* Al Columbia tells Inkstuds he destroyed the art for his and Alan Moore’s Big Numbers #4 to make an album cover for his roommates in the band Sebadoh. I really don’t know what else to say about that, except that the actual story has ended up being even better than the rumors suggested.

* Again, please do listen to Al Columbia’s entire interview with Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell; an absolutely fascinating way for comics lovers and Columbiaologists to spend two hours. He comes across as an enormously affable guy, admirably cognizant of and secure in his talents and his limitations, and prone to dropping the occasional deeply troubling revelation into the conversation at a moment’s notice.

* pood #3 hits stores April 20th; you can order it through Previews now.

* Retailer and commentator Brian Hibbs has posted his annual look at the BookScan graphic novel/comics sales figures for the bookstore market. It makes for fascinating, if occasionally grim, reading. I think you’ll be surprised by just how well-represented the major corporate prose publishers are on the lists; it can be hard to tell, because their comics releases tend to be spread between various imprints. Unfortunately for fight fans, Brian didn’t include his customary comparisons of the bookstore market to the Direct Market of comic specialty shops, and thus failed to provoke the customary Brian Hibbs/Tom Spurgeon reenactment of the Roddy Piper/Keith David fight from They Live over the conclusions drawn in those comparisons.

* I don’t usually comment on the weekly serial comics releases, but I want to state for the record someplace less ephemeral than twitter that this week’s The Walking Dead #81 from Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard has to be one of the best issues of the series. There’s a line in it that made me say “Oof” and sort of shake my head, and that’s quite aside from whatever zombie-related developments may or may not take place.

* This reminds me that I should have said something similar about The Invincible Iron Man #500 — I mean, I said on Twitter that it was the best issue of the Matt Fraction/Salvador Larroca run, but I want to say it here too. I enjoyed the flashforwards, I thought the recursive structure was well thought-out and well-executed and also fun to read and unravel rather than just being showoffy or self-satisfied, the action was slam-bang, and Fraction wrote a Spider-Man cameo that actually made me laugh out loud at one point. Plus it boasted fine art from a variety of contributors, including Larroca, Nathan Fox, Kano, and Carmine di Giandomenico. Thumbs up.

Page eight of Destructor’s “Prison Break” has been posted.

I wonder if Nick Gazin and Vice stopped tagging their comics-related posts with “comics” so that the comics-only Vice RSS feed I made wouldn’t work anymore.

* CBR has a pretty extraordinary Joyce Farmer in-store appearance report. Man, it sounds like she tore her guts out to make that book.

* Matt Seneca interviews CF for the Hooded Utilitarian. One of the highlights is CF’s impassioned denial that he’s encoding occult symbolism of any sort into Powr Mastrs. And he really comes out swinging in favor of story-based comics:

I’m aware that there are young people right now trying to make moves in comics and deny the story, but comics are a storytelling medium, more or less.  They can be poetic in the hands of one who “knows” (John Porcellino), but comics are designed to tell stories of some kind.  So in a way you’re asking “why comics?”.

Stories are actually our history, our knowledge, our wisdom.  We can’t live without them!  Stories are unique in their ability to speak on many levels at once in a very intimate way.  I’m drawn to that infinity of possibility.  I want to talk about “everything” with my work, but in an elegant and economical way.  Comics are perfect for this.  So we have funny jokes, economics, significant and insignificant events, cruelty, violence, eroticism, death, and tranquility within one work.  It’s a visual world, with exclusive abilities, living in time…. and still so simple.  That to me is very beautiful. This is what comics are for… if I want to do other things, I make a painting, a sculpture, or music.  There’s no excuse for abusing comics.  Of course we can play with the idea of “story”, and I think that’s a great, worthy thing to do, but I want the characters and ideas to always remain legible within that experiment.

* Today’s look at the work of Uno Moralez seemed to go over pretty well; here’s his Tumblr. (Via Same Hat!)

* This looks promising: The writers and cartoonists L. Nichols, Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, and Kevin Czapiewski have started a group blog called Comix Cube, where they’re mostly talking about influence and process and such, and in refreshingly personal terms. Highlights so far? Czap’s review of Blaise Larmee’s 2001, and his post touching on (among other things) one of the greatest comics of all time, Kevin Huizenga’s “A Sunset.” To me that’s the “Here” of the ’00s. Like Czap, I too was floored by that strip — it absolutely recalibrated my understanding of what comics were capable of. I think it’s maybe the underdiscussed comic of the past ten years.

* I’m tabling this till I can actually read the book, and god knows when that will be, but at first scan, Charles Hatfield’s review of James Stokoe’s Orc Stain, comparing it at length to other acts of fantasy-narrative worldbuilding and to D&D, looks like it’s working some very fertile ground.

* Dan Nadel explains Fort Thunder. Readers looking for a canonical list of Fort residents will come away confused, though, so make sure to consult The Official Handbook of the Fort Thunder Universe if you have any questions.

* Graeme McMillan loved Nick Bertozzi’s Lewis & Clark. Can’t wait to check this one out; Bertozzi’s historical comics have historically been beasts.

* Spider-Man’s joining the Fantastic Four (again). Sure, I’ll eat it. Spidey’s got a history with those characters, he’ll give the book some comic relief, the Hickman/Epting FF run has been really entertaining so far, and I like costume color changes on principle. Why not?

* Here’s an amusingly complete recap of the past fifty or so episodes of Jesse Moynihan’s cosmic-realist webcomic Forming. It’s a bit like reading a Wikipedia entry on The Young & the Restless, only instead of Victor Newman, there’s Ghob King of the Gnomes.

* This is just fine, fine writing on “Welcome to the Jungle” and Guns n’ Roses by Mike Barthel.

* I’m less nuts about Grayson Currin’s rave review of James Blake’s self-titled full-length album for Pitchfork, because given that the record’s big departure from Blake’s previous, shorter releases is the introduction of singing, it seems like the lyrics should have been discussed more, which is to say at all. This goes double because the lyrics are so minimalist, and therefore so direct. But I could just be saying that because the singing and the lyrics are what sold me on Blake at last, after a bunch of instrumental EPs that I thought were kind of undistinguished versions of things I’d heard before as far back as Burial and as recently as the last Four Tet record. By contrast, James Blake feels like the emergence of a bonafide pop songwriting tradition with mid-to-late-’90s Aphex Twin at its roots, which couldn’t be more up my alley. (That said, when I hear the phrase “Joni Mitchell cover,” I reach for my gun.)

Various comics and illustrations by Uno Moralez
Uno Moralez, writer/artist
self-published, 2011-
Read them for free at UnoMoralez.com

I’ve been struggling mightily to put my finger on what the art and comics of Uno Moralez remind me of. I got that he draws the faces and figures of his characters to evoke that weird frisson you get when you see commercial illustration from other cultures, where what’s perfectly normal in (say) Eastern Europe or the Indian subcontinent or Southeast Asia or Central America looks just slightly off-kilter and disconcerting to us. And I got that he paces his horror comics with the attention to narrative economy and rhythm of a dark Nick Gurewitch. (That comic about the kid and his telescope gave me panicky giggles with each subsequent reveal.) And I got that there’s a massive, in-your-face dose of kink and smut, tying it to similar traditions in Japanese illustrations and comics and also reinforcing that “I shouldn’t be seeing this” feeling. But that weird, glitchy computer drawing style — what is that all about? Then it hit me: It looks like a black-and-white version of the still images they used as cut scenes in old 8-bit Nintendo games. It feels wrong to apply that aesthetic to these horrific images and stories; and because the style is so mechanical, it’s a wrongness that feels as though it has settled into and infected the very digital medium conveying it — the computer equivalent of Pim and Francie‘s Golden Age animation studio gone horribly wrong. Put it all together and you’ve got one of the most impressive and fully formed horror aesthetics I’ve seen…well, since Michael DeForge, I suppose, coupled with that same “whoa” factor I got from the format and pacing of Emily Carroll’s brilliantly assembled “His Face All Red.” Jeepers creepers, does this person hit my buttons.

(Via Zack Soto via Jillian Tamaki via Ryan Sands)

* The first trailer for Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree is out. It’s cut for maximum red-band-osity, but aside from that it does indeed look intriguingly weird, as befits the spiritual (if not literal) sequel/remake/reboot of Hardy’s own The Wicker Man, one of the most intriguingly weird films of all time. At this point I should probably abandon even the pretense of going to see interesting-looking horror movies in the theater — I still haven’t seen fucking Midnight Meat Train, let alone Monsters — but this could be entertaining.

The Wicker Tree – Trailer
Uploaded by dreadcentral.

* My Robot 6 colleague Kevin Melrose has the best round-up of the critical beatdown Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark took in today’s papers, and the best headline for it as well. One silver lining I think we can all hope for for this thing is that it could maybe serve as the “Uncle Ben getting murdered”-type catalyst for a late-period U2 creative self-reevaluation and renaissance, which is badly needed right about now. (Fun fact: In the show, Uncle Ben dies not from a burglar that Peter Parker failed to stop, but from an unrelated car accident.)

* Hey, Richard McGuire’s “Here” is online in its entirety. One of the all-time great comics.

* The San Diego Comic-Con 2011 completely sold out in one day. Zoinks. Tom Spurgeon has further thoughts, centering on the fact that the show still puts up a world-class slate of comics programming and exhibitors and that the programming end, at least, is better attended now than ever — but that none of that may matter if the way that tickets to the show are sold redound to the movie-trailer crowd’s near exclusive benefit. It’s not clear that that’s the case, however. One thing that seems abundantly clear is that the days of SDCC being something a casual or curious person could plop themselves into the day of, or even the month of, are loooooooong gone, never to return; everyone’s expectations should be recalibrated from there.

* Saving this for when I have the chance to really listen: Inkstuds interviews Al Columbia for two hours. Worth it for the below header image alone:

* Tokyopop is looking into publishing a collection of Brandon Graham’s King City at the extra-large trim size of its Image Comics serial-comic incarnation. I look forward to reading it! Via Frank Santoro, who has more.

* Now this is freaking heartwarming, doubly so if you’ve read the books: The girl who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones has adopted the dog who plays Sansa’s direwolf Lady. That’s the happy pair with the young actors who play Bran and Arya. <3 <3 <3

* Speaking of A Song of Ice and Fire, I agree with the assessment of regular commenter Hob, who emailed me a link to this astonishing map of Westeros by Other-in-Law with the message “Possibly the best fan art I’ve ever seen.” Click the image to see the whole thing, and more maps from ASoIaF besides.

* The Hobbit starts shooting on Monday, March 21, 2011.

* The Australian magazine The Lifted Brow looks interesting — the current issue boasts contributions from comickers Eddie Campbell, Lisa Hanawalt, Noel Freibert, Ron Regé Jr., and Lane Milburn. (Via Mr. Freibert.)

* Interesting list of the Seven Deadly Sins that crappy horror movies commit from Tawnya Bhattacharya. I don’t agree with them all — what inner demon of Sally’s did Leatherface represent in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Her childhood fascination with the zebras on the wallpaper in her grandparents’ house? — but so many horror movies are colossal wastes of time that it behooves us to try to understand why. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Rob Humanick reminds us that Shutter Island > Inception.

* Headline of the Day: One in 50 Troops in Afghanistan Is a Robot

* He’s certainly an expert on leadership vacuums, I’ll say that much.

* Is it just me or does R. Fiore’s review of Acme Novelty Library #20 get just about everything wrong, from matters of basic reading comprehension (the veracity of Lint’s son’s memoir) and aesthetic judgment (the quality of the memoir’s art) to the overall assessment (Ware needs to buckle down and tell a by-god STORY already!).

* Finally, do not tl;dr Lawrence Wright’s enormously long, enormously compelling New Yorker article on the Church of Scientology, as seen through the eyes of its most socially prominent defector, Crash/Casino Royale/Million Dollar Baby writer and director Paul Haggis. I tend not to go for South Park-style Scientology skewering, because it seems clear that the only thing keeping the tenets and traditions of all the world’s religions from sounding just as ridiculous as Scientology (or Mormonism) when laid out in just-the-facts terms is centuries of faith and familiarity. Start a faith thousands of years ago in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent rather than decades ago in the United States of America and they magically become a lot harder to mock as bad science fiction, Moroni and Xenu be damned. However, the CoS’s alleged financial shakedown and apparent physical intimidation of its members, as well as the extraordinary lengths to which it goes to ensure they don’t leave, rise above and beyond the illogic all religions definitionally share and enter the realm of Roman Catholic Chuch-style criminal conspiracy. Moreover, no one who’s spent as much time in the occult/conspiracy underbelly as I have can fail to find the story of L. Ron Hubbard’s shake-and-bake religion, Jack Parson’s black-magick orgy house and all, deeply and darkly hilarious; and the article is coldly ruthless in the way it exposes Hubbard’s self-aggrandizing legend as hokum. Equally damning is its quiet but emphatic and repeated contrast of the Church’s official line about this or that claim by its detractors, however mild or innocuous, with the claim itself: Not only are the particulars of any given apostate or non-member’s recollection of an event denied, but the event in question is said to have never taken place, and indeed the participants are alleged to have never even met. Finally, the way it just tosses out the occasional wholly chilling detail makes for bracing reading. Fun fact: Church leader David Miscavige has apparently had his own wife disappeared for insubordination; no one outside the Church has known where she is for years, and the Church isn’t talking. (Via Anne Laurie.)

Page seven of Destructor‘s “Prison Break” has been posted.

Squadron Supreme
Mark Gruenwald, writer
Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, John Buscema, Paul Neary, artists
Marvel, 1985-1986 (my collected edition is dated 2003)
352 pages
$29.99
Buy it used from Amazon.com

Originally posted on August 10, 2009 at The Savage Critic(s).

I don’t know what it is about Squadron Supreme, but I seem to read it only during times of great personal trauma. I first read the book in 2003, during my wife’s hospitalization at a residential treatment facility for eating disorders. I have vivid memories of sitting at a nearby Panera Bread between visiting hours, slowly turning the pages. And as I reread the book over the past couple of weeks, an 11-month period during which my wife suffered two miscarriages was capped off by the news that one of my cats has a chronic immune-system disease, complications from which prevented him from eating; our other cat had a cancer scare; both of our cats required major surgery; and one of my wife’s best friends lost her sister-in-law, her niece, and all three of her very young children in a catastrophic car accident that left three other people dead as well.

So it’s entirely possible that as effective and affecting as I find Mark Gruenwald’s magnum opus, my real life is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Certainly there are a couple of very different ways to read this, arguably the first revisionist superhero comic available to the North American mainstream. For some people, no matter how interesting Gruenwald’s ideas are in terms of laying out the effects of a Justice League of America-type group’s decision to really make the world a better place by transforming society into a superhero-administered utopia, the execution–art, dialogue, and melodramatic plotting all firmly in the mainstream-superhero house style–cuts it off at the knees. For others, it’s precisely that contrast between the traditional stylistics of the superhero and a methodical chronicling of superheroes’ disastrous moral and physical shortcomings that makes the book work.

Count me in the latter category. Squadron Supreme may have more in common with later pseudo-revisionist works like Kingdom Come than it does with Watchmen in that it obviously stems from a place of great affection for the genre rather than dissatisfaction with it. Heck, even The Dark Knight Returns, which is really a celebration of the superheroic ideal, earns its revisionist rep for a thorough dismantling of the superheroes-as-usual style, something Squadron Supreme couldn’t care less about. No, by all accounts (certainly by the testimonials from Mark Waid, Alex Ross, Kurt Busiek, Mike Carlin, Tom DeFalco, Ralph Macchio, and Catherine Gruenwald printed as supplemental materials here) Mark Gruenwald seems to be working in Squadron as a person who loves superheroes so much that he can’t help but try to find out just how far he can take them. That what he comes up with is so bleak and ugly–nearly half of his main characters end up dead, for pete’s sake–is fascinating and sad. It’s like watching Jack Webb do another season of Dragnet consisting of plotlines from The Wire Season Four: Against America’s broken inner-city school system and grinding cycle of poverty, violence, corruption, and abuse, even Sgt. Joe Friday would be powerless.

Of course, in Squadron Supreme the heroes generally do prove able to conquer humankind’s intractable problems. A combination of the kind of supergenius technology that under normal circumstances only gets used to create battle armor or gateways to Dimension X and the tremendous sheer physical power of the big-gun characters proves enough to end war, crime, and poverty, and even put a hold on death. (The book’s vision of giant “Hibernaculums” in which thousands of frozen corpses are interred until such time as medical science discovers a cure for their condition is one of the book’s great, haunting moments of disconnect between cheerful presentation and radical society-transforming idea.) Gruenwald and his collaborators seem to have no doubt that should Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and the rest of the JLA (through their obvious Squadron analogues) be given the reins of the world, they really could solve all our problems for us.

It’s the methods they’d use to get us there that Gruenwald has doubts about. A Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing for criminals; a Second Amendment-busting program of total disarmament for military, law enforcement, and civlians alike; a takeover of many of the key functions of America’s democratically elected government–despite placing his beloved heroes at the center of these plots, it’s no secret where Gruenwald’s sympathy lies. (To return to the Hibernaculums again, a brief sequence involving “right to die” protestors features some of the book’s most provocative ideas just painted on their placards, eg. “WITHOUT DEATH, LIFE IS MEANINGLESS!!!” Yes, there were three exclamation points on the sign.) Still, Gruenwald backpedals from condemning his heroes for their excesses outright: During the book’s climactic confrontation, as bobo Batman Nighthawk wages a war of words with Superman stand-in Hyperion, the rebel leader reveals his biggest problem with the Squadron’s “Utopia Program” to be his fears over what will happen to it when the golden-hearted Squadron members are gone and someone less worthy takes over their apparatus of complete control. (It’s worth noting that the Squadron gets the idea for the Utopia Project as a solution for the damage they themselves did to the planet while under mind control by an alien tyrant.)

But parallel to the big political-philosophical “What If?” ramifications runs another, more affecting revisionist track. This one focuses on the individual problems and perils of the Squadron members. Some of these flow from the underlying Utopia Project scenario, and about those more in a minute, but other times–a Hyperion clone succesfully impersonating him and seducing the Wonder Woman character, Power Princess, in his place; little-person supergenius Tom Thumb (just barely an Atom analog) dying of cancer he’s not smart enough to cure–Gruenwald simply takes a familiar superhero trope or power set and plays the line out as far as it’ll go. In some cases, such as setting up a fundamental Batman/Superman conflict, making Superman and Wonder Woman an item, explicitly depicting the Aquaman character Amphibian as an odd man out, and dancing up to the edge of Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” essay on the dangers of superhero sex, I would guess Gruenwald was for the first time giving in-continuity voice to the stuff of fanboy bull sessions that had taken place in dorm rooms and convention bars for years.

While that’s a lot of fun, it’s the unique touches brought to the material by Gruenwald, shaped into disconcerting images by his rotating cast of collaborators (mostly Bob Hall and Paul Ryan), that get under your skin. Nuke discharging so much power inside Doctor Spectrum’s force bubble that he suffocates himself. The vocally-powered Lady Lark breaking up with her boyfriend the Golden Archer under a suppressive cloud of giant, verbiage-filled word balloons. A comatose character’s extradimentional goop leaking out of him because his brain isn’t active enough to stop it, threatening to consume the entire world until Hyperion literally pulls the plug on his life support system. Power Princess tending to her septuagenarian husband, who she met when she first made the scene in World War II. Hyperion detonating an atomic-vision explosion in his semi-evil doppelganger’s face, then beating him to death. Tom Thumb’s death announced in a panel consisting of nothing but block text, unlike anything else in the series. Amid the blocky, Buscema-indebted pantomime figurework and declamatory dialogue, these moments stand out, strangely rancid and difficult to shake.

Perhaps no other aspect of the book gives Gruenwald more to work with than the behavior modification machine. There are all the ethical debates you’d expect–free will, the forfeiture of rights, the greater good. There’s the slippery slope of mindwiping you saw superheroes slide down decades later, and far less interestingly, in Identity Crisis. But again, the personal trumps the political. The standout among the series’ early, episodic issues is the one in which Green Arrow knockoff the Golden Archer (who has the second-funniest name in the series, after Flash figure the Whizzer) uses the b-mod machine on Black Canary stand-in Lady Lark to make her love him after she rebuffs his marriage proposal. She ends up unable to bear being away from him, her fawning driving him mad with guilt, and even after he comes clean about his deception and is expelled from the team, the modification prevents her from not loving him. Later, the device’s use on some of the Squadron’s supervillain enemies turns them into obsequious allies-cum-servants whose inability to question the Squadron, and moreover to feel anything but thrilled about this, does more to turn your sympathies against the SS than all the gun-confiscation scenes in the world.

Late in the book, another pair of behavior modification-related incidents ups the pathos to genuinely disturbing levels. When b-modded ex-villain Ape X spies a new Squadron recruit secretly betraying the team, her technologically mandated inability to betray the Squadron member by telling on her or betray the rest of the team by not telling on her overwhelms Ape X’s modified brain and turns her into a vegetable. And when Nighthawk’s rebel forces kidnap the mentally retarded ex-villain the Shape in order to undo his programming, his childlike pleas for mercy are absolutely heartbreaking, as is the cruel way in which the rebels repeatedly deceive him in order to advance their aims. The look of panic on his face as he shouts “Don’t hurt Shape please!” is tough to stomach.

What it reminds me of more than anything is taking an adorable stuffed animal that you love and throwing it in the garbage. Do you know that feeling? This is not a sentient creature, it does not and cannot interact with you in any real way–and yet you love it. It never did anything to hurt you. Why would you want to throw the poor guy away? No, don’t! By the time you get to the end of Squadron Supreme, a love-letter to the Justice League of America that ends with an issue-long fight that leaves half the participants brutally slaughtered, that’s the feeling I get from the whole book. These superheroes never did anything but bring Mark Gruenwald great joy, he wanted to repay that by doing something unprecedented with them, but as it turns out the unprecedented thing to do was to throw them away.

* Really can’t say enough about Blaise Larmee’s new webcomic 2001. Beautiful.

* Well this is outstanding: Max Brooks has posted a vampire story set in the World War Z universe for free on the Daily Beast. Nerdout commencing! Can’t wait to read this thing; World War Z holds up miraculously well. (Via CRwM.)

* Stephen King apparently heard about the new adaptation of The Stand at the same time the rest of us did. In this day and age that seems like a failure of due diligence on the producers’ part, doesn’t it? So much nerd media rises and falls on its makers’ ability to convince the nerd audience that the property’s original creators (or current caretakers, on the part of superhero movies) are involved every step of the way. You’d think they could have given Uncle Steve a phonecall.

* Beavis and Butt-head are coming back. “Dammit, Pantera! Get your ass into the kitchen and grab me a beer.”

* Jessica Abel and Matt Madden are blogging about each and every one of the 71 “Notable” comics listed in the back of Best American Comics 2010. Very cool.

* Congratulations to pood‘s Kevin Mutch for his Xeric win.

* Fantagraphics hires Janice Headley for its already formidable marketing department.

* I sure like listening to Tom Brevoort talk about comics.

* Yep, that’s Adrian Tomine’s workspace, alright.

* It’s Brian Chippendale’s world; Dan Nadel just visited there.

* Very, very close, I daresay!

* A couple of Real Life Horror links via Matthew Yglesias: Timothy Snyder tackles the world-historical horrorshow of life in the lands contested between Hitler and Stalin, while Daniel Davies springboards off the Egyptian revolution to muse on the strategic value of arseholes:

And so that brings me to a useful piece of advice for any readers who are aspiring dictators, one that the Communists knew, Suharto knew, but that some modern day tyrants seem to have forgotten. There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million, meaing potentially as many as three million adults on the streets in the worst case. Your total active-duty armed forces are unlikely to be a tenth of that. When it becomes a numbers game, there is only one thing that can save you.

And that is, a reactionary citizens’ militia, to combat the revolutionary citizens’ militia. Former socialist republics always used to be fond of buses full of coal miners from way out the back of beyond, but the Iranian basijs are the same sort of thing. Basically, what you need is a large population who are a few rungs up from the bottom of society, who aren’t interested in freedom and who hate young people. In other words, arseholes. Arseholes, considered as a strategic entity, have the one useful characteristic that is the only useful characteristic in the context of an Egyptian-style popular uprising – there are fucking millions of them.

(Sidenote: Matthew Yglesias has the worst comment section on the Internet, and I say that as someone who reads comic book websites.)

* I co-wrote the latest, Super Bowl ahem BIG GAME-themed episode of Marvel Super Heroes: What The — ?! I had nothing to do with the funniest bits, though. Fun fact: Alex Kropinak animates these things all by himself.

One of my favorite things to do (and what this says about me I couldn’t begin to guess) is backlog enough comics reviews that I can take a few weeks off from the funnybook grind and plow my way through a suitably ambitious prose-reading project. This winter that project is apparently reading fantastic-fiction series written for young adults. First up was Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence, which I’ve talked about a bit before. Christmas almost always puts me in the mood for these books, just like seeing bugs congregate around my houselights when I take the garbage out at night makes me want to re-read Stephen King’s “The Mist” every summer. The Dark Is Rising, which gave the series its name, contains some marvelously Christmasy stand-offs between good and evil in the English countryside, involving carols like “Good King Wenceslas,” constant references to Midwinter’s Day, the magical properties of holly, and so forth — the ancient Britannipagan roots of the Christmas traditions we know today. But it’s also the second book in the series; the first, Over Sea, Under Stone, was written some years before the rest and is much more a children’s mystery and much less an overt fantasy. So you kind of have to buckle down and commit to reading the whole megillah before you get to the candles and wassails and mince pies and so forth (whereas with “The Mist,” you get a sweltering summer instantly and giant insects crawling across supermarket windows within half an hour’s reading), which is an investment. But this year I felt up to the challenge, and thus over the holiday break I took a crack at the whole series for the first time in eight or nine years. I ended up quite impressed by how much mileage Cooper could get out of merely describing how her conflict between the Lords of Light and Dark — and I mean sheer description, an endless succession of infodumps. Any time our young chosen-one hero Will confronts the enemy, the rules governing their conflict are simply asserted, either by the more experienced characters or, after he reads a book that literally teaches him everything ever, by Will himself, rather than uncovered through action. It’s not a choice I’d have made, certainly…and yet it never feels lazy, somehow. Why? Because Cooper’s overriding theme is that pure Light and pure Dark are both hard masters. Having all the usual fantasy story beats arrived at not through struggle or coincidence but by through “it is the way it is, the way it must be” rules and prophecies and plans and destinies makes perfect sense in a world where even the heroes are resigned to the occasional destruction of the souls of normal humans with the misfortune to be caught up in the conflict. Don’t get me wrong, this series isn’t at all about the necessity for Hard Men In A Dangerous World; indeed I’m not sure there’s any appropriate ideological/allegorical reading to be applied to it. It’s more a combination of Cooper pursuing the brand of fantasy that most intrigued her — lofty and explicitly Arthurian — and then occasionally, and particularly in the masterful Newbery Medal-winning fourth volume The Grey King, chronicling the emotional effect such cold purity has on we hot, impure humans. It’s a fantasy series with a lot of images that shine brightly — the Black Rider, the White Rider, the Six Signs, the Afanc, the Mari Lwyd — but also sting.

Far closer to ground level is Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. Like Cooper, Alexander drew heavily on Welsh legends, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. On the surface it’s the most (and prior to A Song of Ice and Fire, the only) thoroughly Tolkien-indebted fantasy series I’ve ever read, albeit one written on the reading level of The Hobbit throughout its five proper installments and subsequent collection of prequel short stories. There’s a dark lord (Arawn, Lord of Death) who rules a stronghold at the edge of the known world (Annuvin) and sends his undead thralls (the Cauldron-Born) against a motley crew of various beings (the Companions) masterminded by a wizened wizard (Dallben) and spearheaded by an unlikely-hero hick (Taran, the Assistant Pig-Keeper) and his scion-of-royalty guide (Prince Gwydion of the Sons of Don) whose home is eventually besieged (Caer Dathyl). Where Alexander distinguishes himself from the good Professor is in the welcome regularity with which he drives home the central theme of the book: “Please put in the hard work necessary to learn how to not be a jerk.” He depicts Taran’s intellectual, emotional, and ethical growth process in such detail that it’s almost an instructional volume. Taran is never swept along by the mystical conflict with which he becomes entangled on his way to becoming a hero — he trudges and marches and stumbles and picks himself back up and continues to trudge through it. In each book Taran repeatedly is faced with decisions only he can make; he makes them first impetuously, and after learning how that usually works out, with as much care and consideration as he can muster; they either work out or don’t; then — crucially — he accepts responsibility for the results of the decision, accepts the results themselves as the terrain on which he must operate, and endeavors to move forward from there. It’s a constant process of experimentation, failure, contrition, and moving forward with his friends’ support. People try to do right by each other in this book, at all costs. One sacrifice, toward the very end of the book, made me tear up, something I thought I was long past in books like these — it wasn’t even a fatal sacrifice, just one you knew tore the sacrificer’s heart out but didn’t stop him from making it to help the people he cared about. He’d learned not to be a jerk.

I tweeted about all this a few days ago, and two separate people tweeted back in virtually identical terms that the books sound like the anti-Ayn Rand. That’s precisely it. The message is that acting responsibly toward others is really the only way we can gauge responsibility to ourselves — an enormously salutary message, more so now even than when the books were first written over four decades ago. Indeed Arawn Death-Lord’s greatest evil is said to be not his warring and general sorcerous nastiness, but his theft of the skills and secrets that made everyone in Prydain’s lives better once upon a time — better ways to farm and build and sew and create. Arawn took them all and hid them in his own private Galt’s Gulch; Taran’s quest was in part to liberate them, but much more than that it was to work to find his own gifts, and his own limitations, and contribute to the lives of others as best he could.

(In that light it’s hard to find fault with Alexander for his one weakness here, which is that he’s far more willing to harm the characters his main characters care about than he is to harm those main characters, i.e. the ones he and we care about. (This made me appreciate just how much of a taboo George R.R. Martin really shattered, by the way.) Plus, Arawn, the Cauldron-Born, the Huntsmen, and the Horned King are all world-class villains, so on a fantasy-mechanics level there’s still plenty to crow about.)

Finally I’ve just now started Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. I don’t know what I was expecting, prose-wise, but it certainly has that slightly-weak-YA-fiction tendency to eliminate subtext and spell everything out. If the heroine has a tragic backstory, she is going to tell you what it is in the opening chapters. If she feels one thing but is forced to say another, she’s going to describe the situation to you in pretty much exactly those terms. In other words, big surprise, the writing is not as strong as George Orwell or William Golding. Don’t go comparing dystopian apples to oranges as I did.

What it has going for it instead is two things, as best I can tell. I only got up to the actual Hunger Games — the Battle Royale-style bread-and-circuses spectacle in which tweens/teenagers from the subjugated populations are forced to fight each other to the death for the sport of the ruling class as a way to show everyone who’s boss every year — today, but obviously as with any such dystopian-future bloodsport set-up, the kill-or-be-killed nature of the Games is pure narrative napalm. You’ve got a built-in structure that keeps people turning the pages, you’ve got a ready-made cast of varying antagonists you can endow with noteworthy quirks, of course you’ve got life or death stakes, and you have the audience’s expectations that at some point your hero (or heroine, in the case of lead character Katniss) will rip the lid off the system and show the world that the game is rigged and the only way to win is not to play. Juicy, pulpy stuff, regardless of how many school summer reading lists it’s on.

The other thing (and again, I’m barely halfway through volume one, so who knows where if anywhere this all leads) is that it makes bracingly literal contemporary culture’s penchant for watching young people display themselves and/or die for our entertainment pleasure. There’s an out-of-nowhere injection of kink before the games begin — Katniss is stripped, shaved, inspected, and tarted up by a team of stylists to help her win over the crowds; she has every expectation that she may be made to perform in front of a live audience of thousands and television audience of millions stark naked, which has apparently happened to the teen contestants in the past — that fairly blew my mind at age 32; if I’d read this when I was part of the target audience I’m not sure if I’d ever think of anything else. That willingness to go there in the face of what I imagine were objections from the folks in charge of placing this thing in libraries was refreshing.

Moreover, the youth of the bloodsport contestants, as mandated by the government, reminds me not just of the simultaneously voyeuristic and condemnatory coverage of teen misbehavior upon which huge swathes of the media depend, but also of the cold hard fact that when wars are called for, what’s really being called for is for young people to travel someplace to kill people and get killed. Again, I’d imagine that if I were a teenager, this would connect with me very hard on some level, even if I weren’t able to quite articulate how.

On a sillier note, I can’t remember the last time I read a book that my mind cast with actors as quickly and irrevocably as it did here. Katniss is Kristen Stewart, skin tone be damned; Gale is Talyor Lautner; Peeta is Armie Hammer minus a few years; Effie is birther queen Orly Taitz with the voice of that “great, great, really great!” woman from Elaine’s office in Seinfeld; Haymitch is Lieutenant Eckhardt from Tim Burton’s Batman; Cinna’s the guy who runs the New York City bridal salon on Say Yes to the Dress. I wonder who will be brutally murdered next.

Spotting Deer
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
Koyama Press, December 2010
12 pages
$5
Buy it from Michael DeForge

SM
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
self-published, December 2010
12 pages
I forget what it cost

“Although physically similar to a common white-tailed deer (Ocoileus virginianus), the spotting deer (Capreolus vulgaris) is actually a kind of terrestrial slug.” So begins the first of two short, creepy comics debuted by Canadian wunderkind Michael DeForge at this past December’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, and so does one get a sense of the type of skin-crawly, dis-ease driven horror DeForge is creating here. In the guise of a nature guide, the cartoonist not only piles discomfiting detail (“Its ‘antlers’ are actually colonies of parasitic polyps that are first attached to the deer during adolescence”) upon discomfiting detail (“biologists nickname this phenomenon the ‘sexual acqueduct'”), but trots out a unique and fully formed full-color palette to do so; he then whisks the comic into unexpected territory by making it just as much about the obsessive in-story writer of the guide, whose face we never see even as evidence quietly accrues that his interest in these strange creatures has more or less ruined his life. The self-published SM is similarly based in the horror of the squicky and gross (a snowman stands mutely smiling as two teenagers take a knife to it, unpleasantly revealing that it’s somehow made out of real flesh) and similarly takes off into unpredictable territory (the flesh is hallucinogenic; the snowman’s nearest neighbor is a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style old man who doesn’t take kindly to trespassers). As if compensating for the comparative lack of color, DeForge makes the book’s centerpiece as sensual as possible: It’s a full-on psychedelic freak-out laid atop a topless makeout session by an ersatz Maggie and Hopey. It’s enough eye candy to send you into the visual equivalent of diabetic shock, which somehow leaves you even better prepared to picture the unpleasantness that goes on between panels on the subsequent page and is about to go on after that elegant final panel. The best part of all, of course, is that while DeForge’s alt-horror idiom is familiar enough (especially to me, especially lately), his personal drawing style isn’t; DeForge’s comics really do look only like themselves. Give me more.

Switch and gauntlet alike are thrown in today’s page of “Prison Break.”

* PictureBox reveals the details about their next release from Yuichi Yokoyama, Garden. Really looking forward to this one.

* Bill Kartalopoulos’s “Cartoon Polymaths” show sounds pretty cool. I mean, Winsor McCay and Paper Rad in one art exhibit, y’know? It opens tomorrow at Parsons in NYC.

* They’re making A Song of Ice and Fire comics. Shrug. It looks like they’ll be done in the typical front-of-Previews mode, which I don’t think will do the material any favors.

* Jeet Heer defends Art Spiegelman. I think it’s a testament to how deeply influential were not just Maus but also the original version of Breakdowns (not to mention his co-editorship of RAW) that what were once hugely groundbreaking works are now deeply ingrained as almost habits of thought in all of art/alt/lit comicdom and are thus undervalued. Heer also points out Spiegelman’s value as a comics’ foremost public intellectual.

* Michael DeForge reminds us (or at least me) that The Believer has had an Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section for many issues now. Anyone read the mag? How is it? I mean, the February 2011 issue has Jonathan Bennett, Charles Burns, Lilli Carré, Michael DeForge, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Leif Goldberg, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Haven and more, so it seems like it should be pretty great, yet I feel it’s sort of disappearing into the void, at least among comics-critic-dom.

* Speaking of things I’m not reading because I’m a miserly ignoramus, Frank Santoro takes the opportunity of what I think is the conclusion of the Shaky Kane series The Bulletproof Coffin to wax tangential on different modes of serialization in contemporary comics. One of those tangents involves the fate of collections of work that was getting some attention in serialized form, like Coffin and King City. My reading of serialized comics basically hinges on what I can access for free, and my request for review copies for Bulletproof Coffin, King City, Orc Stain, and Morning Glories was turned down en masse by Image, so I can tell you, Frank, I’ll probably be very likely to check out collections of those if I can get my hands on ’em.

* Here’s a nice primer on Mokele-Mbembe, the relict sauropod dinosaur that supposedly roams the Congo basin and is one of my favorite cryptozoological creatures in the world.

* Emily Carroll’s fondness for drawing sessy ladies gets my full support.

* My pal Isaac Moylan is pretty talented.

* Based on a true story!

* Is the latest episode of Axe Cop intentional commentary on the role of women in superhero comics, or is that just a pleasant coincidence?

* I really want to redirect you to Matthias Wivel’s interview with Chris Ware, now that I’ve finished reading it at last. Must-read material. Question now that I’ve read it: Where would Ware be without Richard McGuire’s “Here”?

Studygroup 12 #4
Zack Soto, Steve Weissman, Eleanor Davis, Michael DeForge, Trevor Alixopulos, T. Edward Bak, Chris Cilla, Max Clotfelter, Farel Dalrymple, Vanessa Davis, Theo Ellsworth, Jason Fischer, Nick Gazin, Richard Han, Jevon Jihanian, Aidan Koch, Amy Kuttab, Blaise Larmee, Corey Lewis, Kiyoshi Nakazawa, Tom Neely, Jennifer Parks, Karn Piana, Jim Rugg, Tim Root, Ian Sundahl, Angie Wang, Dan Zettwoch, writers/artists
Zack Soto, editor
Milo George, editorial/technical advisor
Published by Jason Leivian and Zack Soto, December 2010
80 pages
$20
Buy it from Zack Soto

This is going to come out sounding waaaay more like a diss than it’s intended to, but in flipping through the comeback installment of this Zack Soto-edited alt/artcomix anthology a few weeks after my initial read-through, I realized I didn’t remember anything in it prior to cracking the covers once again. Which is fine, I think! Looking at it now, Studygroup12 #4 seems to me to be much more an art book than a comics anthology. For one thing it’s exquisitely made: Beautiful screenprinted neon-pink-and-aqua covers inside covers (trust me, it’s much glowier than the scan above suggests); a gallery of impactful pink/blue/purple splash pages to kick things off and close things out, including some of the most striking images Jon Vermilyea and Dan Zettwoch have ever constructed out of their customary melty-monster and diagram styles respectively; pages printed in the vivid, inky blue-purple of a carbon copy. It’s a lovely package even compared to the similar approaches of Mould Map and Monster. My point is simply that all these things point to a book that works better from moment to moment as a catalog of images and illustrations rather than one whose strength arises from the cumulative impact of individual sequential narratives. Flipping through, I’m struck by the weird mystical sensuality of Aidan Koch’s portraiture and triangular caption boxes; the Renee-French-on-a-photocopier haze of Jennifer Parks’s creepy little strip; the pleasure of seeing Tom Neely images reproduced at a much larger size than his customary minicomics; the strength of the way Vanessa Davis designs leering faces, something that’s much clearer to me here than its ever been in the comics I’ve seen from her elsewhere, which frankly have never bowled me over the way they have so many readers; some funny punk/thrash/metal/trash pastiches from Vice Magazine’s mustache-at-large Nick Gazin (I wish a HAUNTED HOLOCAUST: “THE TEENAGE TITS TOUR” t-shirt actually existed). But much of what really reads as comics does so rather weakly — an uncharacteristic experimental misfire from Michael DeForge; the return of USApe, my least favorite Jim Rugg character; diminishing returns from Vermilyea’s anthropomorphized breakfast gang, which here get a little too Milk and Cheese-y; a Farel Dalrymple strip that’s drowned out by its over-shading; etc. Ultimately it’s really only Blaise Larmee’s riotously confrontational anxiety-of-influence comic, in which one of his trademark prepubescent/elfin protagonists navigates her way through some sort of abstract geometric maze only to stand in front of a menacing reproduced photograph of Charles Schulz (!!!), that hits me hard as comics; perhaps not coincidentally it’s the first time I’ve seen anything from his whole Comets Comets crew that makes good on their kill-yr-idols gotta-make-way-for-the-homo-superior internet trolling. As a look at the Portland-helmed turn-of-the-decade artcomix look, it’s swell; as a look at their comics, and where they might take everyone else’s, it’s only a start.

* They’re making a movie of Stephen King’s The Stand, one of my favorite novels and already the basis for a pretty-darn-good-for-what-it-was TV miniseries. I think there are several potential pitfalls here. For one thing, you truly do need more than the length of a conventional theatrical movie to adapt this thing, but at the same time I’m not sure a rated-R post-apocalyptic survival-horror saga is the sort of thing that can sustain Lord of the Rings/Hobbit/Harry Potter/Twilight-style multi-movie adaptations in box-office terms. Obviously Ron Howard and company are out to prove me wrong with The Dark Tower, but that series is also a fantasy and a Western and science fiction; The Stand is about everyone in the world dying from a biological weapon. I’m also not convinced that the two projects won’t cannibalize one another’s critical and audience and PR oxygen — I mean, without giving too much away, they have a lot in common. I’m also realizing I’m at an all-time low ebb in terms of my tolerance for big-budget Hollywood studio genre blockbuster filmmaking. But I’d be quite happy to see a good Stand movie or movies, certainly.

* It’s Hans Rickheit’s next book, Folly. I know a lot of people who’ve wanted to check out Rickheit’s minicomic series Chrome Fetus, and this is going to collect a lot of that material, so I expect it will go over well.

* The One Ring warns us that the talk about Hobbit creature designs in The New Yorker‘s recent profile of Guillermo del Toro should be taken with a grain of salt, since the interview predated del Toro’s exit from the production. I can’t think of a single cinematic phenomenon more overrated than del Toro’s supposed proficiency with creature design — the alleged complexity of Christopher Nolan movies, perhaps — so this is good news to me.

* To me, the meat of Clive Barker’s recent series of tweets is the forthcoming live-action teaser for his third Abarat book, not a supposed “return to directing” from Barker himself, which is what all the horror sites are talking about but which seems to me to stem from a possible misinterpretation of Barker referring to “my next movie.” After all, the guy has produced the last few adaptations of his work — he has a production shingle and everything — and I’m sure he considers those “his movies” too.

* Curt Purcell on the role of religion in Battlestar Galactica. I don’t want to spoil anything about the show, but speaking from a perspective of thoroughgoing irreligiosity, I’ve always felt that it took an almost willfully small-minded approach to the topic to find anything objectionable about how BSG treated faith and God as valid concerns. The howl of butthurt from the kinds of atheists who voluntarily turn off their brain at anything less obviously condemnatory of religion than Monty Python’s “Every Sperm Is Sacred” joined in chorus with the Science Fiction Is Serious Business with Rules to Follow crowd to create an enormously dispiriting reaction to a show that deserved much better even from its critics. If you watch BSG and think that the series has shoved the Skyfather down your throat, I feel bad for you.

* Ken Parille’s Daniel Clowes Bibliography is really impressive. How great would it be if every major cartoonist had a similar resource?

* Gabrielle Bell wraps up her bedbug comic.

* The great Geoff Grogan has started a “Covered”-style blogathon of his very own. First up: Mike Ploog’s The Monster of Frankenstein #2.

* Still can’t quite get over that Frank Santoro and the Great Cartoonists of Los Angeles photo.

* Finally, I’ve only read half of it — parts one and three, even! — because I missed how it was paginated before I loaded the constituent parts onto my laptop for the train ride home from work, but Matthias Wivel’s interview with Chris Ware, conducted at the Komiks.dk festival in May 2010 and now published on The Comics Journal’s website, is an absolute pleasure. Page one, page two, page three, page four. Here’s a great bit:

MW: …something people often talk about in terms of your drawing style is that it’s kind of dispassionate, distanced, and I think that’s a very purposeful approach …

CW: I prefer the word ‘constipated.’
MW: Right. [Laughter from audience.] I wasn’t going to say it.
CW: Are you asking me why?
MW: Yeah, the choice of this very clean style.
CW: Well, again, it’s to try to get at sort of an ideographic style of drawing, a cartooning style of drawing. I think the closest analogy in the history of art would be Japanese prints, which are really not in any way representational — they’re all about how things are remembered. Their idea of perspective is not about how something is seen, it’s about how something is felt and remembered, and I try to get that in my work too. If I can use the word ‘work’; it makes me sound like I think I’m an artist. So, I don’t try to draw how things are seen, I try to draw how they’re remembered, I guess that is the best way to put it. And I don’t want them to be interesting lines or interesting drawings, because then my hand comes into it too much.
MW: Why is that a problem?
CW: Because I just think it’s harder to read, in the same way that I wouldn’t want to read Ernest Hemingway’s rough draft of one of his novels, I would want to read the typeset, clean version, because I don’t want to be aware of his handwriting or anything. Not that you couldn’t be, necessarily. It’s certainly interesting to see an author’s corrected proof — you can see his scratch-outs and things that are added in — but fundamentally the intention is to have it read smoothly. It’s the words that matter; it’s the story that matters, and fundamentally, I’m interested in the story…

Much much more where that came from.