It’s been a delightful couple days to be ADDTF, thanks to the extremely kind words folks have been bandying around in reference to my gentle chiding of Jeph Loeb from yesterday. I’m privileged to say that so many people have said so many swell things about the piece (using fun words like hilarious, torrid, destroy, and annhiliation in the process) that I’ve actually lost track, but thank you to one and all. No one may have ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American public, but no blog ever lost hits for beating the rhetorical snot out of people who do so.
So, what can I tell you. I realized after I posted the piece that I’d left out another major, sure-to-be-permanent change in the Bat-mythos that took place in “Hush”–Two-Face is now one-faced once again. Yes, a little plastic surgery and he’s handsome and one of the good guys, pretty much. Gee, that’ll last. Funny thing, though–why does this plot development seem so familiar? Oh, right.
There’s a ton of good writing floating around the comicsphere these days. John Jakala is back from vacation–I’m not sure if he’s even up to double-digits in terms of number of posts, but he was born a fully-formed comicsblogger. J.W. Hastings responds to David Fiore‘s take on Geoff Klock’s How to Read Super-Hero Comics and Why, and the endlessly fascinating Fiore (seriously, this guy puts up a comics-related gem every single day) responds back, and adds more analysis; there’s thought-provoking stuff said about everything from Jack Kirby and fascism to Neal Adams and realism to Frank Miller and revisionism to Harold Freaking Bloom and the anxiety of influence to Spurgeon & Raphael’s Stan Lee biography (David, you “loathed” it? Explain! and explain how you could call Raphael childish but give his “critic” a pass…) mixed in there, too.
I got over the hump on a couple of big professional projects today. That leaves me available to lay out some plans for what I’ll be doing on the blog this October. I’ve got some big ideas, about which you’ll hear tomorrow. They involve evil, but that’s all I’m saying for now.
Finally, remember: If Mr. Loeb (who I’m sure is a perfectly nice guy) happens to ask, make sure to tell him that it was actually Clayface who wrote that post.