* And the bald shall inherit the earth: ICv2 has released its November sales chart for the direct market. Of particular note is how Brian Bendis and his “give the people what they want” take on event comics, Secret Invasion, took the top slot and five of the top 10, while smug Scottish middlebrow mediocrity Grant Morrison and his utterly incomprehensible abject failure of a fan-rejected event comic, Final Crisis, plummeted all the way to #2 on the charts and took a paltry, embarrassing three of the top 10. Your revolution is over, Mr. Morrison! Condolences! The bums lost!
* Speaking of Final Crisis, the reactions keep rolling in. Tim O’Neil reveals just how angry this comic book made him, which quite frankly is way more angry than any comic that isn’t some vile piece of filth, some hideously racist or sexist or homophobic horrorshow, should make anyone. I think there are any number of factual errors and unsupported business and critical assumptions in there, to say nothing of the hyperbolic mischaracterizations of other people’s viewpoints and the admitted ad hominems directed against them. Moreover, the main, underlying argument seems simply to be a particularly vehement and event-comic-specific expression of “you got chocolate in my peanut butter,” which as I’ve said before strikes me as odd in this particular case. But the main thing I take away is that it can’t possibly be healthy to get that worked up about a comic book, or a comic book creator’s interviews, or comic book readers’ comments, not when they’re not doing anything actively evil. It certainly doesn’t lead to Tim’s finest hour as a writer, as an overabundance of elaborate fecal analogies, snarky “you know”s, and the rather pot-kettle concluding demand that Grant Morrison “grow the fuck up” would indicate. It’s not just my feelings about Final Crisis that make me skeptical about this approach, mind you–I’ve said for a long time that commentators whose primary mode of interaction with art is based on rage don’t do it for me.
* Also on the FC beat, Tucker Stone be-bops and scats all over the thing. Honestly there’s a little too much be-bopping and scatting for my taste, but then I don’t get these crazy kids and their rock and roll. My main problem with it is that it obscures his actual point, which I believe is that FC had its ups and downs but it’s ultimately pretty neat that Morrison did it his way. It’s interesting how Tucker seems to come away from the comic sharing many of the reservations that Tim does, but taking the exact opposite positions–Morrison doesn’t have contempt for his audience, he has faith in them; there’s merit to experimentation regardless of whether it leads to an Ang Lee Hulk situation from a business perspective–than the ones Tim ends up taking. Tucker’s takes on recent issues of Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man (of which he is a vocal and frequent proponent) and Ed Brubaker’s Captain America and Daredevil are also worth a read, provided you’re okay with him working blue.
* ICv2 reports that the Christopher Handley case has been postponed until late March. Handley has been hit with child-pornography charges rooted in his possession of manga. I’ve discovered continued support among some relatively prominent online comics commentators for the notion that unpleasant speech does not deserve protection; some of that support is so extreme that it seems tailor-made to demonstrate the slippery slope argument in action. This attitude is disturbing and both legally and morally wrong. Support the CBLDF.
* One aspect of the story that Reed is setting up a Chicago comics convention to compete with, and possibly supplant, Wizard World Chicago that I haven’t seen noted by anyone but Heidi MacDonald is that Reed’s concomitant move of the New York Comic Con to early October starting next year will move the NYC show into closer competition with altcomix shows like SPX and APE. However, given the really embarrassing lack of an alternative and literary comics presence in the programming and exhibitor list for NYCC–a show based in New York freaking City!–I’m not all that worried. If anything, this may simply guarantee that alt/lit publishers avoid NYCC permanently.
* Speaking of Wizard, sorta: Back when I was still with the company and me and the other guys there who like alternative comics got a booth at MoCCA 2007, a few of ’em chatted with Tim Leong of Comic Foundry, who told them that he liked us and liked a lot of stuff we did but kept bashing us because it got him attention. I found that level of open, unabashed duplicity oddly refreshing, so in that sense it’s nice to see that he stuck with it till the bitter end.
* Here’s a Seattle Post Intelligencer article on my old pal Davey Oil (the other half of my oft-told Blair Witch Project origin story!) and his comics/performance-art project, the Slide Rule Comic Strip Slideshow Players.
* Josiah Leighton, who I am happy to report will be attending the New York Comic Con with me this weekend, does his thing with Nicolas De Crécy’s Foligatto.
* I really enjoyed the latest Five for Friday over at Tom Spurgeon’s, because it reminds you just how much we’re losing as the alternative comic book dies off. And I say that as a big proponent of book-format comics and a pretty big skeptic of the pamphlet format, mind you.
* Speaking of Spurge, his review of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible/Astounding Wolfman crossover offers a pretty interesting take on the core idea behind Invincible, the character’s equivalent of “With great power comes great responsibility.” For my part, I’ve always felt that the book’s success stemmed from a great deal of initial pep, slowly giving way to a meticulously planned roll-out of long-term storylines. That and Bill Crabtree’s coloring.
* Holy God these images from an upcoming Kyle Baker Hawkman project look amazing.
By all means, Mr. Baker, do indeed draw everything like this from now on. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* Curt Purcell does a one-man Manly Movie Mamajama by way of Super Bowl counterprogramming. The initial results of his back-to-back first viewings of Point Blank and Get Carter made me giggle.
* Whitney Matheson’s Best of the Lost Comments post this week is as much of a treasure trove of “why didn’t I think of that?” as ever.
* There is no possible answer on any possible Earth to the question “Whatever happened to Bill Jemas?” that could ever be better than this one. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)
* Seeing David Lynch starring in a short film called The Soul Detective now, I feel as though my stomach is filled with a team of bumblebees.
* Looks like They are still planning on remaking The Birds.
* Bruce Baugh serves up some WoW-blogging odds ‘n’ sods, including an image of a gigantic sea turtle that’s right in my water-monster/immensity wheelhouse. (And don’t worry, Bruce, I’ve got the patience of a saint.)
* Hilzoy and Glenn Greenwald, two commentators who to the best of my knowledge do not carry water for the Obama administration when it comes to torture, civil liberties, and human rights, debunk recent reports, gleefully promulgated by torture enthusiasts, that the administration will be continuing the Bush 43 practice of extraordinary rendition as a backdoor to torture.
22 Responses to Carnival of souls