* It’s a red-letter day over at the Fantagraphics store: 15% off all their Ignatz nominees (and there are quite a few!), while brand-new books West Coast Blues, Prison Pit Vol. 1, Giraffes in My Hair, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, Love & Rockets: New Stories Vol. 2, Rock Candy, and The Squirrel Machine are all now in available for purchase.
* This week’s League of Tana Tea Drinkers “best of the horror bloggers” link roundup features posts on Thirst, Delphine, True Blood, His Name Was Jason, District 9 (by yours truly), and a guest post by…Andrew W.K.?
* Curt Purcell continues his series comparing Blackest Night to The Great Darkness Saga with another pair of posts. First, he tackles the changing nature of superhero violence. One thing I think’s a little odd about Curt’s superhero blogging so far is that he primarily cites The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen in terms of their use of bloody/realistic violence and its influence on later comics. But neither of those comics is particularly gruesome in that regard (indeed one of the big complaints about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was that it was bloody all the way up to the end, at which point it became bloodless, as opposed to the comic which more or less worked the other way around). I actually think the increased use of graphic violence in superhero comics is the least direct of their legacies. I also think he’s slightly misreading Dirk Deppey’s “superhero decadence” concept by using it synonymously with “stuff that would get these comics an R-rating,” when I think the more crucial element is the debauched nature of contemporary superhero comics as art primarily concerned with itself, its own continuity and conventions–an increasingly artificial edifice built on shaky foundations and displayed for an audience with no interest in ever looking at anything else. But Curt does brush up against that aspect in his second post on the topic, this one focusing on superhero comics going meta. Of course most meta-superhero comics contain some kind of critique of the genre, while the true decadents in the Dirk Deppey formulation are perfectly content just to create ever more baroque variations on Captain Marvel.
* Go, er, squint: Nick Bertozzi tries to condense a 5,000-word prose article to a two-page comics spread. Have I mentioned I’m excited that Nick is blogging so much lately?
* Allow me to be the 40,000th person to recommend Dash Shaw’s interview of Hope Larson on the topic of comics creators working with editors. The problem with working with editors is that some editors are idiots. The problem with not working with editors is that sometimes you’re an idiot.
* TJ Dietsch applauds Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later as superior to Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later, a judgment with which I concur.
* Jeet Heer on the Eiffel Tower’s recurring role in genre movies as something that gets blown up or knocked down, with a tantalizing look at a story in which the Tower itself becomes a city-destroying monster.
* More lowlights from the CIA Inspector General’s report on the Bush Administration’s torture program: Digby focuses on the use of forced enemas, diapers, and forcing detainees to wallow in their own filth, while in a lengthy post running down the worst of the abuses, Glenn Greenwald summarizes the situation thusly:
(1) The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle — all things that we have always condemend as “torture” and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies (“torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .”) — reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.
(2) As I wrote rather clearly, numerous detainees died in U.S. custody, often as a direct result of our “interrogation methods.” Those who doubt that can read the details here and here. Those claiming there was no physical harm are simply lying — death qualifies as “physical harm” — and those who oppose prosecutions are advocating that the people responsible literally be allowed to get away with murder.
Also, my congressman, Rep. Peter King, is a fucking monster.
Hey Sean–
Even if I’m off-base about decadence, DKR, and WATCHMEN, those are more decorative flourishes in that post than premises in my argument; the points remain that BLACKEST NIGHT takes a significantly more graphic and lethal approach to violence than GREAT DARKNESS SAGA did, and that this difference is reflective of different periods in comics history and what’s happened in the years between them.
Having said that, I’m not so sure I am off-base about those things. On the question of decadence, I’d just point to this recent clarification (in response to Bill Willingham’s notorious Big Hollywood piece) and the images Dirk chose to illustrate it. I actually think Dirk touches on both the “R-rated” stuff and the matters you raise. It’s not even clear to me that he sees these as separate issues, rather than related facets/expressions of a single phenomenon.
For what it’s worth, he’s linked to a lot of my posts about superhero decadence, and I can’t think of a time he’s ever corrected me or called me out about misstating his position. I expect he’ll issue another clarification in light of this exchange.
Now, on the question of DKR and WATCHMEN influencing superhero comics in a more violent direction, I think there’s a fairly widespread impression that such is the case, though as I tried to argue in my OMEGA MEN post, that impression is not entirely correct. The reason I think there’s such a widespread impression is that every other review or article of the movie seemed to have some boilerplate paragraph chortling over the irony that those comics were supposed to make superhero stories more adult in the sense of more sophisticated and deconstructive, but instead influenced superhero comics to be grimmer, grittier, darker, more violent, more rapey, etc.
Granted, they don’t look so bloody in retrospect, but that was the period when these changes were taking place, and these comics did confer a sheen of respectability on those trends. I can vouch that there was at the time something startling and unprecedented in my prior comics experience (including the OMEGA MEN and similar stuff like Willingham’s ELEMENTALS) about Rorschach’s finger-snapping, the Comedian’s murder, the original Silk Spectre’s rape, the frank thematization of the fetish-aspect of superhero costumes to the characters, etc. I really think they were part of that whole shift, though I think they get more credit/blame for it than is warranted.
P.S.–since you linked to interrogation stuff, I’m surprised you didn’t include this extraordinary mea culpa from Spencer Ackerman. Can you imagine if our mainstream journalism were characterized by such moral/intellectual honesty? Yeah, me neither.
Hey Curt–I definitely think Watchmen and DKR DID push superheroes in a more violent direction, but mostly because most superhero creators, being not as talented as Moore, Gibbons, or Miller, seized upon a relatively minor aspect of those books’ revisionism and made it the be-all end-all of the lessons they learned. That, and first-person narration with no sentence subjects. 🙂
As for Ackerman’s thing, yeah, that was impressive. I was horribly, horribly wrong about a lot of things for several years and I have no trouble admitting that. (Trouble coming to terms with it, but not admitting it.) I don’t understand why we don’t hold people whose JOB it is to try to be right about these things to at least that standard.