I’ve been meaning to say something about MSNBC’s Bob Arnot for some time now. Of all the reporters currently covering Iraq (and I only really watch NBC and MSNBC, because I don’t get any other cable news nets and, well, they play Imus in the Morning), he’s far and away the one who covers the successes (and there are many) with anything resembling the gusto with which most cover the failures (there are plenty of those, too). He’s a one-man antidote to the police-blotter reporting that’s given so much ammunition to the anti-warriors and anti-Bushites (who, I think it’s safe to assume, comprise a large perecentage of the people doing the reporting). His reports on last night’s edition of Chris Matthews’s Hardball were no exception. Take a look at the other, more accurate (and therefore, unsurprisingly, more positive) side of the story. (Link courtesy of Instapundit.)

For further illustration of how deceptive the “things are getting worse and worse” meme really is, here are a few examples of it–from World War II. (Links courtesy of Little Green Footballs.)

Finally, Christopher Hitchens does his usual comprehensive job dismantling the notion that true peace was ever going to be possible with Saddam Hussein and friends, and Andrew Sullivan shoots down Wesley Clark’s attempts to claim that the Kosovo War was justified while Gulf War II was not. (Might I add that the eminently just and justifiable Kosovo campaign, which Clark touts as proof of his military acumen, was an atrociously planned and executed near-disaster?)

Comics! Yeah.

Johnny Bacardi didn’t like The Dark Knight Strikes Again one bit, and tells me and Dirk Deppey so in no uncertain terms. Johnny, I think you’re misinterpreting both the target of Miller’s ire and his motives for expressing it. I don’t see the book as a “take the money and run” toss-off at all–Miller has explicitly stated that the lo-fi look of the altcomix at SPX were a big inspiration here, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that he just crapped this out because he was irritated with the demand for him to do a superhero comic and wanted to get back to “ancient Greece and Elmore Leonard.” If there’s a single comics professional alive who could spend the rest of his whole life doing any goddamn thing he chose, it’s Frank Miller. He only returned to Batman because he wanted to, and he only wanted to, I think, because he felt the whole damn thing needed to be blown up and started over again. Re-read the exchange between Wonder Woman and Superman in which WW berates Supes for basically becoming a boring pussy–that’s Frank Miller talking to the people who make superhero comics, not the people (like you and I, Johnny) who still read them hoping to be entertained.

Johnny also takes issue with the way David Fiore compares Alex Ross to Leni Riefenstahl. Please forgive me if I don’t dive into this debate with the gusto you might expect from someone who is such an enthusiastic devotee of comics and enemy of fascism, but Christ on a crutch, I’ve seen this argument on the Comics Journal messboard so many times I could plotz. The crux of the debate seems to me to center on whether or not certain artistic techniques (specifically heroic portraits of powerful, physically fit people shot from low angles) are inherently fascist, a notion that always seemed ridiculous to me. It came up a lot during my film school days in terms of the award ceremony sequence at the end of Star Wars. Yes, that scene was cribbed from Riefenstahl’s work, but seeing as how the award ceremony celebrated the defeat of a fascist regime, it seems to me you’d have to go through a lot of “but-but-but”s to explain how this is, in fact, National Socialism with Wookiees. (This goes double because of all the big movies made by the maverick late-60s/1970s generation of American directors, this is the only one I can think of in which the revolution actually succeeds.) It’s no more a fascist film than The Godfather is Communist because it cribbed montage techniques from Eisenstein. Similarly, it seems silly to argue that Ross is a fascist (i’ve seen it be done, believe me) because you can see the bottom of his characters’ chins, which is why I don’t think that’s what David is arguing–what he’s saying is that Ross’s work promotes uncritical valuation of heroes for their hero-ness. I think that’s a fair critique–judging from interviews with the fellow Ross seems to be a bright, insightful guy with altogether too much “respect” for the superheroes he’s made a living off of, as though he truly believes the “modern Pantheon” myth-marketing scheme his work has helped create. I don’t think that’s particularly healthy, but nor do I think it’s particularly fascist. (Seems to me a far more cogent criticism of his work would be that the men all look like gym teachers, the women all look like guards at a women’s correctional facility, and ambient white light finds its way everygoddamnwhere in every one of his paintings, like sand when you get home from the beach.)

This weekend a friend mentioned that Rufus Wainwright’s new album, Want One–specifically the orgiastically magnificent “Go or Go Ahead”–is the kind of music Radiohead should be doing. The Missus and I both agree, wholeheartedly. Hail to the Thief might have its moments, but Wainwright’s manically inventive production and lovely, exotic vocals eat that record alive. “Bolero,” the Brill Building, Brahms, and Britney Spears all find their way in there at one point or another (though Britney, fortunately, is just a one-off reference, not a musical inspiration). It’s tough to talk about individual songs for all that, though; this is an album that’s meant to be taken in as a whole. (That won’t stop me from picking “Oh What a World,” “I Don’t Know What It Is,” “Movies of Myself,” “Go or Go Ahead,” “Vibrate,” and “Beautiful Child” as the best orchestral rock songs since OK Computer, though.) This one’s a must, music fans.

Also picked up the Strokes’s Room on Fire. If that’s a fire, it’s a negative-four alarmer, man. Where’s the urgency? Compared to the first record, which had more hooks than the prop department for a revival of Peter Pan, this one, well, plods. Not plods, exactly–it just kinda putters along, with most every song consisting of slapped-together arrangements of different notes each played eight times in a row. On the other hand, it is growing on me. A couple of songs are obviously great, in the spirit of Is This It–this would be the very nervous sounding “Reptilia” and the album-closing “I Can’t Win”–and the two Cars homages are entertaining too. There’s a decent ballad in there as well, “Under Control,” which uses a “Moby Dick”-esque drum lick for good measure. It’s not as good as Is This It, the album it is inexplicably called a clone of by critic after critic, but it’s good nonetheless.

And that Outkast double el-pee is pretty good, too. I’ve never been as wild about Outkast as many people seem to be: sure, they’ve come up with amazing unclassifiable songs like “Bombs Over Baghdad,” and great hip-hop stuff like “So Fresh, So Clean,” but for all that you have to put up with a lot of meandering stuff that never gets off the ground and (the bane of modern-day hip-hop) skits galore. (And no one will ever be able to explain to me why “The Whole World” was recorded, much less released as a single off a greatest-hits package.) However, I’m pretty happy with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. I think they work best if you really do listen to it as a double album and not just two records that came in the same case. There’s actually something of a flow, an expansion of ideas as the former gives way to the latter. And “Hey Ya!” is every bit as good as “B.O.B.”, possibly better, and “Prototype” doesn’t just peter out the way so many hip-hop songs do, for which I was profoundly grateful, and Big Boi’s “GhettoMusick” is just as weird as anything Andre 3000 came up with, which took me by surprise.

And there’s also Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism to talk about. I’ve only just gotten into Death Cab, thanks to lead singer Ben Gibbard’s wonderful emotronica side project the Postal Service, so I don’t have a whole lot to compare it to; but from what I’ve gathered from fans (and from a few listens to its predecessor, The Photo Album), Transatlanticism is a breakthrough. Ambitious and intimate in equal measure, each song is a lot more “song”-ish than previous efforts, there are surprisingly Beatleish/Lennonish moments, and it’s got a crescendoing 8-minute title song centerpiece that ends in a swelling chorus of “Come on.” I think it’s a beautiful album.

Amanda follows up on the Naomi Wolf controversy with a comprehensive, convincing dismantlement of Porn As We Know It. Among other things she points out the fact that insofar as the clitoris isn’t so much as a blip on the porn-flick radar screen, it isn’t doing anyone any favors–if you’re using porn as your normative standard for how sexual pleasure is given and received, women get gypped, and men aren’t even aware they’re gypping the women. (You’ve also got your basic inadequate sex-ed curriculum to thank for this. Remember the lesson on clitoral stimulation? Yeah, me neither. So teenage girls nationwide go through their teenage years getting jabbed at by their special fellas, wondering what all the fuss is about.)

Amy’s post is basically a close reading of porn, and it ain’t pretty. However, she also disagrees with Wolf’s apparent embrace of religious orthodoxy as something “hot.” Essentially we’re all looking for maximum sexual choice and fulfillment, and neither fundamentalism nor mandated money shots are going to get us there.

The War On Drugs is an obscene, violent, Orwellian, unconstitutional sham. Film at 11.

Also: Is the “Bush lied about the imminent threat” meme an imminent threat to my ability to take Democrats seriously ever again? Andrew Sullivan reports, you decide.

“And this would have solved things how?”

By winning, Jim. By beating them. That’s how problems caused by armed people killing us are solved, generally, not by retreating behind Fortress America and congratulating ourselves for no longer “abridging liberty” while lunatic theocratic fascists skullfuck their subjects with impunity.

Or do those folks’ liberties not count? This is an aspect of the antiwar libertarian argument I’ve never understood. That, and the Confederacy fetish. I dunno, maybe I’m still a pinko at heart.

Uh, how ’bout that Alias storyline, huh? 🙂

Well, the big news here is that I received a link from the mighty Corner, The National Review‘s group blog. Mike Potemra comments on my discussion with Eve Tushnet of the Calvinist/arbitrary horror in Kubrick’s The Shining. This precipitates a discussion about Kubrick, Tarantino, Un Chien Andalou, etc. with Jonah Goldberg. (What does the fact that I’m actually pleased about getting linked to by NRO say about post-9/11 politics? That’s a topic for another post, I’m afraid.)

Bruce Baugh talks Wicker Man, pointing out two subtle strengths of a movie with many. He also reviews The Eye, yet another Asian horror film I’ve heard good things about, and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (The only Argento I’ve seen is Deep Red, an experience which took a lot out of me. Man, that bathtub scene is… unpleasant.)

Big Sunny D talks about the ways your viewing conditions affect your receptivity to horror movies (a very important point, i think), and refuses to give up hope for a horror comic as scary as a really great horror film.

Rick Geerling asks whether less is more in horror, in terms of both what is shown and what is explained. The consensus seems to be that sometimes less is more, and sometimes more is more–it just depends on the intent and the execution. That’s my take on it, as a cursory glance at the films on my list might suggest. But beyond the fact that I like horror films that take a wide range of approaches to showing and explaining the horror, it seems that I tend to prefer films that show quite a bit and explain very little. But that’s not a hard and fast rule.

Finally, the Malaysian government has banned horror fiction (link courtesy of Dirk Deppey). Apparently they’ve decided that their revolting brand of Islamic quasitheocracy is scary enough.

The little meme that could continues to spark discussion as more bloggers jump into the “do comics actually suck?” fray, and earlier contributors refine their original statements. Here’s Johnny Bacardi on the trials and travails of buying comics on an unemployed person’s budget. Here’s Kevin Melrose on how bad bad retailers can be for comics (the post also touches on Pimpgate–joy!). Here’s Eve Tushnet on what’s wrong with floppies. Here’s Ron Phillips, taking a view on all the negativity that’s roughly equivalent to Clemenza’s view on the upcoming war between the families in The Godfather. And here’s the man who started it all, John Jakala, saying “My God, what have I done?” and clarifying that he’s only as fed up (or not) with comics as he is (or isn’t) with every other art form. On the upside, here’s Tegan Gjovaag, defending both floppies and Diamond’s pre-ordering system as embodied by Previews. It ain’t all gloom and doom!

In other news:

My defense of DK2 is seconded by Dirk Deppey, who offers ebullient praise for Miller’s controversial book himself as part of an exceptionally entertaining day at Journalista. And mine and Chris Allen’s dueling reviews of the book are being discussed at the V forum.

Entertaining capusle reviews from Jim Henley (particularly insightful regarding the unsatisfying wrap-up of the actual Purple Man storyline in the final issue of Brian Bendis’s excellent Alias), and from Big Sunny D (on the mess that is the current X-Statix storyline), and from Eve Tushnet (Grant Morrison and Ultimate Spider-Man, pros and cons thereof). Eve also offers entertaining capsule summaries of the appeal and drawbacks of different superheroes. She’s wrong about Ultimate Spider-Man in both posts, though, because that book is awesome. (Wrong about Batman, too.)

Over on the Comics Journal message board, there’s a thread that’s equal parts horrifying and hysterical about the problems the New York Press has been having with paying and firing its freelance illustrators. In my experience in publishing, when it comes to arguments about this sort of thing, the freelancers are almost always in the right. Just keep that in mind.

This anti-porn article by Naomi Wolf has been making the blogosphere rounds lately, most recently by way of a dismissal of it at The Intermittent. I’m of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I’m a lot more sympathetic to Wolf than most people, and even many feminists, seem to be. This is because I found The Beauty Myth, her book about how the fashion, diet, entertainment, and cosmetics industries essentially generate neurosis in women to fuel their respective economic engines, both compelling and convincing. It does not hurt that I’ve seen this in action, live and in person, with my wife, who without putting too fine a point on it was driven to slow suicide with the help of the standard of “beauty” propogated by contemporary culture. The current wave of “lighten up!” sentiment is well taken when it’s used against the stifling of dissent that’s part and parcel of political correctness, but when it ignores or ridicules the real, demonstrable damage done to real, demonstrable women by unrealistic, impossible standards of appearance and behavior, it’s something to fight against, not for.

And Wolf’s article points out many things to be feared about the pervasive influence of pornography on our culture. I guarantee you that high school and college age girls now feel compelled to kiss each other to turn guys on. This is not some victory for the sexual revolution–well, it may be for some girls who are genuinely bisexual or even lesbian–it’s just forcing yet another unrealistic, male-dictated sex role on women who ultimately have little say in the matter if they want to be valued as sexually attractive beings. I’ve talked about this before in the context of MTV (the Tatu and Madonna/Britney/Christina bullshit), but it seems reasonable to suggest that porn has helped raise the demand for this sort of behavior among men–aided and abetted, of course, by the pop-culture media that jerks itself off about such things (Rolling Stone, anyone?). Finally, there’s certainly an argument to be made that while porn is interesting and arousing, PORN! as trumpeted on the covers of every New York City-based glossy and beamed into our homes in countless salacious MTV and E! and Dateline reports and staring down at us in the shape of a 200-foot Jenna Jameson billboard in Times Square is a tedious, anti-sensual bore, just like trucker hats and Ashton Kutcher.

But Wolf also evinces what appears to be a strange and, I think, unhealthy aversion to sex practices that have little or nothing to do with pornography. Listen to the way she seems to shudder as she discusses the idea of using orifices other than the vagina for sexual gratification, or the prospect of having one’s face ejaculated upon. I’ve never been able to figure out what’s so degrading or demeaning or insulting or dominating about any of these things. They aren’t degrading or demeaning or insulting or controlling at all–if you’re doing it right. They can, and maybe even should, be a part of any sexually healthy person’s repertoire of giving and receiving pleasure. Personal preferences may vary, and no one should do anything they find physically or emotionally uncomfortable, but Wolf appears to suggest that there’s something intrinsically wrong with these things, beyond the clear wrong of feeling pressured to do them.

This vague sense that sex is somehow dirty or bad is reinforced by her effusive praise of an orthodox Jewish friend of hers who has adopted the strict dress code and head-covering routine of that religion. Wolf breathlessly describes how “hot” it must be for this woman to only be visible, sexually, to her husband. I don’t think I need to suggest that you simply substitute “fundamentalist Muslim” and “burqa” for “orthodox Jewish” and “head-covering” for the bizarrely retrograde and repressive nature of this notion to be readily apparent. I’m all for women covering up if that’s what they feel like doing, but fundamentalist religions make not doing so a sin, something intrinsically wrong and bad. There’s nothing hot about that at all, particularly since such rules of dress and conduct usually applies a lot more stringently to women than they do to men. And the idea that this kind of covering-up is for the wife’s benefit as opposed to the husband’s (his property, his alone to enjoy) is simply preposterous. (I don’t mean to suggest that orthodox Jews are akin to the Taliban or the ayatollahs–I’ve heard of very few honor killings in Crown Heights, just by way of a for instance–but you’ll forgive me if I have very little respect for religions that prove how “special” women are by forcing them to shroud themselves like dead bodies at a crime scene.)

As for the notion that men are being “spoiled” by porn and are no longer attracted to real live women, I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of this, but in my experience and in that of most guys i know, seeing sexy women makes us more interested in being with sexy women, not less. At any rate, if the prevalence of male-directed porn is truly a problem, to me the answer is more porn, not less–and this time of the female-centric variety. And not just porn, either, but Maxim-style magazines where the latest male starlets are paraded around half naked and airbrushed for the perusal of bored women commuters; sitcoms where dimpy, annoying women are married to gorgeous, intelligent men and not the other way around; Justin Timberlake making out with David Bowie; and so forth. Women are not going to be sexually empowered by sticking them in head coverings and nuking the Internet so men have no other options; they’re going to be empowered when they take the reigns of sexual culture and are free to explore and demonstrate what they find sexy, not what they’re supposed to find sexy–pornography and puritanism be damned.

This was the speech I’ve been waiting for during long months of wishing I was governed by Tony Blair. It articulates nearly everything that needed to be articulated about why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why it needs to be done. Someone up there gets it.

And yet those same voices who complained for years about our coddling of dictatorships the world over–and rightly so–are beside themselves with rage now that there’s an administration who’s actually doing something about it. No, they’re not doing everything, and they’re not doing it perfectly, but it’s a start, and a good one.

The comicsphere is getting esoteric all of a sudden. We’ve moved on from Tony Isabella and The Comics Pimp to trying to determine whether or not blogs and comics both actually suck.

My two cents on both topics can be found here and here, along with some links; and more folks are jumping into the fray.

Defending Blogs, we find D. Emerson Eddy and Rick Geerling. D. opts against the simple defense I offered–that good blogs are, in fact, quite good indeed–and instead argues that the mere fact that blogs are a means by which people can express themselves, for good or for ill, makes them worthwhile; Rick brings it back down to earth by recounting how the blogosphere lacks the idiotic initiation rituals and name-calling atmosphere of message boards and such.

On the “Sick of Comics” front, there’s Rick again, saying that the last few months have been a dry spell for him but that these things are cyclical; Ron Phillips, pinning his disillusionment on the fact that they don’t make comics shops like they used to; and Alan David Doane, pointing out that you know what? this has been a good year for comics, at least in the alternative arena.

I tend to be optimistic about these kinds of things, but then I’m also optimistic about the new Matrix movie, so take that for whatever you think it’s worth.

Tegan Gjovaag has written her own tremendous post on the Green River killings, reminding us that the dead and their families were only the tip of the iceberg when it came to “the vicitms.”

Where Christopher Hitchens gets the patience to enumerate the innumerable reasons why Saddam Hussein’s regime needed to be destroyed, and why the arguments agains this action all contain the seeds of their own refutation, is beyond me, but thank goodness he gets it somehow.

Then again, Hitchens is probably just one of those national-greatness types, hellbent on turning the United States into a Baathist regime.

Interesting reviews of the work of Frank Miller were posted by two different writers today.

J.W. Hastings continues his series (one, two) of “comics ain’t for kids” grudge-match tandem reviews of the work of Miller and his contemporary Alan Moore. This time, Miller comes out on top. Generally speaking, I’m all for that–Miller is my favorite comics creator, so much so that any time I attempt to explain why I lapse into semi-incoherence. J.W. is right to criticize Moore’s lack of tonal variation within the confines of a given story–with pretty much any Moore book (excepting, perhaps, Smax?) you can quickly determine what kind of comic you’ll be getting–funny, scary, retro, revisionist, etc–without fear that this will change at all before “The End.” I also enjoyed the way J.W. skewers the occult/conspiracy angle of Moore’s Jack the Ripper epic From Hell, which given the seriousness Moore invests in the topic can come across as simultaneously simplistic and pretentious; and additionally I dug the way he goes after the “this is a comic you don’t have to be ashamed of!” crowd by saying, essentially, “just get over yourself.” But I think J.W. sells From Hell, which I think is in every way a remarkable comic, way too short, particularly in comparing it so unfavorably to Miller’s enjoyable, powerful, but nowhere near as complex or rewarding Ancient Greece war comic 300. Please keep in mind that I’m a lot more receptive to Miller’s emphasis on loyalty, courage, and honor (which, by the way, is a more nuanced take than anyone gives it credit for) than I am to Moore’s mystical-radical hodgepodge (though I’m receptive to that too)–it’s just that in this case I think Moore & Campbell produced a monstrously successful, and important, book.

(I also tend to agree with Alan David Doane‘s view that Miller’s final Daredevil story, Man Without Fear, feels like a redundant coda rather than an essential contribution; to me, Miller said everything he needed to say about Daredevil and his milieu in the astounding Elektra Lives Again. On the other hand, as an excuse for some of the most gorgeous and propulsive superhero artwork in the world, courtesy of a never-better John Romita, Jr., you can’t do much worse than this.)

Writer number two is Chris Allen, who, in the course of a very long column that also includes a spot-on take-down of World War 3 Illustrated and an interesting interview with internet critic Johanna Draper Carlson, reviews Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes Again. I was glad to see that Allen enjoyed the former, which he was revisiting after years without having read the book. I myself return to it time and again, and find each visit rewarding (the masterful pacing, the tremendous linework, the splash pages, the manically black humor, and, yeah, the message). So I was bummed out to see Chris jump on the DK2-bashing bandwagon. This is one of the most underrated comics, well, ever. Its detractors employ a panoply of arguments: It’s hurried, it’s sloppy, it’s stupid, it’s hamfisted, it’s cashing in, it’s corporate. (Those last two are inexplicable to me–if Miller wanted to really just cash in he could have handed in something exactly like DK1; and what kind of corporation wants to release a comic in which Batman flies planes into buildings and Superman and Wonder Woman destroy a mountain while fucking?) What they miss is that Miller almost single-handedly wrested superheroes away from the leaden reverence they’ve been saddled with by Alex Ross and his ilk and produced a comic that’s the spandex set’s equivalent of Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power. Nothing is true, everything is permissible: Characters scream and shout and let it all hang out, as does the art (panels are obliterated, inking is chunky as hell, and of course Lynn Varley subjects her Photoshop to a panoptic gang-bang), as does the storyline, which begins with Batman and his superhero pals beating the snot out of Superman and then just gets crazier from there. Chris argues that Miller’s refusal to acknowledge, say, the current Flash and Green Lantern secret identities, smacks of “arrogance”–and I say, shit, yeah. What the hell is wrong with us if we think that Wally West and Kyle Rayner deserve “respect” or something? That way lies madness. Miller isn’t saying “comics are better the way I remember them”–he’s saying “comics are better when you break free of the obligation to capital-R Remember anything.” He’s thumbing his nose at the self-reflexive, self-aggrandizing superhero-continuity establishment, and showing that the important thing for superhero comics to do is to ROCK. I, for one, was rocked indeed.

Stuart Moore runs the numbers on the direct market and trade paperbacks, proving my long-time theory that American comics companies will remain beholden to floppy/pamphlet/monthly/individual issue comics, as opposed to more book-like tpb or manga formats, for some time to come.

Also, this comic is funny, because nothing on God’s Earth is funnier than someone masturbating, then crying. (Courtesy of John Jakala.)

No sooner have bloggers and the Comics Pimp been duking it out over the best way to convey the message that Comics Doesn’t Suck than messboard users and still other bloggers are coming to the conclusion that You Know What? Yeah, Comics Does Suck. These threads at TCJ.com and this one at Sequential Tart advance the meme; John Jakala and Johnny Bacardi can’t help but ponder the same imponderables (thanks to Rick Geerling for linkage).

Me? Well, alls I can say is that today was a pretty great haul at the comics shop, one of the best New Comics Days in a while for me: Powers, Alias, Ultimate Spider-Man, Savage Dragon, Supreme Power, and Arrowsmith; I’ve been avoiding collections for financial reasons lately, but a collection of Matrix comix and Gilbert Hernandez’s monstrous Palomar collection just came out today as well, and the last month or so has seen oodles of great trades tempt my comics-buying dollar.

I don’t blame people for suddenly getting sick of the amount of crappy comics, or even just not-great comics, they’ve been buying more out of habit than anything else–this happens to all of us from time to time. I just think it’s a mistake to ascribe the decision to stop buying them to some sort of searing insight into comics versus other media. This goes double because, when you’re in a bad mood about comics in general, I’m you end up being much harder on specific comics than they deserve.

I have something of a professional (and, in the case of the blog, serious-hobbyist) obligation to keep on top of comics, both for the the publication I write for and for my own aspirations to writing comics professionally. I’m lucky enough to have a great deal of this mitigated by financial compensation for many of the things I purchase in order to keep abreast of the medium. Still, I occasionally feel jaded by how much inessential stuff I’ve accumulated. On a week-to-week basis I find I’ve purged a lot of this feeling by no longer buying no-longer-interesting titles. Mainly, though, I just enjoy the heck out of a lot of comics, and those I’m still buying.

In those TCJ.com threads, scholar Andrei Molotiu is dead right about being a devotee of an entire medium–that really is silly. That’s the fatal flaw of comics activism, too: Comics is worthy of consideration the same way film, literature, TV, music etc. are, but that’s something that will be proven to the world at large, if it ever will, by the strengths of individual works, not some vague devotion to Comics. And it’s the former, not the latter, that keeps me excited to visit the shop every Wednesday morning.

UPDATE: Please note that I’m not just some comics-hating curmudgeon who hasn’t Done His Part–I’m actually something of an activist myself. Here’s the deal: I really do think that “comics activism,” which even when you just write it or say it is self-evidently silly, is sort of dumb.

Great Garys in Serial-Killing History, Volume II: Gary Heidnik

The Missus‘s “Favorite” Serial Killer: Albert Fish

Serial Killer Most Likely to Have Bumped Into Jimmy Corrigan’s Grandpa at the Chicago World’s Fair: H.H. Holmes

Harry Chapin’s Unlikely Muse: Charles Whitman

Who Inspired Hannibal Lecter?: the candidates

All links courtesy of the indispensable CrimeLibrary.com.

Gary Ridgway has confessed to the Green River killings. For those of you who aren’t unhealthily obsessed with serial killers, the Green River Killer was for years the unsolved mystery in the American serial-murder demimonde; like Jack the Ripper several times over, “he” was deemed responsible for so many slayings (mainly of prostitutes) that it was widely believed (and by legendary FBI serial-killer expert Jack Douglas) that “he” was actually a “they,” two or more different serial killers with roughly the same M.O. and area of activity.

Actually, I still wonder whether “they” is the real deal here. Ridgeway pled guilty to 48 counts of first-degree murder mainly so he could avoid the death penalty, and I’d imagine there are many, many law enforcement officials happy to see this case closed. (Since the Green River killings stopped years ago, there’s not even really an issue of “we got the wrong guy!” to worry about.) It’s also worth noting that there are at least 7 “official” Green River slayings that Ridgeway did not plead guilty to, and God knows how many other killings took place that didn’t make it onto law enforcement’s tally (Ridgeway pled to six such cases himself).

At any rate, if you’re interested in this case you could do worse than to read over CrimeLibrary.com‘s thorough run-down of the Green River Killer. The site has recently been redone, and it’s user-friendly and fascinating. Let’s just hope they’re able to add an epilogue to this story that will stand the test of time.

Amanda has written a truly moving post about our little cat, Lucy. I’ve got to say, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about casual cruelty lately, but Amy brings the reality of it home.

Early in October, blogger Bruce Baugh promised to do a bunch of horrorblogging for the remainder of the month. That fell by the wayside, but it looks like he’s making up for lost time now: here’s a post on horror as a means of expressing grief (“that was worthwhile, and now it’s gone”), here’s a post on 28 Days Later that pays attention to the unusually strong characterization in the film, and here’s a post on the most recent David Cronenberg movie, Spider, which I haven’t seen (and which is just going to have to go to the back of the Netflix cue like everyone else).