* Mind-melting stuff in Bookslut’s interview with the great cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner regarding her contribution to Mia Kirshner’s project I Live Here. I’m just quoting it at length.
Well. A few weeks before I left for Mexico, I was hired to illustrate a book called The Many Joys of Sex Toys (by Anne Semans). I remember receiving a stack of documents from Amnesty Int’l about the murders of girls in Juárez the day I was beginning an illustration to accompany a chapter about “rectal plugs”—what they are and ways to use them. The text described preparing one’s body to accept larger “plugs” by beginning with the smallest available—they are available in sets of varying dimensions. Some people would insert them for the day, even carrying them inside the rectum while at work—an exercise for the anal sphincter muscle.
Anyway, my assignment was to make this and other practices easily understandable and to help remove any attached taboo with clear and warm, friendly drawings—to make people feel comfortable with a variety of sexual practices they may or may not have previously considered or tried.
The Amnesty documents described the forced anal intercourse and concurrent strangulation of victims. They described the insertion, per anum, of splintered, broken lengths of wood. One victim was impaled in this manner and apparently was left to slowly bleed to death.
I suppose it’s hard to describe the revulsion I felt after going to Mexico and then returning, two weeks later, to finish the sex book.
I really can’t speak highly enough of Phoebe Gloeckner’s work in A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl. I know there are some people who read this blog and actually heed my recommendations–I recommend those books as hard as than anything else I’ve ever recommended around here, I think. Shit, you can borrow them.
* It’s all official and stuff: Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle will be playing Tony Stark and James Rhodes in Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, while Jon Favreau is directing the Iron Man sequel and executive producing the big superhero team-up. I hope War Machine joins the Avengers, or gets his own movie based on Chuck Austen’s U.S. War Machine, complete with nudity and genocide and Dr. Doom. Meanwhile, IM2‘s action scenes will feature input from Genndy Tartakovsky. Haha, the dude from Swingers is like “get me the Samurai Jack guy!” and the giant corporations are like “sir yes sir!”
* Remember Nate Fisher, the teacher who lost his job over giving a ninth grader a copy of Eightball #22? He’s teaching again, thank goodness.
* Pascal Laugier supposedly will direct the Hellraiser remake, but given that this is a Clive Barker project and a horror movie in which the Weinsteins are involved, I wouldn’t bet money on it.
* PictureBox has an auction blog. This Dave Gibbons Watchmen cover portfolio and this Chris Ware McSweeney’s cover aren’t bad places to start.
* Bryan Alexander and his commenters have more on the World of Warcraft zombie plague, which appears to have emerged, as no doubt the homeland security threats of the future will emerge, from unguarded ports.
* I see as much Cenobite as Saw in the fashion of Kei Kagami, but then, I would, wouldn’t I.
Sean, you totally fucking killed me with that Swingers/Samurai Jack comment.
Also, if there’s one human being on the planet who would start eating at Denny’s only for the Sean T. Sandwich, it would be Dave.