* The latest Strange Tales spotlight, and one of my favorites so far: Michael Kupperman. Jeely Kly did his Namor strip crack me the hell up. I was literally doubled over from laughing.
* Here’s a nice pick-me-up for all the comics fans out there: Check out the preliminary Best Comics of the 2000s list Tom Spurgeon is asking people to help him put together at ComicsReporter.com. The number of very high quality comics published over the past ten years is simply astonishing. This is the kind of thing I keep in mind every time I read someone saying comics, in whatever configuration, is dead.
* The 2009 Ignatz Award Nominees have been announced, and there are quite a few ADDTF faves in their number: Tim Hensley, Josh Simmons, Ron Rege Jr., Gabriella Giandelli, Jordan Crane, Acme Novelty Library #19, Kramers Ergot 7, loads more. The winners will be chosen by ballots from SPX’s attendees and awarded on Saturday, September 26th. It sounds like I’ll be presenting one of the awards, which is an honor. (Via Peggy Burns.)
* Torture Links of the Day: It sounds like Attorney General Holder will be appointing a prosecutor to go after only the actual, physical torturers, i.e. the grunts, rather than the architects of our torture policy. Moreover, from what I’ve read any prosecutions will likely only target those who went beyond even the fatuous guidelines provided by those policymakers, essentially serving as a retroactive ratification of those torture policies. Meanwhile, a new report reveals CIA torturers threatened to kill at least one detainee by holding a gun and a power drill to his head. A fucking power drill. Spencer Ackerman has more lowlights from the report.
* Nick Bertozzi’s SVA students have completed their collection of Iraq War comics, adapted from the true stories of the soldiers and civilians involved. It sounds like it will only be available as a webcomic, so get clicking.
* The great Frank Santoro interviews the great Ben Katchor, back in 199friggin6. When I think about what I was interested in in the ’90s when people were still trying to carve out lives in altcomix, my mind reels. Frank Santoro and Ben Katchor were making their bones when I was picking up cheerleaders.\
* In a quartet of posts found here, here, here, and here, Curt Purcell compares Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night to Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen’s Great Darkness Saga in terms of villain reveals, technical advances in coloring, the purpose of clunky old-school dialogue, the concept of spoilers, and more.
* Ben Morse picks his definitive Hulk comics. I think this passage on Peter David’s decade-plus run on the character was interesting:
…the whole thing has so many twists, turns and game-changers that it’s like reading several runs bridged together by a shared author and tone, but almost as if it were a long-running TV series that switched things up as cast members aged or departed and now you’re getting the box set.
By the time I graduated high school I’d pared down my reading to essentially four titles, and David’s Incredible Hulk was one of them, though only Sin City and The Maxx survived the move to college. (The fourth title was the animated-style Batman Adventures.) David has some tics that I have a hard time with, like dragging supporting characters through every book he writes, and I haven’t really read him in years. But it seems to me that of all the writers working in the ’80s and ’90s he probably had the surface storytelling sophistication that became the norm in the more writer-centric ’00s–I certainly remember it standing out at the time. I’d place his Incredible Hulk run just behind Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon on a short list of long-running superhero titles headed for critical reappraisal among people for whom superheroes aren’t the be-all and end-all in the next couple years.
* Two posts on comics and format that give you something to chew on when read in tandem: Geoff Grogan on Kramers Ergot 7, Wednesday Comics, and the respective values of inaccessibility and ubiquity, and Tom Spurgeon on Spy vs. Spy, MAD Magazine, and what happens when format trumps content.
* Johnny Ryan illustrates his critics. (Via Mike Baehr.)
* This Jeffrey Brown Hulk vs. Wolverine comic strip is pretty terrific.
* I was pleased with my contribution to Tom Spurgeon’s latest Five for Friday reader-participation feature, asking participants to name five songs you’d like to see adapted as comics and who you’d like to do the adapting.
* There’s a new World of Warcraft…expansion, is it? called Cataclysm coming out, and here’s a trailer for it. Rob Bricken is right about how cheesy it is–wayyyyyy too much po-faced narration for my, or surely anyone’s, taste. I remember when the trailer for Wrath of the Lich King came out–I’ve never played WoW for a second and yet I watched that thing over and over and over again, it was so perfect at expressing its ersatz Tolkienisms. This, on the other hand…Well, I sure wish Shift-T were a going concern so I could be told what to think about it.
As a player, I think all the new WoW stuff looks good. But mostly because of technical reason to do with playing — it’s not selling much of a story.
Likewise, the Cataclysm itself will have more impact on those who have already travelled through the lands extensively. (It also looks really pretty, but that might just be me.)
Certainly the new trailer doesn’t grab me the way the Lich King was, nor the excellent “You are not prepared.” But yeah, the content looks great. I may have to take up WoW blogging; too many of the folks I’ve enjoyed reading have retired.
I’ll have something to say about the WoW trailer should I ever have time to blog again.
Basically, the Lich King trailer was built around an awesome piece of fantasy art, and this one is more or less a long advertisement and feature list.
More later. Maybe.
I want my life back…