* When good comics critics collide: Chris Mautner interviews Joe “Jog” McCulloch. Hearing that my blog helped inspire Jog to start blogging himself made my weekend.

* Fearfodder’s Pete Mesling resurfaces to give Clive Barker’s new novel Mister B. Gone a rave review. (At least I think he did–I haven’t read the book yet so I really just scanned the review.)

* Tom Spurgeon has gone on one of his occasional review rampages, critiquing 57 comics in one go. Holy moses.

* The Golden Compass reached number one at the box office but with a disappointing $26 million haul. I have a hard time thinking about this business story without also thinking about a number of disheartening factors: the naked desire of its studio, New Line, to replicate its Lord of the Rings franchise’s success, all the more irksome given that same studio’s treatment of the architects of that franchise; the leeching away of the source material’s anti-theist philosophical oomph; the odious Catholic League riding shotgun; a possible glut of fantasy film set in CGI snow. Add it all up and it doesn’t equal “good time at the movies,” at least for me.

* Finally, after the recent Finnish school shooting involving a young man who posted videos implying his intentions on YouTube, resulting in the media making hay out of that fact although it really had nothing to do with the case itself, I noted that you never see headlines like “Massacre linked to pen and paper” when killers chronicle their thoughts in a more traditional fashion. Sadly, life, in the form of mall shooter Robert Hawkins, has provided us with proof. Note moreover that as far as I can gather, you’re also not seeing voices from the Right decry the victims as exemplars of the feminization of America and the decline of the West this time around, perhaps because it’s politically trickier to dance on the graves of Midwestern Christmas shoppers–or Christian missionaries and megachurch members–than on those of college students.

A day earlier, [Georgina] Papin’s three sisters cried and clutched each other’s hands in court while the judge reviewed the testimony of witness Lynn Ellingson, who said she walked in on a blood-covered Pickton as Papin’s body dangled from a chain in the farm’s slaughterhouse.

Prosecution witness Andrew Bellwood had testified that Pickton told him how he strangled his alleged victims and fed their remains to his pigs.

—“Canadian pig farmer found guilty of 6 murders,” AP, CNN.com

Authorities plan on charging Robert “Willie” Pickton with a total of 26 murders, primarily of prostitutes and junkies; while in prison he boasted to an undercover police officer of committing 49.

Normally I’d put this under the heading “The state of the beast” rather than under the title of the short story from which that phrase came, but in this case I’m making an exception for obvious reasons:

On the slaughterhouse floor at Quality Pork Processors Inc. is an area known as the “head table,” but not because it is the place of honor. It is where workers cut up pigs’ heads and then shoot compressed air into the skulls until the brains come spilling out.

But now the grisly practice has come under suspicion from health authorities.

Over eight months from last December through July, 11 workers at the plant all of them employed at the head table developed numbness, tingling or other neurological symptoms, and some scientists suspect inhaled airborne brain matter may have somehow triggered the illnesses.

—“11 Minnesota Slaughterhouse Workers Fall Ill; Pig-Brain Removal Technique Is Suspected,” Martiga Lohn, Associated Press, ABCNews.com

(Via Bryan Alexander)

* The teaser poster for the next M. Night Shyamalan movie, a natural-disaster-apocalypse movie called The Happening, is out. Needless to say it hits my buttons.

Via Bloody Disgusting. And Jason Adams points out something about the poster’s tagline that never even occurred to me.

* Riffing off a recent post of mine about the reaction to No Country for Old Men, Jon Hastings talks film-critical aversion to craft.

* It’s still Krampus Week over at Monster Brains, and this particular postcard of the Christmas devil is stunning. Dig that color design!

* Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell turn a skeptical eye to Beowulf, focusing on whether the tech really works. I disagree with many of their observations (duh) but it’s the most thought-provoking negative review of the film I’ve read; the effects-based comparisons to The Lord of the Rings were particularly specific and illuminating.

* Jonathan Bennett brings our attention to HitchcockWiki’s 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project, which breaks down every one of the Master’s films into 1000 screen grabs.

* Breaking news: Jeph Loeb is not a very good writer.

* I love that Kevin Huizenga keeps posting his Powr Mastrs fan art. I really just love when any artist shows unabashed enthusiasm for the work of one of his contemporaries by creating homages to it (that’s why I’ve been happy about the recent return to quick-response pop-music cover versions–for years and years I thought we were losing something by not having the equivalent of Joe Cocker’s within-the-year Beatles covers, you know?) Anyway, his seemingly extradimensional Jellyfish Emperor is really blowing my mind.

* Apparently in response to the infamous Gordon Lee case, which at this point looks more likely to end in a misconduct conviction for the prosecutor than an obscenity conviction for the retailer, all Free Comic Book Day books must now be all-ages. I’m no retailer, and I dunno, maybe FCBD really is geared all-but-exclusively to children already. But my first instinct was that this is a profoundly dopey (and cowardly) decision equivalent to the film industry having a free-movie day that only includes PG-rated movies.

* For a glimpse of the kinds of things that went down before video-game culture fully calcified as a children’s affair in the public mind, take a look at some naughty “adult” Atari games courtesy of Kotaku. (Link via the Daily Gut.) The combination of the ultra-lo-res graphics we associate with the game-playing experiences of our youth and the crassly pornographic subject matter leads to some fascinating cognitive dissonance.

* Finally, this week’s Horror Roundtable is all about our best creative achievements of the past year. Come listen to us toot our own horns!

Blogging is not hard, and don’t believe anyone who says that it is. Blogging is easy. Getting all the way through the Dark Tower series was the hardest thing I’ve ever done bloggingwise, and it was still easy as pie compared to virtually anything else I’ve ever done that doesn’t involve a blog–getting my driver’s license, finding a good brand of store-bought salsa through trial and error, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, hooking up my TiVo, learning how to French kiss, waking up at 6 every morning to feed my cats, deciding which KMFDM CDs to leave on display and which ones to store once I ran out of room on my CD shelves, working in publishing, washing my face before I go to bed, buying tickets to the GZA show at the Knitting Factory next Friday, anything.

* Sad news: While wrapping up “Scarred,” his great series of mini-interviews with horror luminaries about their formative scary moments, Steven Wintle of The Horror Blog takes the opportunity to announce a scaled back blogging presence. That bums me out.

* Speaking of Steven, I Am Legend, the Will Smith-starring, seemingly Hollywoodized adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novella that has become Mr. Wintle’s archnemesis, boasts the voice of none other than Faith No More’s Mike Patton, who did the vocalizations for all the vampire creatures. The gentle art of making enemies indeed!

* Slate’s Jody Rosen celebrates the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s album Thriller by trying to get across both its quality and its impact. That’s as good an excuse as any to link to my essay on why the video for “Thriller” is a horror landmark.

* Finally, I am completely infatuated with the trailer for Speed Racer. It’s like an adaptation of the old Super Nintendo racing game F-Zero, or even Mario Kart. (Via AICN. Thanks to Jim Treacher for alerting me to how crazy this movie looks.)

Proposed (Classified) Bill Will Defend Against Flesh-Eating (Classified)

* My friend Ben Morse talks to writer Matt Fraction about the cast of kung-fu warriors he’s invented for his and Ed Brubaker’s magnificently entertaining series The Immortal Iron Fist.

* My friend Rick Marshall talks about the trials and travails of sharing the same name as both a prime suspect in San Francisco’s Zodiac murders and the dad from Land of the Lost.

* Publisher Alvin Buenaventura, Comic Art editor Todd Hignite, critic Ken Parille, and cartoonists Jonathan Bennett and Tim Hensley have started a group blog. (Via Eric Reynolds.)

* Tim O’Neil gives a thumbs up to the Marvel event miniseries World War Hulk, up to and including the inexplicably-panned-elsewhere ending. I liked it too. (So did NeilAlien.) Ever since I spent a dreary Thanksgiving weekend reading through about 60-odd issues of Savage Dragon back in 1999, I’ve held the belief that some comics are just tailor-made for reading all in a row rainy Saturdays, and I look forward to having a series of Planet Hulk and World War Hulk paperbacks to do that with one day. (Same with Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern run. Same, I think, with Marvel’s Annihilation series.)

* Here’s a nice little essay on the experience of watching Blue Velvet in a crowded theater by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Rumsey Taylor.

* Artist Robert Burden paints and draws gigantic, heroic portraits of action figures. I love them.

To give a sense of scale, note the actual action figure framed atop the painting. (Via Jacob Covey.)

Both times I’ve seen No Country for Old Men in the theater, this trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has been attached. It is the best trailer I’ve ever seen.

It took me a while to find this on YouTube–when I looked after the first time I saw NCfOM I couldn’t find it at all. I truly hope it’s not one of those “you need to see it on the big screen” deals. But through a combination of the editing, Daniel Day-Lewis’s manically committed performance (evident even in several-second snippets), Jonny Greenwood’s preposterously ominous score, and the best tease of a title since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it’s just about the most frightening trailer imaginable. I love it so.

By the way, the second best trailer I’ve ever seen is this:

What are your favorite trailers? Please post links if you’ve got ’em.

What is behind this popular and patently false critical suspicion that a “well-crafted” movie is automatically phony or inauthentic, while a film that is “unpolished” is considered genuine — automatically real or truthful?

—Jim Emerson

Great question. As I’ve noted, the proficiency-as-deficiency argument has been used most memorably against the likes of No Country for Old Men and Children of Men, but it’s also popped up (with varying degrees of vehemence and slightly different points of attack) in discussions of Beowulf, 28 Weeks Later, even 300.* “Craft is the enemy” is a weird motto for film critics of all people to embrace.

Anyway, read the post and then stick around for the comment thread, which veers off into an engaging discussion of The Mist of all things. This very spoilery post ultimately goes somewhere I don’t agree with, but it starts out by critiquing the film for answering several of the original novella’s most haunting unanswered questions, which I definitely think works against the film.

(Via Ken Lowery, a leading light of ADDTF’s burgeoning comment scene.)

* By linking these movies, I don’t mean to imply that their skillful craftsmanship is deployed to uniform, or uniformly successful, effect.

The Hellraiser remake has a release date: September 5, 2008. It’s also apparently called Clive Barker Presents: Hellraiser, which is interesting–putting the imprimatur of the original creator on a remake in such an explicit fashion is an unusual move–but may also just be one of those bits of not-quite-accurate information that calcifies into Internet Factdom.

Looks like the ranks of those unhappy with J. Michael Straczynski’s “One More Day” Spider-Man storyline include…J. Michael Straczynski, who’s basically throwing “OMD” artist and Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada under the bus for the arc and saying he came this close to asking for his name to be removed from its final two issues. He also cites wanting to have Peter Parker sire illegitimate children by Gwen Stacy as an example of his sound judgment, which is hilarious. (Via every comics blog everywhere.)

Long live the new flesh: Feast your eyes on this Flickr set of “Horrorshow,” Johnny Ryan’s horror and exploitation film-inspired series of paintings. Best part: The originals are on sale! (Via Eric Reynolds.)

It feels like it’s been a long time since I blogged about a good old-fashioned sea monster, which is why it was such a pleasure to come across this article about a newly discovered species of prehistoric, sea-dwelling, carnivorous reptile the size of a bus. Fuck, the dinosaur era was AWESOME.

Aeron at Monster Brains brings us links to several photo galleries’ worth of photos from Austria’s Krampus festivals, celebrations of the mythical devil who hangs with Santa Claus and punishes the naughty children. Some of these costumes are weapons-grade scary.

Glenn Kenny and his commenteers are close-reading the bloody bejesus out of No Country for Old Men. I’m always torn when I see discussions like this going on. On the one hand it takes me back to my film school days, when similar bull sessions frequently lasted until dawn or sobriety intervened. And it’s always fun to watch people geek out so unabashedly about something I love as much as I love film, particularly a great one (and No Country is a great film). On the other hand it edges a little too close to the parlor-game mentality whereby great art is seen to be not just appreciated or understood but decoded, like the Jumble in the funnypages. I don’t think it works that way. I certainly hope it doesn’t. At any rate I’m pretty sure that determining whether or not Chigurh is in a certain room or holding a certain weapon in a certain scene is not some magic key to understanding what it all means. Like, when you watch that movie, don’t you just naturally come away understanding what it all means? Without having to resort to the equivalent of “the walrus was Paul”?

Finally, oh Marty, how I love you. (Bonus points for casting Simon Baker in the Hitchcock hero role. And for Thelma Schoonmaker on-screen. And for the ending.) (Via every movie blog everywhere.)

You know a review’s going to be a doozy when it approvingly asserts in its second sentence that Slate‘s humorless killjoy of a film critic Dana Stevens “spoke for many” about, well, anything. Calling the review “Beowulf: War Porn Wrapped in a Chippendale Dancer’s Body” is probably a tip-off too. And the straight-faced inclusion of the sentence “The three beasts in the film in fact line up pretty well as stand-ins for Iraq, North Korea and Iran” would be exhibit C.

But what really perplexes me about Alexander Zaitchik’s Alternet piece on Beowulf is that it seems to argue that a movie whose main point is that warriors are about 60% bullshit and bluster, 30% greed, lust, and sloth, and MAYBE 10% bravery tops is some sort of paean to the glory of war, then goes on to support this argument, incomprehensibly enough, by calling attention to the film’s anti-Christian strain–only to completely reverse itself in the final paragraph and wonder if the point of the movie is in fact that war is not all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s a real head-scratcher.

(Via The House Next Door’s Links for the Day, which are all pretty great today.)

Do you know what I’m talking about? I didn’t think he did the first time I watched 28 Weeks Later, and I’m rewatching it and I still don’t think so. But it was obviously in the promos, and I’ve heard people talk about it being in the movie too. Can anyone else out there with the DVD confirm or disconfirm this suspicion?

Also? What a great movie.

1) Due to a freelance assignment I reread Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke today. As I did it I had in mind the oft-voiced criticism that the book has no relevance to real life, a line taken not just by reviewers but also by, and perhaps most vociferously by, and maybe originally by, Moore himself. I totally disagree. Even if you haven’t been in one yourself, surely you know someone who’s been locked into a mutually destructive love-hate relationship with someone that brings out the worst qualities in both parties. Perhaps you’ve also known someone who is or was, for lack of a better word, addicted to illness. I think there’s at least as much personally relatable heft to the emotional core of this book as there is to, say, the Gordian Knot thing at the end of Watchmen. It’s also a pretty great Batman story in which both he and the Joker are actually pretty scary, which is harder to pull off than most writers seem to think. And Brian Bolland can draw, boy howdy.

2) Over the past few months I’ve talked occasionally about the un-selfconscious craziness of ’80s action movies like Rambo and Invasion U.S.A.. I wonder: are the slick, gratuitously violent superhero comics of today, like Countdown to Final Crisis or Mark Millar’s Wanted, an equivalent entertainment? I mean, there’s caveats in both cases, to be sure: Countdown has that sprawling “to be continued in the pages of Title X” would-be mega-crossover thing going on, and Wanted thinks it’s Fight Club. But both appear to have that love of bloodshed and lack of self-awareness that characterize the slaughterfests of yore. I guess it just comes down to whether they succeed as entertainment, which, well, compared to Road House? Not so much. (I enjoy Wanted well enough, I guess, though the glib rape references leave a terrible taste in your mouth and like all Mark Millar comics the hero just starts winning at the end because it’s time for the hero to start winning.)

3) So I guess it’s now out there that Spider-Man is going to swap his marriage to Mary Jane for the life of Aunt May courtesy of Marvel’s satanic stand-in Mephisto. I try not to comment on these “how dare they” superhero plot points because there are 40,000,000 other blogs where you can find that if you want and because there are more productive ways to spend one’s blogging-about-comics time and energy, but I’ll make an exception here because Spidey was my first superhero favorite as a little guy and because this is just so colossally wrong-headed that it practically demands scorn and derision, like that “rappin’ John Wayne” song from the ’80s.

For starters, it should be self-evident that having your flagship superhero, your exemplar of heroic values and morality, the guy whose book gave us the phrase “with great power comes great responsiblity,” the most popular fictional character in the world whose name isn’t Harry Potter, literally make a deal with the devil is just a terrible, terrible idea on the face of it. That he does so to scrap the romance at the center of his multi-billion-dollar, zeitgeist-bestriding film trilogy should probably have sent up a few red flags too.

But it’s worse still because, much like all the mystical “avatar of the Spider-God” poppycock writer J. Michael Straczynski has shoehorned into the character’s mythos–including his origin, which with Batman’s and Superman’s was among the most famous and note-perfect origins of any heroic character ever as-is–it runs counter to every core aspect of the character: his roots in science fiction, his role as the Marvel superhero community’s everyman in the city, his nature as not some Chosen One blessed and cursed by the gods but just some loser teenager who got dealt a crazy hand by dumb luck.

The final, fatal, unforgivable flaw, of course, is that it doesn’t even work from a standpoint of emotional realism. Simply put, if you ask any happily married couple to trade away their entire marriage, past present and future, to save the life of a septuagenarian mother figure, no matter how beloved, who probably is just a few years from dying anyway, the answer would be no.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

–Craig Whitlock, “Jordan’s Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA; Foreign Terror Suspects Tell of Torture,” Washington Post

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Becky Cloonan draws Scylla.

Censors don’t read, but they do go to movie theaters.

—Bryan Alexander on the absurdity of protests against the years-old, highly successful His Dark Materials YA fantasy series by Philip Pullman only when its first installment, The Golden Compass, is being made into a motion picture. So you can add “illiterate” to the heap of vituperative adjectives I use to describe the Catholic League. (I went to a Catholic high school, man. Some things you don’t forget.)

At The House Next Door, Ryland Walker Knight reviews The Mist. I’m perplexed by his assertions, which I’ve heard frequently elsewhere, that a) Mrs. Carmody and her religious nuts are scarier than the monsters, and b) the film is more interesting when the survivors interact than when the monsters attack. I think in both cases the answer is quite clearly “no, they’re not” and “no, it’s not,” because of how stock the characters are in both cases. We’ve seen Mrs. Carmody a million times, and nothing interesting is done with her beyond casting Marcia Gay Harden. We’ve seen a disparate group of people thrown together and forced to cooperate to survive a post-apocalyptic world of danger two million times, and usually much more interestingly than this. As I alluded to before, compare this crew and what they do to, for example, the way Ben and Cooper’s behavior and decisions challenge our preconceptions about their competence in Night of the Living Dead, or the warmly multifaceted interpersonal dynamics between Stephen, Peter, Roger, and Francine (including friendship, love, idolization, one-upsmanship, stoicism, panic, foolhardiness…) in the original Dawn of the Dead. Nothing at all like that is going on here; the one big shock is at the end, and as Knight points out, that shock is so sudden it feels like it undercuts the rest of the movie. Arguing that the characters are the best part and that the humans are the scariest part are the sorts of things one is supposed to say about a horror film, but in this case as in many, many others, including many good horror films, they’re not true.

At The Forager, Jon Hastings reviews The Transformers. For the first time he’s made me realize why I’ve been so reluctant to watch it: I was never a big Transformers kid–Star Wars, He-Man, G.I. Joe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were my action figures/media tie-ins of choice, I think probably because the Transformers were really expensive–but in my experience their shows and their movie were really pretty weird. I remember the leaders of both sides dying and floating three-headed robot tribunals and a giant planet that ate other planets and stuff like that. Michael Bay’s vanilla “hey we’re all having fun here!!!!!!!” blockbuster mentality would never capture that weirdness and seriousness.