SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT

* When it emerged in the course of Sawyer’s conversation with Jack that he was going to detonate a nuclear bomb and change the course of time because Kate broke up with him, I can’t be the only person who shook his head in utter dismay. My first recourse was to the old “nobody cares about the love quadrangle anymore” saw, but you know what? I doubt that that’s true. Nobody on the Internet may care about it anymore, but I’m sure Lindelof is right and that his mom and people like her are totally tuning in week after week to see who Kate chooses and suchlike. (Granted there are a lot fewer people like Lindelof’s mom in the audience for Season Five than there were for Season One, but still.)

* So no, that’s not ultimately what bothered me about it. What really irked me is something I’ve been talking about for weeks now, which is how utterly selfish and irresponsible the main characters’ behavior has become with regards to anyone who isn’t a main character. It’s fine to care about the love quadrangle, but doesn’t the whole “some people are more equal than others” aspect of how much more important who Kate chooses is than whether or not the other 30 or so non-main-character castaways live or die kind of creepy? In this episode it was particularly pointed. Even Sawyer, who momentarily looked good when in the midst of beating the bejesus out of Jack he pointed out that Jack was out to steal the best three years of his and Juliet’s life from them, is really just looking out for him and his when you give it more than two seconds of mid-fight thought.

* This chronic case of mefirstandthegimmegimme-itis was the case not just in Jack risking the lives of everyone on Island ’77 and using the lives of everyone on Island ’04 as a maguffin for his real motive, i.e. to hopefully Pound That Pussy once more someday, but also in Jack becoming a relentless killing machine, gunning down countless Dharma guards. These guys aren’t cultlike Others or Widmore thugs but salarymen trying to protect the lives of an island full of scientists and janitors and schoolkids and so on. Dudes straight out of Dante and Randall’s Death Star debate in Clerks, more or less. Genre pieces occasionally have such lapses–Neo and Trinity’s electronica-soundtracked massacre of innocent security guards and police in the first Matrix movie is a good example–and they always bug the shit out of me.

* But ultimately, I think we have to abandon the notion that Lost is about anyone but the main characters. This isn’t Battlestar Galactica, where personal needs and the greater good were constantly weighed against one another during life-and-death choices. It’s a show about a bunch of people with horribly fucked-up personal lives who come to a place that violently forces them to confront the personal failures that got them where they are, and to attempt to fix them in the future. The personal lives are what matters here.

* So how did things look through that lens? Well, they weren’t perfect. My ears are still ringing from the pounding of the plothammer that made Juliet launch “The Great Sub Escape” to stop Jack only to end up leading the sub crew in their Wild Bunch shootout as Jack’s backup. It was particularly weird and random given that we were certainly to believe by the end of that climax that Sawyer really did love Juliet and vice versa, and that he was telling the truth when he said “it doesn’t matter who I looked at–I’m with you.” Kate’s turnaround was just as unpersuasive–she was more dead-set against blowing up the bomb than anyone, and I can’t even recall what Jack said that made her change her mind.

* Another lapse: The shockingly hamfisted Juliet flashback. The writers raced through it in order to make their pat point, and there wasn’t even the mitigating circumstance of Jacob’s presence to justify showing it any way other than “we just want to make Juliet’s bizarre behavior seem even slightly plausible.”

* But!

* The climax was really something! First of all, kudos to a setpiece that references the Sarlaac Pit fight from Return of the Jedi and the climaxes of Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Return of the King, and of course Lost Season Two all at once.

* More importantly to the show, it was really something emotionally. Smart, smart filmmaking to track the reaction to Jack’s release of the nuke solely with tight closeups of the four main characters’ emotionally wracked faces. And while it seems a shame to jettison the love story with the most believable chemistry the show’s seen so far by killing off Juliet, that same chemistry is what gave it all such an impact–that and Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell’s really gutwrenching performances. Once you saw where it was going, it actually became difficult to watch. It’s easily the show’s most powerful death scene this side of the execution of Alex.

* The point is, Lost is like opera, or superhero comics, or art-house kung-fu movies. In opera, the singing (at least the arias) is a spectacular representation of the emotional states of the characters. In superhero stories and wuxia flicks, that’s what the fighting is for. In Lost, that’s what the daring, desperate, dangerous, deadly last-ditch plans are for. Whatever its flaws, this episode made that work as well as it ever has on the show.

* And then there’s the whole Locke story. Am I a little disappointed that the Locke we saw hilariously lording it over Ben, the Locke who finally gave that compulsive liar his comeuppance, isn’t Locke at all? Hell yeah. Is it gonna keep me up at night, given that we’re now watching some kind of skin-changer waltz around settling centuries-old grudges? Hell no! That’s awesome!

* Also awesome: Casting Titus Welliver as your sinister ur-antagonist. God bless Lost and its Deadwood Cast Relocation Program. Paula Malcomson, Robin Wiegert, and William Sanderson pass the torch to you, sir!

* So that leaves us with the question of Jacob. I take it the cabin housed this other guy back when the creepy rocking-chair silhouette said “help me” to Locke? Are Christian and Claire working for him, or for Jacob? How does he get off the Island? Does Ben and Widmore’s battle have any relation to the fight between Jacob and the other guy? Did everyone notice their black and white color schemes during the opening scene? Shouldn’t Hurley have tried to throw himself out of the cab when a stranger knew who he was given that he was convinced people were out to get him? Just how many Island factions have shadowy global networks, anyway?

* The statue is nice and creepy. Well done, designers. Also? “It was like that when I got here.” LOL!

* I wonder how long Terry O’Quinn knew he wasn’t Locke anymore.

* Thinking about it now, whatever or whoever Locke is, he’s not omniscient. Otherwise why go through the whole farce of browbeating Richard into showing him where Jacob lives? That makes me feel like New Locke/Titus Welliver Character and the Smoke Monster are two separate things, given the Monster’s apparent role as a security and surveillance mechanism–if this guy had transmogrified into Smokey, surely he could have tracked Jacob down?

* A nice reversal: Ben spent the back half of season three trying to convince John to kill someone; Locke pulled the same trick with Ben in the space of one episode.

* It’s just occurring to me now how much having the Island be riddled with tunnels and secret passages is 100% pure kids playing around in the basement. Love it.

* The whole “obliviously standing in the middle of the street facing the camera when all of a sudden a vehicle comes out of nowhere and plows into you” shot is getting a little cliched at this point. Sorry, Nadia, you deserved better.

* So that’s probably the last we’ll see of Rose and Bernard. I’m fine with that. I loved those characters and this is pretty much the ending for them that both they and I wanted. I just hope they end up being the Adam & Eve skeletons.

* I’m less okay with this being the end of Vincent. Which I doubt it is, if only because Lindelof said he’s the one character you can count on being safe till the end of the show. Still, “safe” and “on the show” are not necessarily synonymous–just ask Walt!

* Walt better come back, man. He was a HUGE DEAL, you can’t pretend he wasn’t!

* Man, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, aren’t there? I figured we’d get more traction on the Christian & Claire question, just for starters.

* Desmond, Penny, and Widmore also had no role in the finale.

* Meanwhile, Sun dragon-lady’d her way to the forefront earlier in the season only to recede to the background in the back half. Weird.

* I love that Frank Lapidus is a big deal. The way he reacts to everything like “[sigh] Now what?” is so hilarious to me. It reminds me of the headshaking dismay and resignation with which Mike asks Michelle what’s goin’ on in Utah.

* I always hope that big episodes will bring back dead characters for a cameo, but no joy this time around. Cynthia Watros, call your agent, that Gossip Girl prequel was not hot!

* The fade to white with a black logo instead of cut to black with a white logo was pretty clever. It’s the opposite sketches, motherlovers! Anything can happen!

* I got a kick out of seeing the promo for the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy, which seems like it will be the second time a character has been written out of the show because the actor playing him or her is an insufferable asshole. It’s a different ballgame over there!

* Here’s the thing about the cliffhanger: If the bomb’s detonation really does change everything, then the whole scene with New Locke and Ben killing Jacob while Richard and Lapidus and Ilyana gape at Dead Locke outside would never have happened. And since I assume that that was meant to be a cliffhanger too, rather than a collection of characters we’ll never see in the same place together again, I’m guessing the bomb’s detonation didn’t change everything.

Below are links to all my “Lost thoughts” posts for this season.

Episode 5.1: Because You Left/Episode 5.2: The Lie

Episode 5.3: Jughead

Episode 5.4: The Little Prince

Episode 5.5: This Place Is Death

Episode 5.6: 316

Episode 5.7: The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham

Episode 5.8: LaFleur [part one]
LaFleur [part two]

Episode 5.9: Namaste

Lost thoughts extra: “…and the rest”

Episode 5.10: He’s Our You

Lost thoughts extra: Ben time

Episode 5.11: Whatever Happened, Happened

Episode 5.12: Dead Is Dead

Episode 5.13: Some Like It Hoth

Episode 5.14: The Variable

Episode 5.15: Follow the Leader [part one]
Follow the Leader [part two]

Episode 5.16: The Incident

* Lost season finale tonight! I’m excited.

* Topless Robot’s Teague Bohlen counts down The 10 Most Shafted Characters from Lost. Definitely agreed on #1.

* The Onion AV Club interviews Jorge Garcia, aka Hurley.

* Well, enough happiness–this ought to get you good and depressed: James Turner is thinking about quitting comics following Diamond’s refusal to carry his new series Warlords of IO. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Jeet Heer reviews, at length, Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles. There are times where I think he swings for the fences and missess, such as when he argues that Delisle’s and Tintin auteur Hergé’s respective lines embody their era’s respective political zeitgeists, but other passages were quite eye-opening for me in terms of my own take on the book. For example:

Burma, as Delisle encounters it, is not a nakedly Orwellian police state but something perhaps more subdued although still sinister, a suffocating authoritarian regime where the population has resigned itself, uneasily, to the status quo. In trying to distil the unspoken despair he encountered in Burma, Delisle takes a deliberately understated approach, one that is at first glance deceptively casual.

* Cloverfield monster designer Neville Page’s sketch gallery? Yes please! (Via Giant Monsters Attack.)

* Jog reviews Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy Vol. 2: The Slaves of Mickey Eye #2. Putting the opera back in “superhero soap opera”!

* The upcoming He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie Grayskull sounds like it’s going to be awful. Via Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken, who elaborates until being sidetracked by an unfortunate brain aneurysm.

* As always, plenty of horrifying torture news: The new pick to lead the war in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, oversaw the coverup of the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman and three years of torture in Iraq’s Camp Nama. In perhaps related news, the Obama Administration is now seeking to block the court-ordered release of hundreds more photos of torture and abuse of prisoners by US troops, a reversal of his previous position on the matter. (Links via Neel Krishnaswami.)

* The bloodcurdling, “when will I wake up from this endless nightmare?” quote of the day:

One of the reason these interrogation techniques have survived fore 500 years is because they work.

—Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC.

* Have we lost the torture debate to the torturers and torture enthusiasts? On the one hand, leading figures in one of the country’s two major political parties are now comfortable arguing in public that America should adopt the standards of the Spanish Inquisition; leading figures in the other major political party failed to exercise any oversight to prevent this from happening; the President and his administration seem opposed to practicing torture themselves but equally opposed to any consequences befalling their predecessors for doing so and bound and determined to prevent that from happening; and the he-said/he-said nature of media coverage has placed “harsh interrogation techniques” as the normative description of torture and reserved the actual word “torture” for the province of “some critics.” So that’s all in the “lose” column. On the other hand, I like to think that having unpalatable political figures like Dick Cheney out there proudly proclaiming their own brutality will cause people to turn away in revulsion. I don’t know. I have a lengthy track record of abject, shameful, willful ignorance on these matters. I’m going to go make an ELI ROTH WAS RIGHT t-shirt.

* I can’t help but feel like giving the ’80s flashback episode of Gossip Girl/backdoor pilot of Lily a hard time makes me Kurt Vonnegut’s proverbial fully-armored person attacking the metaphorical hot fudge sundae, but: This very much did not work. Not because it was an ’80s period piece, but because it was a poorly observed one.

* For example, in regular Gossip Girl you get maybe one big recognizable pop hit on the soundtrack per episode; the rest is comparatively obscure indie pop/rock. By contrast, the flashback material consisted almost entirely of songs that got their own segments on I Love the ’80s. I’ve seen some people complain about the presence of over-obvious ’80s props like the Rubik’s Cube and Jane Fonda workout video, but none of that bothered me nearly as much as the easy-peasy soundtracking.

* The writing was also much, much weaker–hokier–than normal. It feels churlish to complain that “nobody talks like that” on a show that normally features the wit and wisdom of Chuck Bass, but seriously, nobody does those self-aware “this is the moment where you fall in love with me” things, let alone does them again later on in the evening as a callback. The dialogue and behavior of the villainous Van Der Woodsen character (dun-dun-DUN!) was similarly canned, right down to yelling “Get him!” at a pack of undifferentiated preppy ’80s villain types. There was a noticeably forced infodump early on when Lily described her sister to her father and us in the audience. And so on and so forth.

* And at times the weak dialogue went beyond making the characters sound silly right into undermining the whole emotional premise of the story. The whole business about Lily trying to find her own way despite the well-meaning conformist meddling of her parents was presented in as cliched a fashion as possible in that closing “one phone call” scene, but it seemed to me the writers thought they could get away with it because of the irony that Lily will go on to do exactly everything her mother wanted her to. The problem is that that irony is just as obvious and cliched as what it’s purporting to subvert. I’m bored with this character and her sister and her bad-boy boyfriend already. (Like Lily’s mom, I too would take an army of Dan Humphreys over that pouting greaser.)

* Back in 2009, the prom stuff was all pretty cute. It was fun to see the mean girls fail one last time, and even though it felt like the latest off-again from Nate and Blair kinda happened because it had to, it was still well done and reflective of the fact that that whole relationship really has run its course. If I were Nate I would have responded to her request to “hold me” with a counteroffer to play a game of Hide and Go Fuck Yourself, but hey.

* Inasmuch as the Lily/Lily’s Mom business was really just a continuation of the flashback material, it didn’t work for me, especially that final conversation–one second Lily’s really giving mom the business about having wanted to choose her own destiny, the next second she’s demanding a hug?

* However, I walked away from this episode feeling great. Why? Because of the one big exception to the flashback’s “Obvious ’80s Smash Hits Only” rule: They ended the episode with “Doot Doot” by Freur! (That’s Underworld before they were Underworld.) All is forgiven, Gossip Girl, all is forgiven.

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken seems skeptical about Gamer, the upcoming Gerard Butler action movie whose trailer you see below. I think this is because Rob is unaware that the film is directed by Neveldine and Taylor, the men behind the magisterially ridonkulous Crank and Crank: High Voltage. (The latter of which I still haven’t seen, by the way–any NYC-area readers looking for a movie date, my email’s to the left.) Rob is therefore forgiven for his lapse in judgment.

* Rob also catches that the initial Watchmen Director’s Cut DVD will not incorporate the animated Tales of the Black Freighter material, as was director Zach Snyder’s stated intention at every step of the way. Everyone seems to sniff a DVD double-dip attempt by the studio and I’m inclined to agree.

* I hope Brian Ralph isn’t kidding about working on Daybreak 4.

* The Onion AV Club interviews Michael Emerson, Lost‘s Benjamin Linus. He’s always a great interview subject. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Lots of real-world torture porn to consume: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whom we captured and transferred to Egypt for torturing and who subsequently falsely confessed to WMD links between Iraq and al-Qaeda that were used to justify the Iraq War, has “committed suicide” in the Libyan prison he ended up disappearing into. Meanwhile, John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped greenlight torture and famously argued that no treaty or law could constrain the President of the United States of America from crushing testicles of a terrorist suspect’s child in order to extract information from his father, has been hired as a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. And the Obama administration is threatening to cease intelligence sharing with Great Britain if they disclose information regarding the torture of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed.

* Eve Tushnet reviews the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, one of my very favorite films of all time.

* Tom Spurgeon speaks to Darwyn Cooke (and Ed Brubaker) about Cooke’s upcoming adaptation of Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s Parker novels. A lot of it reads just like a journey through Cooke and Brubaker’s book and DVD collections, which is fun in and of itself.

* At first it seemed like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the torture of Abu Zubaydah, but it turns out that’s not true, at least as far as we know and as far as she and currently available records both say. You’ll no doubt be thrilled to the bottom of your heart to learn that torture is still enthusiastically supported by Dick Cheney, until four months ago the Vice President of the United States of America.

SPOILER WARNING

* I didn’t mention this, but it was refreshing to see Hurley’s not-so-brightness presented as a liability (in that hilarious “so you served in the Korean War?” exchange with Dr. Cheng) instead of as a method of audience identification for a change. Remember when Hurley was the common-sense character? The one who’d ask the questions the audience argued anyone would have the sense to ask in the castaways’ situation? That was back when the writers’ attitude vis a vis the character was “You guys in the audience are calling attention to some of the plot holes and dramatic lapses, so we’ll have Hurley try to address them.” Now that they’re doing all this time travel stuff, the attitude appears to have switched to “You guys in the audience aren’t quite bright enough to follow The Terminator, so we’ll have Hurley force people to spell it out over and over.” An audience identification character who used to be a compliment is now a veiled insult!

* Okay, I’m about to break my own rule and talk about some stuff Damon Lindelof recently said about what we can expect from the show in the home stretch. It’s nothing along the lines of what I was saying yesterday about not wanting to hear that, like, Matthew Fox is replacing Simon Cowell as a judge on American Idol–it’s nothing that’s going to spoil the season finale for you. But it does eliminate some options regarding a pair of long-standing mysteries that everyone expected to be tackled in the final season, so in that sense, BEHIND-THE-SCENES-TYPE SPOILER WARNING.

* After watching last night’s episode I realized just how much ground the show has to cover in its less-than-20 remaining hours. I listed some of the outstanding mysteries I hope to see addressed in this season’s finale, but there are plenty more that will hopefully pop up in the final season. One of the dangling plot threads I’ve been excited for them to get to is the story behind Libby, the ill-faited Tailie paramour of Hurley who was revealed to have been housed in the same insane asylum, and also gave Desmond the boat he ended up shipwrecking on the Island. My assumption ever since Matthew Abaddon described his gig for Charles Widmore as “I get people where they need to be” was that Libby had the same job. But it seems we may never find out, because at some kind of nerd-media panel last night, Damon Lindelof revealed that actress Cynthia Watros is apparently pointedly uninterested in reprising the role. Lindelof says this means they can’t address the question adequately, so they won’t do it all. I think that’s a bridge too far. For starters, she was okay with showing up for a 10-second cameo in last season’s finale to tell Michael it was time to die, but actually getting to act again is something up with which she will not put? Weird. Second of all, it seems easy enough to have the beans about her true motives spilled to Hurley by some relevant character, particularly if my Widmore theory pans out. I mean, I understand Lindelof’s point about telling-not-showing being kind of annoying, but leaving this hanging is much more annoying.

* Also frustrating are Lindelof’s conflicting statements regarding the Numbers and what, if anything, will be revealed about their provenance. On the one hand he says they’ll be revealing perhaps quite a bit more about them. On the other, he says that the origin of the Numbers as revealed in that dopey ARG from a few years back–they are the constants (!) in an equation devised by Dharma scientists to predict the end of the world, and that the Initiative’s goal on the Island was to conduct experiments that might help them alter the equation and thus save the world from its inevitable demise from war or ecological catastrophe–won’t come up on the show because too much of the audience isn’t hardcore enough to care. This is irritating as all get-out to hear, given that the entire first two seasons virtually centered on the Numbers; fans who are interested in hearing what’s up with them are not just the fans who cooked up elaborate theories based on the writings of real-world philosopher Jeremy Bentham. I guarantee you that if they close out the show without bringing this up, you’ll read sooooooooooo much bitching about it from fans not hardcore enough to have followed the ARG or gone to nerd-media panels featuring Damon Lindelof. In fact it’s the NON-hardcore fans who suffer from this decision the most! Now, I understand what Lindelof is saying about how there’s no real answer for “what the Numbers mean”–like most numerological phenomena, the Numbers themselves are arbitrary, and their meaning stems from their reoccurrence (be it coincidence or synchronicity). That is, it’s not like you’ll find out why it’s “42” instead of “43.” But it would be nice to trace them as far back as you can, and a misreading of the audience to expect them not to care.

* I disagree with Todd Van Der Werff’s contention that this episode was too plot-heavy to actually be good–one of the first times this season I’ve found myself at significant odds with his take–but as always his review/recap is worth your time and attention.

* Back to Libby/Watros for a second, I’m sure I’ve kvetched about this before, but I hate it when I find out that real-world actor issues forced changes in the plot of any movie or TV show. The most heartbreaking example of this, for me, involves a ’70s film classic that I’m not going to mention because I just found out a friend of mine hasn’t seen it and I don’t want to prematurely disappoint him about it, but in Lost‘s case I hate that Mr. Eko was written out of the show prematurely because Adewale Unspellablelastname didn’t want to live in Hawaii anymore. I don’t hold it against the actors or whoever was at fault, mind you–it just bothers me, as a fan, that stories rarely emerge in their platonic form.

* Anyway, it turns out that Watros is going to show up on Gossip Girl soon. Not since my hope that Bart Bass’s secret sex society was somehow linked to Charles Widmore has a Gossip Girl/Lost crossover flowered so fully in my mind. “Spotted in the Hatch: Golden Girl, grabbing supplies for a beach-blanket buffet with cute’n’cuddly Lotto Boy. Are these two really crazy…in love? Or will Michael go off half-cocked and shoot down their shot at love? Only time will tell–let’s just hope it takes less than 108 minutes. XOXO, Gossip Monster.”

* Comic Book Resources speaks to Grant Morrison at length about his upcoming miniseries Multiversity. As usual with Morrison interviews lately, it’s compelling reading both for the ideas he trots out and, in terms of ideas he says he had to abandon for reasons beyond his control, the implications regarding DC’s apparently, oh, let’s say “less than optimal internal cohesiveness” over the past few years.

* My pal Ben Morse proudly presents his debut comic as an editor for Marvel.com: War of Kings: Warriors #1, containing the origin of extravagantly Mohawked outer-space superguy Gladiator. Believe it or not, the origin of this Chris Claremont creation and the basics of his race were completely unexplored up until this point. I for one was particularly pleased to see an in-continuity explanation for his ridiculous haircut.

* Of all the responses to Tom Spurgeon’s recent essay on Diamond and the Direct Market, I like NeilAlien’s summary the best:

The Direct Market comics shop should be the jewel in the crown of multiple comics markets during a peak time of comics craft and mass-media attention; instead it eats its own arms off

Just about!

* Speaking of (in a way): PictureBox has announced a pledge drive to help support the upcoming release of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs 3 and Brian Chippendale’s If ‘n Oof. There’s really just no way to slice this story without drawing horrifying conclusions about the financial and aesthetic state of the North American comics market, I’m afraid. But do consider pledging: PictureBox is a great publisher, these sound like great books, and at any rate a pledge actually counts as a purchase of the books with some swag thrown in.

* I really like the look of the new facsimile edition of Adrian Tomine’s 32 Stories, not least because I’d never gotten to read this material before.

* Battlestar Galactica Season 4.5 arrives on DVD on July 28th, along with a Complete Series box set.

* Check out what some of my fellow horrorbloggers have been yapping about lately in the latest League of Tana Tea Drinkers roundup.

* Meet Victor Aleman Jr., recently arrested on drug and weapons charges with a Jeep full of cash and cocaine…and a cellphone sporting pictures of four severed heads lined up on a table. Florida police still have not identified or located the heads. (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

* “Crazy sickness” is spreading in Nicaragua. The unexplained “grisl siknis,” which usually strikes young women of the country’s indigenous Miskito ethnic group en masse, basically turns people into something out of Shivers or 28 Days Later. Scientists and doctors are unable to determine whether it’s physical or mental in nature–perhaps caused by ergotism like various mass-hysteria outbreaks of yore, or perhaps just a societal safety valve blown wide open. (Via Yucky Tuna.)

SPOILER WARNING

* Before I begin, a plea: We’re heading into season finale time, which means I’ll be speculating a bit about what will happen. If you know what’s going to happen–or at least have some educated guesses–based on in-real-life, behind-the-scenes stuff that you’ve read in interviews or the press, actors getting cast in other pilots or whatever, I ask that you please do not bring it up in the comment thread. I try as hard as I can to restrict myself to whatever ends up on the television, meaning the episode and the next-week teaser, and really really hate finding out about future developments because so-and-so is in some article from Variety or Jeff Jensen said something a little bird told him, so I’d like to keep the comment section free of that too.

* This episode of Lost got my heart racing like the show hasn’t done in a long time, perhaps not since last year’s season finale (Keamy and the freighter), or maybe even the previous year’s (“NOT PENNY’S BOAT”). I think it’s because it’s really starting to feel like we’re moving toward some major showdowns–Locke confronting Jacob, whatever “The Incident” is, Jack trying to set off the bomb, maybe some revelations about Richard and/or that Annie girl that Li’l Ben was friends with in portentous fashion a few seasons ago who we haven’t seen or heard from since–with the end in sight, and suddenly I realize that anyone’s probably fair game to go.

This has been a harder trick for the show to pull off now that it’s pared down the original cast so much. Boone and Shannon were relatively easy marks, Charlie started as a core character when the show was depending on Lord of the Rings fandom to boost ratings but by the time he was killed he was the definition of a supporting character, the Tailies (even Eko) didn’t get to stick around long enough for their deaths to be real hard work for the writers, Michael got the shit end from the start of his heel turn so sending him out like a punk wasn’t a huge risk, Walt’s aging gives fans agita every time he shows up so people don’t seem to mind that he’s gone, Vincent seems to have undergone Charlie’s basic trajectory from foreground to background, the redshirts are the redshirts (despite the occasional for-fun elevation of the likes of Arzt, Nikki & Paulo, and Frogurt), and I don’t hear too many people clamoring for the return of Claire, Rose, and Bernard from parts unknown. (I love me some Rose & Bernard, but I know I’m in the minority.) Heck, even most of the major Others like Tom and Mikhail are dunzo. Obviously the show has kept up the mortality rate by offing freighter characters (and newbies like Cesar), but while the freighter gang is fun, I don’t feel as attached to them as I am to Desmond, Penny, Ben, and Juliet, let alone the remaining original castaways.

So along comes this episode, and all of a sudden we’re getting tons and tons of foreshadowing that There Will Be Blood between Sawyer and Juliet, while Jack and Locke are involved in high-stakes Island brinksmanship with forces beyond their control and characters with demonstrably few scruples. And since this is the show’s penultimate season finale, when it sends the message that anything could happen to characters we’ve cared about for a long time, I believe it. Which makes for exciting television!

* My friend the great Ben Morse brought my attention to this pretty thoughtful review of last week’s episode at Primetime Pulse, which contains the following provocative paragraph:

A lot of people have brought up how these characters may not want to change the future, as landing safely to LA (strangely enough) is a worse fate than crashing on the island. Sure, that’s true. Kate was on her way to prison, Sawyer had nothing to live for, Locke was paralyzed and working at a dead-end job, Hurley was cursed, Rose had cancer, Jin and Sun were in an emotionally abusive relationship. Things weren’t that great. But, then again, think about all the people who have died: Boone, Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Eko, Charlie, Michael, and all those nameless red shirts. Is it acceptable for our heroes to say, “You know what? I didn’t really like the apartment I was living in before the crash. It was too small and in a bad neighborhood. I don’t want to go back there. To hell with all those good, innocent people who had to die”? I suppose Locke’s view of “I wouldn’t change the past because those events made me who I am today” is a bit more acceptable, but still.

I’ve already talked about this sort of thing in terms of the Oceanic Six’s disregard for the lives of the other people on the Ajira flight; iirc I was ready to book them for criminally negligent homicide over the death of the plane’s pilot. So my response when Ben pointed this out to me was this:

Nutshell reaction: Sadly, I think the morality of the main characters’ actions vis a vis the redshirts is something that the show can never address without making Jack into Tony Soprano, so we just have to ignore it, more or less.

Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when saving the lives of all the people who died during their Island experience and its aftermath was one of Jack’s first offered rationales for trying to go through with Daniel’s plan. I kept waiting for the show to send us a big signal that we’re meant to think that Jack is wrong to want to do this and Kate is right, but beyond the preexisting warped calculus of screentime-based emphasis, privileging Kate’s actually rather miserable romantic relationships with Sawyer and Jack over the lives of untold dozens, we really didn’t get one. In fact I think we’re supposed to be irked with Kate for winding up on the sub and potentially fucking things up between Sawyer and Juliet one last time. Yes, the show tried to make Kate seem less like the most selfish person on the planet by couching her objection to the H-bomb plan in “if you’re wrong you’ll kill everyone on the Island” terms, but that was clearly an afterthought. Now, I suppose you could say the same thing about Jack, i.e. his main rationale for wanting to change the future isn’t to save Boone, but so that he doesn’t spend those few years of his life constantly fucking up and feeling guilty about it. But so far the show seems to be leaning toward the (correct) point of view that the Main Characters’ thrilling adventures taking their stand down in Jungleland aren’t worth sacrificing the lives of everyone else on the plane. (Meanwhile I don’t think Faraday would be trying to set off the H-bomb if it was going to kill anyone except perhaps the people setting it off–seems to me like the idea is the energies of the bomb and the Island will cancel each other out relatively harmlessly–so that’s why I’m not giving much credence to Kate’s idea that Jack is risking the lives of the Dharma people or whoever else.)

This show is never going to be about morality the way The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica were about morality–it’s more about the emotional consequences of decisions you make or are prevented from making than the moral ones–but I’m happy to see this addressed even a little bit. It could just end up being a one-line nod in the general direction of the idea before ignoring it entirely, a la Ben saying “who cares” about whatever happens to the other Ajira passengers, but I’ll take what we can get.

* I got a good chuckle out of how Ben sheepishly tilted his head down and averted his eyes after Locke mentioned that he did, in fact, die.

* I’m kind of disappointed in the “next week on Lost” teaser for revealing that Sawyer, Juliet, and Kate all end up back on the Island somehow. I feel like the teasers have done a lot of that sort of thing this season–prematurely revealing the temporal/spacial proximity of characters who we didn’t know were in the same point in the spacetime continuum, showing that people who were in a bad spot got out of that bad spot, etc.

* Hopes for the season finale: seeing Jacob, seeing the DeGroots or Alvar Hanso or whoever really runs the Dharma Initiative, seeing Annie, a flashback to Statue Time or Black Rock Time, finding out what lies in the shadow of the statue and who the people who are dropping that catchphrase are, a happy ending for Sawyer and Juliet, explosions, The Incident, Richard info…

* I’m hugely impressed by how well done Poe Ghostal’s list of The 10 Most Famous Geek Arguments for Topless Robot is.

* “‘Fuck it!’ Yes! That’s your answer! That’s your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead!” When it comes to attempting to reform the Direct Market instead of storming out in a huff, Dirk Deppey is most definitely not a Lebowski Achiever.

* My pal Kiel Phegley talks at length to cartoonist and fellow Chicagoan Jeffrey Brown.

* David Lynch has two new, unorthodox projects brewing: providing visuals for Dark Night of the Soul, a musical compilation curated or produced or something by Dangermouse and Sparklehorse (via Pitchfork), and Interview Project, a yearlong series of interviews with ordinary Americans (well, as ordinary as Americans can be when David Lynch gets through with them) conducted during a road trip and posted at Lynch’s site (via The House Next Door.)

* The Onion AV Club talks to Scrubs creator and Josh Homme lookalike Bill Lawrence about the series, whose likely to be final episodes air tonight. Lawrence is impressively candid about the creative highs and lows of the show, though he and I differ about what those are. (Count me in as a fan of the increasingly far-out material of the late-middle seasons, which Lawrence thinks went too far.) This interview reminds me that I’ll be happy when everything goes into reruns so my TiVo can start taping the show again; we might have been able to shuffle things around on the very busy TV night of Wednesdays in order to keep taping the show, but by the time we realized we were missing it it was weeks too late. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Flipping the script, Scott Wilson talks to the Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias about his delightful New Cult Canon series. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I liked Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads but I’ve been skittish about the prospects of Tokyopop ever allowing him to finish his OEL manga series King City, so I’ve never bothered to track it down. Therefore I’m pleased to see Graham will be publishing the book (and republishing what’s already come out) in serialized form with Image Comics. (Via JK Parkin.)

* The Coming of Kodansha. (Link and awesome headline via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Starro the Conqueror goes Frazetta via JG Jones? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Topless Robot.)

* There’s something genuinely frightening about how present this cthulhoid brute’s eyes look in this piece by artist Bradford Rigney. This kind of illustration isn’t usually my cup of tea, but kudos to Rigney–you can download a sizable interview and image gallery in PDF form from 2D Artist magazine here. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Real-world torture porn update: As I’ve followed the revelations of the Bush Administration’s use of torture, I’ve been really struck by just how much the nature of the news media’s basic “he said/he said” template has allowed the torturers to frame the debate. That’s the way brutal methods understood around the world as torture since their inception are now referred to straightfacedly as “harsh interrogation techniques that some critics say amount to torture.” It’s also how the Abu Ghraib photos that most closely resemble the “frathouse antics” that torture proponents dismissed them as became the dominant frame for that scandal, to the point where when Rachel Maddow showed a picture of a man tortured to death during his CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib on her show last night, I was stunned to realize I’d forgotten that that even happened. That’s why releasing and publicizing the nauseating details of our torture program is so important. When you learn that someone was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, it’s harder to defend the completely imaginary “one and done” super-awesome terrorist-breaking conception of waterboarding concocted by the torturers and the Internet and think-tank tough-guys who fawn over them. When you learn that we were locking people in boxes with insects, it’s harder to depict the torture program as an orderly means of extracting information as opposed to the sordid province of sickos. For that reason, I fully support the release of as many incriminating photos as possible, and I hope they greatly discomfit the torturers, their defenders, and the people who, like me, spent years in blissful, even willful ignorance of the fact that it can happen here, and contemptuously dismissing those who tried to tell us otherwise.

Let me be the 20th person to encourage you to read Tom Spurgeon’s essay on why Diamond’s rejection of James Turner’s Warlord of IO is a terrible thing. I’m confused by a lot of the reactions I’ve seen to it. Tom can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe his point is this: Comics’ Direct Market as currently constituted is incapable of reliably selling comics, even comics of obvious quality and reliability, unless they’re the biggest superhero comics from the biggest publishers; and monopoly DM distributor Diamond’s current actions, while nominally in the service of improving the bottom line, are taking for granted a set of assumptions that are unrelated to the genuine financial well-being of either Diamond or the DM and that make it even more difficult to sell the aforementioned comics, perhaps irreversibly so.

Heidi MacDonald can correct me if I’m wrong too, but she seems to be taking that as the end of the discussion rather than the beginning, choosing to focus on touting other options instead of improving the existing one. It’s wonderful that there are other, better avenues for comics like Turner’s to reach an audience. It’s great that there’s manga and webcomics and iTunes and bookstores. But celebrating that and pursuing those avenues is by no means mutually exclusive with addressing the problems of the Direct Market, as opposed to writing them off.

Meanwhile, Brian Hibbs, though he eventually goes for the gusto and attacks Diamond’s deals with the Big Publishers for tying everyone’s hands, then focuses on (for example) publishers needing to do a better job advertising their wares to retailers and customers in the Previews catalog–but even doing a fan-freaking-tastic job in an inherently cockamamie and self-defeating system like Previews is like being the world’s tallest dwarf. Moreover, Diamond isn’t giving James Turner that option anymore even if he wanted to take it.

Tom’s said it before and it’s true: The great thing about comic shops, in theory, is that they’re shops that sell the comics. If you’re interested in one comic, it seems logical that you should be able to go to a comic shop and get it, and once you’re there, it seems logical that you should be able to look down the aisle from the comic you’re interested in and find other, different comics. Narrowing that selection to the Sure Things will, I think, be about as effective in saving the Direct Market as the chain record stores in the malls with their outrageous pricing for the Billboard Top 100 albums have been in saving the music industry. For years, all you could do about the shitty selection and pricing of record-store chains was bitch about them, but then along came Amazon and iTunes (let alone mp3 blogs, let alone Napster 1.0 and BitTorrent) to eat their lunch, and when the likes of Tower went out of business no one gave a shit, not even hardcore CD buyers like me, because no one felt any goodwill toward those stores regardless of their goodwill toward music. The graveyards of the world are filled with indispensable “in-store experiences.”

Pushing the price of the bestselling comics ever upward while preemptively choking off the market access of other kinds of comics at the source is a recipe for disaster. And it really would be a disaster, because no matter how crappy the local Android’s Dungeon is, the Direct Market comic shop in its ideal form and even in its less-than-ideal form is the kind of sales mechanism most media would murder dozens of innocent people to have access to. I’ve read enough on the topic from even artsy-fartsy stalwarts like Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds to know that even the DM’s red-headed stepchildren depend on the DM and would be devastated by a collapse. And it’s not necessarily at the top of my list, but the in-store experience at comic shops, good ones at least, really is something of value in and of itself. So yeah, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. But it’s a disaster that can be staved off, provided people, like Tom, repeatedly point out how disastrous it is, rather than whistling past the graveyard while being really glad for the latest 12 simultaneously bestselling Naruto volumes or the ridonkulous book deal Craig Thompson signed or the fact that Diesel Sweeties can support itself with merch. You can be really glad about all those things–I am!–and still want and work toward a better Direct Market.

The reason that disaster can be staved off is because Diamond’s move is not, in any way, the inevitable result of the market having spoken. The Direct Market’s inability to sell anything but Avengers titles in quantity is not a result of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand flipping everything else the bird. That notion is belied by the fact that there are viable alternative sales avenues that have been discovered by webcomics, manga, literary comics and the like. If no one wanted to buy them, they wouldn’t make money anywhere. Instead they can’t make money in, ironically, the one venue dedicated solely to their medium. That is a result of conscious decisions made by major players at various levels of the market–publishers, distributors, retailers, consumers, creators, and commentators all share in the blame. Now, however, the monopoly distributor of comics to the venue dedicated solely to selling comics is officially instituting that venue’s unofficial failure as policy. They shouldn’t, and we should tell them why, and we should also be able to tell them how not to without having to suggest that they wake up tomorrow as an entirely different sales mechanism. I’m not ready to give up on the DM as is.

* Rob Bricken, the Topless Robot, draws our attention to District 9, an upcoming science fiction film about an alien refugee/internment camp here on Earth, directed by Peter Jackson cohort Neil Blomkamp. This sucker is hanging right over the plate for any lazy film critic to knock their “I only pay attention to genre films insofar as I can read them as political allegories” grand salami right out of the park, but you know what? I’ll eat it.

* Heidi MacDonald draws our attention to three comics projects of note. First is The Iraq War Stories Anthology, an Act-i-vate-hosted collection of, well, Iraq War stories by the students in Nick Bertozzi’s Comic Book Storytelling Workshop at SVA. Nick is a blazing talent, he was my very first friend in comics, and this is an idea that seems almost necessary, so count me in. It launches on May 10th.

* Next is The Big Feminist But, an anthology of comics about contemporary feminism by the likes of Jeffrey Brown and Julia Wertz. I think feminism is in a weird place right now, where it’s almost always treated as something relatively lighthearted. Granted, my main exposure to movement feminism during my adult life has been through hipstery mags like Bust and Bitch, but that really does seem the dominant approach among my age group, and it’s weird to imagine, say, black civil-rights activism working primarily in that vein, isn’t it? So I’m a little skeptical, but also quite curious.

* Finally there’s The New Yorker‘s preview of Daniel Clowes’s upcoming graphic novel. It’s going to be told in the strip style of Ice Haven and The Death Ray. And holy crap is this panel hilarious if you’ve ever had any exposure to the work of Daniel Clowes:

* I really enjoy reading my friend and Marvel.com editor Ben Morse writing about superhero comics, and he’s done so at length recently, with a tribute to Brian K. Vaughan’s forgotten Cyclops miniseries and a two-part list of his favorite ’90s heroes.

* Meanwhile, my buddy and ToyFare editor TJ Dietsch serves up a seemingly sound theory about Geoff Johns’s upcoming Green Lantern-based event comic Blackest Night, using Johns’s affinity for old continuity minutiae and the DC collected editions department’s propensity for republishing newly relevant stories as a springboard.

* Pavlovian conditioning is starting to kick in with me every time I see a Flog! post that starts with the words “Now in stock.” This time around, I’m salivating over Anders Nilsen’s Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes.

* Jog reviews X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the live-action Death Note spinoff L: Change the WorLd (twice!). I really liked this bit about how oddly soulless big-time superhero movies can be despite cramming in so much of the comics’ refreshingly bizarre ephemera:

Granted, I can’t say Ryan Reynolds is terrible so much as he’s stuck in the hopeless position of playing a fan-favorite character that became a fan-favorite due to his handling by specific writers, yet shows up solely for the purposes of having another fan-favorite character in the movie regardless of how he’s actually presented, since hey – he’s a fan-favorite, right? So, here we’ve got a Wade Wilson that cracks jokes for ten or so minutes, and thereafter turns into the Super Skrull by way of Baraka from Mortal Kombat, complete with a showdown on a thin, high ledge, and you sort of wonder how the writers couldn’t quite manage the psychological muscle of Rob Liefeld-era New Mutants.

* More nostalgia porn for at least a few of my readers: Todd Klein serves up two more posts on the logos he designed for Amalgam.

* Lost fandom can be really slow (see item #3) and really self-parodic (see item #10b). I kinda like the theory in item #2, though. (UPDATE: Link fixed!)

* This story about Mahdi Army death squads killing gay Iraqis by sealing their anuses shut with glue and inducing diarrhea is so bizarre and gruesome that I have a hard time believing it regardless of the assurances it offers. But if it turns out to be true I wouldn’t be that surprised, since I think it’s pretty well established that the perversions of most crusaders for morality dwarf the alleged depravities of their targets. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

It has not been a good week for cameo players in History of the World Part I. Rest in peace, Dom DeLuise. Your Caesar is immortal.

* Now that was an episode! One thing I’d forgotten to mention about last week’s installment was that it was the first one I could think of to end on a series of cliffhangers in a long, long time. Because Gossip Girl moves at three times the speed of any other show, usually storylines more or less get wrapped up by the end of the hour, and then some tease-y thing is appended to the end to hook you for next week. But last time out, almost nothing was resolved. It was all gonna play out here. And it sure did!

* I can’t exactly remember the details anymore, but I seem to recall some elaborate scheme last season being screwed up by Vanessa’s ill-timed intervention. This time around it was down to Dan and Lily to blow up the spot. Which was frustrating insofar as it was repetitive, but also fitting: It took Dan’s self-righteousness and Lily’s status-fixated meddling and made them real liabilities for the characters.

* As far as the Lily end of that point goes, that was part of what made this such an effectively emotional episode. Kelly Rutherford doesn’t get a whole lot to do on this show other than be rich and MILFy, but I really liked the way she slowly revealed the various aspects of the investment-payback and get-Serena-arrested schemes to Rufus, as though with each new sentence she had to redouble her efforts to deny that what she was doing was completely fucked up.

* Lily’s go-along-to-get-along mentality also made her a more fulfilling antagonist for Serena’s scheme than what I thought was going to happen, which was Lily trying to get the police involved and Serena trying to dodge responsibility by taking Poppy and Gabriel down herself. Instead, the roles were reversed, and Lily was the sketchier of the two. Well done writers.

* Getting back to the emotional bit, Chuck and Blair’s exchange at the Russian Tea Room was interesting in that I really had no idea how it was going to go down. It was a good choice on Ed Westwick’s part to smile when he lied to her about it all being a big game to him, because for serious, does he ever really smile on this show? Seeing his teeth made it seem like this was a really unique moment, somehow. I’m not sure I buy his reasoning for letting Blair go, however. Doesn’t it seem like she’d be totally happy with him at this point, particularly if he was prepared to be honest and tell her he really has feelings for her, which is what he could have done at that very moment? The Missus and I were convinced he did it to spare Nate. I was really, really hoping that when Serena asked him “Chuck, why did you just do that?” his answer would be a gravelly whisper of “Bros before hoes.”

* So they played Georgina’s Jesus stuff strictly for laffs this time around, which is how I thought they were going to go the whole time. That’s fine I guess. A good excuse to paraphrase Pulp Fiction‘s made-up Ezekiel verse.

* Speaking of pop-culture references, there was much rejoicing in the Collins househould when Jenny distracted Lily by explaining the plot of Twilight. ‘Round these parts, you could keep me busy for a solid hour just trying to convince me that vampires in Twilight sparkle in the sunlight instead of burning up. “Wait, they sparkle? You’re making that up.”

* Another Vanessa-less episode! Woo! Actually, The Missus rightly said tonight “I’m glad Vanessa slept with Chuck. I don’t hate her anymore!” It’s true! She became more interesting through genital osmosis.

* Meanwhile you’ve got a lot of other interesting characters floating around who you could work into the mix on a more permanent basis. Well, mostly Eric Van Der Woodsen, whose not-a-main-cast-member status is inexplicable. But Georgina and Gabriel both have potential in a reformed-villain and/or anti-hero kind of way. Like Hawkeye in the early Avengers, or Venom.

* I’ll give the ’80s flashback/spinoff a try, sure. But god help us was that No Doubt covering “Stand and Deliver”? Fuck that noise. Gwen Stefani isn’t fit to do Marco Pirroni’s make-up.

* I really liked Kiel Phegley’s three suggestions for how to approach Free Comic Book Day as a chance to have fun with friends and family.

* This is a terrific bit from Tom Spurgeon’s post on Drawn & Quarterly’s new Doug Wright collection:

The great thing about cartooning is that sometimes the texture and feel of the way cartoonists approach the form can be as important as the content of the narratives. That’s why, to use a famous example, you can look at an end table drawn by Charles Schulz and feel his entire world through its line.

That’s a crackerjack insight no matter what, but what makes it even better is that before I read the post I just sat and gawked for a bit at the Wright panel Tom chose to illustrate his piece:

I think different kinds of comic geeks geek out in different ways: Lately I geek out by marveling at things like just how goddamn well-drawn that dude’s jeans are. I’ll tell you what, you draw jeans like that and your comics have instantly earned a lot of credit with me.

* Here’s a bizarrely eloquent post on Wolverine by national-security blogger Spencer Ackerman. I’m impressed by the way he unpacks the character as better understood through a series of small personality-based revelations throughout his publishing history than through a comic or movie that purports to be his “origin.” Also, it’s funny to look at Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X through a topical lens. Thank god we stuck with waterboarding and didn’t give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed an adamantium skeleton.

* I did not care for James Turner’s Nil, but I still think it’s an ugly and ominous development when the monopoly distributor of comics to the market system in which the vast majority of comics are purchased opts not to carry a book of obvious seriousness of intent and execution like Turner’s new project Warlord of IO from a publisher of long standing like SLG yet still makes room for Frog Thor busts.

* There’s nothing about Harry Knowles’s post on the Wolverine movie that isn’t totally hilarious at the expense of both Harry Knowles and the Wolverine movie.

* The Viggo Mortensen-starring adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has been pushed back from Oscar season 2008 to Oscar season 2009.

* They’re going to make a Hollywood movie out of Death Note. (Via Dread Central.)

* Artist Ryan Dunlavey reveals his part in one of my favorite things ToyFare magazine ever did: The Bearriors, an ’80s toy line and cartoon series starring anthropomorphized warrior bears…that the magazine invented from whole cloth as a hoax.

* Sea monster porn: a CGI reenactment of Predator X, the most powerful carnivore in the history of the world, in action. (Hat tip: Matt Maxwell.)

Forbidden Worlds #114: “A Little Fat Nothing Named Herbie!”

Shane O’Shea (Richard E. Hughes), writer

Ogden Whitney, artist

American Comics Group, 1963

14 pages

Read it at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine

Buy it (I think) in Dark Horse’s Herbie Archives Vol. 1 from Amazon.com

Not to be a vulgarian, but holy fucking shit, this is what Herbie comics are like? I mean, I knew the basic look and set-up, taciturn fat kid with a lollipop is actually a terrifying war machine with godlike powers of destruction, it’s from the ’60s and it’s a funny in a weird art-out-of-time way. But my God! The comedy in this thing is a solid 40, 45 years ahead of its time. You could animate this thing and it’d feel right at home on Adult Swim between Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, or make it a webcomic and stick it in your RSS feed along with The Perry Bible Fellowship,, or buy it from Buenaventura Press in a two-pack with the next issue of Boy’s Club. The two-panel tier, six-panel grid pages are really just perfect for a “set-up/punchline” gag structure with zero room for milking the humor out of things by taking too long with them, and for increasing the randomness of the juxtapositions. One panel, Jackie Kennedy is swooning with unrequited ardor for a morbidly obese child as JFK fumes in the background; the next, Herbie is soaring through the air on the back of a giant parrot. You know what I mean? The actual plot-based gags are similarly non sequitur–Herbie defeating an army of ghosts by suddenly being able to call the animals of the jungle to his defense by bellowing like Tarzan is the kind of thing you’d see in one of those two-minute sequences in The Family Guy where Stewie is suddenly reenacting William Shatner’s “Rocket Man” performance or Peter performs “Shipoopi” from The Music Man in its entirety. (I like The Family Guy; let’s not have that debate here.) Then there’s Ogden Whitney’s art, which is about 12 times as strong as it needs to be to make this work and 40,000 times more realistic. But it’s not just the contrast between the visuals and the subject matter that he has to recommend him; it’s also the angles he chooses for the planes of action within his panels, and his choices for the strip’s “actors”–the way the proud dads directly address the audience at the beginning just kills me. So does the visual shorthand he uses to depict Herbie planning his vengeance: a series of blackened thought balloons with bright red question marks in the middle. That’s exactly how I’m going to picture my own rage from here on out. For me it really all comes together in the final four panels, which silently culminate in a panel so deadpan it anticipates the awkward-pause comedy of everything from Space Ghost Coast to Coast to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hilarious. I want these books now, badly.

(via Tom Spurgeon)