Still playing catch-up with work and email. But you can expect recaps, reviews, reminiscences, revelations, and reprimands of the events of the San Diego Comic-Con all coming in the next few days. I’ll probably even talk about some non-comics stuff at some point. ADDTF Fever–catch it!

At a panel celebrating 25 years of the graphic novel (the fat book-like format that’s become the preferred way to package “good” comic books), I saw an interesting glimpse into how damn difficult it’s going to be to get comics into the genuine mainstream–i.e. libraries. Colleen Doran (the incredibly cool cartoonist with the splendid Southern accent who writes and draws the immensely readable fantasy series A Distant Soil) spoke of her (pretty selfless) attempts to get comic books into the hands of librarians and library-system buyers at Book Expo, the regular-book publishing industry’s big convention. Speaking of the obstacles to this process, she said the one complaint she hears most often from librarians is that simply not enough information is given to them about a comic book or graphic novel for them to be able to make a decision about buying or shelving it. Often times the publisher just hands them whatever they wrote up for the comic-shop guide Previews, and in the real world, “Corsair makes a startling revelation to Cyclops, but can the Starjammers save either of them from Omega Red?” isn’t very helpful. Also, they don’t put age levels or grade levels or the other standard things that go on books headed for young-adult sections in libraries.

Well, this last bit caused quite a row amongst the participants of the panel. Graphic designer to the stars Chip Kidd angrily snapped “Why don’t they just read the books and decide for themselves what their about and who should read them?” The obvious reply, one which was shouted out by librarians in the audience, was that believe it or not, librarians do not have the time to read every single comic book in the world. They want to stock graphic novels, but without some help from the publishers in terms of explaining what they’re about and who they’re geared toward, it’s hopeless. But Kidd and some of the other panelists, namely Craig Thompson and Will Eisner, continued taking umbrage at the suggestion that age-levels be placed even in the catalog listing or promotional copy let alone on the back of the book (as is done with, oh I don’t know, every young-adult book in the world).

I don’t necessarily fault these important creators for having their positions, at least from some standpoints. They come from a world in which they’re constantly doing battle against a two-headed dragon: One head being the notion that comics are for kids, the other being that we must institute codes and censors and guidelines to make sure that all comics remain for kids, under the threat of hauling people off to jail for selling adult comics to adults. But this simply isn’t the reason why librarians want these things–it’s so they know where to put the books on the shelves, so they know who to recommend it to, and so they know (believe it or not, this isn’t such a bad thing) not to hand an eight year old a copy of The Filth.

My point is not to find fault with Kidd et al, but to point out this enormous blindspot in their ability to accurately and effectively market their books to libraries. A simple difference in trade-dress culture literally prevents comics from getting into libraries.

Comics are climbing, but let there be no doubt that even at their best (i.e. Kidd, Thompson, & Eisner) they’re still climbing uphill.

The most dangerous threat to comics is not the unreconstructed fanboy (i.e. the people who keep writing Pete Milligan and asking him to bring back the original X-Force cast), but the pseudoeducated fanboy, or PEFB. I spoke with one or two in San Diego, and it was a chilling experience, all the more so because they honestly mean well. These are the people who think Udon Studios is manga, that Alex Ross is the best artist in comics history (“I mean, they look like real people!)”), and that Liberty Meadows is an alternative comic. These people are aware enough to understand the “Team Comics” concept of getting comics out to the world at large, but not aware enough to realize that what passes for “different, out of the mainstream” works in their comics cosmology is insipid manipulative middle-of-the-road crapola. People who watch Martin Scorsese and read Kurt Vonnegut will be handed a Chuck Dixon CrossGen book as an example of something similarly great and groundbreaking by the PEFB. I think it’s difficult to underestimate the kind of damage such egregiously bad standards can do if their proponents remain such a vocal part of the comics-proselytizing movement.

That’s why Gary Groth’s recent jeremiad in favor of much more rigorous critical standards is so important. As he and others like him have long argued, it’s impossible to justify holding up, say, the Speedy-does-heroin storyline from the old Green Lantern/Green Arrow book (regardless of how forward-looking it may or may not have been in the context of the superhero comics of the time) as some sort of masterpiece of the form when Robert Crumb was working at the same time. Similarly, I’ve been hard on Mark Millar’s teen-geared Trouble at least in part because, as a professional writer, he should know better than to hold it up as some sort of instant classic in a medium that also produced genuine teenage-oriented masterpieces like Ghost World, I Never Liked You, The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Blankets.

There’s just no excuse for mediocrity in a medium capable of greatness. And there’s even less of an excuse for confusing the former with the latter.

Well, I’ve returned–physically, at least; mentally I’m in the kind of ADD nirvana that only a huge honking pile of unread comic books can provide–from the San Diego Comic-Con, basically the biggest pop-cultural convention of any kind anywhere in the United States. This is my third year in attendance, and each year it appears to have doubled in size. (This go-round the con expanded to occupy the entirety of the San Diego Convetion Center, which at the height of traffic on Saturday felt like a small city unto itself.) Each year I buy an ungodly amount of comics of every type imaginable. Each year I’m indescribably tickled by the collision of mainstream comics, art comics, video games, toys, movies, and Klingons. Each year I rub elbows with some pretty ridiculously luminous luminaries. Each year I miss The Missus. Next year I’ll definitely be bringing her, because SDCC is something that everyone should experience at least once.

For those who aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about, SDCC is the biggest trade event in a field that has lots of them. There are panels in which different comics-related issues are discussed, announcements are made by the big companies involving their upcoming plans, pros come to sign books and meet and greet the fans, parties are held for mingling purposes, comics-related and genre-based movies are previewed, and tons and tons of stuff are sold on the enormous convention floor. It’s one of the rare places where a person dressed as Frodo Baggins could meet the actor who played Frodo Baggins. It’s also one of the rare places where Los Bros Hernandez sign autographs not five feet away from Rob Liefeld doing the same. Metaphorically, SDCC is the sublime and the ridiculous getting hammered and screwing on a pool table with a Halloween party full of people watching. (Hat tip to Kevin Smith–who was there, actually–for the imagery.)

Highlights for me were many, and since this is a blog, I can just list them and leave all that structure malarkey for the New Yorker. Here we go:

** Upon arriving at the hotel booked for myself and my companion, one of the A&F Quarterly’s illustrators, we found that both of our rooms had hot tubs in them. At a con where some of the best cartoonists in the world sleep three in a bed, we were basically pimped out.

** Meeting Dirk Deppey, the mastermind behind Journalista, live and in person. He’s just as delightful in the flesh as he is online. Be sure to ask him about anti-Scientology hip-hop bands, and tell him Sean sent ya!

** SDCC is one place where you are allowed, if not encouraged or even mandated, to talk about comics for hours and hours on end. One night myself, Josiah (the illustrator) and Fantagraphics intern extraordinaire Sebastian spent probably four hours drinking beer and talking about every comic we could think of. In the real world it’s next to impossible to find someone smart who’s smart about comics. If you know where to look at SDCC, you practically swim in them.

** Among other insights that such conversations yielded was Josiah’s assertion that the character of Jack the Ripper in Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s From Hell was, in fact, a superhero–he’s got extraordinary powers, he receives a mission from a supernatural authority, he’s part of a secretive order dedicated to the betterment of mankind, and he takes action to change the world. I’m pretty much ready to re-read the comic because of this simple recontextualization. That’s the kind of good stuff that comes out when you put smart comics fans together.

** Conversation between myself, Sebastian, and Kim Thompson re: David B’s Epileptic:

SEBASTIAN: How is that, Kim?

KIM: It’s a masterpiece. Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Epileptic.

SEBASTIAN: Is that the whole thing, or is there more?

KIM: He’s working on the second half. It’ll be called Epileptic 2.

SEAN: …Electric Boogaloo? (Too easy, right?)

KIM: No. Epileptic Boogaloo.

Those krazy kut-ups at Fantagraphics!

** Speaking of which, Gary Groth is a really nice guy. He seems truly pleased to talk with you if you’re interested in Fanta books, and the fact that if you wrote something he didn’t like he’d tear you a new asshole in print actually enhances his likeability. He’s honest, even if you disagree with him half the time, and I like that a lot.

** I had a fantastic conversation about Roxy Music and design with The Filth artist Chris Weston and Vertigo Group Editor Shelly Bond. Getting a group of Roxy Music fans in one place is even rarer than getting a group of smart comics fans in one place.

** Just to stake my claim, I was part of the conversation in which Ron Rege & Marc Bell devised a plot to encourage Teratoid Heights creator and master of funny monster one-liners Mat Brinkman to do a weekly gag strip. If it ever happens, you heard it here first.

** Interviewing Blankets author and almost impossibly friendly guy Craig Thompson. He said his next book will be a fantasy of sorts involving drought, adding another intimidating natural feature to his repertoire (the ocean and snowy winters have already been tackled). He also posed for a picture with my wife’s stuffed wombat and went skinny dipping, but not at the same time, much to my wife’s chagrin. But the sketch he did in the hardcover copy I bought for my wife was just phenomenally beautiful, meaning that it suited its recipient, basically.

** The second-best Kim Thompson quote of the con: Chris Ware’s next graphic novel, Rusty Brown, “will make Jimmy Corrigan look like a minicomic.”

** Met some PEFBs. Survived. (Click that link for further details about the PseudoEducated FanBoy.)

** Met Colleen Doran. Was delighted. Not only is she friendly and funny (and, as seems to be the case with most really good comic-book creators, cool-looking), but she brooks no bullshit. Amidst a long debate during the “25 Years of the Graphic Novel” panel, in response to the question of whether changing the terminology would help the form gain respectability, she said, “Sometimes I just think, ‘You won’t read somethin’ because it’s called a ‘comic book’? What an elitist loser! Why the hell would I want you to read my book?’ I wouldn’t treat a ditch-digger the way some people treated me when I told them what I did. Who needs them?” Testify!

** Doran really held her own at the “25 Years of Graphic Novels” panel, and in so doing revealed a pretty big knowledge gap about the real world even amongst really great comix creators. Click here for details.

** Say what you will about Kevin Smith, but the guy is funny. During his very popular panel he told a story about getting walked in on by his daughter while having sex with his wife that was just a scream. Probably not so much for him at the time.

** In the regret column: On separate occasions, being seconds away from talking with Dave Cooper and Frank Miller when they suddenly get up and leave. The ones that got away, if you will.

** Chatting with Grant Morrison about the X2 premiere party in London at Sir Ian McKellen’s house, to which I was invited but stayed home to interview Phoebe Gloeckner instead:

SEAN: How was it?

GRANT: It got so gay so fast!

As is the wont of parties in which Sir Ian and Alan Cumming are in attendance, I’d imagine.

** Also in the regret column: Looking at someone in a costume consisting of a thong and fishnet stockings from behind, then realizing that someone was a man.

** Watching a woman whose “shirt” consisted simply of two strips of electrical tape pose for pictures outside the Highwater Comics booth. Word is sales of Kramer’s Ergot 4 improved dramatically at the time, displaying an unpredicted crossover appeal for Vampirella fans.

** Because it bears repeating, Los Bros Hernandez (Love & Rockets) did a signing about five feet away from Rob Liefeld (Youngblood) doing the same. This is roughly akin to Stanley Kubrick doing a joint appearance with the makers of 2 Fast 2 Furious.

** Blind item: Which prominent Vertigo creator tore me a new asshole not two minutes after first meeting me for the crime of interviewing and liking TV psychic John Edward?

** Josiah swiped Frank Miller’s pint of Guiness at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund party. (Frank had already left, but still.)

** Met Brian Michael Bendis in person. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I was a little bummed that my interview with him was just a phoner. He’s funny and friendly in person, and told me that before he realized I’d sent him a comp copy of the A&F issue he was in, he went to the store to buy it and got screamed at by the teenage clerk for flipping through the book without buying it first. And he gave me a freebee copy of Total Sell Out. Huge!

** I had a long conversation about Fossil watches with one of the women working at Dave McKean’s booth. I walked away with new enthusiasm for my timepiece. (Those flashing colors really bug people out!)

** Erik Larsen (of Savage Dragon fame) told Josiah he could “draw the hell out of” stuff. Damn.

** I discovered that there actually ARE laugh-out-loud funny comics out there. Marc Bell’s Shrimpy & Paul, Johnny Ryan’s Portajohnny and Jason’s Meow Baby were freaking funny. Now if only I could discover a horror comic that was actually scary…

** Got to see almost half the cast of The Lord of the Rings at a panel presented by New Line. Sean Astin is adorable, Elijah Wood is good looking, Dominic Monaghan (Merry) is surprisingly good looking as well, and Andy Serkis (Gollum, pre-CGI), besides seeming like a genuine badass, appears to be quite blessed in the Li’l Smeagol department, if his tight trousers are any indication. Also, the few clips they showed of Return of the King revealed a scale that simply dwarfs the imagination. The big battle in RoTK features an enemy horde twenty times the size of the one in The Two Towers. Holy moses.

** Further regret: Josiah lost his ATM card, leaving it at the Fanta booth after using it. That’s the kind of thing that would have drove me NUTS if I had done it. He handled it with aplomb, I must say, as it didn’t interfere with him walking across a beach for an hour or so later that night. (Stay tuned for explanation.)

** Went to a fabulous art-gallery show of original comic art by a ton of altcomix heavyweights. There’s something awe-inspiring, in a cult-of-the-object sort of way, about seeing the original drawings from great comics. I was particularly wowed by the two-page spread from Dan Clowes’s David Boring and the comic (my favorite one, actually) from Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl. I also bought the show’s catalog, which as an added bonus came with a baggie full of authentic trash from a cartoonist featured in the show. Mine had Phoebe’s–I recognized the Long Island Rail Road ticket!

** Another item in the regret column: Taking cabs. Almost without exception, every single cab driver we encountered was an incompetent moron. One just couldn’t figure out how to get to 420 G Street, despite getting onto G Street and driving in the direction of the number 420. He actually rolled down his window and yelled for help to other cabbies, who, surprisingly enough, were no help at all. Another couldn’t figure out how to get to 530 Broadway, again despite getting onto Broadway and driving in the direction of the number 530. This winner blew past the hotel, took us five blocks out of the way to get back (he seemed genuinely surprised that the streets in the area were one-way, and who can blame him? he’s only a goddamn cab driver), overcharged us once he got us close enough to drop us off, and then nearly tore the arm off the girl trying to get in the cab after we got out as he drove off with the door open in an effort not to pick her up. (Keep in mind both of the above incidents took place in the tourist-heavy downtown area, where, one would think, a cab driver might be familiar with the locations of major hotels, as well as the existence of one-way streets and the fact that numbers proceed up or down the street in a fairly orderly, not at all mysterious fashion.) But the one who took the taco was the miserable bastard who, when told to take us to Ocean Beach, then after saying “Pacific Beach?” and being told “no, Ocean Beach,” proceeded to take us to Pacific Beach anyway, without telling us he was doing so. He drove us about 15-20 minutes out of our way, dropped us off on the wrong land mass, let alone the wrong beach, and made a killing because it cost so much damn money to get that far away. Since we were looking for a party on the beach, we actually ended up walking the entire length of the shore, about five miles, before we realized we weren’t just dropped off at the wrong place on the beach, but at the wrong beach entirely. We had to get back in another cab (the one good driver we encountered, thank Christ), cross a bridge, and drive for about ten minutes before we were back to where we should have been. Mizzable bastards. I did not handle this well, no sir.

** Beach party fun: Aside from the aforementioned glimpse of Craig Thompson’s bare ass, there was the added spectacle of watching an incredibly inebriated lone party crasher plop down on the sand and drunkenly warble along to her acoustic guitar, while an also-drunk artcomics fan tried to shout her down.

** More beach party fun: Tom Devlin offered his most direct take on EC Comics yet: “Oh, they suck.”

** Doing our good deed for the weekend, we offered two very nice women who were in town to support altcomix luminary Dame Darcy one of our hotel rooms so they wouldn’t have to sleep in their van. No word on whether they took advantage of the hot tub.

** I bought a lot, and I mean a lot, of comics.

Teratoid Heights by Mat Brinkman

Yeast Hoist by Ron Rege Jr.

Only a Movie by Jordan Crane

Shrimpy & Paul and Friends by Marc Bell

The TCJ Library: Frank Miller from the Comics Journal

Meow Baby by Jason

Ripple by Dave Cooper

Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware

Cages by Dave McKean

Alec: How to Be an Artist by Eddie Campbell

A Distant Soil Volume 1 by Colleen Doran

The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot by Frank Miller & Geof Darrow

The complete Martha Washington series by Frank Miller & Dave Gibbons

The Buenaventura Gallery Show Catalog by various and sundry awesome cartoonists

I also bought copies of Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl and Jim Woodring’s The Frank Book for friends. Yes, I’m a giving sort.

** Finally, a veritable orgy of namedropping, as much to indulge my ADD-derived love of listing things as to brag (though believe me, I’m bragging). Huge thanks to all the comics pros who talked with us, drank with us, gave us freebies, signed our books, invited us to parties, or otherwise made our lives enjoyable at the Con: Mark Alessi, Axel Alonso, Brandon Badeaux, Marc Bell, Brian Bendis, Shelly Bond, Charles Brownstein, Peggy Burns, CB Cebulski, Jordan Crane, Dirk Deppey, Tom Devlin, Marshall Dillon, Colleen Doran, Shawna Ervin-Gore, Tim Ervin-Gore, Gary Groth, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Jason, Erik Larsen, John Layman, David Mack, Grant Morrison, Dan Nado, Mike Norton, Mike Oeming, Ron Rege Jr., Jamie Rich, James Robinson, Johnny Ryan, Gareb Shamus, Craig Thompson, Kim Thompson, Brett Warnock, Chris Weston, and everyone else we hung out with.

Thank you also to The Missus, for being patient with her husband the geek.

Stay tuned for reviews of the books that I got. Maybe even reviews of all of them. I’m feelin’ productive!

Nyuk, nyuk.

Please read this article from Time magazine, detailing some of the practices and policies of the late Uday and Qusay Hussein. How does it affect your perception of the phrase “blood for oil”?

I’d like to return the praise of the excellent popculture/comics blogger Big Sunny D. He’s a tremendously effective critic and reviewer with great taste in pretty much everything. If I weren’t writing this blog, I’d want to be writing his.

I’m back from San Diego. Expect some postings soon.

Hey guys. I know this comics stuff is boring you to death. But hey, you might find out something neat, so do read it, won’t you? I’m telling you all, that Blankets book is fantastic.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comix news and views roundup:

First of all, the Pulse offers a overview of tomorrow’s San Diego Comic-Con, to which Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat will be sending a representative or two. It’s really, really big, if you want the nutshell version.

While we’re on the SDCC tip, the best summary of the experience that is this enormous comic-book convention comes from Scott Tipton of Movie Poop Shoot. (Amy, I’ll bet you like that website name.) It’s an excellent piece–go and read (after you finish reading this whole post, of course).

Speaking of Blankets, Newsarama has an interview with Craig Thompson on his soon-to-be-released magnum opus. It’s interesting to see how, a la Phoebe Gloeckner, he’s almost hesitant to call it “autobiography” due to the liberties he takes with the facts of his life for the sake of the story. (He has a sister?) It’s also an interesting glimpse into how an altcomix creator pays the bills.

Jess Lemon, Pulse’s designated fly in the fanboy ointment, takes on Mark Millar’s Epic teen book Trouble. Ouch. As I said, when there’s not adamantium skeletons and black ops and pop-culture references to kick around, Millar’s a bit, shall we say, limited in the dialogue department.

Bill Sherman reviews Iron Wagon, the new murder mystery by Norway’s mononymed master of incredibly sad cute-animal comics, Jason. This is Bill’s first Jason comic, and it’s an odd one to start with, as it was adapted from a turn-of-the-century Norwegian novel by Stein Riverton, and as such is unrepresentative of Jason’s usual musings on life, death, and loneliness. But Jason’s thematic preoccupations show through to a surprising degree, particularly his effortlessly chilling depiction of the haunting power of death over the living. The ending, also, is more powerful than it perhaps has a right to be. Excellent work.

In a long roundup of his own, Alan David Doane scoffs at fans’ objections to the way Darick Robertson draws fan-fave character Wolverine (namely, like a knee-breaker for the Teamsters). Why? What’s the objection to making this dangerous, mysterious character a sexy one as well, instead of depicting him the way an eight-year-old might? ADD’s gloating about the uproar seems like kneejerk contrarianism rather than a thought-out response to a controversial aesthetic decision.

Johnny Bacardi (“always interesting”? aw! right back atcha!) has some thoughts on my pamphlet post of yesterday, and points out that many long-form collections of initially serialized books seem to drag on after a certain point. I’d argue that that’s a strength of collections, not a weakness–separate the wheat from the chaff and all that.

Eve Tushnet (who probably doesn’t remember that I lived next door to some of her friends at Yale freshman year) offers a non-fangirl take on some comics she bought on a whim. She has good things to say about Grant Morrison’s and Pete Milligan’s X-books, unsurprisingly. (Link courtesy of Jim Henley, who shouldn’t worry about ever coming off my blogroll. I second his recommendation of books by Brian Bendis, by the way.)

When I post some hype for my day job at the Comics Journal Message Board, this is the kind of thing that happens. It’s actually a lot more civil than I thought it’d be, and is slowly turning into a fairly interesting discussion of pop-culture philosopher Slavoj Zizek. All this because of a clothing catalog, folks!

Finally, I was surprised to see copies of the Comics Journal issue with Gary Groth’s pro-criticism essay in it. Having read it in its entirety, I’ll say that while I still agree with it generally, it’s a flawed call to arms for a couple of reasons.

First of all, Gary never really develops his theory of why criticism (by which he means negative criticism, as well as simply well-written and well-informed positive criticism, which is also in short supply these days) is a dying breed. There’s a lot of complaints about corporate this and corporate that, and a few potshots about invading Third World countries thrown in for good measure, but ultimately the death of criticism indicates that critics anywhere, not just at corporate-owned publications, are in short supply. Why does no one want to grow up to be a critic? Are schools or the academy simply not preparing people to be critics? Has the corporate boosterism mindset (or, on the other side of the coin, the po-mo aversion to value judgements) infected writers’ mindsets during their educations? These interesting and vital questions go unexplored in favor of windmill-tilting heated rhetoric–admittedly Gary’s forte, but still, I was looking for something I could sink my teeth into.

Second, Gary appears to conflate rah-rah’ing critics with the infamous Team Comix mentality of artists. It seems ungenerous to me to demand that artists become critics themselves. While there are certainly cases where luminaries in one dabble in the other, and in some cases even thrive in both, it’s really not one artist’s job to pick apart the failings (or to praise the strengths) of another. Much of what Gary interprets as an appalling lack of critical faculties (or of backbone) on the part of today’s alt-comix in-crowd may simply be seen as a desire to avoid talking shit about people when that’s not what they’re being paid to do. Historically, Gary Groth has had an admirable immunity to fear of being seen as an asshole. Not all artists were born with this sort of bulletproof willingness to tell otherwise nice people that their comics are for shit, and not all artists should be expected to do so. If they set themselves up as “critics,” have at ’em, Gary, but don’t fault people for not wanting to pick fights at parties over whether James Kochalka’s Sketchbook Diaries were any good.

Well, folks, that’s probably the last round-up for a while, as the Con is almost upon me. Don’t know what the computer-access situation will be in sunny San Diego, but I guess we’ll find out together, you and I. Let us join hands and walk into that future together!

Assuming the submissive role, as once can conclude is his wont, Jim Treacher follows my suggestion and blogs about his favorite band. Well, technically, he blogs about song-poems, but good enough.

In addition, he brings it to our attention that somewhere there exists a mash-up of Gary Numan’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and the Sugababes’ cover of Adina Howard’s legendary ode to the congress of the cow, “Freak Like Me.” Holy shit, people. For the record, I hated the infamous “Smells Like Teen Spirit”/”Bootylicious” mash-up just as much as Amanda did, but Numan and a paean to doing it doggystyle? Please tell me if you think that’s anything but two great tastes tastin’ great together.

(I know, I know, this blog has been very heavy on comics lately, but Comic-Con is coming, and I got comics on the brain.)

When most people think of comic books they think of the thin, staple-bound, flimsy things you used to see on racks in drug stores. In comics-biz parlance they’re called pamphlets. A Comics Journal messboard thread about the slow demise of this format led me to post the following:

The problem with pamphlet-format comic books as I see it is that they denote throwawayability to the average Joe. Most people aren’t in the habit of saving and rereading magazines or newspapers, two periodical forms that comic books most closely resemble. If people still think that “comics are for kids” (and not in a good, Harry Potter kind of way, but in an annoying, Double Dare and Garbage Pail Kids kind of way), I think we can blame the association in grown-ups minds between comics and the easily beat-up and torn-up and soaked-through and discarded pamphlet format they may remember leaving strewn around their bedrooms as children.

Now, even superhero creators are writing and drawing with an eye toward a lasting legacy: improving paper quality and cover stock and coloring techniques; writing in multi-issue arcs geared toward collection in more durable paperback and even hardcover formats; and in some cases a rise in the overall quality of the art and writing itself (though that, of course, is a more controversial position to hold). In light of these developments, to say nothing of the obvious qualitative and aesthetic reasons the superheroes’ alt-comix counterparts have for appearing in graphic-novel form, clinging to a transitory, far less durable format like pamphlets seems especially anachronistic. The need to get away from pamphlets only increases now that the huge up-and-coming comics-reading audience–teen girls and guys who read manga–have been weaned on book-sized, book-shaped, and book-bound collections.

Yes, there are practical reasons (both in terms of economics and of critical feedback) for the pamphlet, even in alt-comix land, as detailed by many of the posters in this thread. But much of the childlike joy it engenders in comics fans (both of the superhero and alt-comix varieties) is offset by the aversion it apparently produces in the general populace. As Dr. Frank N. Furter might put it, pamphlets have “a certain naive charm–but no muscle.”

“ELVIS PRESLEY EYE COLOR AND PENIS SIZE”

When have I ever talked about Elvis Presley, or eye color, or penis size on this blog, let alone all three in tandem? Ah, the vagaries of Google.

While we’re on the subject, if Google’s being a bit slow, may I suggest All Too Flat’s Google mirror?

In other odd news, I’m going to visit a psychic tonight. This will mark the second time this week that a member of the Collins household has visited a psychic, but only the first that a member of the Collins household has visited a psychic who isn’t also Tori Amos’s psychic. This is the world I live in, folks.

The big-media onslaught begins: Here’s Time.comix’s review of Craig Thompson’s masterful Blankets. Go Craig! I’ll be interviewing Craig for the A&F Quarterly during the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, so I’ll be doing my part as well. And as soon as this comic comes out in wide distribution, I’ll let you all know. I don’t care who you are–there’s almost no reason you shouldn’t enjoy this book.

(And I endorse this review, despite the fact that Time.comix’s main man, Andrew Arnold, was so goddamn wrong about the work of genius that was Frank Miller & Lynn Varley’s Dark Knight Strikes Again that it makes my hair hurt. That book was “corporatized,” Andrew? What the hell kind of corporation says “this has Big Bucks written all over it” of a book in which Superman and Wonder Woman destroy a mountain while fucking?)

Over at Markisan Naso’s column (scroll down for the pertinent item), Epic editor Stephanie Moore lays the smack down on some the conspiracy theories advanced by “Felicia,” Marvel’s ersatz Deep Throat. Go Stephanie! (I’m just speaking for myself here, but having had some contact with several of the parties involved in Epic, I can say that while there are some snags being hit, and with some regularity, it’s not some giant con job, and Stephanie herself is a smart, dedicated, talented, devoted editor who wouldn’t let it become a con job even if that’s where it was heading.)

Bill Sherman sez that the old strip Pogo is applicable to today’s self-righteous warbloggers. Hey, Bill, I resemble that remark!

Franklin Harris, unlike Sandman impresario (and Friend Of Tori) Neil Gaiman, seems to have gone unnoticed in lists of antiwarbloggers. Hey, Franklin, I noticed you!

Only six months till Economas! Start shopping, people!

The incredibly illustrious (and tenured!) Stanford scholar Scott Bukatman points out on this Comics Journal messboard thread that the New York Times has gone completely apeshit over superheroes lately.

First there’s this article by Douglas Wolk, arguing that the comic-book version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is superior to the film version in virtually every respect. Having not seen the film yet, it’s tough to comment, but from everything I’ve heard I’d suspect that even at its best the movie is probably the same kind of streamlined (or dumbed-down–your call) version of the Alan Moore original that From Hell was a year or two back. League was actually one of the only two comics from Moore’s America’s Best line that actually succeeded in being compelling and involving as well as clever (the other being Top Ten), so it’s tough to imagine how it can be brought to the screen with all its good qualities intact. (I must say, however, that Moore’s kvetching about the addition of Dorian Grey and Tom Sawyer is extremely unbecoming. What makes them any more or less appropriate or multi-dimensional than, say, using Fu Manchu as the bad guy?)

Then there’s this article by A.O. Scott, complaining (or is it? it’s that kind of high-falutin’ pop-cult critique that’s apparently too smart to actually bother coming down on one side or another of the issue it’s talking about) that the genre of “term paper blockbusters” like Ang Lee’s Hulk or The Matrix Reloaded is sucking the fun out of big movies. (Again, that’s what I think he’s saying–if you write pop culture commentary for the NYT, refusing to enter a value judgement is apparently in the style sheet.) I myself sorta see where he’s coming from–The Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded, and before them Spielberg’s A.I. and Minority Report (or even the two Star Wars prequels, with their emphasis on Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda and their op-ed tie-ins to real-life cloning and digital-media debates) could all be reasonably argued to have, shall we say, overplayed the intellectual hand that God gave their makers. (I happened to like them all, if you’re interested.) Still, I can’t help but be appalled at Scott’s apparent belief that dopey, dopey movies like the Charlie’s Angels and The Fast and the Furious franchises are in some way preferable to movies that are at least trying to say something interesting, regardless of whether or not they succeed. (This “it’s just harmless fun” viewpoint is one of the cultural bugbears Gary Groth’s attempting to slay in his latest essay, and good luck to him.) Scott’s also wrong to put any sort of “blame” for this “pretentious superhero” genre on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, whose blend of whimsy, awe, emotion, action, and intellect is virtually unsurpassed and the excellence of which is all but unquestioned. It may have a brainy bent, but blaming it for less successful combinations of CGI and PhD strikes me as being as unfair and silly as “blaming” Star Wars for Independence Day or Seinfeld for Suddenly Susan.

Big Sunny D, in a repost of a conversation he had with a fellow comix fan, inadvertently but correctly notes that the maddeningly infrequent output of most alt-comix titans makes the alternative/indy scene a lousy candidate for “saving the medium/industry” despite its inarguable superiority content-wise. How often does Black Hole or Eightball or Acme Novelty Library or Weasel come out these days? Twice a year at the absolute most often. People like Crumb and Spiegelman publish actual comics even less often. And even though I happen to dig the cartoony low-key Highwater/Fort Thunder/used-to-do-minicomics style (into which, I suppose, one could lump Kochalka and Hart and various other 3rd Wave luminaries), most of them lack the financial security, the grand ambition, or (in some cases) the talent to regularly publish the kinds of comix that take the biz by storm.

Instead, the alt-comix world revolves around one-time-only “event” books like Blankets or Diary of a Teenage Girl or Safe Area Gorazde or Persepolis which, by definition, cannot come out with any sort of regularity, or on “event” collections like Jimmy Corrigan or David Boring or Boulevard of Broken Dreams which are wholly dependent on the completion of the infrequently published series from which they draw.

As an alternative to this feast-or-famine publishing model (one which nearly bankrupted Fantagraphics due to their inability to accurately predict which one it’d be), alt-publishers might try the Japanese manga model: publish big fat compendia of work by all their top creators for cheap, so that people can get a wide sampling of what’s available, then go seek out the individual issues or collections of the creators they most enjoy. The problem here might be the wide variety of formats and sizes that alt-comix folks work in. It’d be pretty damn difficult to figure out how to publish a book that contained a full issue of both Eightball and Acme Novelty Library.

Is it me, or are the commercials for NBC’s fall shows actually designed to make you not want to watch them?

Between For Love or Money, Will & Grace and every conceivable iteration of Law & Order, the Missus and I watch a decent amount of NBC. (Helps that we only get 23 channels–minus the two of which that are home shopping, the two that are public access, the one that’s the guide to all the other channels and the four that are in Spanish–so there’s no specials about UFOs or sharks or serial killers or 80s nostalgia to watch.) This means that I’ve seen the almost infomercial-length commercials for Las Vegas and Miss Match approximately seven hundred thousand times each. Jesus Harold Christ in a bright yellow Hummer are they annoying.

First of all, let’s take Las Vegas. “They caaaaall… you laaaaa… dy luck.” No, they call you the goddamn commercial that has actually ruined Guys and Dolls for me for the rest of my goddamn life. And then there’s what goes on in the commercial. Basically they’ve concocted some vile blend of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an excellent film, by the way, which means that this show is going to be great too!!!! Oh wait, NO IT DOESN’T) and Aaron Spelling’s Melrose Place, and thrown in a very, very tired looking Jimmy Caan because, I guess, he played a mafioso once, and that’s supposed to have generated enough goodwill for us to watch him in this piece-of-shit show, or at least its countless interminable piece-of-shit commercials (actually, it didn’t). So at some point we see Molly Simms (who, surprisingly, actually DID generate a fair amount of goodwill from those Old Navy commercials she did) fuckin’ some guy, and then she turns around and faces the camera (a Caan’s-eye-view) and says, “Oh, hi, Daddy.” Damn, people, but is there anything sexier than seeing a woman with a man’s erect and throbbing penis in her well-lubricated vagina turn around and say hello to her father as he walks in on her copulation? Yes, actually, because THAT’S FUCKING VILE AND DISGUSTING. Meanwhile poor Jimmy gets to say shit that nobody on Earth would ever actually say like yelling “Nobody cheats in my casino!” haughtily to a room full of gamers who are probably like “this guy watches too many Mafia movies.” And it all ends with the voice-over guy saying “and the city of Las Vegas as itself,” as if Vegas had been handed a script and said to its agent “you gotta get me in on this, Bruce.” Bullshit. If its lucky Vegas will be dropped after the pilot like the original captain in Star Trek and move on with its life.

And then there’s Miss Match, a show starring Alee-see-ah Silverstone (oh, I’m sorry, did you think it was pronounced “Aleeshia”? Not now that she’s a member of the NBC Family–that’s the motherfucking Peacock Network, motherfuckers!). Miss Match is about the fact that she’s not just a pretty face. I know this because about seven thousand fucking times per commercial they play the same fucking line from some stupid fucking song, which goes “Sheeee’s… noooot… just a pretty faaaace…” I don’t know, was there a legion of people arguing the contrary? Was America saying to itself, “Remember that girl from Clueless who in a dangerous marathon operation had her career donated to Reese Witherspoon? She was just a pretty face!” Maybe I missed that. Anyway some guy says something stupid about some girl’s hair, and the guy who created Sex & the City was involved somehow, which means maybe there’ll be some character who can eat pussy real good involved. Or not, I don’t know, it’s broadcast.

The only show whose commercials are actually a little intriguing is that new Rob Lowe thing The Lyon’s Den, because they’re making it sound like there’s going to be some big season-long murder mystery a la Laura Palmer, only it’s in Washington D.C. so it’s going to talk about The Important Issues and explore whether Justice Really Is Blind and whatnot. I guess that’s interesting. Rob Lowe was really good in The Stand, but I think leaving The Howard Dean Show might have been a mistake. (That’s what it was called, right?)

I would like to say, in case anyone from GE is reading this, that NBC isn’t the only network with godawful commercials for its fall shows. I was a big fan of America’s Next Top Model (go Adrienne! go people who wear nine inch nails and Pink Floyd t-shirts in general!), which meant that I had to sit through ads for an abortion in sitcom form called Rock Me Baby, starring Dan Corteezy (Oh, I’m sorry, did you think it was Dan Cortezz? Then you a asshole) formerly of MTV Runs Around Screaming A Lot About Sports. A baby urinates on him in the commercial, which is funny! Ha! Ha! Ha! Look, people, people urinating on other people is now funny, and we’re all going to have to get used to the idea, so quit your goddamn crying and be a fucking man about this. BE A GODDAMN MAN FOR ONCE IN YOUR FUCKING LIFE.

I think I understand what went through Elvis Presley’s head, shortly before he’d shoot his television.

Another trip to the local Borders, another glimpse into the future of comics. As Amy and I looked through the one bookshelf dedicated to, well, every comic in America that isn’t manga–Boulevard of Broken Dreams next to Hellboy next to The Big Book of the Unexplained next to The Invisibles next to a Bendis Daredevil next to Dark Knight Strikes Again next to Blood Song next to a Mad collection next to The Totally Awesome Guide to Spider-Man or whatever–a teenage girl (and not one o’ them pink-haired Hello Kitty backpack-sporting teenage girls, but an Abercrombie & Fitch wearing POPULAR GIRL–drags over a guy friend and starts handing him book after book of manga series that she likes, which are found all neatly shelved on three bookshelves devoted entirely to Japanese comics. They were joking and laughing and getting all into it–“oh my God, no wonder you like this, it’s like porn!” or “Hey, don’t show me anything, I’m not up to that one yet!”–like it was a good movie or TV show they were into. It was just another form of entertainment that perfectly normal teenagers are into.

This is the future of comics. Why the big American companies are still letting, essentially, the fanboy culture of retailers and readers dictate business decisions like format and trade dress is completely beyond me. If you were DC, wouldn’t you just take volumes one through 15 or whatever it is of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, reprint them at manga size, give them nice uniform trade dress, ship ’em to Borders and B&N, and watch the money just roll in? This is such a no-brainer it’s absurd. And actually, it gives that (probably spurious) Felicia doomsday theory, in which Bill Jemas is said to be conspiring to fire all the big-name creators and replace them with talented nobodies, an element of common sense, if said firings were done in tandem with a wholesale switchover to the smaller, more readable manga format. This girl doesn’t know who Mark Waid is, and couldn’t care less. She DOES read comics, and lots of them. This is the market. If it takes a legion of new blood willing to cut ties to the industry’s past and tap into this audience of rabid, enthusiastic fans, then so be it.

Well, just to prove it ain’t all gloom and doom here at ADDTF, here’s a really cool article about creator Jai Nitz from CNN.com. I’m not familiar with Nitz’s work, but what’s great about this article is that it makes comics seem like a perfectly legitimate, perfectly respectable, perfectly interesting form of art and entertainment to be involved in. Go ye and read, and think about the future.

(I’m trying to think of a good title to stick with for these little round-up posts I do from time to time. I really like “Comix-and-match,” but what if, as in this current case, it’s not all about comics? Oh, who am I kidding–it’s always all about comics for me.)

Due to rising controversy, Princess Diana will no longer be appearing in an upcoming arc of X-Statix, the superhero/pop-culture satire by Pete Milligan and Mike Allred. Oh well. I thought it was a funny idea, but then I’ve never felt particularly attached to the princess, and have learned the hard way (during a disastrous “musical tribute” sketch I was a part of back in college) that the people who liked her will fucking tear you to pieces if they think you’re insulting her in some way.

Speaking of things that matter more if you live in Great Britain, Big Sunny D doesn’t like the new Blur single, “Crazy Beat.” I’ll up the ante by saying their entire new album just plain sucks. Granted, their last, heretofore most difficult album, 13, was an acquired taste that I managed to acquire, but I can’t see that happening with Think Tank, a self-indulgent aimless mess with a couple of tossed-off pop-chart sops thrown in to drive sales. The current single’s an example of the latter. Anyway, may I reiterate how good Big Sunny D is?

Bill Sherman notes that The Big Shocking Ending Of The Current Arc In Mark Waid’s Brilliant But Tragically Cancelled Run On The Fantastic Four (TM) stands no chance of actually lasting. Indeed, it’d stand not chance of actually lasting even if Waid hadn’t been booted from the book. Without giving things away too much, let’s just say major changes to a main character’s appearance do not last in comics, ever. It’s a lazy way to “make an impact,” and ultimately, who cares?

Gary Groth is back, with an excerpt from an upcoming essay tearing into the lack of critical standards in comics and the world in general. As always, he’s worth reading, because like any grumpy old socialist, he wants the best for the masses, even though they don’t deserve it, the morons. Seriously, it’s a pretty smart piece. I’m sure I’ll talk about it some more when I read the full version.

(One funny little note: Mainstream superhero comics actually do have a vociferous contingent of critics who aren’t afraid to say negative things–creators themselves! Peter David, Erik Larsen, Micah Wright, Bill Jemas, etc. etc., savage so many creators and books so often that it’s actually pretty unbelievable. Of course, sending rambling grammatically poor emails to news sites about why the Epic editors didn’t treat you with the respect a star of your magnitude should be afforded is probably not what Gary had in mind. Basically, all those guys, like them or not, talk shit about business decisions they don’t like and have no real critical background or standards to speak of. I guess it’s better than unchallenged boosterism, though.)

NeilAlien has some brief snarky things to say about Dirk Deppey’s latest anti-superhero rant, which I sort of had an opposing take on here. NeilAlien fights the good fight, man.

Finally, James Lileks (in the middle of a pretty long Bleat) says something I and several other people I know have been saying for a while: Stephen King is the late 20th century’s Charles Dickens. Yes, I like Stephen King. I consider rreading The Stand the equivalent of getting a doctorate in Post-Apocalyptic Arts. Which will lead me to my next post… (stay tuned…)

(Now updated, with 20% fewer potentially offensive overly broad generalizations! You’ll see what I mean.)

Okay, folks, here’s the deal. It’d be too damn tough to talk about what needs to be talked about when discussing this film while avoiding certain give-away’d plot points, so I’m not going to bother. If you’ve already seen the movie, or you don’t care about having stuff spoiled for you, knock yourself out, okay? Okay. (I will say that I don’t QUITE fully give away any of the big surprises, except one of them, and that’s at the veeeerrry end of the review. But still, caveat lector. Or in other words, SPOILER ALERT!!! (And to those who were here when I had the whole post hidden except if you highlighted it, it was just too damn irritating for me myself to read. Sorry.))

I’m a big fan of director Danny Boyle’s first two films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. The former is a supertaut thriller, the kind of thing Hitchock might do if he had the sensibilities of a 90s filmmaker. With little more to work with than three characters and their own paranoia, Boyle built a sense of mounting madness and violence that demonstrated he’d have a deft hand if he were to try his hand at horror proper. Trainspotting showed more of the same, with its nightmarish moments (the heroin-withdrawl scene, particularly) giving lie to the “salute” to the junkie techno lifestyle that a lot of hipsters I went to college with seemed to think the movie offered. Though I skipped seeing A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, following rules I have about the proper response to movies involving Cameron Diaz or Leo DiCaprio, I was certainly excited to find out that Boyle was going to be doing a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, because folks, I don’t know if you know this about me, but if there’s one thing I love it’s a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.

Like most good recent horror films, 28 Days Later is as memorable for its allusions to past genre masterpieces as it is for what it achieves on its own. There’s a scene in an abandoned supermarket that’s straight out of George Romero’s anti-consumerist zombie fable Dawn of the Dead, there’s a military-dinner-amid-the-savages scene straight out of Apocalypse Now Redux, a hand-to-hand combat murder straight out of Midnight Express; moreover the overall feel of the film, from its grainy appearance (courtesy of digital video, as opposed to, say, the 16mm on which genre classics like Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were shot, or the beat-up rented videocasette copies we grew up watching them on) to the characters’ haircuts to the fact that it’s set in Great Britain (a country that for all intents and purposes is perpetually reliving 1977), is a throwback to the bleak horror films of three decades ago.

But then there’s the innovations. If 28 Days Later’s only claim to fame was the fact that it had zombies that moved fast, it would still go down in zombie-flick history as a true pioneer. MAN, those fast-moving zombies! Technically, though, they aren’t zombies at all, but zombified living humans who’ve been infected with a nebulously defined chimpanzee disease that turns them into mindless red-irised killing machines so fixated on slaughter that they don’t even bother to stop and eat their victims. (That’s right, it’s a zombie movie with no real cannibalism–innovation number 2!) Boyle films the lightning-fast zombies at odd angles and with choppy editing that only enhances their mercurial menace. The result is the kind of fast pace that modern audiences require, meaning that 28 Days Later isn’t just a valuable addition to the horror canon, but perhaps a vital one.

And there’s the stunning use of soundtrack. It just wouldn’t be a British Post-Apocalypse without Brian Eno, and his “An Ending (Ascent),” used with devastating emotional effect at the end of Stephen Soderbergh’s Traffic, is employed with equal aplomb here. There’s also a memorably haunting “Ave Maria,” a bit of rambly Britpop in the shopping-cart scene, and tons and tons of Godspeed You Black Emperor*, which in terms of eeriness is a good thing indeed.

None of this would matter, of course, if you didn’t care about the characters, but the foursome that comprise the film’s band of protagonists (tough survivor Selena, ectomorphic bike messenger Jim (What is it with all these malnourished British actors, anyway? Damn, Danny, hire a freaking craft services department already!), good-humored cab driver Frank and quiet, thoughtful teenager Hannah) are almost instantly (and non-manipulatively) likeable. I found myself favorably comparing the bunch to the four characters at the center of Ang Lee’s Hulk film, who despite about two hours of in-depth psychological investigation and backstory muster hardly a whiff of empathy from the audience. (Would you have cared for a second if the Hulk had wiped out the entire remainder of the cast?)

Basically, I loved this movie. This is not to say, however, that many aspects of it, particularly in the film’s final third, weren’t actually kind of easy to predict, provided you had an extensive enough background in the Post-Apocalyptic Arts. Some lessons, if I may be so bold:

1) In terms of faint military radio broadcasts audible on your hand-wound AM receiver, repeated use in the broadcast of the word “salvation” is roughly equivalent to saying “we have gone Colonel Kurtz and are setting up rape camps and impaling heads on sticks as we speak.”

2) In the world of post-apocalyptic fiction, anyone who knew how to use a gun before the apocalypse is going to be a bad guy after the apocalypse. The bad-guy quotient increases geometrically if said individual learned to use guns while in some form of uniformed service. (Exceptions to the bad-guy gun rule are made for quiet, steely loners from rural areas who learned to shoot by picking rusty cans off a tree stump.) Please see Kathy Bates’s last stand in the TV minseries version of The Stand for more information.

3) Strangelove’s Law: Any time you’re in a group of people in which females are greatly outnumbered by males, things are going to get unpleasant. Likelihood of unpleasantness increases proportinately to the amount of males in said group to whom the Bad-Guy Gun rule is applicable.

4) Bad things will always happen in churches in the post-apocalypse, because zombies, much like filmmakers, can’t resist symbolism.

5) Strider’s Axiom: When attempting to hide from relentless undead killing machines, do not light fires.

6) If you are one half of an attractive mixed-sex pair making your way through the post-apocalyptic world, you will fall in love and fuck. Ridiculing the notion that, as one half of an attractive mixed-sex pair making your way through the post-apocalyptic world, you will fall in love and fuck, does not prevent this from occurring.

7) A virus with a window of “10-20 seconds” between exposure and mindless raving zombiehood greatly reduces the likelihood of said virus spreading off the island of Great Britain and to “Paris and New York.” If a zombie got on a plane, that plane’d be a debris slick inside of two minutes, and it also seems safe to assume that a boat full of zombies would be fairly easy to see coming. Really the only way the virus could spread would be through the Chunnel, and do you honestly think that France would be welcoming fleeing Britons with open arms? Please. Chirac would be manning the barricades himself to keep them out if he had to, swinging a baguette and waving a TotalFinaElf flag.

7) This isn’t a Post-Apocalyptic Arts lesson so much as it’s a Film Stuides Lesson: Anyone who refers to any movie of any genre as “a genre-busting vision” is an asshole who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. If a movie of a particular genre is good, it hasn’t “busted” the genre or “transcended” the genre or any other dopey pseudoeducated cliche–it IS the genre, insofar as it’s the best the genre has to offer. So please, horror film snobs, sick that in your pipe made out of a severed human head and smoke it.

(I’m a little defensive about horror films, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

That said, our foursome’s protracted run-in with the military hits the usual notes of “it’s not the zombies who are the worst thing imaginable, it’s selfish greedy establishment types.” Not a bad lesson, even if it’s one taught (with a great deal of last-minute expectation-reversing panache) by Night of the Living Dead and countless other horror films. Still, they do it well here, throwing in a Deliverance-esque transformation from mild-mannered “this can’t be happening” type to stone-cold killer to boot. Also, when was the last time you saw a zombie movie in which the main characters’ survival hinged on one of them breaking into someplace, as opposed to keeping the zombie out? (Innovation #3!) And it’s also worth noting that, particularly during the final chase through the military’s compound, it appears that the zombies have no heightened sense of hearing, smell, or miscellaneous ability to “sense” living humans nearby–they’ve got to find them the old-fashioned human way, i.e. with the five senses the good Lord gave ’em. Innovation #4!

Back to the military aspect: Much of the success of this final section of the film owes to the strength of actor Christopher Eccleston’s performance. It’s one of the strongest in the film (along with the almost painfully sympathetic Frank, played by Brendan Gleeson). Eccleston, who portrays the ranking officer in the military unit that takes our heroes in, was the pivotal character in Boyle’s Shallow Grave. His performance in that film was rivetingly Gollum-esque, a chillingly grotesque demonstration of the outcome of keeping secrets. Here, though, he’s a model of reserve and polish. Far from “going native,” Eccleston’s Major acts as officers are supposed to act–sacrificing everything, even, perhaps, his own morality, for what he honestly believes to be the good of his men. It’s knowing that the Major, at heart, just might not be such a bad person that makes him so effective as a villain.

It should also be added that what might seem like yet another throwback to the liberal 1970s horror cycle–making the military the ultimate bad guys–has much of its P.C. aura deflated by the fact that the plague was unleashed by a bunch of do-gooding animal rights activists, who free a test chimp despite being told by one of the project’s scientists, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, that the monkey is infected with a lethal disease. In all fairness to the PETA goon squad, though, I think I too might be a bit skeptical if told that a chimp was infected with “rage.”

Actually, calling the chimp’s disease “rage,” as opposed to inventing some wonky faux-scientific explanation, made the film that much more effective for me. Citing emotion instead of bacteria as the source of apocalypse heightens our awareness that a moral law has been breached, not just some E.U. testing ban. And the film’s opening section, in which a chimp is forced, a la Axl Rose in the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” to watch countless looped clips of horrific mob violence the world over added a chilling tone to the proceedings that folks of all political leanings could appreciate.

And speaking of politics, though it’s kind of sad that that’s what this is reduced to at this point, there’s a scen towards the beginning of the film in which Jim finds a kiosk covered with xeroxed “missing” posters made by families trying desperately to find lost loved ones in a country increasingly ravaged by the zombie infection. It spoke more directly to the chaos of confusion, pain, and loss in New York City after 9/11 than just about any work of art I’ve seen since the attacks occurred.

There are a few little plot flaws I’ll note briefly:

1) I understand that the army guys waited as long as they did to make their presence known to our foursome in order to establish that said foursome was harmless, and in so doing inadvertantly ensured that said foursome was reduced to a threesome. But given what we later learn of their motives, why not cut said foursome down to the appropriate twosome and be done with it?

2) C’mon–surely SOME radio and TV signals are still floating around Great Britain post-apocalypse, especially given what we come to learn about the worldwide situation by film’s end?

3) If the British government and/or military were faced with the kind of the decision the rest of the world apparently made about the UK, wouldn’t nuclear blackmail start looking like a good idea?

Aaaaallllll that being said, I’m concerned that my relatively flippant tone indicates that I thought this movie was “a roller-coaster ride” or “a popcorn-guzzling theme park attraction” or something else that people say about 2 Fast 2 Furious. It isn’t. It’s dark, dark, dark–it’s one of those movies that grabs the audience around the neck and forces them to watch unpleasant, horrible things happen to good, decent people. It’s a nastiness that the dopier aspects of the action-packed climax, or even the happy ending (for which I was unspeakably grateful, especially after the filmmakers naughtily teased us with several possible bad-ending red herrings, including one that was once again awfully close to Night of the Living Dead), can offset. It’s the kind of nastiness that makes for great horror.

Oh yeah, that’s right–it’s a zombie movie with a happy ending. Innovation Number Five!

* Political digression that might irritate you so please stop reading if you think it will because I want you to like this review of this movie, honest I do: Godspeed You Black Emperor and I have sort of had a falling out, after they titled the first huge song on their latest album, Yanqui U.X.O., “9-15-00,” in “honor” of the start date for the most recent (and most appallingly, senselessly violent) Palestinian intifada. To me, this is a bit like there being a group of people in the world of the film who are militantly pro-zombie. (Update: No, I don’t mean that all Palestinians are zombielike. Just the suicide belt brigade and the “not one Jew left” crew. I’m not an asshole, honestly!) It was a weird bit of cognitive dissonance only enhanced by the fact that once I left the Union Square theatre in which I saw the film, there was a “Free Palestine” demonstration going on in Union Square, in which folks played hackey-sack and danced around and waved signs and did other things that, of course, they’d never be able to do if they lived in a country run by Islamic Jihad. But hey, back to the light-hearted stuff, like killer zombie movies!