* J. Michael Straczynski elaborates on his decision to leave his monthly comics for writing original graphic novels and limited series. His characterization of the delays on his Marvel series The Twelve as being due to him waiting for artist Chris Weston to catch up to him rather than the other way around is the first time I’ve heard that series’ problems explained in quite that way.

* Here’s a pair of fun Grant Morrison interviews, first with IGN on his Batman run and then with my pal Rick Marshall from MTV’s Splash Page on Sinatoro, his upcoming film collaboration with Adam Mortimer.

* Matt Fraction, live in conversation with C.F. and Brian Chippendale? My goodness!

* This Bruce Baugh World of Warcraft post on an end-times cult currently plaguing the game may be my favorite post in his recent WoWblogging resurgence. The game’s about to undergo a major overhaul that they’re tying to an in-story near-apocalyptic event, and so they created an end-times cult. Brilliant.

* Rick Trembles’s Motion Picture Purgatory comic on the I Spit on Your Grave remake struck me, a person who’s seen neither the original nor the remake, as thoughtful and thought-provoking.

* LOVE AND ROCKTOBER: Mome standout Derek Van Gieson contributes cover versions of panels by Jaime and Gilbert to Repaneled.

* Real Life Horror: The Republican Party’s repeated intimations of militarization have disturbing implications.

* Finally, here’s your latest portrait of the State of the Awful (links to previous entries in this series may be found here and here): Inside the fiction-for-hire factory of notorious fabulist James Frey. My skin crawled. (Via Alex Segura.)

Now that the more-or-less final chapter of Phase 2 of Grant Morrison’s grand Batman mega-run, The Return of Bruce Wayne #6, has been released, I took the opportunity to read all of his Return-related comics in a row, interspersed in a way that made at least some sense to me. This is how I did it:

Batman and Robin #10
Batman and Robin #11
Batman and Robin #12
Batman #700
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1
Batman and Robin #13
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #2
Batman and Robin #14
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3
Batman #701
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #4
Batman #702
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5
Batman and Robin #15
Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #6
Batman and Robin #16

I post this for two reasons. One, I’m wondering if anyone else there has a better or more official reading order for this material. (God, can you imagine how nuts this would all drive a civilian?) Two, I want to say that reading all this material back-to-back was almost unspeakably badass. A gigantic Batman epic sprawling from the dawn of man to the end of time, involving all his oldest friends and allies and three of his creepiest and scariest villains, with more secrets and clues and booby traps and symbols than Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, featuring impeccably choreographed fight scenes, dotted with career-best work from Frazer Irving and Cameron Stewart and some fine stuff by a whole lot of other people too. I’m not going to say “if you like superhero comics at all, you’ll love this” because I’ve been at this long enough to know that there isn’t a single comic out there of which this is true–certainly not a Grant Morrison comic at that. But it is absolutely, positively what I come to superhero comics for. And after a month and a half spent reading the work of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, all that jumping back and forth in space and time and story necessitated by interpolating the different series and storylines like I did only made it better. I imagine that if I were to have read his entire run back-to-back, including Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis and everything, I’d be in something akin to a happy Bat-coma. Such a magnificent comics-reading experience!

Fear of Comics
(Love and Rockets, Book 17)
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2000
112 pages
$12.95
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

The one moment in Fear of Comics, a collection of Gilbert’s short stories and experimental work from between the first and second runs of Love and Rockets proper, isn’t visual, but verbal. “Dr. Fritz, in this dream I look at you and I can only think of killing you,” says the bizarrely dressed character known as the Diva to her therapist. “I focus my hostility toward you because I’m actually angry with somebody else from my past who’s been abusive to me but it’s you I want dead. If I kill you all the world’s pain would go away because I would be satisfied…! God forgive me…”

“Not to worry,” Fritz replies in her trademark lisping voice. “It’th your dream and you’re thimply working out your reprethed daily fruthtrathionth.”

“My dream…?” the Diva replies.

In the next panel Fritz awakes with a shock, the crescent moon whose shape adorns the Diva’s headgear shining coldly through her dark bedroom window.

It is just such a chilling moment, that one little turn of phrase where suddenly Fritz’s dream avatar realizes that dream though this may be, she’s in mortal danger. Shudder-inducingly subtle. And frankly I think subtlety is an underrated quality of Beto’s comics. Especially in a collection like this one, where the selling point is that it’s all the weird, wild, surreal, sexy, and violent shit he did when he really cut loose between Palomar-verse runs, it’s important to note how many of the strongest moments are also the quietest ones. Take his little parable of skill, jealousy, and ignorance “The Fabulous Ones,” for example. Not to undersell the prodigious penises of the nude characters or the grotesque act of brain-eating that forms the crux of the story, but the really haunting bit is watching the surviving tribesman sitting there after placing his slain friend’s brain in their slain rival’s skull, in hopes that this will revive the man so that they can apologize for having killed him in the first place. The act isn’t the really troubling part, it’s his silent realization that he’s made yet another terrible mistake, and the subsequent silent panel of him fleeing, knowing he can never really run away from his crime. Or look at “Father’s Day,” a bleak, loosely inked little thing about a well-meaning father who pays for his meddling in his wayward teen daughter’s life with his own: It’s not dad getting beaten that gets you, it’s his daughter sleeping, unaware of his fate, and his wife waiting up, dreading it. Or look at what I believe is the collection’s best known strip, six panels of a man who looks like a caricature of Richard Nixon convulsing or cramping up against a generic trees-and-cityscape background under the title “Heroin”: I’ve said this before, but while I may not know what this strip is about, I know what it’s about. Or take perhaps my favorite recurring device in Beto’s oeuvre: The mystical tree that will grant supplicants their wish as long as they can bear to look at its true face. We never see that face ourselves, and what we do see tells us little other than that whatever it is is incomprehensible: A shapeless shadow, the edge of a giant clockwork gear.

Fear of Comics is a wonderful book, one of the finest short-story collections the medium has ever produced. It’s laugh-out-loud funny at times, filthy at others, disgusting and poetic and black as midnight at still others. And it’s a showcase for comics’ premier naturalist to abandon that style altogether, to take his distinctive and exaggerated figurework to their absolute extremes, to tell stories that feel like neither the magic realism nor the science fiction for which he is best known but rather like fairy tales, or even myths of some creepy nihilistic religion. It’s definitely weird and wild. But for my money, it’s loudest when it’s quiet.

* Today on Robot 6, three quotes on three different aspects of J. Michael Straczynski’s abrupt departure from his much ballyhooed Superman and Wonder Woman runs:

* Mark Waid compares him to Sarah Palin;

* Tom Brevoort notes that he’s still working on his similarly departed Marvel series The Twelve;

* and Tom Spurgeon wonders about the messaging inherent in a high-profile writer leaving monthly comics because that’s “where the business is headed.”

* Speaking of Spurge, he catches that the San Diego Convention Center expansion will be designed by Curt Fentress, who did Denver International Airport, by far the nicest airport I’ve ever been to.

* David Bowie has no plans at this time to make more music. 🙁 (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* A New Cult Canon column on Clue? Yes please! I have every word of that film memorized and I probably haven’t seen it in twenty years. It basically did for me as a kid what a different movie about Tim Curry running around a giant scary mansion on a stormy night did for me as a teenager.

* I thought it was a little weird that the next Gilbert Hernandez pulp graphic novel had a Beto cover rather than a painted one like the first two did. Turns out it’s got a painted cover after all! My goodness.

* Jim Henley on Armistice Veteran’s Day.

Amor y Cohetes
(Love and Rockets Library: Short Stories)
Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Mario Hernandez, writers/artists
Fantagraphics, 2008
280 pages
$16.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

One of the things I’ve missed out on in reading through Love and Rockets one Bro at a time is seeing where they stood in relation to each other. I’m told by at least one trusted reader who was there at the time that “it’s the way they played off each other!” is an overrated element to the original serial-anthology format, but that’s fine, because my interest in this topic was more historical than critical. Isn’t it fascinating to know, for example, that “The Death of Speedy Ortiz” was in the same issues as “Poison River”? And I’ve heard straight from the Bros’ mouths that seeing what the other one was doing in the early issues helped shape the storylines that would define each of them: Gilbert was so impressed by Jaime’s obvious mastery of the “cute girls hanging out in a science-fiction setting” set-up in his Locas strips that he abandoned his similar material to create Palomar; then Jaime was so impressed with the extensive, realistic character work Gilbert was doing in Palomar that he beefed up that aspect of the Locas stories. It wasn’t so much “I’ll see you and raise” (although surely that’s a part of it, as it is whenever any talented people work in proximity) as it was each brother seeing what areas in their shared ideaspace gave them the room to bust loose.

In collecting all the (mostly) non-Locas, non-Palomar odds’n’ends from the initial run of Love and Rockets from both Gilbert and Jaime–and Mario too, the “sometimes Y” to Beto and Xaime’s AEIOU–Amor y Cohetes reinforces that conception of the brothers’ working relationship. It’s not one-upsmanship, it’s not trading eights, it’s more a matter of pulling from a collective pool of ideas about comics. For example, it’s striking how similar the two brothers’ science-fiction work looks. In “BEM,” the SF adventure that I believe was Beto’s very first L&R material, he hatches and spots blacks and draws romance-comic female faces in the way you expect from Jaime’s genre work. I mean, it’s still recognizably Gilbert, but it’s quite clear that both brothers conceived of these kinds of stories as ones that are by default painted with the same visual palette. As time passes, Gilbert’s sci-fi stuff dwindles down to the single storyline of Errata Stigmata, the asymmetrically coiffed character whose omnipresence in L&R promo material over the years always left me wondering who the hell she was since I’d seen neither hide nor hair of her in Palomar or Locas; even then, his layouts are wide open, using far fewer panels per page, and are driven by vast fields of stylishly designed black–Jaime-esque, in other words. Meanwhile, a pair of punk-based Beto stories–one the fictional history of a shoulda-woulda-coulda been the next big thing bad as told by one of their fans, the other an autobio vignette about the night his 17-year-old future wife puked her way through his would-be panty-dropping tour of punk hotspots–show the same easy familiarity and casual mastery of that milieu that Jaime’s does. How’d he do it without all the practice Jaime had? My conclusion is that, like how sci-fi should look a certain way, knowing how to write punk comics is just part of their shared gestalt. Hell, Beto even contributes an awesome little wrestling story, about the real-life night he saw (pre-Adorable) Adrian Adonis basically go nuts, that further proves the point.

The road goes both ways, of course. Jaime’s light-hearted sci-fi-comedy romps with pretty teenager Rocky Rhodes and her absolutely adorable robot sidekick Fumble eventually veer off into the sort of sad, you-can-never-go-back cul de sac of regret that’s normally Beto’s territory. There’s also a barely-veiled autobio story about the day a KKK event in his neighborhood provoked a riot that feels more Love and Rockets X than Locas. When the Bros swap characters for a special issue, Jaime hews much closer to the spirit of Palomar in his Luba/Maricela/Riri story than Beto does in his proto-Birdland gender-bending sci-fi sex romp with the Locas (whom he eventually transmogrifies into Locos!). To put even more of a point on it, Jaime takes a zany old Looney Tunes-style comic Beto did as a kid and redraws it with Maggie and Hopey in the lead roles, and damn if it doesn’t feel like the kind of kinetic, wordless romps Beto throws in as short stories from time to time as an adult.

Thrown into this mix for the first time in the L&R books I’ve read is Mario. Dude’s an accomplished cartoonist too, and in a style that I think anticipated a lot more comics I’ve seen than Jaime’s or Gilbert’s, believe it or not–his blobby, dynamically dashed-down inks feel alt-Euro to me, poised halfway between expressionism and naturalism. His main storyline, about the fallout from a coup d’état in a slightly sci-fi-tinged Latin American country, unfolded over the course of short stories spaced out over years, and offers more proof that the Bros were all building off the same foundation–it’s quite easy to place his “Somewhere in California”/”Somewhere in the Tropics” political thriller somewhere between Maggie and Rena’s Mechanix-era revolutionary misadventures and Gilbert’s serious-as-a-heart-attack Cold War/Drug War shocker Poison River. Which makes sense, I suppose, given that he and Beto collaborated on several of the strips.

Ultimately it’s Gilbert who emerges as the star of Amor y Cohetes. While Mario’s stuff feels like a cameo and Jaime’s like a detour, Gilbert’s non-Palomar work comes across like a second main throughline for his career. Whether incorporating Frida Kahlo’s style and a dizzying array of cultural and political eyeball kicks into his biographical strip about her, placing autobiographical stories and dialogue in the caption boxes and word balloons of totally incongruous superhero and sci-fi artwork, crafting harsh and mostly wordless short stories about violence, or developing Errata Stigmata into a damage case every bit the equal of a Palomar resident, he comes across as restless and relentless in his desire to do whatever he can think of doing with comics. All three Bros shine on this shared stage, but Beto’s the one pushing through the audience and taking it out to the street. It’s exciting to watch that shared ideaspace expand.

* DC opens up its own DC Digital Comics Store.

* J. Michael Straczynski in not-finishing-what-he-started SHOCKER!

* Wait–what?

* A new Fritz B-movie-verse book on the way from Gilbert Hernandez! Love from the Shadows, coming in January. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Tom Devlin takes a few seconds to crow about Drawn & Quarterly’s 2010 release slate. With some justification!

* The Game of Thrones news blog Winter Is Coming examines existing scripts, casting sides, and so on to determine how much the show will be deviating from the book. The answer seems to be “some, but probably not much in any way that really matters,” which is what you’d expect from an adaptation on the faithful end of things.

* One of the reasons I’m so grateful for the existence of Grant Morrison’s Batman run is that it really, truly does lend itself to annotations of the sort done by David Uzumeri for today’s The Return of Bruce Wayne #6. On the reader end, it’s not over-earnest fan overreach at all, and on the creator end, it’s not something required to enjoy the story on the page, but it’s all there if you want it. Just such a pleasure to read a superhero comic that works in that way.

* It’s a pleasure watching Spurge unpack a book like Mouse Guard.

* Finally, if you like the Venture Bros., you can buy original storyboard art here to help raise money to save the life of a cat. I truly love all the cats of the world so I hope you consider this. (Via Spurge.)

* Ask and ye shall receive! Earlier today I blegged for good critical writing on World of Warcraft and It by Stephen King. So bless Sean P. Belcher for recommending this fine Margaret L. Carter essay on Lovecraftian cosmic horror sans Lovecraftian nihilism in It. Meanwhile, I’ve got the Rob Cockerham World of Warcraft diary that my old All Too flat major domo Kennyb recommended opened tab by tab and waiting to be read. Thanks, fellas!

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Jaime Hewlett’s adaptation of Pulp’s “Common People”;

* and Tom Brevoort’s advice to young comics writers. Clarity and emotional oomph get top billing.

* If you’re in the market for more Walking Dead episode 2 target practice, Sean P. Belcher and Adam Serwer have you covered. Serwer’s last line is almost maybe too harsh, but it’s also pretty accurate for at least a few of the characters we’ve met.

* Brigid Alverson’s exhortation to read Hans Rickheit’s Ectopiary may be just the kick in the ass I needed.

* Tim O’Neil lists his five favorite Wu-Tang Clan solo albums. We have three in common; can you guess which?

* Bald Eagles covers Benjamin Marra. This should be submitted to the Covered blog, no?

* Jim Woodring keeps killing it.

* Real Life Horror: George W. Bush is a proud torturer and torture is legal because a lawyer said so once. One day he will die in comfort, surrounded by his loved ones, feted by leaders of both parties.

* There Will Be Blood: The Nintendo Game. Spoiler alert? (Hat tip: Bill Magee.)

* Finally, I love when comics critics calmly use some goofy comic to excoriate the society that produced them top-to-bottom. In that light, behold Tim Hodler on Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey. We haven’t seen its like since Brian Chippendale’s unforgettable take on The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu #34.

If anyone can find me good critical writing on World of Warcraft or Stephen King’s It, I will shake that person’s hand.

* Curt Purcell echoes a lot of what I said about last night’s episode of The Walking Dead, and adds something I barely touched on, which is that the zombie stuff wasn’t very good in it either.

* If I had to imagine the way network executives talk about genre programming, I’d probably come up with something like this exchange from a pair of HBO honchos about the upcoming Game of Thrones adaptation. “Transcends the genre”: check. Interchangeable use of “sci-fi” and “fantasy”: check. Dutiful referencing of the twin goals of pleasing the fans and appealing to a wider audience: check. Not that I’m upset about any of this–they mean well. It reminds me, though, that by the sound of it this will be a much more reverent adaptation of the source material, in terms of fidelity, than True Blood.

* LOVE AND ROCKTOBER: Frank Santoro notes the silent messages being sent by what panel grids Jaime Hernandez uses when in his gobsmacking “The Love Bunglers”/”Browntown” suite from Love and Rockets: New Stories #3.

* Speaking of Frank: Naughty, naughty!

* Nick Gazin reviews some recent comics and not-comics releases for Vice. I’m interested in what he has to say about Destroy All Movies!!!, Bent, and so on, but mostly I’m interested in having the opportunity to once again beg him and Vice to create a comics-only RSS feed. (Yes, I’ve tried to hobble one together myself using Page2RSS; no, it didn’t work.)

* Despite its obnoxious one-image-per-page linkbait format, this Wired slideshow previewing Destroy All Movies!!!, the aforementioned look at cinematic treatment of punks and punk, got me pretty excited. It also makes me wish that some current science-fiction filmmaker would populate his post-apocalyptic wasteland with emo kids. (Via Fantagraphics.)

* This Tom Spurgeon drubbing of Mark Millar & John McCrea’s Jenny Sparks Authority spinoff contains what will surely be the critical line of the week. See if you can spot it.

* The great cartoonist Jason lists his 15 favorite cartoonists. It’s as interesting to see the ones who didn’t influence him in any obvious way as it is to see the ones who did.

* Real Life Horror: Americans love the vengeance murders of imprisoned murderers.

* The Xorn/Magneto story is only confusing if you insist on counting things not written by Grant Morrison as part of the story. I understand that Marvel got cold feet about having Magneto slaughter thousands of Manhattanites in extermination camps, then get beheaded–though it frustrates me that they greenlit the story if that’s how they felt about it–but the thing is, there are a million potential outs for that scenario that don’t involve undoing the big reveal at the heart of Morrison’s whole run. Scarlet Witch could have brought him back and he could have repented. Phoenix could have sent him back to life with the mission of making up for his transgressions. Nanosentinels or Sublime particles could have been responsible for his rampage, or brought him back to life, or both, or whatever. All things built right into the story, or into other important stories; all things that don’t necessitate contradicting what was already on the page. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

Birdland
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Eros, 1994
104 pages
$14.95
Sold out at Fantagraphics
Buy it used from Amazon.com

“It occurred to me: The basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” –Richard Harrow, Boardwalk Empire

Does Gilbert Hernandez agree with this, or doesn’t he? That seems to me to be the central question of the Palomar books, and the answer depends on which one you’re reading. Palomar is very much a fiction of community; its stories are not simply about a collection of individuals who either interact or don’t, it’s about that web of interaction and the collective effect it has on everyone involved in it. Certainly in the earlier, lighter material it appears that the importance of this connectivity is paramount for Beto — a sentiment that recurs anytime the characters chafe at the encroachment of the outside world, or at co-option by the United States. On the other hand, you have things like Tonantzin’s self-destruction, or the pack of murdering ghouls who make up the cast of Poison River. In cases like these, all the things we think of as potential connections — love, sex, family, political and ideological worldviews dedicated to the greater good — are revealed as enormously destructive, utterly indifferent forces, at least as well equipped to tear people apart as bring them together. One could easily conceive of Palomar as a long chase scene in which destruction is constantly nipping at connection’s heels.

Birdland, then, is connection opening up the healthiest lead it’s had in hundreds of pages. Doing a straight-up porn comic that borrows the Palomar-verse characters Fritz and Petra gives Beto the freedom to be as silly and utopian as he wants, something he couldn’t get away with in the naturalist, politically aware world of Palomar and Love and Rockets proper. As a result, he can spend three-quarters of the story watching various adulterous pairings unfold as the characters attempt to compensate for their unhappy unrequited loves and unfulfilled lives — and then blammo, aliens can abduct everyone and grant them the gift of totally guilt-free fucking, in which they inflict no emotional pain on one another whatsoever and everyone can get exactly what they want — and then double-blammo, a cosmic mishap shows them how their romantic misadventures, their pleasures and sorrows, echo those of basically every life form throughout the history of life itself. Talk about a happy ending!

Perhaps the easiest way to see what he’s up to here is to note that by the project’s very nature, the human bodies with which he has always shown such proficiency must needs connect. I mean, just look at the amount of luscious, loving detail Beto puts into, say, Mark’s body hair, or Inez’s vagina. When a guy who draws like that is gonna do a sex comic, you’re gonna feel like those connections are worthwhile almost by default. That’s what happens when bodies start slappin’.

Beyond Palomar
(Love and Rockets Library: Palomar, Book Three)
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2007
256 pages
$16.95
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

If all that Poison River were was dense, that would be one thing. We’ve already seen how far Beto has been willing to push his pacing over the course of discrete sequences like that climactic bit in “Human Diastrophism”–jumps in space, jumps in time, jumps in storytelling and story logic. Doing this for 180-odd pages, to the point where uninterrupted stretches of story bridged either by cuts involving a recognizable end for one scene and beginning for another or by some sort of visual signifier of a transition becomes the exception rather than a rule, is a tour de force performance to be sure, but it needn’t necessarily be a shocking one.

And if all Poison River were was brutal, that would be one thing. Beto has done bleak before–it was the exceedingly bleak Israel spotlight strip at the end of Heartbreak Soup where the Palomar stuff really came into its own, after all. And he’s done brutal (the murders in “Human Diastrophism”) and sordid (Israel’s mercenary hedonism) as well. Creating a story that can basically be described as “Luba’s Adventures Among the Worst Motherfuckers on Earth” can make for a grueling read, absolutely, but it needn’t necessarily be a stunning one.

No, it’s the combination of form and content, style and substance that makes Poison River–the graphic novel-length “origin of Luba” story that comprises this collection’s first two-thirds–one of the most singular, potent, unforgettable comics ever made by anyone, ever. When there are more characters involved in the story than in the entire Palomar mythos thus far; when their stories involve a complex web of conspiracies and betrayals, deceptions and secret affairs, over the course of multiple generations; when virtually no page has fewer than seven tightly gridded panels and most have nine or more; when those panels are filled with Gilbert’s never-stronger sooty, inky linework and character designs, which virtually never serve up the sort of iconic imagery that allows you to quickly scan and move on; when each move from one panel to the next holds the promise and threat of feeling more like a page turn or a chapter jump than a simple “and then, and then, and then”; when that feeling lasts not just for a single bravura sequence but for the longest story Beto has yet told; when it’s a story that regularly invokes such brain-lacerating topics as rape, miscarriage, racism, domestic violence, and torture; when it repeatedly slams your heart into scenes of utter cruelty and your genitals into scenes of pure depraved sexuality…It’s like your brain has to spend the length of the story running as fast as it possibly can to keep up, and every so often you run full tilt into someone swinging a baseball bat. You can’t just lie there and shake it off, you’ve got to leap back to your feet and resume sprinting, even though you know you’ve got no hope of not being knocked flat on your ass again.

I’m trying to focus on the emotional response, the feeling, of reading Poison River because, frankly, it’s so overwhelming. But intellectually, I think this is Gilbert’s meatiest work as well. I’m fascinated by how willing he is to lay bare some of his work’s most indelible tropes, like Luba’s comically large breasts and all the baggage that comes with them–with the equivalent of a corny joke, no less: They do her no good in a marriage to a man with a fetish for women’s stomachs. Given the fire Gilbert has taken for his visual depictions of women, it’s quite easy to read Poison River as a lengthy meditation on the damage that having a “type” can do, no matter what your “type” is…which means it’s an extremely black take on the whole of human sexuality, pretty much. It’s also a savagely political work, fusing his past examinations of the powers wielded by both body and brain by showing the physical depravity unleashed around the world by the ivory-tower/missile-silo conflicts of Cold War ideologies promulgated in nations thousands of miles away from the action in the story itself. There’s a haunting, recurring leitmotif involving a racist caricature comic-book character, his beatific blackface smile appearing in the background, and occasionally in context-free close-ups, as a symbol of unthinking, commoditized cruelty. Poison River may also be my favorite artistic exploration of hypocrisy, neither overly condemnatory nor in any way compromising, in terms of how it treats being queer: Nearly every character in the book is either financially or emotionally close to someone who isn’t strictly straight, and nearly all of them really don’t care, and nearly all of them would nevertheless punish those non-straight characters for it if doing so became convenient–and some of the punishments meted out are far more perverse than anything the characters being punished would dream of cooking up. The story also takes Luba herself about as far into unlikablity, even irredeemability, as it can go, before literally walking her through a tunnel and out the other side, as she and we shake off the previous events of her life like a nightmare and emerge with a scarred but strong sense of morality. There’s just a fucking lot going on in this thing.

I feel bad about barely discussing Love and Rockets X, the also-pretty-long story that rounds out the collection, in which we follow some of the Palomar characters in racially tense, hard-partying Los Angeles circa 1990. But in a way, it feels like a riff on the same ideas that drive Poison River, simply filtered through the American/urban/musical milieu normally occupied by Jaime. Racism, capitalism, the way we let sex make us into worse people, violence in the name of ideology…it’s all still there, no matter how many people call each other “dude.”

There aren’t very many comics this affecting, that much I can tell you. You can probably count them on two hands with fingers to spare. I would say I envy the people who still get to read this for the first time, but I just re-read it, and here I sit, knocked on my ass.

* Kevin Melrose offers a succinct summary of where the Supreme Court justices seem to stand on the video game-related First Amendment case currently before them. Keep an eye on this one. Scalia may be a crazy bastard, but he’s on the side of the angels now and then.

* While we continue to discuss Frank Darabont’s The Walking Dead in the comments below, do check out Sean P. Belcher’s take on the pilot episode. Not only does it use that music cue–you know the one–as a synecdoche for the entire episode, it also points out something I’d missed, which is that the episode title clears up a spelling mistake from Kirkman’s original comic that has bothered me for literally years.

* Sopranos/Boardwalk Empire director-producer Tim Van Patten is directing the first two episodes of Game of Thrones. That augurs well. Interestingly, the four directors involved in the first season are all directing contiguous runs of episodes, rather than being interspersed throughout. Also, the piece notes that the director of the original pilot, Tom McCarthy, appears to have been excised from the show entirely. It’s hard to know what to make of that, especially given that HBO’s executives were by all accounts (including their own) over the moon for that pilot. It has been extensively reshot, but the thinking was that this was due to casting changes for several key roles. Seems like there was more to it.

* Here’s a great little interview with Grant Morrison on his upcoming Batman Incorporated project by Wired’s Scott Thill, examining such touchstones as capitalism, the Arkham Asylum video game, the Brave and the Bold cartoon, and that “I wanna be a billionaire so friggin’ bad” song (not really). Great photo, too. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Speaking of Morrison, something big happened in today’s issue of Batman and Robin. It certainly surprised me! Let it surprise you by not clicking that link until you’ve read the issue, if that’s something you care to do.

* Interestingly, DC allowed newly minted Editor in Chief Bob Harras to emerge from his Republican Senatorial candidate-style media blackout to address the big Batman thing, and the big Batman thing only, it seems. I’m really looking forward to hearing what else he’ll do in that chair.

* I’m always fascinated to watch superhero fans react to a plot point as though it emerges from a vacuum wherein the skill of the writer and artist involved doesn’t even merit mentioning.

* Jeet Heer on racism, young Jack Kirby, and other things the Greg Sadowski-edited Golden Age comics anthology Supermen! can teach us about.

* Thanks to Brett Warnock for reminding me I forgot to link to Tom Spurgeon’s “name five favorite Top Shelf releases” Five for Friday feature. So many paths to take!

* Weezer’s Pinkerton gets a 10 out of 10 from Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen. I don’t know about all that, but it’s a great record, and there is absolutely a qualitative difference between the first two Weezer albums and everything else they’ve done since–it’s not simply a question of a born pop-rock star emerging during a weird alt-friendly era, disappearing, and then finding his voice as a musical mercenary.

Mome Vol. 20: Fall 2010
Dash Shaw, Sara Edward-Corbett, The Partridge in the Pear Tree, Josh Simmons, T. Edward Back, Conor O’Keefe, Nate Neal, Michael Jada, Derek Van Gieson, Steven Weissman, Sergio Ponchione, Jeremy Tinder, Aidan Koch, Nicholas Mahler, Ted Stearn, Adam Grano, writers/artists
Eric Reynolds, editor
Fantagraphics, October 2010
120 pages
$14.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

(Programming note: Taking a brief break from LOVE AND ROCKTOBER today as this book hits stores.)

“5 years, 20 volumes, 72 artists, and 2,352 pages of comics”–that’s how the relatively sparse introductory text describes this landmark installment in Fantagraphics’ flagship anthology series, which I believe at this point has produced more pages of comics than any other such English-language effort. It sees a redesign of the series’ iconic cover layout and a quartet of series debuts, from altcomix known-quantities Jeremy Tinder, Steven Weissman, and Sergio Ponchione, plus Aidan Koch. Paul Lynde and Lil Wayne also make their first appearances in the series. So, big shit poppin’ in Mome 20. Good thing it’s also pretty good!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still the usual stuff I’m not feeling. Nate Neal’s broad schtick, Ted Stearn’s Fuzz & Pluck (despite some wicked crosshatching), and Nicholas Mahler’s anecdotal autobio never amuse me the way they’re supposed to. Conor O’Keefe’s impeccable McKay-by-watercolor riffs remain more lovely than compelling. T. Edward Bak’s biography of explorer and naturalist Georg Steller still comes across as stiff and disjointed despite some hardcore sex in this installment. And Mome newcomer/Ignatz veteran Ponchione’s studied cartoony character designs don’t communicate anything to me.

But what works works really well thanks mostly to bravura cartooning. Dash Shaw captures the awkward performative heterosexuality of an episode of Blind Date in his adaptation, rendered in a TV-screen-glow green and making the most of his tendency to render people as gestures rather than figures. Sara Edward-Corbett crafts a little funny-animal fable about an ill-fated menage that’s her strongest and most emotionally troubling work to date; the more I look at it the more I realize that no one else in alternative comics has a line that emphasizes its line-ness the way hers does. Josh Simmons’s collaboration with The Partridge in the Pear Tree continues to ratchet up the uncomfortable with the introduction of a leering, sweating, quipping Paul Lynde as a protagonist, chased here by a massive, gorgeously colored slug-pachyderm the size of one of the AT-ATs from The Empire Strikes Back; it’s called the Jiggaboo. (Good Lord.) Michael Jada and Derek Van Gieson’s shadowy World War II story begins with a literal bang, one of the most powerfully drawn gunshots I’ve seen in comics. Steven Weissman’s scratchy black-and-white-and-zipatone art actually works better for me in this harsh, slippery story of memory and loss than it does in his humor stuff. Jeremy Tinder is taking his funny-animal stuff further out and getting sharper as he goes, adding in an artcomix influence to boot. Aidan Koch seems to draw poetic twentysomething slice-of-lifers as tenderly and attractively as anyone currently doing that. And Adam Grano encourages us to Free Weezy, always welcome advice. Here’s to 20 more volumes of this occasionally frustrating, occasionally fascinating, always worth reading series.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Nick Gurewitch unveils a new Perry Bible Fellowship comic and some old BBC cartoons;

* and Douglas Wolk unveils the secret of All Star Superman. Or does he?!?!

* Hobbit news: Bofur and Ori have been cast, Gandalf has not.

* Neil Marshall’s Centurion is now out on DVD after a blink-and-you’ll-miss it theatrical run (and some time on VOD, I guess). Marshall’s three-film track record runs “overrated/masterpiece/great time at the movies” for me thus far, so I’m really looking forward to this one.

* More behind-the-scenes sketches and notes from the new Morrison/Stewart/Clarke Batman & Robin hardcover, this time focusing on the new characters in the book.

* I love that “Genesis P-Orridge Quits Throbbing Gristle” is a headline that can be truthfully written in the year 2010.

* I’m always glad to see Brian Hibbs put on his reviewer hat; this time out he reviews a trio of midlist DC books and a pair of zombie television shows.

* If you’re not all Halloween-mixed out, you definitely want to check out Tim O’Neil’s contribution to the genre. This one focuses on the sinister ambient/industrial/electronic end of the spectrum, much to its benefit. I’d also forgotten how the otherwise pretty dire Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was sprinkled with quotes nearly the equal of the iconic lines from the first two–thanks for reminding me, Tim.

* Finally, you’ll notice I’ve added one of those thingamabobs whereby you can instantly post my posts to the social network of your choice by clicking a button at the bottom of each post. My question is, which of these does anyone use? Twitter and Facebook seem like no-brainers, and the email icon seems to be gmail-specific, but I also put Google Buzz and Digg and Delicious and Technorati and StumbleUpon down there because I’ve at least heard of ’em. Do any of you use them? Is there anything you don’t see down there that SHOULD be down there? Please let me know what you think in our wonderfully fast, non-double-posting, non-spam-ridden comments!

Several people have asked me about the new site’s RSS feed. My Google Reader had no problem finding it, but apparently some readers aren’t picking it up. Well, it’s https://seantcollins.com/feed/. I will add a link to the sidebar as well.

* Oh boy, my first Carnival here at the new digs!

* So yeah, welcome to seantcollins.com. This has been a long time coming, as anyone who’s ever had to suffer through me trying to tell them the url for my old blog can no doubt attest. Thanks once again to Ken Bromberg for helping to move everything off of the old site, to the All Too Flat team of Ken, Ben, and Ton for hosting me for over seven years even though their own interests led them elsewhere, and especially to Jason Ervin for designing and building this wonderful new site. It’s still a work in progress in some respects, of course, especially given the plans I have for it–and my laptop’s meltdown last week didn’t help either–but I think it will only get better and more useful. Thank you for being here!

* Josh Cotter needs your help. Please consider buying something to keep this enormously talented cartoonist and his family afloat after they were afflicted by a fire.

* Recently on Robot 6, a bunch of cool comics links:

* Emily Carroll’s “His Face All Red”, a quiet knockout of a horror comic;

* Gabrielle Bell’s “Voyeurs”, which I can relate to a bit more than I should perhaps admit;

* Gabby Schulz’s “How Every Single Discussion About Sexism and Woman-Type Stuff on the Internet (and Real Life) Has Ever Happened and Will Ever Happen, Always, Forever, Until the Earth Finally Falls into the Sun. (Or Until the Patriarchy Is Dismantled.)”, which is sort of the “Calgon, take me away” moment for any of us who endured the horrible Kate Beaton debate last week;

* and, I’m quite pleased to say, me and Isaac Moylan’s “I Remember When the Monster Started Coming for the Cars.”

* Meanwhile, you can check out all of our Robot 666 Halloween horror posts here.

* ZOMG Benjamin Marra draws Brian DePalma’s Body Double! Lots of drawings at the link. Please do yourself the favor of watching that film if you haven’t. Spectacularly bizarre, and perfect for Marra.

* Now here’s an odd, unexpected, potentially positive development: sales for the lowest selling books in Diamond’s monthly Top 300 comics sales charts have increased over their historical norm. Does this mean that at least some of the people who stopped buying the big books when the events ended and the prices went up started buying other stuff? Or does it just mean that the big publishers’ product glut has pushed smaller publishers even further down the trough?

* Frank Santoro talks about a variety of recent releases, including books by Seth, Frazer Irving, Darwyn Cooke, Charles Burns, Aidan Koch, and John Romita Jr. Man, I could not disagree more with Frank’s contention that Irving doesn’t do clarity of action.

* DC’s Source blog has posted a pair of cool process-related, art-heavy posts drawn from the back matter of the deluxe Batman & Robin Vol. 2: Batman vs. Robin hardcover.

* I still haven’t had the chance to watch The Walking Dead, so I’ll spare you my thoughts on other people’s thoughts on something I haven’t seen myself. (The poor guy I blew up at on Twitter over Glee‘s bowdlerized Rocky Horror episode last week should’ve been so lucky!) In the meantime I can link you to some things that friends of mine are saying: Rob Bricken (who hasn’t read the comic) was quite impressed, Curt Purcell and TJ Dietsch (who have) were not.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates was in very good form today.

* Real Life Horror: A good sign that a whistleblower is doing something right is that various keyboard tough guys want him murdered.

* Finally, at some point I’m going to go back and read all the way through 31 Days of Knife, Sean P. Belcher’s woefully under-linked-to-by-me October slasher-blogging marathon. For now, his concluding essay about the subgenre is a good place to start.

Human Diastrophism
(Love and Rockets Library: Palomar, Book Two)
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2007
292 pages
$14.95
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

(Programming note: Yes, LOVE AND ROCKTOBER marches on! And I’m sticking with “LOVE AND ROCKTOBER” because “LOVEMBER AND ROCKETS” just sounds kinda goofy. Thanks for sticking with it, thanks for switching blog locations with me, and thanks for your patience with the unrelated-to-the-blog-switchover computer meltdown that screwed up my reviewing schedule last week.)

I know I just got finished explaining that biology is destiny in the Palomar stories. But what struck me upon rereading the material collected in this volume, dominated by the titular story of a serial killer’s stay in the town, is the power of ideas. Not emotional or sexual drives, even, like the web of lust and unrequited love surround Luba’s mother Maria in the suite of stories that forms the second half of the collection, but actual honest-to-god ideas. Tonantzin is literally driven mad — broken — by the late Cold War political apocalypticism of her criminal boyfriend. (He himself is freed from nihilism’s grip by a jailbird religious conversion, for all the good it does anyone.) Humberto is thrown so far off-kilter by his discovery of the avant-garde artistic tradition from the Impressionists onward that the impact, combined with his fear of the killer, drives him to abandon notions of right and wrong entirely in favor of the truth art can express. In both cases, this ends in disaster.

But there’s a counterpoint to the damage these ideas do. Pipo’s success as a designer and entrepreneur is at least as driven by ideas — from the designs she and her siblings create, to her no-nonsense but still thoughtful approach to business and investing, even to her adamant refusal to learn English as a way to defy being fully coopted by American cultural capitalism — as Tonantzin’s self-immolation and Humberto’s life-threatening secret. Similarly, “American in Palomar” Howard Miller once thought his ideas of art and genius allowed him to dehumanize and exploit the Palomarians, until his actual experiences with them revealed what a creep this makes him; now he’s returned to help Pipo and Diana rebuild and restore the town, using the money made from the artistic project that his time in Palomar forced him to rethink.

Maybe I’m just looking for pat connections here, but perhaps this is why Gilbert’s technique takes a turn for the heady here. Think of that climactic sequence in “Human Diastrophism” where over the course of three tightly gridded pages, each panel represents a jump in time and space, forcing the reader to reconstruct the events that led up to each image herself. Think of the entire Maria/Gorgo section, with its massive, unceremonious leaps throughout the history of the pair’s lives and relationship, the exact contours of which constitute as much of a mystery as the sinister events that forced them both into their secret lives. Think even of the almost playful, superhero-universe-style continuity games Beto plays — the implication that the weird animals that surround Palomar, from an eyeball-eating bird to those vicious monkeys to perhaps even those giant, tasty slugs, are the result of experiments by American military scientists; most especially the oblique revelation that concludes the volume (and all of the first run of Love and Rockets) by bridging the lives and worlds of two of the most haunting characters Gilbert and Jaime ever created. If Heartbreak Soup showed us Gilbert the literary comics stylist, Human Diastrophism shows us Gilbert the mindfucker — the Gilbert who’s still with us today.

Two more quick notes:

1) Human Diastrophism is the one point in the entire excellent Love and Rockets Library digest-size reprint program where I actually have something to object to, format-wise. I found the Palomar hardcover somewhat frustrating because it left out Love and Rockets X and Poison River, two stand-alone graphic novels set in the Palomar-verse if not in Palomar itself. But it wasn’t as bad as Locas leaving out short stories like “Flies on the Ceiling,” and at any rate I understood that when you’re talking about adding two full-length graphic novels to an already gigantic book, page count becomes a factor. However, I figured that with the digests, we’d finally get all the Palomar-verse stories in chronological order, so that Palomar Book Two would include “Human Diastrophism” and “Love and Rockets X,” and Palomar Book Three would include “Poison River” and the material originally collected in “Luba Conquers the World,” which marked the end of the first Love and Rockets run. Instead, things are collected pretty much as they were in the Palomar HC, with the “Human Diastrophism” and “Luba Conquers the World” material collected back to back in this volume, and “Love and Rockets X” and “Poison River” taken out of order and placed in Book Three, Beyond Palomar. If Eric Reynolds had a nickel for every time he’s heard me complain about this, he’d have, well, at least two bits, but this has always driven me nuts. I could be wrong, but I think collecting everything in order would have worked just fine in terms of page count, story cohesion, you name it. Human Diastrophism is a fine collection, and in all honesty the material towards the end involving Luba, her mother, her sisters, Gorgo, and their backstory isn’t really any more confusing without having read the intervening stories in “X” and “Poison River” than a lot of things Gilbert does on purpose. But it wasn’t the way the material was first released, it does make things confusing at least to an extent, and most importantly, it gives the back half of this collection a valedictory, bon voyage feel (since that material was the end of Love and Rockets, as far as anyone knew) that comes across as really sudden and jarring. Next time I may manually monkey with the reading order and stop Human Diastrophism halfway through, read Beyond Palomar, and then pick up with the back half of the book. Hey, if I can do this sort of thing for Final Crisis…

2) di·as·tro·phism (dī as′trə fiz′əm)
noun
1. the process by which the earth’s surface is reshaped through rock movements and displacements
2. formations so made
Origin: < Gr diastrophē, distortion < diastrephein, to turn aside, distort < dia-, aside + strephein, to turn (see strophe) + -ism Thanks, Webster's.