* Over at The House Next Door, the very good TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz, Alan Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston debate which show by The Three Davids–Chase’s The Sopranos, Milch’s Deadwood, and Simon’s The Wire–is the best TV drama of all time in a podcast. One day, when I finish going through The Wire and then roll through Deadwood, I plan on listening to this with great interest, but until then I’m steering clear. In the meantime I will say 1) They missed a David; 2) So far (I’m a couple episodes into Season Four), as good as The Wire may be, between it and The Sopranos it’s not even close.

* A terrible week for the cast and the fans of Road House just gets worse: First Jeff Healey dies, and now we learn that Patrick Swayze has (terminal?) pancreatic cancer.

* Apparently Joss Whedon is going to have Buffy the Vampire Slayer have a lesbian fling in her current comic book. Feminism! (This gratuitous bit of browncoat-baiting is brought to you by Jason Adams.)

* The Blot artist Tom Neely keeps doing great work; the sad and upsetting comic strip he posted today knocked me to the floor.

* Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle unearths one of the most unnerving stories I’ve heard in a long while, one I’m surprised I hadn’t heard before: the Dyatlov Pass Accident. In 1959, nine Russian cross-country skiers made camp in the Ural Mountains to wait out a storm. The next morning they were all dead–apparently having literally torn their way out of their tents and ran into the -30 degree Celsius night in their underwear, two of them with massive internal trauma to the chest but no external injuries, one with a crushed head, one with a missing tongue, all bearing traces of radiation and all with their hair turned gray literally overnight. More weird details at the link. Given my reading of late, this rolled right down my alley.

UPDATE: A friend did some googling and discovered that virtually all references to this story stem from the past few weeks (there’s some sketchy stuff from 2006 on Wikipedia (where the article is up for deletion) and a Russian-language message board thread purporting to be from 2004 but that’s it), so take it all with a tub of salt.

* Finally, via Bruce Baugh I came across this alternate ending to Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend.

As they say at the link, it’s not perfect–the new coda feels like it needs a separate transitional scene to make sense given the tenor of the revised climax that forms the bulk of the alternate take–but it’s vastly superior to the out-of-nowhere Signs riff imposed on the film in the theaters. It ties directly into emotional themes present throughout the film, it makes more sense out of the viro-vampires’ behavior, and it comes a lot closer to the most provocative aspects of the book’s conclusion in terms of how the vampires think of themselves. There’s even a nice little visual callback to the Central Park Zoo lions that ties it all together.

It’s funny: As I’ve thought about the big apocalyptic monster movie trifecta of the past few months–The Mist, I Am Legend, Cloverfied–I came to terms with the fact that even though the character work in the middle movie is head and shoulders above the by-the-numbers material of the other two movies, I was still more likely to end up owning the other two flicks on DVD because their monsters were better. But if I Am Legend had this ending in the theater, I’d have walked away from it with more or less no reservations, and it’d have been a whole different ballgame.

Death Note Vol. 2

Tsugumi Ohba, writer

Takeshi Obata, artist

Pookie Rolf, translator/adapter

Viz, November 2005

200 pages

$7.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

First of all, look at that price point–talk about bang for the buck! No wonder these things are so popular. Second of all I found this volume to be an improvement over its predecessor in virtually every respect. The art is more interesting and individualized in its depiction of the characters: I loved the big bag-rimmed eyes, wiggly bare toes, and thumb-biting neurosis of L the wunderkind investigator, and man oh man I could look at the clothes and hair Obata delivered for the ill-fated Naomi Misora all day. But of course we won’t be seeing much of her anymore, and that’s part and parcel of the improvement in terms of the tension of the cat-and-mouse suspense aspects seen in this issue: We see just how far Light will go to preserve his anonymity by killing off very likeable, very innocent characters, and by having that happen this early in the game, the creators show us that no one is safe and that they’ll be throwing curveballs. I still get a little tired of the constant narration of everyone’s thoughts and deductions–I long for the quiet cogitation of the characters from The Wire, which I’m experiencing for the first time more or less simultaneously to Death Note and which displays a lot more faith in the audience to follow what’s going on–but I’ll admit that it’s an effective way of showing off how byzantine the schemes and counter-schemes get from moment to moment. It’s enjoyable pulp fiction.

* I don’t have any D&D related puns to deploy, but regardless, rest in peace, Gary Gygax. I didn’t play D&D as a kid, but I have very fond memories of jumping completely cold into a campaign some buddies of mine had going the summer after my freshman year in college and learning on the job, drinking Sam Adams and listening to the Braveheart soundtrack. My DM cooked up an amazing twist ending that had us all completely flabbergasted. For those memories, and for your role in paving the aesthetic road for synthesizing a variety of nerd traditions into a stew based solely on what happens to be awesome about them, god bless you, Gary Gygax. (Via Brian Hibbs.)

* The cast of Lost asks the creators of Lost their burning questions. I like this feature a lot because a) it shows that the actors have as little idea of what’s really going on as we do; b) the formatting makes it really easy to skip past questions you don’t wanna know the answers to; c) some of the answers are genuinely informative. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Bruce Baugh considers the critical consensus on Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend…and agrees with it!

* Eve Tushnet takes a cue from last week’s Horror Roundtable and picks five filmmakers for her dream horror anthology movie. Let’s just say she gets a little more adventurous than John Carpenter.

* Star Wars, Saul Bass-style. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* Finally, a press release about an art opening for the great Teratoid Heights cartoonist and Fort Thunder alum Mat Brinkman:

MAT BRINKMAN

SOLO EXHIBITION: RV AND TRAILER DRAWINGS

March 7 – April 6, 2008

OPENING RECEPTION with the artist: Friday, March 7, 6-9 pm

At certain times in history something unexpected, groundbreaking, and ahead of its time arises. From the eternal dark rivers of Providence, RI came Fort Thunder. Under its pure and unrestricted banner founders Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, together with the legions of unbridled creativity, fought against the quietness of modern mediocrity throughout the dark age of the 1990’s. Despite its demolition in 2002, the legacy of Fort Thunder continues to inspire a generation of artists who keep the true and hallowed flame of the underground in art alive.

LOYAL is proud to present this highly anticipated solo exhibition of new drawings by Mat Brinkman. Darkness will descend upon the opening night when the true defender of black metal, E from Watain, will bring holy damnation from the vinyl players. Pure hellish superiority!

Brinkman crushes predictability and creates a new order of storytelling. With his rough yet highly sophisticated lines, Brinkman’s stripped-down, ink-on-paper drawings use little and tell much. Demon-ghouls with razor claws and cloud-shaped entities bound through an unearthly labyrinthine darkness made up of cell-like squirming lines, revealing primordial undertones in our contemporary world.

In the year 2002, the four person outfit Forcefield (Fort Thunder residents Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg and Ara Peterson) was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 2006 a retrospective of Providence artists in the exhibition Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the Present was held at the RISD Museum. The exhibition included 1000’s of posters made for events at Fort Thunder and at places like Hilarious Attic and Dirt Palace.

Teratoid Heights, the first collection of Brinkman’s work was published in the summer of 2003 by Highwater Books. A classic of dark and heavy energy, Teratoid Heights is oblivious to the passing of time in its epic, monolithic spirit. New work by Brinkman will be featured in the forthcoming volume of LOYAL Magazine.

LOYAL

Torsgatan 53 & 59

113 37 Stockholm

Sweden

phone +46 (0)8 32 44 91

cell +46 (0)73 322 9289

info@galleriloyal.com

http://www.galleriloyal.com

If I were in Stockholm, I’d go to this, as the saying goes.

Blar

Drew Weing, writer/artist

Little House Comics, 2005

20 pages

$3.25

Buy it from Little House

This minicomic about an adorable barbarian killing machine and his gag-strip adventures reminds me of Roger Langridge’s Fred the Clown stuff in three particulars: 1) The bigfoot-style cartooning is absolutely impeccable (I actually prefer this to Langridge–it’s warmer and humbler, if that makes sense); 2) the humor stems primarily from a human shortcoming (in this case stupidity, in Langridge’s case usually a combination of stupidity and venality) being expressed through comic business; 3) the comic business isn’t funny. Seriously, I’d love to see this character in a far more straightforward action-adventure mode, one that’s as ridiculous as this is and just as chock full of crazy enemies (The Berserker Hordes of Nazroth! The Dread Wizard-King! Mecha-King Gilgator!) but stripped of the shallow pratfall-based punchlines.

Did I mention the cartooning, though? Christ. Actually the book’s most entertaining aspects stem from the art more than the business–the house-sized sword in the final strip is a laugh-out-loud riff on the Berserk school of big-ass-sword-wielding, and that die-cut blood splatter on the front cover is witty and eye-catching (that cover scan doesn’t do it justice at all), and I love that Blar’s arm is almost always extended perpendicular to his body, with his sword perpendicular to his arm. The jokes could be that good too!

Part survival horror, part historical fiction, part training manual for arctic naval expeditions, part Jaws on Ice, Dan Simmons’s The Terror is a peculiar book. The story (though I didn’t know this until after I finished it) is a heavily fictionalized account of the voyage of two real ships from the British Navy, the Erebus and the Terror, to seek the Northwest Passage amid the frozen arctic seas above Canada during the mid-1840s. Bouncing from character to character to present a spectrum of viewpoints, primarily from officers and petty officers, its main narrative thrust is provided by a rigorous accounting of the logistics of such an expedition, and an equally meticulous cataloguing of the myriad paths it takes to disaster: subzero temperatures, treacherous ice, frightening storms and blizzards, food poisoning, scurvy, fire, starvation, murder, and most importantly, alpha predators. I don’t want to tip the book’s hand any more than that, but suffice it to say that the men come to believe–indeed have already come to believe, given the book’s initial in medias res set-up–that a “thing on the ice” is stalking them, with intentions more malevolent than mere predation and abilities more deadly than (literally) the average bear.

The book is very, very long, probably way longer than it needed to be; all those technical terms about ice conditions and parts of the ship and who answers to whom on board eat up page after page. Yet I don’t recall ever feeling bored, or coming to a point where I felt “that right there–that could have been cut.” I couldn’t imagine writing a book stuffed with that much technical detail, let alone making an entertaining genre effort out of it, but Simmons makes it feel so smooth that you hardly notice how stuffed to the gills it is with the fruits of his research, even if you don’t know a serac from a fo’c’sle. But maybe that’s the problem with it: It’s constructed in such a way that every detail seems equally vital, meaning that nothing ultimately is vital. I suppose the slow avalanche of detail is in its way evocative of the day-by-day grind the arctic conditions, natural and otherwise, take on the men and their ships, but compared to something like The Ruins or the Barker and King short stories of which that book is reminiscent, that palpable panicked breakdown momentum is missing; here it’s more a resigned despair. Which is valid, I suppose, but to me less compelling.

Certain elements do stand out against that blinding white background. For one thing, Simmons has a refreshing tendency to zig when you expect him to zag with his characters. A racist stuffed shirt turns out to have risked his career to help abused prisoners; a stereotypical evil homosexual is offset by the introduction of two lovers who are among both the noblest, smartest, and most psychologically complicated members of the crew; a cynical drunk turns out to be a stoic mensch; a squaresville naif delivers the most memorable and cutting rebuff to the book’s bad guys in the whole novel. While the book is never scary in the keep-you-up-at-night sense, the thought of wrestling with the notion that you are most likely going to freeze or starve or rot to death over slow months and years on the ice if you don’t get eaten first can certainly give you something to stew about as you drift off to sleep. And there are memorable horror visuals both operatic (the Carnivale) and insidiously subtle (what the sledge party sees off in the distance throughout their trek). Finally, like those characters, the whole book takes a wild trip off into left field for its final act, something hinted at only slightly by a pair of feints in that direction much earlier on (the first of which, now that I think of it, would have been much better left unrevealed until this final act). To me, this was the book’s best, most unique, and ballsiest section, beating out even the cat-and-mouse suspense of its long-running mutiny subplot. The only problem is that it rather completely undercuts the book’s menace, and that is a very big problem. After all, whether you’re referring to the thing on the ice or the fear of oblivion, you’re talking about the title character here.

This week’s Horror Roundtable is all about assembling directors for the ultimate horror anthology film. Frankly I wouldn’t care what kind of movies my crew made.