* I saw Iron Man and Speed Racer and then I reviewed them both!
* My friend David Paggi, one of the people at Wizard who does know who the other two guys are but alas was not in a position to stop one of the ones who doesn’t, interviews Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds about the company’s transition to Diamond as their direct market distributor.
* Kristin Thompson reads some tea leaves to determine that the Hobbit movies will be written by Lord of the Rings masterminds Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (though she doesn’t mention their cowriter, Philipa Boyens).
* A trio of The House Next Door’s critics–Keith Uhlich, The Odienator, and Matthew Zoller Seitz (hopefully reports of his retirement from criticism have been greatly exaggerated!)–take on the original Indiana Jones trilogy. For my money Uhlich overwrites his piece on Last Crusade into incoherence, but Seitz is predictably compelling on the “Anything Goes” nature of Temple of Doom while Odienator nails the everything-in-its-right-place narrative economy of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
* The great young cartoonist Kevin Huizenga announces sales for several of his comics and some of his original art.
* My friend Jesse Thompson runs down the 10 Worst Album Covers by Comic Artists at Topless Robot. I think the Meat Loaf one’s worth every penny of that 45 large, actually.
* Comics wonk and commentator for hire Douglas Wolk compares the Barack Obama of those crazy email forwards your vaguely racist relatives send you to the evil mirror-image denizens of Earth-3. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
* Tom Spurgeon reviews Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns et al’s DC Universe #0, a comic which I liked but which to no one’s surprise Tom hated. I do see what he’s getting at, though. Also, I appear to have forgotten the meaning of the word “insouciance.”
* Also on the Spurge beat, I’ve been very grumpy lately so I liked this paragraph from Tom’s post on the dire financial straits of ailing artist Gene Colan and what that portends for the industry given its history:
Comics operates under the shadow of an original sin of exploitation where caretakers and money men cash in from obliquely “managing” a property during a single quarter for greater reward than the original creator and their family might see in a lifetime. It’s an industry where elements of this kind of practice continue in the present day through, say, brutally unfair secondary rights clauses in standard contracts and no one want to talk about it because it’s unpleasant and violates some seemingly agreed-upon right that every creator must be allowed to sign a bad contract if they want or don’t know better or can talk themselves into it being for the greater good. It’s a business where some of its most devout patrons can recast what should be simple matters of creators rights and economic justice into issues of dishonor and greed based on the concern of whether or not their corporate branded fantasy fix will continue without interruption. All of this is supported by a culture of indulgence, and denial, and status based on establishing a life for oneself behind the “staff only” door without ever asking the question of whether or not that’s a life worth leading.
* But so as not to leave you on a down note, this comment from Whitney Matheson’s weekly “Best of the Lost comment thread” post put a smile on my nerdy face:
Remember in the Nikki & Paolo episode when in her flashback she was an actress in a television show and was told that they were going to reveal a major villain at the end of her show’s fourth season? It’s the end of Lost‘s fourth season.