There are 266 titles on the list so far.

—Dick Hyacinth on the database he’s compiling of comics people have put on their Best Of 2007 lists. That’s almost 300 different comics, and while surely some of them are bad and were listed by people with not-so-good taste, I think that’s indicative of both the scope of the industry and the number of high-quality releases out there right now.

* Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter site is back, thank God. I really enjoyed his interviews with two of my favorite people in alternative comics, Fantagraphics editor/publicist Eric Reynolds (worth reading for the beans he spills about Fanta’s upcoming releases–Rory Hayes!) and AdHouse publisher Chris Pitzer (worth reading for Pitzer’s overview of his company’s mission as a publisher).

* Bloody Disgusting reports that Doomsday, the post-apocalyptic thriller from The Descent director Neil Marshall, is now slated for a March 14th release.

* Lost star Matthew Fox lets slip some mild spoilers in a lengthy interview with Entertainment Weekly’s Dan Snierson (what, was Jeff Jensen busy?). So be warned, he does state some facts (both structural and specific) about the the show’s previous and upcoming seasons that are not readily apparent from what we’ve seen so far. But if you can stomach that, he also has some fairly candid and interesting things to say about what has worked and not worked on the show.

* Dick Hyacinth’s lengthy, catholic Best Comics of 2007 list is one of my favorites of its kind so far.

* Echoing Ted Rall’s complaint about the perceived New York Times/Best American Angsty Artcomix Axis, NeilAlien argues that such institutions lean so heavily enough to a certain flavor of comics to create the impression that “all artcomix are precious white suburban objets d’angst,” likening the phenomenon to the deleterious impact of the superherocentricity of the Direct Market. I’ve seen many a “new mainstream” adherent draw this parallel, which is bogus because a) a couple of editors at a couple of outlets don’t have nearly the level of control over access to comics that the spandex-fixated majority of DM retailers do, and b) the real complaint about the domination of one particular genre is not simply that the genre is dominant, but that many examples of that genre are lousy and and don’t deserve the dominance. Unless you’re an inveterate contrarian, this is not something you’d say about the work of creators like Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, and Jaime Hernandez (whose Maggie strip from the NYT doesn’t even fit into the lamely stereotyped mold the anti-angst crew is trying to push on it anyway).

* Finally, from the Ozymandias files, via Bryan Alexander: A joint US/Norwegian research team has stumbled across a bust of Lenin abandoned by Soviet scientists at the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility, the most remote point on the frozen continent, some 50 years ago. Look on my works, ye capitalists, and despair.

Speak of the devil: Ann Thompson of Variety pens an interesting article on the new wave of first-person docu-horror, focusing on Cloverfield and the indie haunted-house film Paranormal Activity and emphasizing both the format and the “less is more” approach to the scares. The Blair Witch Project looms over it all. (Via Dread Central, which calls the films “voyeur horror,” an intriguing label. The next “torture porn”?)

Powr Mastrs Vol. 1

PictureBox Inc., November 2007

C.F., writer/artist

120 pages

$18

Buy it from PictureBox Inc.

Buy it from Amazon.com

It might be the jellyfish-on-human double-penetration tentacle-sex scene that makes you realize that this is an adult fantasy comic, but that label, “adult,” is really present throughout this first in a projected series of chronicles of the land of New China. For all that characters like Subra Ptareo may be on a quest and Mosfet Warlock may be a mad scientist, their interlocking stories (so far) don’t read like the genre narratives of my youth beyond their fantastic trappings at all. Instead, they’re stories about buying things and selling things, about twentysomethings (or at least twentysomething analogues) meeting new people and flirting with them, about getting stoned, about fucking and deceiving the people you fuck, about being moved to tears by the realization that you’re actually good at what you’ve chosen to do with your life. Where the fantasy really comes in, for me at least, is in the art. C.F.’s simple, childlike line is reminiscent in affect and effect of Frank Santoro’s in their mutual publisher’s Cold Heat, but while the latter relies on open spaces and canny color choices to evoke the both the supernatural and the mental states akin to it, the former gets it done with detail. The result is always shocking, whether a sudden splash page overripe with flowers and foliage or a doggystyle-eye-view close-up of a tentacle-filled vulva. The word I’m really looking for here is psychedelic, not the cheesily amorphous lowest-common-denominator version but the intense wall-of-sound riot of art-information present in a Moscoso font or the crescendo in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” The combination results in as fecund a playground for the imagination as a far more traditional fantasy story, but arrived at from a totally different direction. It’s inspiring.

* It blows my mind that Della’morte, Dell’amore/Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi hasn’t directed a horror film since then, and has actually only directed one other movie of any kind in that time (he’s been doing TV work). But Fangoria reports he’s got a project in the works called Catacombs Club, which sounds like it’s got the same intoxicating mixture of romance and morbidity that the earlier film boasted. Click for details, including the news that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen co-writer Charles McKeown is writing the screenplay, and the factoid that Soavi shot second unit on that Terry Gilliam film. (Via Dread Central.)

* BC at Horror Movie a Day pans Blair Witch Project director Daniel Myrick’s supernatural teen thriller Solstice.

* State of the beast update: Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo reprints eyewitness reports from the San Francisco Chronicle that the two surviving victims of the fatal (to both human and animal) tiger attack at the San Francisco View on Christmas had been actively harassing the zoo’s lions shortly before the attack.

* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants takes reviewers of The Orphanage, and Roger Ebert generally, to task for overusing Alfred Hitchcock’s famous “surprise vs. suspense” anecdote. He does this in large part because he thinks The Orphange doesn’t earn the Master’s posthumous approval; I’ve gotta see it before I pass judgment and god only knows when that will happen. As an aside, Jason also mentions how scary he found The Others, a movie I think works exactly one time and then is pretty much useless, so badly does its ending skew everything that comes before it.

* Marvel Editor-in-Chief/Amazing Spider-Man artist Joe Quesada and long-time ASM writer J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski continue to very politely but very publicly blame one another for the shortcomings of the poorly received (by this blog and basically every single other one) “One More Day” Spider-Man storyline, in which Peter Parker and his wife Mary Jane make a deal with the devilish Mephisto to remove all traces of their marriage (past, present, and future) from existence in order to save the life of Peter’s wounded Aunt May. The funny thing is that both men focus on the story’s wonky continuity implications and slapdash use of magic as the narrative equivalent of universal solvent, but neither seem to realize that the emotional, psychological, and moral character-based underpinnings of the entire thing are just as shoddy.

* Finally, allow me to recommend the latest iteration of Dick Wolf’s venerable police and D.A. procedural series Law & Order. The Missus and I watched the back-to-back-episodes double season premiere on our TiVo today, and it’s the best the show has been in a long long time. It’s not just that new cast additions Jeremy Sisto and (particularly) Linus Roache hand in strong performances as lived-in, pointedly un-glossy characters–the whole show seems to have been tightened up, with scenes given more time to breathe, actors given more time to react, even better framing and lighting. It’s almost reminiscent of the show’s earliest Chris Noth/Michael Moriarty years, where half the fun of the show came from watching a George Dzundza or Steven Hill reaction shot. The cop material in particular showed a gravitas it hadn’t had since the departure of Jerry Orbach. Good stuff, worth putting off watching Project Runway and catching one of its countless re-airings instead for.

Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews David Cronenberg’s seminal body horror/media satire/James Woods vehicle Videodrome.

And BC at Horror Movie a Day presents a Best Of/Worst Of roundup of his first year on the job, the job being watching at least one horror movie every day. Read the roundup for either the hidden gems he discovered or the hilariously bad budget-pack junk he watched to make the quota, or simply to reward him for living the dream/nightmare.

* The Daily Galaxy reports that some scientists are worrying that ages-old organic matter unearthed–or un-iced–as global warming melts the polar ice caps will accelerate climate change. Infocult’s Bryan Alexander notes the potential eldritch implications, obvious to fans of H.P. Lovecraft and John Carpenter everywhere.

* New Year’s gift number one: Blogger Ken Lowery, formerly of Ringwood, now has his own fancy new web site, Ken-Lowery.com To think I knew him when he still had the word “Ragefuck” in his blog name!

* New Year’s gift number two: I tend to enjoy The Best of Bootie, year-end mash-up collections compiled by mash-up DJs A Plus D.

* Adam Balz’s brief rumination on the Ed Tom Bell character in No Country for Old Men over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You strikes me as unfair to Ed Tom’s deputy. Balz labels him as “artless [and] simple-minded” whose “far from revelatory” thoughts “dance around the crime.” In fact, if I recall correctly, the deputy’s pretty much dead on in everything he says; the main difference between him and Ed Tom is that he verbalizes most of his thoughts while Ed Tom doesn’t.

* Finally:

They called him Iron Man, a hulking teenage football player with a baby face and winsome smile who lived with his parents in a small ranch house in the Buttonwoods section of town.

Then, one summer night in 1987, Craig Price crept across his neighbor’s yard, broke into a little brown house on Inez Avenue and stabbed Rebecca Spencer 58 times.

She was a 27-year-old mother of two.

He was 13.

Two years passed before Price struck again.

Joan Heaton, 39, was butchered with the kitchen knives she had bought earlier that day.

The bodies of her daughters, Jennifer 10, and Melissa 8, were found in pools of blood, pieces of knives broken off in their bones; Jennifer had been stabbed 62 times.

—“Hulking boy killer changes justice system,” AP, CNN.com

Kid Eternity

DC/Vertigo, February 2006

Grant Morrison, writer

Duncan Fegredo, artist

144 pages

$14.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

So this must be one of those “minor works” I always hear so much about. Collecting the three-issue 1991 Vertigo “reimagining” of some old DC character, Kid Eternity reads like many a current comic really intended as a movie pitch rather than a reading experience: A hapless everyman is inducted by a glib, ubercompetent, superpowered cool dude into the secret truth behind the world as we know it. The pleasures to be had here are in the idiosyncratic details Morrison weaves into this shopworn plot: casting said everyman as an observational stand-up comic (his name, Jerry Sullivan, evokes a Seinfeld with an Irish-Catholic’s hang-ups instead of a Long Island Jew’s); making said secret truth a weird (if familiar) splatterpunk take on Dante’s Inferno; harnessing artist Duncan Fegredo, who currently mimics Mike Mignola in the pages of Hellboy, to the yoke of the world’s lengthiest Dave McKean impression. But the curveballs failed to keep me as too many of the surrounding pitches were predictable and almost half-hearted. Serial killer? Check! Deranged Christian missionary? Check! Crazy lettering? Check! Tarot cards? Big check! Fegredo’s visuals feel similarly lackluster: For every memorably wild vista (his infernal architecture is particularly ambitious) there’s a murky, difficult-to-follow action sequence (I’m still not quite sure what happened in that initial bloodbath), hard-to-distinguish supporting character (I didn’t notice that there were two separate murderous antagonists for Jerry and the Kid until they started attacking one another), or just generally uninspired choice (a would-be mindblower tour of hell is metonymized by a few static stand-alone panels and one image seemingly picked at random to anchor the spread in the background). Morrison’s at his best when his comics either really read like comics (Arkham Asylum, All Star Superman) or look like comics (We3, I dunno, Seven Soldiers), and this comes across as a creature of its era that thinks it’s too cool for school to do either, which it isn’t.

Why not celebrate by checking out my New Year’s horror resolution over at this week’s Horror Roundtable?