Lo, there shall come… a Fumo! Prolific comment-poster and manga-booster Shawn Fumo has got hisself a blog at long last. Enjoy!
The comicsphere gets Filthy: Bill Sherman, Johnny Bacardi and myself offer our opinions on the now-completed Grant Morrison series The Filth, while Big Sunny D has a thoughtful three-part examination of the book with a fourth on the way. This weekend I lent all my trades of Morrison’s The Invisibles to a friend, and took the time to compare it to this more recent, superficially similar series. “The Invisibles,” I said, “didn’t make sense. Neither does The Filth, but unlike The Invisibles, it makes sense in the way it doesn’t make sense.” Um, can we get Chip Kidd to design the collected edition? Or let cover creator Segura Inc. run the show? Please?
Jim Henley finally gets around to reading Eightball #22, which is probably the best single-issue comic ever. I don’t like doing the whole “best ever” kinda thing, but trust me, this book deserves it. 32 pages long, and you can go back to it as often as you do Watchmen, From Hell, Dark Knight, Jimmy Corrigan, or whatever happen to be your own personal favorites. It’s astounding.
Damn, but Doctor Strange lettercolumns were interesting! David Fiore reprints another letter examining Doc’s theological repercussions. NeilAlien, your people need you!
A stupid talk show bashes a stupid comic book, which leads to a stupid political thread on Newsarama, which leads one to the inevitable conclusion that nothing good can come from Joe Kelly thinking that he’s the spandex set’s George Orwell. (See also: Wright, Micah Ian, delusions of grandeur of; O’Reilly, Bill, enormous boost to Al Franken’s book sales due to comments by.)
Ninth Art has a roundtable discussion of comics-creators-as-rock-stars, and the extent to which a writer (that’s primarily what they’re focusing on here) can establish a “brand” through a high public/fan profile and a unique physical appearance. They cite Grant Morrison as the foremost example of this phenomenon, and indeed he is–as I’ve said before, he understands the personal, psychological, and creative benefits of persona creation as well as the economic and business ones. The Ninth-Arters also mention Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and (they debate this, though to me it’s undebatable) Alan Moore. Notice a through-line here? They’re all from the UK, where the arts, particularly the popular ones, are steeped in a rich tradition of self-conscious theatricality. Personally I think 9A missed a couple additional obvious examples: Mark Millar (though he’s modeling himself more on brash Hollywood types than rock stars) and Paul Pope, the sexiest man in comics. I saw Paul at SPX, though, and in that crowd a good-looking, stylish, thin cartoonist sticks out a lot less than if you surrounded him with DC Editorial and the founding members of Gorilla Comics, for example. But Paul really seems to “get” what he’s doing–“I want to look like I could have stepped out of one of my comics,” he once told me, and he does. I think the rock-star model will be very important to the medium in the future–or at the very least an extremely useful tool for ambitious and talented creators.