* And the plugs just keep on coming: Check out an excerpt from my Comics Journal interview with Skyscrapers of the Midwest author Josh Cotter on TCJ.com, and my Strange Tales spotlight Q&A with Jason on Marvel.com. Yes, I interviewed Jason, Hey, Wait… Jason, for Marvel.

* If you’ve read Asterios Polyp, you owe it to yourself to read Ng Suat Tong’s review/reader’s guide over at The Comics Reporter. Tong pulls together a plethora of visual analyses by various critics (including yours truly) and adds his own extensive insights to the mix as well. But the most provocative part of the post is where he takes issue with the coat of unreality Mazzucchelli slathered across the story–ostentatiously naming characters after characters from The Odyssey or giving them monikers like Stiffly and Ursa Major, tons of easy-to-grok symbolism and layout tricks, etc. Tong argues that all the multiple layers of meaning and artifice Mazzucchelli freights his characters with prevents them from ever actually becoming people, as opposed to representations of ideas.

Now, a part of me is quite sympathetic to this line of attack; after all, I’ve gone on at tedious length about how much I dislike fiction that exists to be decoded rather than read or watched. On the other hand, you’re talking to a guy who listed Final Crisis as one of his favorite comics of the year. If watching concepts in human form slug it out in an impeccably thought-through Crisis of Infinite Metaphors isn’t a problem for me, what Mazzucchelli is up to in AP ain’t no thing either. Moreover, the thing’s just too breezily drawn and fun to read to make you feel like you’re sitting through an ARG, or a comic where once you solve the author’s equation, you need never think about it again. And contrary to Tong’s apparent reaction, I really was moved by a few of the squences. (I’ll grant him that it’s tough to get super-super-invested in the cartoonish Majors.) My beef with the book is how well-trod a path the story itself is, and I know that somewhere inside me is a review that tears the book to pieces on those grounds, but at some point early on I decided it would be more fun to like the thing.

* Even as the outraged response to that mean-spirited fanboy’s prank on Rob Liefeld continues to fill my heart with glee, my friend Chris Ward has posted the intro to a profile of Liefeld he worked on for Wizard before the mag spiked it out of fear of a lawsuit

* Goodness, the trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is like a steampunk Speed Racer. (Via Jason Adams.)

* And here’s a promo reel for George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. It’s very difficult to tell if this will be good or awful–memories of Diary of the Dead still haunt me–but it looks different than Romero’s past Dead movies, that’s for sure. (Also via Jason Adams.)

* One last Jason Adams link: His 150-word non-review of The Orphan has me both baffled and intrigued. Jiminy Christmas, I just saw Moon last night–how long is it gonna take me to go see this thing?

* If you can get past the schtick, and there’s a lot of schtick to get past, there’s some interesting stuff in Vice’s interview with Johnny Ryan about his new action comic Prison Pit. Ryan cites C.F.’s Powr Mastrs and Kazimir Strzepek’s The Mourning Star as influences and claims the book is irony-free. (Via Eric Reynolds.)

* New Nick Bertozzi comics are always a cause for celebration.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror issues an impassioned defense of Frank Darabont’s The Mist. Whom he’s defending it from, I’m not so sure. Apparently people really hate this movie? All I ever saw were people saying “It had its moments, but I didn’t like the ending/the CGI/Mrs. Carmody.” That was pretty much my take, though a) my problem with the ending wasn’t its existence but how quickly it seemed to come after the previous events–it felt unearned–and b) I thought the CGI was only crappy in the opening tentacle sequence, which is a shame since that’s the first effects sequence of the film and probably soured people on what came after–the creature designs were uniformly strong, though. Anyway, I think I’ve said this before, but of the trinity of monster-apocalypse movies that came out in the winter of 2007-2008, I initially preferred I Am Legend because Will Smith’s character and performance were so much stronger than anything comparable in Cloverfield and The Mist…but as time went by, IAL became my least favorite of the three because the monsters were just so, so weak. In that light, CRwM’s review of The Mist seems to me to have it about right: “honestly, the film would be better served by cutting it up in flick that ditched the preaching and emphasized the monsters.”

* Topless Rob Bricken is right: this montage of Batman’s takedowns in the upcoming video game Batman: Arkham Asylum really is pure porn for Bat-fans. It’s just Batman owning fools over and over again in quite Batman-specific ways, with Danny Elfman’s magnificent theme music as a soundtrack.

* Speaking of magnificent Batman-related music, today Matthew Perpetua takes a listen to Prince’s “Electric Chair.” Shit was hot.

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