Watchmen

Alan Moore, writer

Dave Gibbons, artist

DC Comics, 1987

416 pages

$19.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Like half the nerds in America, I recently re-read this graphic novel, inspired to do so by the trailer for Zack Snyder’s upcoming movie adaptation. I feel much older than I did when I first read the book during my sophomore year in college, and much of what I appreciated about it then fails to impress me now…or perhaps “fails to impress itself upon me” is the better way to put it. Moore’s scripting, for example, seemed wildly sophisticated compared to the house-style comics of the ’90s with which I could then compare it, but comes across shopworn, even hokey to me now. All those panel transitions where what someone is saying in one place is placed in a dramatically/ironically appropriate caption box over something unrelated yet thematically linked in some other place! There’s one groanworthy bit in the Owlcave where Nite Owl says something about a reflection while we’re shown his reflection, and I liked the failed sex scene juxtaposed against the commentary for Ozymandias’s gymnastics routine better when it was Phil Rizzuto doing play-by-play for Meat Loaf in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” I mean, maybe it’s just that I’m sick of the fact that people like J. Michael Straczynski are still doing stuff like this 20-odd years later, maybe it was a total revelation then, but to me, this sort of neat thematic coincidence requires far more suspension of disbelief than just having guys run around in costumes. It feels emotionally artificial, which of course is the problem I tend to have the most with Moore’s rigorously, ostentatiously authored work.

Instead, what strikes me hardest here, what I don’t think I ever thought about all that much before, is how much power the story draws from its uniformly engaging sad-sack main characters. I think it’s here that Dave Gibbons’s contribution is at its most valuable, with his all but countless shots of heroes and do-gooders worrying, frowning, furrowing their brows, being uncertain. It must be noted that this is worlds away from the Identity Crisis-style vogue for angst and selfish over-emoting. All the characters in those “you’ll believe a man can cry”-type supercomics are just as 100% sure of their emotional experience as their relentlessly upbeat Silver Age counterparts used to be. Not so in Watchmen, where the primary mode of emotional interaction with the world is confused dismay. The mileage Moore can get out of this is almost inexhaustible. These aren’t emo Batmen, they’re Tony Sopranos and Seth Bullocks, idiosyncratic and troubling portraits of great physical strength and moral violence juxtaposed against tremendous emotional and psychological weakness. Their failures–and they spend pretty much the whole book failing–are hard to stomach, especially giving the truly impressive air of impending doom Moore creates out of snippets of current-events and vox-pop cutaways; we hope for their success even though the art and the script both do everything they can to show us without coming out and saying it that their failure is inevitable. I’ll tell you, reading the book this time around, when Rorschach takes off his mask at the end and yells “Do it!” at Dr. Manhattan, tears streaming down his face, I nearly started to cry. To me now, it’s almost as devastating as that line “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” and the subsequent reaction shot were 11 years ago.

I noticed a lot more than that this time around, too. For example, everyone remembers the symmetrical Rorschach issue and the Dr. Manhattan flashback/flashforward issue, but the rest of the individual chapters were all quite structurally different from one another as well. Issue #1 is a pretty straightforward superhero whodunnit. Issue #2 does the classic-flashback thing that the creators of Lost borrowed so effectively. Issue #3 is moved along by those transitions I mentioned earlier. The penultimate issue is driven at least as much by the “normal” characters as the superheroes, and the final issue is as straightforward as the first one. It’s a restlessly creative book, uncomfortable with being this thing or that thing exclusively.

It’s also much funnier than I gave it credit for, especially early on, before the final failures. Rorschach, for example, is kind of a scream, constantly making mental notes to investigate whether this or that character is gay or a Communist or having an affair, obliviously wondering why so many superheroes have personality disorders. There’s also the running rivalry between the left-leaning Nova Express and the right-leaning New Frontiersman. I always thought Moore rather stacked the deck against the more or less nakedly racist and anti-Semitic conservative publication, compared to the smooth Rolling Stone-isms of the magazine that (one assumes) more closely aligned with Moore’s own outlook. This time, however, it suddenly jumped out that while their culprits (Russian and Chinese Reds) were off, pretty much everything the New Frontiersman alleged about what was going on in the world was accurate, while Nova Express was literally a bought and paid dupe of crazy old Ozymandias. That’s pretty funny, actually. So is the fact that at least four of the main characters are crazier than shithouse rats and, if one wants to be literal about it, serial killers. And the more I think about the ending, the more convinced I become that it’s perfect as-is and the kvetchers should zip it. I mean, if you stick with the Comedian/sick joke leitmotif, this very serious book about nuclear war, sociopathy, sexual dysfunction, the intractability of human suffering and so on needed a punchline in the worst way; if you run with Ozymandias and slicing the Gordian knot, this rigorously realistic take on superheroes needed an outside-the-box climax; and for either one, how can you top teleporting a brain-squid-thing into a metal concert at Madison Square Garden?

The ending, and the book overall, are more problematic when viewed as a serious hypothetical response to real-world political problems. Moore’s diegetic voice-of-reason when it comes to geopolitics, Dr. Milton Glass’s “Super Powers and the Super-Powers” prose piece, posits a Soviet Union every bit as undeterrable and ultimately suicidal as the current neoconservative conception of Iran; granted, Moore/Glass’s policy prescription for what do do in the face of such an opponent is 180 degrees away from your Podhoretzes and Kagans, but clearly the validity of the underlying viewpoint was not borne out by events. In that light, there’s something faintly ridiculous about watching Ozymandias go through all this trouble to end the Cold War when boring old military expenditures, international negotiations, and internal politics pretty much took care of it here in the real world. Moreover, I can’t be the only person soured enough by recent years on the idea of the ends justifying the means to completely, 100% side with Rorschach’s doomed decision to reveal Ozymandias’s malfeasance to the rest of the world, right? A faint over-willingness to forgive bad shit done in the name of Moore-ish beliefs can be detected in Moore’s work from V for Vendetta to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and while it’s perhaps fainter here than ever, it’s there, and to the extent that it is there it rankles.

But that’s fine. Great art should encompass enough ideas that you can find at least one that makes you a little uncomfortable. And Watchmen encompasses tons and tons and tons of ideas–the clockwork clues, the extensive Tolkien-style barely-glimpsed backstories, the alternate history, the intricate panel layouts, the emotional texturing, the Charlton riffery, and everything else I just ran down. It’s simply full of ideas, which makes it rich and exciting and thrilling and fun. It’s not someone’s movie pitch or someone’s attempt to write comics like a summer blockbuster, or like anything else, for that matter. It’s a great comic book.

I’ve probably listened to this song 40 or 50 times over the past few days.

When I graduated college and started working in Manhattan, electroclash was pretty big, and I loved it because around that time David Bowie had really softened me up both for the post-punk/New Wave heirs to his sound specifically and theatricality and “posing” generally. I still love it and don’t go in for the backlash, because to me it was never about a scene, it was about sounds and ideas, but one criticism I did take to heart was from someone who said that the electroclash people missed the BIGNESS of early ’80s electronic pop music, particularly in terms of the vocals. I’d take that a step further and say that the big vocals wouldn’t work in electroclash because of the ironic distance that material took from the ’80s originals. Which is fine, but what you lacked is the cavernous, glistening, unabashed emotion of great ’80s pop music. There was no distance–these people were putting it all on the line all the time, investing this enormous sense of drama into pop songs that you really didn’t see with the quiet earnestness of ’70s acoustically driven pop music. It’s impossible for me to listen to songs like “Let Me Go” or “Smalltown Boy” or “West End Girls” or “Head Over Heels” without picturing some actual young human being someplace during that decade listening to these songs, feeling every note and every word, crying or swooning about what’s going on in their own lives and how it’s reflected in the music.

So anyway, that’s what I get from this song, too. Afternoon light and good memories that hit so hard they make you want to vomit, like the past is tangible and its intrusion is disorienting you. I wish the video didn’t stick quotes around the sentiment, but the beginning and end of the clip get it to a certain extent, I think. It almost doesn’t matter because you’ll see your own video in your head. It’s a good song.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4

Michael Kupperman, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

32 pages

$4.50

Buy it from Fantagraphics

If God didn’t hate us all, we’d live in a world where there’d be some way for Michael Kupperman, Johnny Ryan, and Matt Furie to do a world tour in every way the humor comics equivalent of that Guns n’ Roses/Metallica/Faith No More tour my parents wouldn’t let me go to back in ’91–selling out stadiums, inspiring bootleg T-shirts sold in parking lots filled with drunk drivers, and causing riots when Ryan gets in a fistfight with Stephanie Seymour and blows off a show in Toronto out of frustration. But here we are, and the best we can do is get a new issue of Tales Designed to Thrizzle and laugh ourselves stupid.

I think the key to Kupperman’s humor, aside from the mechanical precision of his artwork (watching him contribute to my Bowie sketchbook was fairly astonishing in how painstaking the process was), is how his jokes don’t so much wander as trail off into platonic simplicity. My guess is that his non sequitur structuring puts a lot of people in mind of Monty Python, but Python tended to go from one full-fledged idea into another, even if that other was totally random and disconnected from the original. Kupperman, by contrast, kind of whittles away at his opening gambits until they reveal purer and purer strands of nonsense. The best example here is a parody of an old educational filmstrip about harbors–the set-up goes after how boring filmstrips are, the first set of gags riffs on the kinds of information presented in filmstrips through exaggeration, the second set spoofs the Statue of Liberty through absurdity, the third set entails physical impossibilities, and by the end he’s just repeating the word “Harbors!” over and over and over eight times in a row. It’s a can-you-top-this game pitting Kupperman against logic in a battle to the death. Kupperman wins.

That incredibly boring explanation of comedy will hopefully not discourage you from buying a comic that features…

* Indian Spirit Chewing Gum – Haunted with Dead Indian Flavor (“The tribes of my people used to cover the land, as numberless as the buffalo. Now we are dead and inside your sticks of chewing gum.” – Big Chief Running Commentary)

* Loose-cannon TV-show cops Mark Twain and Albert Einstein (Twain: “Sometimes I get fed up with these Fourth-Amendment punks and their ‘rights’!” Einstein: “Scum disgusts me”)

* N’Sync in “Pirate Scum Are We” (“Pirate scum are we / Sailing o’er the sea / We’ll die with our mates / For pieces of eight / Baby I love youuu…”)

* Pottie’s – For the best of today’s toilet comedians (“Don’t you hate it when it won’t go down?” – Larry Ronco, February 11th)

* “Hell Is for Monkees” (“‘Buried alive!’ Mike Nesmith whispered softly. The words had a terrible finality.”)

I don’t know what it is about actually funny humor comics that turns me into such a bald-faced salesman, but for real, I urge you to purchase this comic book.

* I’ve got one last Comic-Con piece up at CBR, an interview with writer Brian Reed on the upcoming video game Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.

* Everyone’s linking to Tom Spurgeon’s review of Runes of Ragnan, but only because it really deserves to be linked to by everyone.

* The end is not the end: Edward James Olmos will be directing a two-hour Battlestar Galactica movie about the Cylons’ doings in the immediate aftermath of their apocalyptic attack on the Colonies, to air after the series finale. (Via AICN.)

* AMC is developing a series based on Francis Ford Coppola’s comparatively forgotten ’70s masterpiece, The Conversation. I hope it will air, but I have a feeling they’d kill it if they had the chance. (Also via AICN.)

* Whoa, one of the people Viggo Mortensen will be running into on The Road is Omar Little?

Full gallery and little article at USA Today. It looks good. (Via Dread Central.)

* Matt Maxwell notes that in moving to San Francisco, the X-Men franchise isn’t really saying anything it hasn’t said before. The funny thing is that I think it’s saying even less than it used to. When House of M got rid of all the everyday run-of-the-mill mutants, leaving us pretty much just with the ones who fight each other for a living, I remember Joe Quesada saying he did this because the existence of millions of mutants took us away from the concept’s central persecuted-minority metaphor. This, of course, only makes sense if there are just 198 gay people or black people or Jewish people or geeks in the world. One of the many great things about Grant Morrison’s New X-Men was that the book was finally acknowledging the way minority culture could quickly become majority culture, and how maligned subcultures can indeed force the world at large to chance. Now, instead of having a franchise mapped to the explosive rise of hip-hop culture or the increasing prominence of homosexuals, there’s a couple hundred of them cowering in San Francisco.

* Douglas Wolk is back with annotations for the crackerjack Final Crisis #3.

* Writing for Topless Robot, Patrick Cooper runs down The 8 Worst Things in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I think you could probably do eighty before needing to rope in the really pretty rad Ewok TV movies. (The Gorax, yo!) A strict swap with Prince Xizor would be acceptable.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM catches a New York Times piece on a faux-Coney Island attraction called the Waterboard Thrill Ride, actually an art installation highlighting the banal awfulness of our Guantanamo Bay torture regime. Step right up.

* If you liked what I had to say about post-Comic-Con second-guessing, you’ll also like what Matt Maxwell says about it.

* No sooner does the Clive Barker Books of Blood adaptation Midnight Meat Train get buried than the viral marketing campaign for the Clive Barker Books of Blood adaptation Dread kicks off.

* Will I go see McG’s crappy new Terminator movie just because Christian Bale and Helena Bonham Carter are in it? Maybe.

* Jon Hastings rambles about various Crisis and Grant Morrison comics. I mean “ramble” in the best way.

* Do you think he’ll condescend to his paycheck, too?

* John Scalzi’s take on the discovery of 125,000 western lowland gorillas lines up pretty neatly with my own.

* Paul Pope posted a new cover for Heavy Liquid, but it’s gone now. Details about the new edition are still there, though.

* Sammy Harkham has unveiled the cover for Kramers Ergot 7, a bargain at any price.

* Kevin Huizenga has unveiled the cover for Or Else #5. Ditto.

* As happy as I’ll be when disco is officially reclaimed as cool (and we’re already well on our way), I’m also going to be grumpy about it, because the pleasure of reading the liner notes to a Barry White best-of collection in 1997 and suddenly “getting” the genre and loving it for years all on my lonesome is undeniable.

Boy’s Club 2

Matt Furie, writer/artist

Buenaventura Press, July 2008

40 pages

$4.95

Buy it from Buenaventura at some point

Goddammit this is a funny comic book. In the time it took me to pick it up from one corner of Buenaventura Press’s table at the San Diego Comic-Con and walk it over to the end where I could pay for it, I honestly think I’d laughed out loud four times, and we’re talking maybe six feet total. As gleefully stupid as Bluto Blutarsky yelling “Food fight!” or Ogre Palowakski yelling “Nerds!” or Matthew McConaghey’s line in “Dazed & Confused” about high school girls, it’s a pitch-perfect encapsulation of college-age male idiocy. Furie’s quartet of monster dudes run roughshod over decorum like the Four Horseman of Rad Dumbness: Andy’s the prankster, Brett’s the dancin’ fool, Pepe’s the chowhound, and Landwolf’s the party animal. Into their mouths Furie stuffs the catchphrase detritus of a million public service campaigns, Oxy commercials, and NBC sitcoms: “Let’s do this,” “fierce,” “awkward,” “any questions?”, “that’s what I’m talkin’ about,” and my favorite one-two punch of the book, “and I care because?…” and “that would be a yes.” Gags about sharts, peeing with your pants pulled down, and crawling hungover into a shower with your socks still on are all too real, and really just funny as shit. I like it even better than the first issue. Everyone who ever laughed at a Judd Apatow or National Lampoon movie needs to be issued this comic in the mail, courtesy of Uncle Sam. It’s go time!

Well, I liked it. It was cute that since none of the actors had read the book before being cast in the movie, they work overtime to impress upon the fans just how seriously and reverently they’re treating it now that they have read it. Actually, Patrick Wilson said some interesting things about how working with a comic as source material enables you to physically see the authors’ vision of a character’s physicality in a way that normal scripts or book adaptations can’t, which gave him more insight into what Dan Dreiberg’s personality is really like. Matthew Goode, who I liked a lot as the cuckold in Match Point (spoiler alert! a cuckold in a Woody Allen movie!), was silent until moderator and crazed Lost theorizer/time-waster Jeff Jensen specifically turned to him, and then he let loose this five-minute monologue about finding Ozymandias’s accent that was pretty much your dream of what talking to an English actor would be like–at varying times he did the accents of an American good ol’ boy and a mincing British homo-secks-sewell, and he cursed up a blue streak. People were just sort of ambiently laughing out loud by the end of it. Crudup was consistently funny too.

Snyder is not his own greatest spokesman but I think he handled things pretty well. It was interesting to hear him say in person something I’ve heard other people mention he’s said, which was that he deliberately made the Dark Knight-attached trailer a creature of the modern superhero genre, song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and all, as a sort of commentary.

I liked the footage, but then, I like Snyder in general. Still, some of my friends who were skeptical about the original trailer liked this a lot better. It was basically a trailer on steroids–no dialogue, just a lot of snippets and images edited together. So you couldn’t get a sense of whether it was going to be acted like Sarah Polley in Dawn of the Dead or Gerard Butler in 300, but you did get a look at all the characters in costume and in action, sets and locales and scenes from across the breadth of the story. They all looked good, inhabited and intimidating. Tons of slow motion, as is his perhaps regrettable wont. When Dr. Manhattan blows people up they explode in showers of gore. As I think I mentioned, watching him and the Comedian run amok in Vietnam is going to get a lot of the politically based critics of 300 and Dawn of the Dead gunning for this movie too.

Maybe the best part, though, were the audience questioners, who were like a parade of High Comic-Con Ridiculousness. The second guy was dressed as Batman, the third like a refugee from the “Sabotage” video, there was a Rorschach, and there was a pair of identical twins who finished each other’s sentences and even had a stock comeback for when Snyder jokingly asked if they were related (“we’re roommates!”). The funny thing is that the room is so big that you had no idea who was up next until their faces/masks showed up on the jumbotrons. Best of all, except for this one douche in a Strangers in Paradise t-shirt who was way too impressed with himself for making crude innuendo about Carla Gugino’s breasts, all of them just got up, did their thing, and split without trying to hog the spotlight.

Someday I’m going to have to sit down with someone who was there and have them explain to me the precise pop-cultural-historical moment during which it became feasible for a man and his band to dress up like Revolutionary War pirate Scarlet Pimpernels and sing glam-rock songs about the value of being handsome and thereby become massively popular. I do not understand this moment but wish it were eternal.

I read with interest Graeme McMillan’s piece on San Diego’s Comic-Con International for the sci-fi site io9, as linked to enthusiastically by Heidi MacDonald and questioningly by Tom Spurgeon. Graeme’s good people and an old comics blogging hand, but the experience he describes was so different than my own that I all but wondered if we’d attended the same show.

The thrust of Graeme’s piece, which to be fair is mostly asserted through other people’s quotes, is that it was so hard for the press to cover this year’s show that something is clearly wrong with it–that the show has finally “lived up to the complaints” of being too Hollywood, too big, too crowded. Retail giant Chuck Rozanski says “the show is about to lose its crown as the top comics show in America,” a commenter at Heidi’s blog says “CCI does need to get its act together,” Heidi herself argues that the show is primarily for press and marketing at this point, a guy from some SciFi Channel show that isn’t Battlestar Galactica (or Ghost Hunters) says it can take fifteen, perhaps as much as twenty minutes to get into a party, and so on.

I heard plenty of press complaints about press passes not doing much and noted this in my show report; even then, fresh from the show, I was chalking up at least 50% of this to press narcissism. Now I’m leaning even further in that direction, because it seems to me that many of the complaints we’re hearing and seeing stem from people wanting to do what is no more or less than a job on more or less entirely their own terms, which strikes me as unreasonable.

This was the first show I’ve “worked,” and in order to do that properly I voluntarily made sacrifices. I did less socializing, both during and after show hours. I went to fewer “wish-list” panels, things I wanted but didn’t need to attend. I did less eating–regrettable, and I don’t recommend it, but I managed. I saved time that could have been spent schlepping to the press room or back to the hotel boat by simly popping a squat on the floor next to an outlet someplace in the Convention Center and filing half a dozen stories that way. I got to my assigned panels and events in advance, and had at least three other people scope out my main wish-list panel (Watchmen) so that I could combine working and waiting in the most efficient way possible. (I even filed a story while sitting in Hall H waiting for the presentation to start.)

And I was but a cog in the massive machine that was Comic Book Resources’ presence at the show. CBR honcho Jonah Weiland treated the thing like a small military operation, with a staff of about two dozen people; redundancies and failsafes in terms of panel coverage, personnel, and equipment; rigorously planned schedules and deadlines; prioritization of panels and events; a swing-man (me) to pick up things that fell through the cracks and chase news; off-site reporters and editorial support staff, etc. Lo and behold, he’s posted around 175 stories, plus however many blog entries and liveblog entries, with what has to be another 50 or so stories backlogged, and his traffic has now surpassed his main competitor’s.

In other words, both myself on a micro level and Jonah on a macro level made choices we deemed necessary to properly cover the Con. Had I instead attended the biggest pop-culture convention in North America–with an attendance level of 125,000 including over 3,000 members of the press–with the expectation of waltzing in and out and around more or less as I pleased, going to everything I felt like going to, filing coverage at the time, place, pace, and level of my choosing, having a full dance card of social events every night and at mealtimes, and planning to cover 400 official programming hours plus however many exhibitors and guests and unofficial tie-ins and parties and whatnot with a skeleton crew, I would undoubtedly be complaining now too.

Moreover, I did what I did with the help of CCI’s accessible and accurate panel and event schedule and floor map, and while repeatedly conducting 15-20 minute phone conversations with the organization’s spokesman, who literally every time we talked apologized for not being even more accessible. Could the Con have had a better advertised, better located, and (from what I hear) better appointed press room? Sure. Did the lack of one, or any other CCI-based snafu, affect my ability to cover the show at all? No. As much fun as it would have been to relive my salad days of flying in on the corporate account, living it up in my in-room Jacuzzi, cruising from booth to booth and panel to panel on a whim, and gallivanting around the city while half in the bag, I had to do things differently to get my job done this time around, and that’s fine. I don’t expect the CCI organization, or almost any organization that isn’t an all-inclusive vacation resort, to simply hand me my ideal experience, particularly when that ideal is an increasingly unrealistic one.

Meanwhile, I don’t know how you look at a show that had spotlight panels for Jim Woodring and Lynda Barry, a show where Drawn & Quarterly and Buenaventura Press made a good go of things, a show where a 22-year-old superhero comic AND an anthology based on the songs of the woman who sang “Silent All These Years” AND new work by the most important pure-comics/altcomix practitioners ever completely sold out, and kvetch that it’s in danger of losing its comics bona-fides.

Nor do I see why parties being too crowded is a problem for anyone other than the people hosting those parties and you, the person trying to get in.

Nor do I see any line of demarcation between shows and movies and swag that really have nothing to do with comics of old–like Lost, which during the year it premiered at San Diego had zero comics connections and was relying solely on the nerd-cred of J.J. Abrams and Dominic Monaghan; or the Lord of the Rings movies or gaming, because no matter how many adaptations or tie-ins there have been, these things were there in and of themselves not because of some tangential, tendentious relationship to comics–and the shows and movies and swag that really have nothing to do with comics of today–like The Office or Harold and Kumar, which have at least as much nerd appeal as Wanted if my friends are any indication. Once that door’s open, open it wide, I say!

Nor do I think we should even be talking about the comparatively minor issue of the CCI press-pass situation when there’s a far more pressing issue regarding the other 122,000 attendees: the sell-outs, and whether the need to be aware enough of the show to buy your tickets weeks or months in advance keeps out the kind of impulse/casual/mainstream attendee who in theory at least represent the future health of this art form.

When it comes down to it I love going to the San Diego Comic-Con; working or not, there’s nothing else like it. And I have to admit I find it distasteful to watch paid media professionals insinuate that the most egalitarian, something-for-everynerd art-to-fans showcase in the country undergo a radical restructuring because there’s a lot of stuff going on they’re not interested in or that doesn’t flatter their personal conception of what the Con is for–or worse, saying the whole affair has jumped the shark because they had a hard time getting into panels they just kinda thought it would be neat to see, and then maybe if they felt like it blog a bit about how cute Matthew Goode/Carla Gugino looked afterwards. I’m by no means saying that’s the full extent of the complaints, or whether there are other complaints that are much more valid, but this is mostly the read I’m getting based on what I know to have been possible in terms of press coverage of this show, and I am very uncomfortable with slamming the Con based on a wholly imaginary alternative.

Love and Rockets: New Stories #1
Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, writer/artists
Mario Hernandez, writer
Fantagraphics, July 2008
100 pages
$14.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

This handsome new book-sized version of Los Bros’ hallowed series continues both Fantagraphics’ TPB hot streak – Mome and the Love & Rockets digests are also doozies of an argument for this format – and the Brothers’ almost absurd mastery of the art form.

Jaime’s contribution is your proverbial superhero epic, in which Maggie’s friend Angel joins forces with several different teams of female superheroes to help subdue Penny Century, who’s gone and pulled a Parallax (nerd points!) after her fulfilling her long-standing dream of gaining super-powers proves disastrous. It’s fun to see Jaime shift this seamlessly back into the sort of revisionist-genre storytelling he practiced in L&R‘s earliest issues. The trick to it is delivering everything you want in a superhero story – action, suspense, tight costumes – while maintaining his characters’ neuroses and having the events of the tale spring directly from them just like they would in a normal “Locas” story. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but he’s pretty okay at drawing women, spotting blacks, and pacing panel transitions. I know, I hope you were sitting down.

For me, though, it’s Gilbert who’s killing the game here. Sandwiched between his brothers’ two superhero installments, Gilbert’s comics are mostly short, largely abstract, and completely devastating. Two subtly interlocking strips set in completely different milieux , “Papa” and “Victory Dance,” muse on love and restlessness, using disease and solitary travel to nail that feeling of wanting to drop it all and go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s somewhere else. Another strip flips this idea around, recasting Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as jovial space barbarians who slaughter their way back together across a hostile world after their duo has been forcibly disbanded by aliens. Both “Victory Dance” and “?” showcase Beto’s skill at “choreographing” the images in each panel into a rhythm, the former literally through depiction of a dance, the latter with Woodring-esque surrealism. “Never Say Never” is also on the surreal side, invoking Freud and Dali with slightly blue gags about sex and money among funny animals. “Chiro El Indio,” written by Mario, reads like an out-of-continuity “Palomar” excerpt. “The Funny Papers” serves up three newspaper-size strips, any one of which would be the best strip I read all year. This is a guy who makes you want to push away from your table and give up.

Here’s my post-game interview with CCI spokesman David Glanzer.

And here’s a piece I did on the new video game Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion.

* Because I am now an old man, I pussied out on the midnight screening of Ryuhei Kitamura’s Clive Barker adaptation Midnight Meat Train during Comic-Con. Obviously this was a huge mistake, because Lionsgate is finishing off its thorough rogering of this film with the donkey punch of releasing it only in dollar theaters. This way they can keep within the letter of their agreement to release the movie theatrically while being maximally insulting to filmmakers and filmgoers alike. I’ll tell you, I am privy to some behind-the-scenes gossip about the goings-on at Lionsgate under its new-ish boss Joe Drake, and the joint sounds like an absolute nightmare. This is just ugly no matter how you slice it.

* Over at Tom Spurgeon’s joint, I’m part of a roundtable on comics publisher IDW’s kinda sorta decision to stop going to the San Diego Comic-Con.

* Heidi MacDonald posts her even-tempered post-Con wrap-up. She directly addresses how the show’s egalitarianism is frequently its own biggest problem, while admirably avoiding advocating policies that would reward her comparatively privileged place in the hierarchy. She does call for a press day, though, something I’ve now heard from a couple of disparate quarters. (As I mentioned in my report, I just can’t imagine how that makes financial sense for retailers and publishers who retail, but I guess it’s a thing that is done at some shows.)

* Does the fact that Ronald Reagan did not, in fact, ignite a nuclear holocaust adversely affect art made with the underlying assumption that this was a real possibility, like Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen? Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts.

* I thought Rob Humanick’s piece on The Dark Knight is different from most such reviews in what it emphasizes and how much weight it places on it.

* Top Shelf 2.0 editor and swell guy Leigh Walton bemoans the upcoming Garfield Minus Garfield book because of how it attributes authorship for a meme (to someone who came late to it, to boot).

* Jon Hastings takes a look at how Grant Morrison “rescued” DC’s Silver Age from its Bronze and Modern Age contradictions.

* Finally, Bai Ling explains [sic] the time she asked to meet the Burger King.

Scott Pilgrim Full-Colour Odds & Ends 2008

Bryan Lee O’Malley, writer/artist

Oni, July 2008

32 pages

I forget what I paid for it

Buy it at the Oni Press table at a convention

There’s really no reason a Scott Pilgrim fan shouldn’t get this. Colorful, fun, and well designed, it’s like a Scott Pilgrim T-shirt in comic book form. It consists of various (mostly) color SP comics, pin-ups, promotional pieces, and assorted ephemera–a good place to track down things like the Free Comic Book Day prequel to Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, that awesome Super Mario Bros. 3 ad pastiche, the Kim Pine comic strip, and (reproduced at too small a size for my pervy tastes, to be perfectly frank) sexy colored sketches of Ramona and Kim in their bathing suits. O’Malley’s snappy dialogue and “video-game realism” are as on as ever, his paint palette is surprisingly gentle rather than poppy, and you know what? I’ve heard enough people say that SP Vol. 1 isn’t the greatest introduction to the series (which has gotten funnier, more ambitious, more insightful, and more delightfully complicated as it’s gone on) that I wonder if this colorful, less expensive, more immediately appealing book isn’t a better one. I recommend someone give it a try.