If you look to the left you’ll see I’ve added a tip jar, because why not?

I don’t tend to be wild about the online pronouncements of Warren Ellis. Take this column about pop music, for example: There’s something about a grown man working himself into a rage-filled later over Britney Spears and Pop Idol that smacks of adolescent desperation. The piece is also laden with the kind of passages that sound like they’re saying something about the music being discussed but are really not that much more than distracting pyrotechnics–like the make-up and explosions at a Kiss show, used to cover up the fact that there isn’t a thing Kiss does that Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the New York Dolls, AC/DC, Van Halen, and even Alice Cooper didn’t do better. For example:

And, God, look at the “alternative” choices the machine offers up. Travis and Coldplay. Stubbly weaklings who wear socks as hats and would die of fright if someone played them something as rude and vulgar as a melody. Formless, sensitive strumming, riff-free and invisible to memory, and a belief that their vaunted “songwriting” requires nought but muttering lots and lots of words without actually saying anything at all. These people would vaporise if subjected to an honest thought. When did we stop wanting our music and our bands to be vivid?

I think what he’s saying is that he doesn’t like Travis and Coldplay. Fine; I don’t like Travis either, and though I do like Coldplay quite a bit, I think it’s worth re-electing George W. Bush simply to irritate Chris Martin. But what did Ellis actually say about their music? That it doesn’t have melody? Think what you will of Coldplay, but I will bet you twenty American dollars you’ve had the piano line from “Clocks” stuck in your head more than once this year. And all this business about “muttering” and “vaporizing” and “honest thoughts” and “vividness” makes me feel like we’ve wandered into a review column written by Tom Bombadil during a Sunday-morning come-down after a bad trip with Goldberry. You’re welcome to deduce how any of the above passage applies to any of the actual work either band has done, but it’s new comics day today and I don’t have the time to try it myself. It’s stylish nonsense, and to be honest, it’s not even all that stylish.

But something Ellis in his recent column about how lame pop music is brought to mind a similar issue in comics. He quotes writer Kieron Gillen, who says:

“Some poor kid is going to buy into the Vines and end up laying down eighth-rate memories of how good pop music can be, and thus ending up dismissing it as inconsequential. By wasting their first rush on the Vines, they’re going to be the ageing house-wife who doesn’t think sex is a big deal because they’ve only ever experienced a premature gimp trying to reach their cervix with desperate, spasming thrusts.

“If the Vines are your first favourite band, you’re fucked from the start. You’re the pop-equivalent of a thalidomide baby.”

More of the same purple prose you find in The Face, okay, sure; and I truly do feel that this kind of hyperbollically vicious attack on something as personal as music preference is best left behind with acne and algebra. But isn’t this basically the same argument Alan David Doane made, probably correctly, about the work of what I (and Barton Fink) would call The “Merely Adequate” Comics Writers’ Club? Transparently lousy, stupid art, like Britney’s latest album, is too obviously silly to do any lasting harm. It’s the quasi-acceptable, almost kinda good that ends up hurting, if it convinces us as readers to blur our boundaries and weaken our standards and spend our money on something that doesn’t deserve it. And unlike with pop music, there’s only about 250,000 of us consuming comics in this country. The business can’t afford for us to have lousy taste.

Rebuttals and follow-ups are the order of the day in the comicsphere.

As Grant Morrison’s interview is the most entertaining thing to hit the online comics world in quite some time, it’s garnering a lot of attention. Matt O’Rama thinks Grant’s the bees knees for having the balls to put his most outlandish ideas on display; Johnny Bacardi is less than happy with Grant’s Moore-bashing, and offers a cogent explanation as to how the “heavy-handed” tone Morrison dislikes in Watchmen is a feature, not a bug; Graeme McMillan puts together a “can’t we all just get along?” roundup from the messboards; Dirk Deppey takes a “physician, heal thyself” approach; and The Intermittent says we’ve been down this road before with pop provacateurs from John Lennon on. Is it safe to say that if Grant’s goal was to get people talking about himself and his ideas about comics, then mission most definitely accomplished?

(My attitude, unsurprisingly, is that we need more comics creators willing to give interviews like Morrison. I don’t mean we need more idiots like Rall who go around saying how everyone from Crumb to Spiegelman to Herriman to Ware sucks dick, or even more Warren Ellises, who to me reads more or less like a high school sophomore’s idea of what rebels sound like, but people with fascinating, pretension-deflating ideas, packaged in fascinating ways, flexible enough to change them when the dictates of their own passions call for it. In snappy outfits. We need more comic-book Bowies, basically. That being said, Grant’s definitely wrong about Watchmen, though he may well be right about Alan Moore’s career over the last 15 years….)

Mick Martin explains to me why he holds Bruce Jones’s Hulk in the same kind of contempt usually reserved for the Collected Works of Jeph Loeb. Sorry, Mick, but I’m unconvinced. (Why? Off the top of my head, Pratt is shown to be both a rogue agent and insane, so the supposed plot hole in his kidnapping of Banner is no hole at all; ditto for not using the irradiated blood of the Abomination or Doc Samson, since the Hulk has been shown for decades to be the strongest one there is, and presumably unique in the annals of irradiated-blood-dom; etc., etc., etc. At any rate nothing you point out comes close to the gigantic black hole in the plot of that Austen Uncanny X-Men issue we were talking about; moreover, unlike Uncanny, Hulk is a good read above and beyond its plot inconsistencies or lack thereof. But diff’rent strokes, etc., right?)

Franklin Harris shores up his anti-floppy argument against the various counterarguments the blogosphere has offered up. Listen, like Franklin, I still read the things myself, but my sentimental attachment slash insatiable need for a weekly fix doesn’t prevent me from seeing that this format is as attractive to the world at large as a plastic baggie filled with dog poo that someone lobbed at a garbage can but didn’t quite make it in and is now sitting on the sidewalk with a footprint embedded in it. Is it me, or is this inarguably holding the industry back?

In other news, Kevin Melrose wonders who hit the rewind button at the House of Ideas lately. Hey, Kevin, you forgot Marc Silvestri on New X-Men! (I suppose I lose retro-bashing street cred for having enjoyed the first issue of the Millar/Rob Liefeld Youngblood knockoff of Battle Royale, but I never liked Liefeld when he wasn’t retro, so does that even count? [Okay, but you enjoyed those issues G.I. Joe you read… Ed.] Shut up!)

Finally, Jim Henley crunches some numbers and finds out a weird thing about the page and ad counts in Marvel & DC comics. Is there a story here? Paging Dirk Deppey….

Wednesday, Dec. 3

read: the remainder of Three Is Company; A Short Cut to Mushrooms; A Conspiracy Unmasked

First, hello to all you Eve Tushnet fans, and thanks for dropping by! Hope you enjoyed this series’ first installment. New Comics Day almost got in the way of today’s, but I made sure to make up for the lost reading time!

Looking over what I read today, it’s more than a little astonishing to me to see how much even the names of chapters have seeped into my subconscious. Obviously I am far from the only person in the world who got disproportionately excited when, in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, Sam asked “A short cut to what?” and Pippin replied, “Mushrooms!” And I don’t even like mushrooms myself (except the special kind I ate that one time, but that’s a whole other fantasy world).

* “Three Is Company”–ah, those fabulously eerie first two appearances of the Black Riders. Adding to the ominous overtones of the “Shadow of the Past” chapter, these are our first signs that Tolkien knows a thing or two about horror. The snuffling is a particularly wrong touch. Also worth noting in this chapter is the meeting with Gildor the Elf. Most people focus on the ellision of Tom Bombadil in the films, leaving this magical/majestic meeting forgotten even by die-hards in many cases. Our first glimpse of the Fair Folk, it is in many ways also the first thing that indicates we’re in loftier territory than the humorous whimsicality of The Hobbit.

* “A Shortcut to Mushrooms”–Another unjustly forgotten cameo, this time around by the wiser-than-he-looks Farmer Maggott and his three angry dogs. I tend to enjoy seeing hobbits act smarter or braver than the stereotype. (Well, surely there’s a stereotype within Middle-Earth, right?) Maggott’s description of his exchange with the Black Rider is quietly alarming, as is his dog’s reaction to the visitor. And is that a monumental horror-image I spy, with the Black Rider standing up on the ridge?

* “A Conspiracy Unmasked”–Fatty Bolger puts in his appearance here, and I remember really getting a kick out of the idea that there were more than just the four central hobbits who knew enough about the Ring to help out. I used to imagine Fatty becoming something of a hero around the Shire in his own right for his role in helping Frodo get out of town. That’s what friends named Fatty are for, I suppose. Speaking of friends, this chapter contains one of my favorite passages in the whole book, one I used to toast my housemates of three years upon graduation from college:

‘But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,’ said Frodo.

Sam looked at him unhappily. ‘It all depends on what you want,’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin–to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours–closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.’

Of course, friends aren’t above giving friends a hard time when they’re acting dopey, and Pippin’s imitation of Frodo’s tendency to wax poetic over everything on Middle-Earth–‘We have constantly heard you muttering: “Shall I ever look down into that valley again, I wonder”, and things like that’–is both funny and familiar.

Tomorrow: Dropping the Bomb!

Monday, Dec. 1st-Tuesday, Dec. 2nd

read: Note on the Text; Foreword; Prologue; A Long-expected Party; The Shadow of the Past; about a third of Three Is Company

Despite having already read this book about seven times, it’s occuring to me that blogging The Lord of the Rings isn’t going to be as easy as I anticipated. For starters, I didn’t give myself a whole lot of time to actually read the book, much less write about it, if I want to stick to my plan of having it finished by the release of the third film. (This is the way I’ve done it during the past two years.) Finishing off Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar, an epic undertaking in its own right, pushed my projected start date from Thanksgiving to yesterday; and only now did I realize that the film comes out on the 17th, not the 19th as I’d had myself convinced. And this is to say nothing of an unusually busy period at work, a ton of new albums I’d like to give a solid listen to if not for the amount of time it’d take, several other writing projects I’m embroiled in (not the least of which is the rest of this blog)… Oh, confusticate and bebother the constraints of modern life!

That being said, these first sections of the book are like coming home again, aren’t they? I think I’m going to write about the book bullet-point style, just to save myself the effort of organizing comprehensible essay-style posts, unlike what I did to myself back in October. So away we go:

* Even things like the indescribably anal-rententive “Note on the Text,” which traces the publishing history of the book from edition to error-laden edition until its ultimate more-or-less perfection, mirrors the zealous complexity with which Tolkien detailed his world. I’m sure it’s no more necessary for me to read this every time than it would be for me to read the table of contents word by word, but what the hey?

* I always enjoy Tolkien’s foreword. I like how he says not that he dislikes allegory, but that he distrusts it–an altogether admirable trait, I think, particularly if one happens to be concerned with telling a good solid story. (Admittedly I only read the Narnia books as an adult, so maybe I missed out on its enchantments in some way, but particularly in the last installment the need to cleave to the Christian mythos seems to scupper the needs of the narrative almost entirely.) And his diss of his critics is a gem:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

Prof. T. 1, Critics 0!

* The prologue contains the first of the many, many intriguing throw-away mentions of some thing or event that give my imagination hours and hours of things to chew over, quite possibly one of the book’s most endearing qualities. In this case it’s a brief discussion of the hobbits’ relations with the once-mighty Northern Kingdom of Men: “To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it.” Boy, but do I ever wish some tale did! The idea of little hobbits of ancient times fighting against the Witch-King centuries and centuries before Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin started out on their own adventures is a delightful mental Easter Egg. What did the Men make of these strange little people? Did they fight well? (One imagines they did.) Might the Witch-King have noticed them, and tucked the knowledge of these creatures away for future use? Ah, the joys of being a Tolkien nerd!

* “A Long-expected Party” is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, where the party really gets started. I was surprised to feel an almost physical sense of joy and pleasure when I read that first line: “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End…” Hooray! We’re off! I know this chapter is often ragged on by pop-culture critics handicapping the books for film fans, but fiddlesticks to them. I love the little jokes, which all read like the japes of a mischievous old man, which I suppose they are. My favorite is the bit about Lobelia Sackville-Baggins being given a set of silver spoons by the departed Bilbo, who suspected her of having stolen several of them in the past: “she took the point at once, but she also took the spoons.”

* “The Shadow of the Past”: Another Easter Egg here–Sam’s ostensibly tall tale of a tree-creature walking around outside the Shire, which, we might surmise from later events, may not be so tall at all. Actually, when Treebeard the Ent tells Merry & Pippin that the long-lost Entwives might like a place like the Shire, neither they nor Tolkien makes the connection with Sam’s friend’s sighting. Are we supposed to? Well, that’s the fun of reading the books, isn’t it? This swell chapter also includes Gandalf’s tale of his years as a glorified private dick on the trail of both Gollum and the Ring’s real history. Images of Gandalf and Aragorn hunting for, capturing, and spending at least as much time with him as Frodo and Sam do later on are intriguing indeed.

* about one-third of “Three Is Company”: A nice creepy just-missed moment when the hissing stranger questions the Gaffer about Frodo’s whereabouts, and a charming little bit with a fox who wonders what the heck three hobbits are doing sleeping outside. Coming soon: the Ringwraiths’ grand entrance!

So, there you have it–I’d imagine that’s how these things will read. Nothing special, just some favorite bits, and some thoughts on what’s making the book tick at that particular moment. Glad you’re walking through it with me!

Hope your Thanksgiving weekend was delightful!

If you’re interested in playing catch-up with the wacky world of comics, Dirk Deppey has it all, as usual. He truly is the Instapundit of the comicsphere.

It bears repeating: Grant Morrison gives good interview. This would also seem to be the apotheosis of the recent trend of comics creators having some fun at the expense of the inane questions they’re occasionally asked.

Bill Sherman lays the smack down on Marvel’s Trouble, the Mark Millar-scripted launch title for the ill-fated Epic imprint (indeed, the only Epic title to reach its intended conclusion, it would seem). Two little points: 1) Continuity-wise, this would work in the Ultimate universe, where Captain America’s sidekick Bucky did indeed survive WWII; 2) Characterization-wise, this kinda sorta might work in the Ultimate universe, where Aunt May is a lot more “on” than her regular-continuity counterpart. Of course, she still looks way to old for the Trouble-established timeline to make any sense. Then again, the Kingpin is way too old for the timeline established in his recent solo title; the argument in both cases was that a good story warrants screwing with established character points if necessary. To which I say, well, yeah–so when are we going to see those good stories, anyway?

Alan David Doane has the answer to the question of whether comics cost too much: The really good ones sure don’t. Actually, this tends to be the answer to every binary qualitative comics question. “Do comics suck?” “Do superhero comics suck?” “Do altcomix suck?” “Does manga suck?” “Do comics retailers suck?” “Is it a waste of time/money to read/buy comics?” The answer is always “not the good ones!” (The exception to this rule is “Do pamphlets suck?”–the answer there is always yes.) Mick Martin is the latest person to state that winnowing down your purchases to stuff that’s actually quite good does wonders for clearing up a lot of these questions. (I’ve got to disagree with him about Bruce Jones’s Hulk run, though; aside from the obviously grafted-in Absorbing Man storyline (notice how he didn’t include a single mention of any of his usual cast of conspirators?) it’s been riveting.)

A separate question related to the cost issue might be “is it wrong to seek out discounted copies of good comics, if they’re available, potentially at the expense of a good retailer near you?” Well, there you have to weigh the pros (saving money) vs. the cons (stiffing a worthwhile shop in favor of, say, Amazon.com, or one of those manga/anime stores). I’ve got to conclude that retailers are fighting a losing battle if they’re trying to convince purchasers as a class to make decisions that adversely affect their wallets. You’d have to be a hell of a good comics shop to convince someone that despite the fact that they can get the exact same material elsewhere for less money, they should go to you for, like, the ambiance or whatnot. Still, this can be done–Instapundit calls it “the comfy chair revolution” (registration required, so just use “laexaminer” as both user ID and password). It’s just going to require a lot more effort (and cash) on the part of retailers who probably can’t afford it.

No trade paperback of The Filth? Or any of the Vertigo Pop books? How does that make sense? Then again, DC usually takes forever to collect things that aren’t Hush, so hope springs eternal.

Finally, Franklin Harris comes up with more anecdotal evidence that–say it with me now–manga is the future. Rich Johnston pitches in as well. But hey, if we keep repeating “it’s just a trend” to ourselves (or perhaps “kids don’t buy comics anymore–they’re only buying video games”), maybe it’ll all go away….

Look high and low, far and wide, for months on end, and it will still be tough to find a comics-related quote that beats the following bit from the Pulse’s interview with Grant Morrison:

I must admit I have no time for the ’80s style “serious superheroes” books riding the retro wave; never resisting any chance to gratuitously stick the boot in, I thought Watchmen was self-conscious, derivative, and heavy-handed when it first appeared and time hasn’t mellowed my opinion of this vastly overrated series – so the comics I dislike most of all at the moment are filled with unsexy ’80s retro “superheroes-in-the-real-world” type stories. All these soldiers-in-tights comics seem miserly and lacking in wonder, surrealism or novelty. Even Alan Moore himself ran screaming from this kind of story and began an ungainly, 15-year long attempt to reinvent himself as me. So why anyone would look to the awkward pomposity of mid-’80s comics for inspiration is baffling.

Holy shit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about scenesterism and hipsterism lately. Partially this is due to my entree into High Society at the X-Men 2 DVD release party at Jay-Z’s club last week. The whole affair was a little disappointing. The fellow who invited us was a delight, don’t get me wrong, and if I said it wasn’t a little interesting to have Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’s ass wiggling against mine at one point, I’d probably be lying. But mainly, I didn’t see the point of going to something like that unless you were a famous person. If you weren’t a famous person, you were just someone standing around looking at/for the famous people, and what kind of fun is that? You’re a hanger-on, a wannabe, a scenester. It’s boring and silly.

Also boring and silly are hipsters. This is a particularly tough pill to swallow for me, as a twentysomething media worker in NYC who likes weird music and films and reads comic books. But the fact of the matter is that now matter how weird or cool you dress, there are at least 200 other people in this city (I reiterate, at least) who dress in exactly the same way. Most of them spend their nights at deliberately trashy bars drinking deliberately bad beer trying to pick up any one of a cadre of identically-dressed girls or boys. They all read the same hipster publications, take the same out-of-focus photos of one another, do the same drugs, have a friend who takes her top off a lot, blah blah blah. God, it’s so tedious.

And what’s depressing about both these things is how magnetic they seem to be to the artist. Being seen at the right place, or with the right people, or wearing the right outfit–it’s just an incredibly tempting shortcut to Worthwhileville, particularly when compared to the struggle to create something of value, art-wise. It’s also a tremendously easy way to augment the creating you do perform in such a way as to make it seem a lot more impressive. I’m kind of horrified at how soul-destroying and peripheral this enterprise seems to be, since it’s so prevalent, and since there’s a real sense that you’re not living up to your potential if you’re not participating in it in some way.

I’ve long said I’m glad I live on Long Island instead of in NYC. I live there out of necessity due to my marriage to a wonderful woman who happens to teach there, but I’m happy this decision was made for me. If I weren’t married, I’d be living in some awful place on the Lower East Side or Williamsburg or Astoria, paying too much, doing bumps in the bathroom and acquiring sexually transmitted diseases, and God knows how much writing I’d actually be doing, and whether it’d be any good or just something dopey like every other artsy boy in the five boroughs. Which is not to say that what I’m doing now is works of brilliant genius, just that I’m reasonably sure it’s MY work, and not the product of some cookie-cutter scene I’ve found myself involved in.

(And let’s not forget how arbitrarily spacio-temporally biased “scenes” are, by the way. I spend the 1990s getting angry at writers telling me that my enjoyment of, say, Soundgarden was invalid because I didn’t have the good fortune to be born ten years earlier in Seattle.)

This is not to say that I think all aspects of scenesterism are invalid. Certainly if you can find a group of people with compatible artistic drives with whom to work or collaborate, even simply on a moral-support level, go for it. Hey, it worked for the Fort Thunder kids! And just because the comics-crit world is starstruck by them don’t mean they acted like the kind of scenester idiots people are usually starstruck by. Also, I do happen to think fashion and style are important, insofar as they are some sort of expression of your insides made manifest on your outsides. Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols put it to me in those kinds of terms, and suddenly I found myself thinking, “A-ha! I get it now!” In a way this only makes it more depressing when you walk around Avenue A and see 40,000 people who might as well be sharing your closet. But still, dressing up in a way that makes you feel vital and creative is a self-reinforcing thing, or at least it can be–like an athlete or a soldier putting on your uniform, you’re transforming yourself into the person you want to be. Just make sure that person’s you, and not Julian Casablancas.

The only important place is inside your head. That’s the only thing that defines you and your worthwhileness. When you’re an artist, the window to that is what you put on the page. To the extent that you can make your surroundings and your appearance and your circle of friends reflect this in some way, hey, great. But ultimately none of that matters in the slightest. The inside of your head can’t be reproduced, sold in thrift stores, and worn ironically. It’s yours!

Okay, so I’m starting to freak out just a little bit. The world premiere of The Return of the King has happened, and it won’t be long now before the movie comes out around here. As such, it’s time for my annual re-reading of The Lord of the Rings, a tradition that began in the summer of 2000, when Amy and I read the book aloud together. (Prior to that I think I’d read the book four times–once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school, once in college–give or take one reading; it’s just such a part of me I kinda forgot.)

This time around, however, I’ll be blogging my response to whatever I read during the course of a particular day. Nothing elaborate, I don’t think; certainly nothing approaching the effort that went into the October horror-blogging marathon. Just my observations and emotions about passages that strike my fancy.

Would it be too cheesy to say I hope it’s a journey worth taking? Maybe. But I do. First installment coming soon!

And the December 2003 award for Best Creative Comic-Book Excoriation goes to…

Paul O’Brien, for his righteous take-down of the latest Chuck Austen turkey over in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. Ouch. Best part: pointing out a storytelling flaw that makes Jeph Loeb look like Bill Shakespeare.

Here’s a rule of thumb for Chuck Austen (call it Collins’s Law): If he can’t show boobs and disembowelments, don’t read it. Seriously, U.S. War Machine was terrific, The Eternal has been a lot of fun, and I even loved his art on the Brian Bendis-scripted Elektra miniseries (the sole good story told centering around that character by anyone who isn’t Frank Miller). But aside from that… yikes.