* I’ve frequently talked about how much I loved, and love, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe–the prototype for the genre-mashup “art of enthusiasm” I enjoy so much today. El Mayimbe at Latino Review has a lengthy synopsis of a draft screenplay for a new film adaptation of the franchise by Justin “The New David Goyer” Marks. On the one hand, Mayimbe says:

It’s a hard and edgy PG-13 tinkering on [sic] a [sic] R. The script has ZERO CAMP or CHEESINESS. NO FUCKING ORKO EITHER! The writer takes the MOTU mythology very seriously. Whatever made the cartoon corny is not in here at all. In fact, there is not a single beat of comedic relief [sic] in the script.

Which, you know, barf. God forbid we don’t take a franchise that featured a half-skunk half-man named Stinkor seriously!^ However, it’s possible that to translate the awesome-(in the awe-provoking sense)-to-a-five-year-old quality of the original toys and cartoons to a modern blockbuster audience, you have to jump into the madness of it all with both feet; winks and nods toward admitting the original was goofy may just lead to a a watered-down G.I. Joe-style attempt to flatten the weirdness into a conventional action-flick mold. The screenplay sounds fun enough, ripping off Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (right down to an “in ancient times” prologue nominated by a powerful woman from the film’s present) and the superhero-in-training movies of today just as unabashedly as the old He-Man stuff ripped off Heavy Metal and D&D, which is probably as it should be. And the He-Man world’s po-faced mixture of fantasy and science-fiction is apparently a very big deal to Marks. So we’ll see. (Via AICN.)

* A good day for rants, part one: Ken Lowery bemoans Hollywood’s perennial failure to follow up for-women smashes like Sex and the City with more movies for women. Romantic comedies–which my mother calls “sappy crappies”–don’t count.

* Curt Purcell responds to CRwM’s epic series on torture porn, defending the “High Horrorism” of supernatural horror and arguing that fusty Victorian/Edwardian notions of dread actually date back to prehistoric, even primordial times. It’s a great post, though I want to add two things: 1) I don’t think CRwM went nearly as far in the “supernatural horror sucks because it’s too unrealistic” direction as Aaron Weisbrod’s old Dark But Shining essay on that notion, and good on CRwM for that; 2) the comment thread at Curt’s post is the usual roundelay of pro forma, largely baseless responses to the torture porn issue (they suck; they’re just slasher movies but not as cool; the term “torture porn” is insulting to the horror genre) that Curt and CRwM’s posts on the topic have commendably avoided.

* A good day for rants, part two: Look, I’ve got a lot of problems with the superhero movie wave of the past few years, including (heck, especially!) the supposedly good flicks, let alone the real dreck. Even so, I found Chris Nashawaty’s anti-superhero-movie piece at EW to be perhaps the most sloppily researched and argued genre-entertainment thinkpiece it’s been my misfortune to come across in literally years. You truly have to read it to believe it–it’s so bad I don’t even know where to begin.^^ Fortunately I don’t have to: My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity takes a chainsaw to Nashawatay’s strawman arguments, factual distortions, generally abysmal critical judgment, and sucker-punching of Stan Lee. (The Man is a complicated figure in comics history who has a lot of things to answer for; churning out drab, cookie-cutter ideas during his ’60s-era heyday is most certainly not one of them.)

^ Do no fanboys realize that hating Orko, Snarf, the Ewoks, et cetera because they make fucking He-Man, Thundercats, Star Wars, et cetera too silly is ridiculous beyond comprehension? Have they never watched the rest of He-Man, the Thundercats, Star Wars, et cetera?

^^ Okay, that’s not quite true: Anyone who apparently loves Independence Day forfeits their right to complain about X-Men: The Last Stand. Or, really, anything else.

* Horror triumphalism alert! You’ve got to get a kick out of Bloody Digusting’s take on The Strangers‘ $20 million box office success this past weekend:

Un-freakin-believable! This weekend horror took a huge step forward by taking on not only INDIANA JONES IV, but the highly anticipated SEX AND THE CITY in a three way box office battle. Obviously Rogue Pictures’ The Strangers (review) took the number three slot, but to pull in $20 million opening weekend against two giant blockbusters in the middle of summer is such a wonderful sign. Hopefully this will light a fire under Rogue’s ass to greenlight Hack/Slash, which is now near the top of my list as most anticipated horror films in the works. Hurray for horror!

It’s probably churlish to unpack this point by point, but: a) one horror movie doing very well does not mean “horror took a huge step forward”; b) one stylish, upscale-marketed horror film does not make an adaptation of a splatstick comic book whose heroine has posed for Suicide Girls any more likely; c) hooray for horror indeed. At least B-Sol at the Vault of Horror frames the reason to be excited for The Strangers‘ haul purely in box-office terms, citing it alongside Prom Night and presumably The Happening (though oddly omitting Cloverfield or the holiday-season smash I Am Legend) as signs of a strong financial year for the genre. As always I caution against touting the success of films of various origin, style, tone, content, and intent as some sort of victory for Our Beloved Genre.

* LOST SPOILER WARNING: I sadly forgot to link to this last week, but man oh man, is Lost‘s Harold Perrineau angry about how things went down for him on the show. Maybe slightly less so now, but hoo doggy. For what it’s worth, if I were him I’d be angry too; it’s easy to see how Michael could have become a main focal point of the show upon his return, and that not happening would be disappointing for any actor. However, given the horrendous paternal history of virtually every character on the show, his argument that the severing of Michael from Walt reinforces stereotypes about irresponsible black fathers really doesn’t hold any water. I mean, it’s not like Locke, Ben, Jack, Claire, Aaron, Kate, Sawyer, Sun, Alex, Hurley, and Penelope have great male role models either! (Via The Tail Section.)

* Jog reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Speak of the Devil, a book I haven’t read. I bet it’s good.

* Finally, the guy who directed Catwoman is helming some sort of undersea fantasy epic called Mermaid Island, and its promo art looks like this.

Any chance the film will be half as crazy and awesome? Yeah, I doubt it too.

Kramers Ergot 4

Anders Nilsen, David Lasky & Frank M. Young, Renee French, Lauren Weinstein, Marc Bell, John Hankiewicz, Mat Brinkman, Ron Rege Jr, Sammy Harkham, Jim Drain, Ben Jones, Dave Kiersh, C.F., Stepan Gruber, Joe Grillo, Josh Simmons, David Heatley, Souther Salazar, Genevieve Castree, Allison Cole, Leif Goldberg, Tobias Schalken, Jeffrey Brown, Billy & Laura Grant, Jason T. Miles, Kenny, Andrew Brandou, writers/artists

Sammy Harkham, editor

Avodah Books, June 2003

Buy it from Gingko Press

Pre-order a fancy-sounding hardcover re-release from Amazon.com

For me at least it’s difficult to separate Kramers Ergot 4 from how it came into my life. The book made its debut at the first MoCCA festival, joining Craig Thompson’s Blankets in the “big giant powder-blue books that knocked everyone out” sweepstakes; all three events–Kramers, Blankets, and MoCCA itself–turned out to be milestones in my comics-reading life. In terms of Kramers, even for someone weaned on Highwater and NON such as myself, this was heady stuff. I seem to remember there being passionate, even angry debates on my then-stomping grounds of the Comics Journal message board over whether it should have “wasted” pages on non-comics content like collages, and then other debates about whether those non-comics pages are, in fact, comics. It all seems pretty meaningless now–I don’t even remember what side(s) I was on–but I suppose the point is that the book really introduced me to completely non-narrative comics, a strategy I don’t think I’d given much thought to until then. I feel as though in a very real way it introduced comics to non-narrative comics, at least by virtue of becoming the most high-profile and influential release of that nature to date in the then-young decade. If you look at that contributor list and compare it to people’s 2007 Best Of lists, you can probably see the power it had.

In my defense, it is a powerful book. I would say it is in fact a book designed to overwhelm, from the sheer size of the thing to its small-army contributor list to the “yes, but is it art?” nature of so many of its contents. I mean, the textless Mat Brinkman “monsters clash on the Rainbow Bridge” cover is a statement practically begs comparison to the great Hypgnosis album covers for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, even sharing a rainbow with The Dark Side of the Moon. Now that I think of it–and I promise I hadn’t, not even before my initial pass at this review–Dark Side is a great point of comparison in terms of how KE4 functions as a unit rather than as a collection of individual pieces. (There was little question in my mind as to whether I could approach talking about this anthology the same way I’ve done with MOME.)

See, one thing that struck me in giving the book a cover-to-cover read-through (the first time I’d ever done so) is that there are a surprising number of straightforward narrative strips given the book’s outré reputation. There are humor strips (Cole and Jones), autobio/slice of life (Brown), biography (Lasky & Young), underground-type sex’n’violence (Simmons), ruminative mythology-based storytelling of the kind that’s proven so popular (Nilsen), and just plain storytellin’ (Harkham). Even John Hankiewicz’s contribution has a discernible plot. Sure, they’re sprinkled throughout multimedia collages and Fort Thunder joy-of-markmaking exercises and multiple title pages and so on, but they’re there–sort of like how between the cut-up studio banter and looped analog samples and proto-ambient keyboards and psychedelic freak-outs, you can find unindictable masterpieces of rock-single construction like “Time,” “Money,” and “Us and Them” on Dark Side. Similarly, even these more easily graspable bits are, for the most part, pretty challenging in tone and content. Simmons’ contribution had me ready to put the goddamn book away the second he had a character take scissors to a puppy’s eye, Brown’s series of vignettes about dealing with the homeless, dangerous, or mentally ill is the most socially- and self-critical strip he’s ever done all at once, and Harkham and Nilsen’s contributions, “Poor Sailor” and a pair of Sisyphus strips, will no doubt make their creators’ all-time highlight reel. It’s kind of like creating a pop concept album about the pressures of late 20th-century capitalist society driving you insane until you die.

I’m not making this comparison because it’s cute. (I’m certainly not arguing that they sync up together, Wizard of Oz style.) I’m saying that Kramers Ergot 4 is put together the way it is on purpose, for the disorienting, overwhelming effect it has on the reader, how the narrative work lowers your guard for the nonnarrative, how the nonnarrative gooses your synapses and prepares you to focus on things you’re unaccustomed to focusing on in the narrative–how marks are arranged on the page, figures as symbols rather than as characters, design, the emotional impact of the strips rather than the plot-intellectual one. Instead of being a concept album, it’s a concept anthology. Hence the Dark Side comparison: In both cases there’s a sense of sprawl, of a thing you can’t possibly take in on the first pass and must return to and grab bits of meaning here and there, discovering new things each time. In both cases the material rewards repeat visits (I’m not sure I ever even read the Simmons strip before / I only figured out that the guy was saying “I certainly was in the right” a couple months ago). In both cases, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to appreciate them more.

So, Battlestar Galactica. As I’ve mentioned before in passing, this season’s emphasis on the show’s increasingly baroque mythology–both in the literal, religious sense and in the X-Files metaplot sense–has turned me off a bit, in no small part because it’s attracting the same kind of crazed devotion that Lost does from the some of the same Lost fans of my acquaintance who are also driving with that show too. To me the biggest symbol of this is the new opening sequence, which has shifted from laying out the need-to-know details about the Cylon threat to the equivalent of Lost having a thing at the beginning of every Season Four episode asking “Who’s in the coffin?” And duh, I’m obviously not the only person to connect the Final Five with the Oceanic Six.

That being said, I still find it engrossing, suspenseful, and completely unpredictable. And while the overemphasis on the mysticism, mythology, and Starbuck (Vision-Quest Variant) has obscured this somewhat, it’s still frequently moving and profound. There was a time recently when I was very, very down, and suddenly the sinister appeal of Gaius Baltar’s “God loves you because you are perfect” gospel of absolution from personal responsibility became frighteningly clear. Laura Roslin’s terminal illness storyline is as grueling as such storylines get (favorably reminiscent of similar plotlines from The Sopranos and Deadwood). The Final Four Outta Five are fascinating to watch in action. The Cally episode was heartbreaking. And so on and so on.

Which brings us to this past week’s episode, “Sine Qua Non.” I was thrilled to see Apollo and Tom Zarek back in action–the former has obviously been criminally underused this season, particularly considering how his blockbuster conduct at the Baltar trial set him up to become a strange and powerful new moral center for the show. I was thrilled to see a return to the political machinations, the struggle for a traumatized society to overcome turmoil, that had driven the show through its first three seasons. I liked seeing Romo Lampkin, that weird Shakespearean fool of a character, come back. I liked the kitty-cat. I liked the fistfight between Bill Adama and Sol Tigh. (Of course, I like everything about Sol Tigh.) I liked the clue that Sol’s impregnation of the captive Six afforded us as to the fundamental difference between the Final Five and the main Seven–perhaps even the reason the Five were kept secret in the first place. Certain things were sloppy, like Lampkin’s meltdown (though we’ve seen that sort of thing from this show a lot in the past, including Athena’s meltdown in the previous episode), but still, I thought, good stuff overall.

So I was kind of surprised to see how much people hated this episode. My Tori Amos messageboard friends, Jim Henley and his commenters, the House Next Door’s commenters–“worst episode ever” was thrown around quite a bit, and since this series included “Black Market,” that ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. In some quarters, the episode is seen not just as an isolated incident, nor as the hallmark of a lousy season, but as a sign that the entire show has been a complete waste of time.

This made me think: What is the defining characteristic of “the entire show”?

It’s odd, but I’m discovering that I don’t know the show as well as I know other shows I’ve followed this intently. With the exception of something obvious like “Fragged” (an episode cited as successful by Jim), I don’t really remember episode titles or what happened in them. I don’t even remember what came when! Maybe because Battlestar‘s seasons are so much longer than those of the other shows I’ve caught up with at least in part via DVD (The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, and back in the VHS days, Twin Peaks), they tend to blend together? Maybe it’s just harder to track what each season is “about” plotwise, as opposed to The Sopranos‘s villain-of-the-season structure or Lost‘s mystery-of-the-season structure or The Wire‘s urban-blight-of-the-season structure?

But also now that I’m thinking of it, I would say that what I think this show is “about” thematically is harder to pin down than in those other cases. For me, The Sopranos is about how easy it is to be bad and the excuses people will find to do it; Deadwood (which I haven’t finished yet! one episode to go in Season Two is where I’m at) is about the consequences of choosing to do good despite the ease of doing otherwise; Twin Peaks is about the existence, and corrosive influence, of evil; Lost is about how we react to failure; and after watching the pooch-screwing final season of The Wire, I feel like that show is about being an op-ed piece.

What is BSG about? It used to be easy: It’s about the effect of war and atrocity on society. I still think that’s the case, though the Final Five guessing-game and the mysticism dilute it a bit. But last night’s episode (wonky decision-making by the Adamas and the quorum included!) made me think that maybe it’s cohering back into something even grander, and that now it’s about the end stages of this particular human civilization–that they’re all too far gone to make it work anymore. That notion has been cropping up explicitly in dialogue for the past few episodes, I think, and things like Kara’s mutiny-provoking vision quest, Bill Adama’s dereliction of duty, Tigh frakking the Six, Cally’s meltdown, Tory’s journey to the dark side, Baltar starting a religious movement whose message (”God loves us because we are all perfect”) is essentially a total abdication of personal responsibility, Athena getting paranoid and murdering the Cylon leader, Roslin instituting a Bush II-style pseudo-autocratic way of governing, the Quorum adopting a feel-good interim president despite all the obvious conflicts, even Lee giving a dog to a guy who talks to his dead cat–heck, a cynic like Lampkin losing his shit in the first place–it all points to the show depicting a society in its terminal stage. It’s easy to see how it could all be read as sloppiness, but I’m thinking (hoping?) otherwise. And man, won’t it be impressive if that’s where the series goes?

Whenever the topic of Thor comes up, which in my life is often, I say that any and every Thor comic should be at least as cool as Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” or it’s not worth doing.

—Sean T. Collins, March 31

“My Thor is very much a ‘Led Zeppelin III’ kind of Thor….It’s very power metal; lots of power chords, huge riffs and epic colossal guitar noises.”

—Matt Fraction, June 1