deluge of “OMG!!!!”s I knew was coming; I couldn’t even close my computer down fast enough to avoid a few, and Todd VanDerWerff’s review is probably the apotheosis of the form: “If you did not like “Happily Ever After,” then I’m pretty sure we can’t be Internet friends anymore.” Rats!

* But, you know, I did like the episode. It was fine. In the immortal words of History of the World Part I: “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.”

* Aside from my general lack of “DESMOND FTW” vibes, my biggest problem with it–and this is what I was getting at with that one-line post–is that it’s pretty much exactly what I expected. Veteran time-jumper Desmond is the first to figure out that the flashsideways timeline is a bogus existence created by (according to Daniel) the detonation of the nuclear bomb by the Dharma Bums, and now he’s going to try to persuade the castaways to abandon their new, fake lives for the old one. Like, duh, right?

* Admittedly, that first moment when Charlie opens his eyes underwater and smilingly puts his hand on the glass sent a little shockwave for me. It’s one of the show’s most memorable images. But of course, it’s an image from another, earlier episode. Whatever revelatory juice we were supposed to get from the discovery that these aren’t the lives the characters are supposed to be leading was undercut, for me at least, by the fact that that was my assumption from the jump.

* So, unlike the “I want ANSWERS” crowd VanDerWerff rightly rails against in his review, I was perfectly satisfied with the volume of answers we got in this episode. It seemed like a lot to me. Moreover, anytime Lost does one of its big super-science experiments–like throwing some switches and forcing Desmond to quantum leap through the stargate in arguably the cheesiest effects sequence the show’s done so far–I feel like I am getting an “answer” even if you end up just having to shrug your shoulders and roll with pseudoscientificity of it all.

* I also had no beef with spending all that time in the flashsideways universe rather than on the Island. Like I always say, I like these characters, and since the core of who they all are has remained consistent from the main universe to the new one, I never feel, as apparently many people do, that these flashsideways sequences are a waste of time we could be spending on the “real” characters and the answers they seek. These are the real characters too, as far as I’m concerned.

* Specifically, I was thrilled to see Desmond receive not just the approval, but the friendship, of Charles Widmore. I’m a sucker for when grown men are kind and cooperative to each other in fiction, it really hits my buttons, and seeing them smile at each other and warmly hug, their real-reality animosity vaporized, was a treat.

* So too was the part when he got really angry at Desmond for losing Charlie: I thought we were gonna see the old, awful Widmore come out, but his ultimate punishment was just making Desmond tell his wife himself. Chuckle!

* I also really enjoyed the return of Charlie Pace. Is it just me, or has Dominic Monaghan grown as an actor considerably since the start of the show? I find him really convincingly dissolute and puckish; if he were older I could see him going toe to toe with the reigning Manchester junkie-rockstar champ Shaun Ryder. (PS: “You All Everybody” needs to be transported back to about 1994 and released as a single.) It warms the cockles of my heart to see a drugged-up rock star break on through to the other side for real, you know?

* I also got a big kick out of the return of George Minkowski. Poor Fisher Stevens: Everyone was so excited to see him join the cast, but he stuck around for all of an episode before biting it. (Zoe Bell too!) He was so unctuous here he made me uncomfortable through the television screen. Well done!

* Some guy on Twitter spoiled the return of Daniel Faraday for me, so I was kind of left flat by that. (If you’re wondering how any of these return appearances could surprise me to begin with given that they’re all in the opening credits, I cover up the lower third of the screen until the “Guest Starring” section is finished in order to avoid getting spoiled by the show’s own credits.) I mean, I like Jeremy Davies fine in that role, and I liked seeing how he accessed those same mannerisms through the filter of a brilliant musician who’s basically happy rather than a brilliant scientist who’s basically miserable. I just wasn’t bowled over by it, is all.

* Eloise is always fun, isn’t she? A Harry Potter harridan. Perhaps the one aspect of this episode’s mythology advancement that did take me by surprise was that she’s apparently a timecop in this reality as well. I thought the show was clever to present her as this intimidating but ultimately kind lady, only to flip a switch the second she hears Desmond nosing around about something that might trigger his memories of the original reality–boom! out comes the hardass.

* Finally, just because I’m not head-over-heels for Desmond doesn’t mean I wasn’t glad that he managed to score a date with Penny despite an entire reality built on the premise that they’d never met. If I were Penny I would have been blowing my rape whistle and spraying him with mace the whole time, but whatever, good for those two crazy kids.

* So yeah, like VanDerWerff and unlike the ANSWERS!!!!1!! crowd, I had no problem with the flashsideways reality dominating the show, and enjoyed a lot of it. It’s just that at long last, this was a case of the show zigging exactly where I expected it to zig, zagging where I expected it to zag. It’s a bummer is all.

* Over on the Island: This is kind of picayune, but I think casting that dimpy dude from cereal commercials or whatever as one of Widmore’s scientists was the first big casting mistake I can remember the show making in a long time. I’m just not scared of or impressed by a guy who looks like a chipmunk. Casting Debbie from Singles as Dark Tina Fey is fine, though.

* After all these years, Sayid actually is a badass! Sure, it took the Lost equivalent of demonic possession for him to successfully infiltrate anything other than Shannon’s vagina, but give the guy a hand.

* A friend of mine was all psyched up after the episode, saying that it was the show declaring “Alright, it’s on”–but I don’t see it, certainly not any moreso than all the episodes where Jacob or Fake Locke revealed their motives and goals. I mean, Desmond has his quantum leap and returns all beatific and doo; over in the flashsideways timeline it’s pretty clear what he’s up to, but on the Island? First he’s joining the Get-Along Gang with Widmore, then he’s just as pleased to wander off with Sayid after Sayid ices the two Widmorians and (in what I assume was a pretty bad move, aka classic Sayid) lets Zoe run away. That’s intriguing, certainly, but it’s far from “a-ha! Now we know what the endgame will be.”

* So there you have it. My little one-liner was more a response to the response to the episode than to the episode itself, which I liked fine. I’m sorry about that; that’s lame behavior and it’s not the kind of thing I’m glad to have done. But like I always say, I’m always trying to find a way to approach the art I like that maximizes my enjoyment, and kicking against the pricks late last night wasn’t that way. Turns out gettin’ a good night’s sleep and then writing about the episode this morning was, so thank you for your patience!

S.H.I.E.L.D. #1

Jonathan Hickman, writer/artist

Dustin Weaver, artist

Marvel, April 2010

36 story pages

$3.99

Supremely confident superhero comics-making from Jonathan Hickman here. In fact I’d say there hasn’t been a debut issue this sure of itself, this willing simply to throw its audience headlong into what the writer has cooked up, since the Nu-Marvel golden age of Morrison & Quitely’s New X-Men, Bendis & Maleev’s Daredevil, and Milligan & Allred’s X-Force. Who knows where it’ll all end up, who knows if it’ll hold up or make sense or not be really stupid or something. But within the context of these 34 pages of comics and two pages of Hickman designiness, I found it extraordinarily invigorating.

S.H.I.E.L.D. purports to tell the secret history of a Marvel Universe (I’m not comfortable using the definite article for reasons that will become apparent), in which a blend of fantistorical figures like the Pharaoh Imhotep and actual real-world Great Men like da Vinci and Galileo have banded together over the centuries in an ancient secret society called the Shield (I’m not comfortable using the acronym for reasons that are a little nebulous at this point). The Shield has quietly protect the world from assorted apocalyptic threats familiar to us from Marvel’s outer-space material, including Galactus, a Celestial, the Brood, and (I think) the Phoenix. You are perhaps at this point tuning out: Secret histories and secret societies and super-awesome science heroes who protect us both from threats and knowledge of those threats are obviously a pretty shopworn concept at this point, and the influence of Hickman’s mad-idea-mongering predecessors Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis is unmistakable.

But it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean, and Hickman and artist Dustin Weaver keep things moving at breakneck speed. You get a grand total of one page to ease into the action, with main character Leonid slowly and silently walking toward the viewer, and then BOOM, he’s whisked off by a pair of suited agents in a sweet ’50s car, he’s revealing that his body is made of stars or something, he’s flown to Rome and shown a gigantic underground city–by page four. Most comics today might get that far by issue four. I’m not one to complain about decompression, or at least I didn’t used to be, but obviously the technique has gotten so common as to become predictable; most anyone who’s read enough superhero comics could write a new series’ first story arc in their sleep, knowing exactly where each beat would fall. With Kirkman and S.H.I.E.L.D., I’m kept dancing to a different beat, one where world-ending threats are introduced and thwarted in the space of two to three pages, only for a jump of centuries to bring us to the next one; where a character learns his great destiny and then a three year lacuna reveals him stuck in place, bored and staring at the ceiling; where villains are introduced for the very first time anywhere as if we have the same lengthy history with them that the characters do; where names of great import to Marvel fans are dropped in, precisely calibrated to do that whole “everything you thought you knew was wrong” thing; where Leonardo da Vinci flies into the sun, All-Star Superman-style. In my favorite panel, a council of elders just starts rattling off omgcrazy terminology like they’re reading the specials at the Cheesecake Factory: “The Greater Science.” “The Quiet Math.” “The Silent Truth.” “The Hidden Arts.” “The Secret Alchemy.” Rat-a-tat-tat!

I know he’s being singled out for a lot of praise, but I think Weaver’s the weak link here, to an extent. He’s doing great things with the designs of the Shield’s unique armor and architecture, in a fashion that reminds me of similarly impressive filigrees by the likes of Steve McNiven and Mike Choi. But his characters sit awkwardly among the splendor: Their scale is off at times, and but for a blink-and-you’ll-miss it caption and school bus it’s impossible to tell that this is a period piece and that Leonid’s in high school at the oldest. I’d love to see as much attention paid to the mundane aspects of establishing the story’s world as the mind-blowing ones. But this is sort of small beer. Call it supercompression, call it simply a return to the no-nonsense pacing of the Golden and Silver Age superhero origin stories, but S.H.I.E.L.D. comes across as a book that knows what it wants to do and can’t wait to show you. It’s a delightful feeling.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Well, that was about what I expected.

* Please send Robot 6 your MoCCA plans!

* Speaking of MoCCA and Robot 6, Alex Dueben’s got a pretty crackerjack list of comics-related activities attendees can partake in around the city, including a surprising number of plays and museum exhibits.

*Also on Robot 6: The Avengers/X-Men comics/movie conspiracy theory.

* Some dude named Andrew Lincoln will star as Rick Grimes in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead for AMC. That’s good to know, but it also gives me occasion to point out the relentlessly nudity-focused coverage of male casting announcements by my compadre Jason Adams.

* Well, how about that: On the list of cartoonists I expected to participate in Robert Goodin’s Covered blog, John Byrne was nowhere to be found. My mistake!

* So that’s what kobolds are!

* I guess watching this video for Kelis’s shamelessly button-pushing dance song “Acapella” is what watching a Fischerspooner video would be like if I were extremely attracted to Casey Spooner. (Via Tom Ewing.)

* Why I put off listening to this for this long I have no idea, but I am pretty much floored by the excellence of Brad Smith’s MOON8, a cover album of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon done in the style of an 8-bit video game soundtrack. Think of how good you think this will be–it’s that good. Since I’ve pretty much been mainlining this album and Super Mario games for the past year or so, this is some serious two-great-tastes shit for me. To be semi-serious for a sec, it’s also a fascinating combination of the nostalgic flavors: The video games of your childhood combined with the music of your adolescence (or whenever) which itself was likely the music of your parents’ adolescence (or whenever)…but screw being serious, it’s 8-bit “Us and Them”! (Via Topless Robot.)

* While you listen, be sure to pop in for one last look at last week’s Lost thoughts thread–and I’ll see you tonight for this week’s!

I can’t remember the last movie I went to see in the theater with expectations as low as those I had for Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans. It’s not even that I had fond memories of the apparently cheesy-but-fun-if-you-were-a-kid-at-the-time original and its Ray Harryhausen special effects (so if you were dreading my impersonation of Harry Knowles explaining how this raped the unforgettable afternoon he spent in the theater with Father Geek, don’t sweat it). When all I had to go by were the trailers and commercials, I was actually pretty excited. Lord of the Rings meets 300? Sure, I’ll eat it.

Then I got wind of the hideous 3D transfer, and the supposedly turgid and stupid movie underneath, and nearly got spooked off. But I’ve got a buddy I wanted to see who likes seeing big dumb shit on the big screen even more than I do, so off I went. By this point, my theory, and my solace, was that having eschewed the bogus 3D version and with expectations resting somewhere in the underworld, I might actually enjoy the thing. Relatively speaking.

And I suppose…I did? I mean, I didn’t wanna walk out or anything. I don’t even think I got bored. But I want to assure you that if you’ve ever seen a fantastical genre action movie, and I mean ever, there is no need for you to see Clash of the Titans. You’ve seen it allllllllll before, over and over.

Indeed, Clash is counting on you having done so. It relies on a kind of popcorn-movie shorthand to convey key plot elements, attach you to its characters, intimidate you at its low points and rally you at its high points. It’s so ersatz it’s almost mind bloggling. Aside from the fond memories you have of the Fellowship of the Ring or the Colonial Marines or whoever the hell else, there is no reason for you to care about any of the film’s anonymous, uninteresting…I wanna say “characters” here but I have to put it in sneer quotes. Nothing that the green young rookie warriors or the grizzled old veterans or the crazy ethnic tagalongs do or say rises above stock poses and cliches you’ve seen and heard a million times before. The casting department scored a bit with some guy named Draco or Drago or something to that effect simply because he’s played by an older, whiter, more unintelligble doppelganger of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but beyond that? Ciphers to a man. And I’m including Sam Worthington, who in the course of his three SFF tentpole films has established himself as the most bizarrely uncharismatic action superstar since–hey, I’m drawing a blank, so maybe he takes the taco! Gemma Arterton distinguishes herself as Io by being extraordinarily attractive, something that (say) Old Veteran Who Makes Quips In The Face Of Danger doesn’t have going for him, but that’s some faint praise right there.

Now, I’ll say this for Clash: Almost anything creature-related is surprisingly well done. Given how overly fluid, artificial, and biologically unconvincing CGI creatures can look–cf. Avatar–it takes some real doing to, say, light giant marauding scorpions so that the desert haze is properly reflected off their carapaces, or convincingly depict the way the heft of a giant snake-woman’s tail drags her dying body off a ledge. I was impressed that Clash pulled it off and found myself looking forward to each, well, clash. True, Medusa herself was kind of unimaginative and the Hades bat-demon things were never on screen long enough to get a good look at, but the witches and Djinns or whatever they were were delightfully creepy and gross, grand nightmare fodder for little kids. I even preferred the eye-in-hand witch things to the Pan’s Labyrinth critter they ripped the look off from.

But it was pretty much all one step forward, two steps back. For each rock-solid monster there was an embarrassingly obvious greenscreen shot–is it really that hard to make people standing around on a moving ship or animal blend in with the background? The battle sequences were generally well put together, a series of intelligible beats that made use of the space in which they took place and had physical consequences that could be readily understood–again, contrast with Avatar. But within those sequences, individual one-on-one fights were a hastily crosscut blur a la Batman Begins. As my friend put it, it was like they didn’t bother to choreograph, they just shot a bunch of people swinging swords in different directions and put it together in post. This works fine when you’re Peter Jackson and Weta and you’ve run out of time to do the warg sequence in The Two Towers, so you wing it, and even though it’s the least meticulously constructed fight in the whole trilogy, it thereby stands out as a quick, nasty, down-and-dirty tussle. This doesn’t work at all if it’s your whole movie, and you’ve really only got a total of three battles to work with. And seriously–three monsters, one of which was basically just the Cave Troll grown to Godzilla size and slapped with some Watcher-in-the-Water tentacles and Cloverfield appendages? I’m glad they kept the movie short by the increasingly overblown standards of today’s self-important popcorn flicks, but with so little actually happening, it didn’t feel like much of an adventure.

If you’ve read my blog for a long time, you know I always say that plot holes can be forgiven if the stuff that surrounds those plot holes is compelling enough. But a few impressively done scorpions does not a movie make, and thus I just sat there shaking my head at the whoppers in this thing. How did the people of Argos find out Perseus was a demigod? Why does Zeus agree to punish humanity for its hubris (a word never used!) but then constantly attempt to help Perseus stop the plot he himself set in motion? Isn’t the hilarious religious zealot figure, who looks like he came straight from an Oberline hackey-sack circle, completely reasonable in his desire to sacrifice one person in lieu of the tens of thousands who would die if the gods carry out their threat to wipe out Argos–to say nothing of the dozen who actually do die on Perseus’s absurd quest, or the hundreds who actually do die when the Kraken attacks, or even the dozens who die after Perseus defeats the Kraken by turning it to a stone statue so fragile that it collapses, raining concrete death upon the citizens he supposedly just saved? Why should we care about Perseus rescuing a character we’ve barely met and have no reason to care about any more than all the cannon fodder who’ve been sacrificed while the important people work out their daddy issues? Are we supposed to cheer for the return of those two ethnic hunter guys whose names we don’t even know and who participated in a grand total of one battle? Why didn’t the Argossians just, you know, leave Argos before the clearly articulated deadline for destruction arrived? Why cast a real actor as Poseidon only to give him one line and–this part I stress–not even make him the person who releases the Kraken? Was I the only person who got the giggles when watching Liam Neeson as Zeus argue with Ralph Fiennes as Hades because they were both in Schindler’s List?

Look, I care about action and violence and monsters onscreen as much as pretty much anyone I know. I’m always happy to see cool stuff like the scorpions or the Kraken or whatever, they go into the old fantasy memory bank to be drawn from at a later date. I got my money’s worth in that regard. But I could have walked over to the office copy machine and photocopied the cover of The Return of the King, put the page back in the paper tray, then photocopied the cover of 300 on top of that and called it a day.