* There has been a pretty high volume of posts around here over the past couple days in addition to the usual Carnival of Souls linkblogging. In case you missed anything, I reviewed Boy’s Club #3 for The Savage Critic(s), posted my weekly Gossip Girl thoughts, wrote up my SPX 2009 report, and posted MP3s of the Critics Roundtable and New Action panels from the con.
* My goodness, Drawn & Quarterly’s big sale really is offering some nutso discounts, and it ends Friday. I gotta sniff around; you should too.
* Robert Kirkman talks to MTV Splash Page about Frank Darabont and AMC’s Walking Dead TV series. It all augurs well. Can you imagine if there was a post-apocalyptic zombie series that people could talk about in the same breath as Mad Men and Breaking Bad? Can you imagine?? (Via Heidi MacDonald.)
* Superhero-comic tyro Rob Bricken of Topless Robot and his chum Matt Wilson review Wednesday Comics, breaking it down into lists of the Best, Worst, and Just Okay strips. As much fun as it can be for me to bust on Rob when he whiffs on the “facts” of the current Marvel and DC Universes–and believe me, that’s a lot of fun–I still really love when he writes about superhero comics, because in a lot of way’s he’s such low-hanging fruit for those publishers. He’s a giant nerd in virtually every other regard but superhero comics, he has a rudimentary knowledge of the basics, but he’s basically coming to them afresh–can they hook him? I won’t spoil the answer, although perhaps you can guess.
* R. Crumb gave a two-hour press conference on The Book of Genesis in France. Man was it fun writing that sentence.
* Real-Life Horror 1: Should there be a military “solution to the Obama problem”?
* Real-Life Horror 2: I suppose I should weigh in on the Roman Polanski arrest, huh? How’s this: Rosemary’s Baby is one of the all-time great horror movies, Chinatown is overrated, what he went through during the Holocaust and with the Manson murders is awful beyond imagining, and people who drug, rape, and sodomize 13-year-olds as they scream “no” should go to fucking prison.
CHINATOWN isn’t overrated. Agreed on all other points.
Yeah, I’d flip around your assessments of Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby, but otherwise that about sums it up. Most defenses of Polanski I’ve read come down to “but he seems like such a nice guy, and he’s been through so much, and we had a such a lovely time at a dinner party of his last year, and really, what’s one child rape between friends?”
I think the victim’s account is more likely than not to be the truth, but it still kind of bothers me that everyone who takes the anti-Polanski side seems to act like it’s been established with perfect certainty that he is guilty of doing exactly what she accused him of doing. My understanding is that he plead guilty to having sex with a minor, not to the stuff about forcing sex on her when she was telling him to stop. Granted even consensual sex with a 13 year old would be pretty bad (I think he claimed he thought she was older), but on a sliding scale of wrongness I don’t see it as nearly as wrong as the rape of an unwilling victim.
Jesse: Even if we were to grant you all that, establishing it should be the province of the justice system, which he fled. But in general I’m uncomfortable with affording the benefit of the doubt to the guy who pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor in exchange for dropping various drug and sodomy charges rather than to the minor he had sex with.
the anti-Polanski side seems to act like it’s been established with perfect certainty that he is guilty of doing exactly what she accused him of doing
Thing is, even in Polanski’s account, he gave a thirteen-year-old alcohol and Quaaludes and then had sex with her while she was drunk and drugged. That’s not “I met this woman, and we hooked up, and it turned out she was a little younger than she looked.” That’s a child molester.