Not so much a Carnival of Souls since I’m not sure any of them are horror-related, really. And while there’s some comicsy stuff in there it’s not a Comix and Match either, if you’ve been around long enough to remember what those were. Just some stuff of interest.

* Reading this description of author J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, which features three separate narratives arranged in tiers on each page between which readers may bounce at their discretion, made me think that the inherent aspect of comics that excites me the most that excites me the most is juxtaposition–words with images, one image with another.

* As recently as last week I was thinking that as a storyteller, you can pretty much get away with placing any kind of human behavior in the setting of a New York City subway. These non-stationary, non-transient spaces beneath the most fascinating city in the world are pretty much magic for readers–they can be staging grounds for serial killers feeding cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, people can have sex on them, street gangs can rumble in them, people can breakdance in them, vigilantes can kill people in them, sad gay clowns can give speeches in them (I’ve actually seen this happen), and people will buy it. This story and video of hipster girls giving pole dances and lap dances on the subway for cash, which I saw a link to on CNN.com’s front page a couple of days ago, seemed tailor-made to prove my point.

* Jeff Lemire’s painting of Mister Miracle is excellent.

* The other night I went to this:

This raises two points:

1) The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is the most important comics-related organization in America and you should donate to it.

2) Paul Pope was there and the story of Ron Paul (or “Ron Paul” via some savvy assistant) citing Paul (Pope)’s libertarian “Berlin Batman” as (Ron) Paul’s favorite superhero was much bandied about, but it wasn’t until I saw Andrew Sullivan blogging about it (complete with panel scans!) that I grokked that it had become quite a story.

* Finally, I was watching The Two Towers today and a wonderful piece of acting by Viggo Mortensen stood out to me: Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are wandering through Fangorn Forest in search of Merry and Pippin. Suddenly Legolas halts them all and says “The White Wizard approaches,” meaning the evil Saruman. The look on Mortensen’s face in the subsequent shot radiates “Oh Jesus, am I about to have to hit out of my weight class or what” just as surely as if he’d started shivering and chattering like Shaggy and Scooby, but it’s shot through with an inability not to at least try to physically defeat this entity, basically the second-most powerful being in all of Middle-earth. The look in his eyes and the line of his mouth basically says “I’m going to do this even though I’m scared shitless, but let’s be honest, I’m a few seconds away from dying.” It’s fascinating.

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