* If you’ve ever wanted to see a vomiting Mr. Mxyzptlk get burned and face-stomped to death by an evil Superman, Tim O’Neil has the scans for you. Normally I steer clear of dogpiling on stuff like this, because the material is so self-evidently, almost self-parodically bad, and because I think that since most intelligent readers have already made an informed decision as to whether or not such comics are worth their time and money, the people who stick around to complain about it have similarly made their own decision, for whatever reasons, and living with it is their problem and not mine. Still, this sequence stuck out to me because it seems almost like it was intended not just to exemplify the bizarrely visceral hatred some fanboys of my acquaintance have for Silver Age DC material that doesn’t jibe with current storytelling values, but to embody it. (Via Dirk Deppey.)
* Speaking of comics blogosphere warhorses I try not to ride, in an interview about the end of his series Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan inadvertently articulates why I find the periodic outbreaks of (pseudo)feminist outrage over some dopey superhero image or other hard to take seriously as either criticism or activism:
It felt like comics had never really talked about gender in a sophisticated way. Whenever they talked gender it was always like, ‘Should Catwoman’s boobs be smaller?’ ‘should she be called the Invisible Woman instead of the Invisible Girl?’
(Via JK Parkin.)
* Cartoonist Josh Simmons, the guy behind the shocking, wordless horror graphic novel House, shares some scary, funny memories of Candyman and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as part of Steven Wintle’s “Scarred” series. He’s got good taste, or at least his teenaged self did.
* Hey, look, Paul Pope is drawing Orion from the New Gods!
* Hey, look, Nicholas Gurewitch is drawing some extremely black humor in the Perry Bible Fellowship!
* Hey, look, Tom Neely is drawing more exquisite horror imagery as a means of anti-war protest!
* Hey, look, Madballs are back!
* Inspired by a recent viewing of No Country for Old Men, Rich Juzwiak of FourFour finds something funny on the DVD of Blood Simple.
* Physician Kent Sepkowitz casts a skeptical eye on the movie Awake and its use of “anaesthetic awareness” as a plot device and selling point (more the latter than the former, really).
* Matt Zoller Seitz defends Beowulf against the anti-cinetechnophile crowd. Read the comment thread, too, both for skeptical responses and a discussion of co-screenwriter Neil Gaiman’s comic book work that veers off toward Alan Moore, too.
* It wasn’t until my very Christian in-laws brought it up in the context of a discussion of those “hey look out for this supposed peril of modern-day living that’s probably easily debunked with 15 seconds of googling” email forwards we all get from time to time by way of offering an exception to the rule, but apparently Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy series and its first volume’s imminent film adaptation, The Golden Compass, are taking flack from the usual suspects for their atheistic author’s atheistic message. I haven’t read the books and didn’t know much about them so this all came as a surprise to me. Here’s the Snopes article on the emails, confirming Pullman and his books’ anti-religious bent; here’s Andrew Sullivan rounding up some pro and con links, including claims that the studio watered all that down anyway and the de rigeur posturing by the shameful, shameless Catholic League; and here’s a SciFi Wire article on producer Deborah Forte’s attempts to dodge the subject.
* So I guess Stephen King recently said some, oh, let’s say “provocative” things about torture, celebrity, Jenna Bush, and Britney Spears in an interview. Carnacki is sympathetic to the Bard of Bangor’s cri de coeur, MSNBC.com’s Courtney Hazlett considerably less so. I’ll say that I’m largely on board with the points King’s trying to make, but that his attempts at pop-culture and political commentary are almost always off-putting and that metonymizing unhealthy trends in either sphere through young women who while emblematic of those trends really bear no responsibility for their perpetuation strikes me as cheap and quietly misogynist.
* I’m having fun discussing the roles of the leading men in film noir in the comment thread below my quickie take on Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick vs. Josh Hartnett in The Black Dahlia, and you might enjoy doing it too.
* Quote of the day:
“Her legs were gnawed to the bone.”
–from “Woman killed by stray dogs in Bulgaria; Briton’s legs were ‘gnawed to the bone’ by wild dogs,” Reuters, MSNBC.com.
* Finally and OT, Matthew Perpetua nails what’s up with the song “Wow” from the great Kylie Minogue’s new album X. This sort of post is why he’s my favorite music writer.
7 Responses to Carnival of souls