* I’m still plugging away at Robot 6. My posts today include a report on the taxicab that exploded outside the DC offices this morning and a piece on Tom Brevoort’s thoughts on the difficulty of maintaining series with female, minority, or international leads.

* A trio of strong pieces from the Comics Comics crew appear in the new Bookforum: Jeet Heer on R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, Dan Nadel on the career of David Mazzucchelli, and Joe “Jog” McCulloch on alternative manga. (Via Chris Mautner.)

* My God, I really can’t remember the last time I heard horror sites go on about how terrifying a movie was like they’ve been going on about Paranormal Activity. “Awesome,” sure; “terrifying,” no. “Scariest Movie of the Decade,” apparently?

* Real-World Horror: It’s long been clear that Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer–he wrote a book about it recently!–which is just one of many reasons why I’ve long loathed Pat Buchanan and marveled at his continued place in the firmament of publicly acceptable punditry. But there’s something about his latest piece on the topic, “Did Hitler Want War?”, that is disturbing me more than usual. I mean, part of it is just the obvious ridiculousness of his “No” answer to that question. You don’t have to have recently read a thousand-page biography of Adolf Hitler (though it helps!) to know that “Hitler didn’t want war” is only true in the sense that he would perhaps have preferred to have Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union surrendered to him voluntarily, with Western Europe and Britain then dutifully entering into vassalhood, than to go through the time and expense of conquering them forcibly. (And I’m not even sure I’ll grant you that; Hitler and his ruling clique, and even the less Nazified elements of the German military, strongly believed in the salutary effect of military conflict and conquest on the character of a nation. They didn’t want to get into just any war, mind you–they wanted wars they could win. But given that natural precondition, war was a-okay.) But more than that, we’re living in a time where there is a cottage industry among this country’s right wing dedicated to confusing and obfuscating the origins and goals of Hitler and the Nazi Party in order to score short-term political points. Most notably this is being done by deceptively interpreting “National Socialism” as actually having something to do with socialism on the Left. Now, this is just plain stupid, like arguing that because it’s called The People’s Republic of China, the Red Chinese are Republicans. But it’s also outrageous, and offensive, and contrary to any number of readily available accounts of the thoughts, words, and deeds of Hitler and the Nazis. It is, in other words, a deliberate assault on the facts surrounding the deaths of millions and millions of people, including the systematic genocide of six million Jews in the Holocaust, which concept Buchanan cannot even bring himself to acknowledge. It’s morally monstrous and its practitioners are moral monsters.

* Your quote of the day comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I think there’s this presumption that people who are anti-death penalty get there out of some sympathy for criminals, or some wide-eye naivete. Maybe some people get there that way. I came up in an era where young boys thought nothing of killing each other over cheap Starter jackets. I don’t have any illusions about the criminal mind. I don’t believe in the essential goodness of man–which is exactly why I oppose the death penalty.

* I’m still over at Robot 6–if you’d like, you can click here to see all my posts so far.

* TheOneRing.net reports that the Tolkien Estate and New Line Cinema have reached a settlement over revenue from The Lord of the Rings movies. When oh when will some brave soul stand up to the Cult of the Author?

* This week’s League of Tana Tea Drinkers best-of roundup features a diverse lot of horrors for your reading pleasure: Blackest Night, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Mother’s Day posters, Shrooms, Faces of Death, and post-millennial “road horror” movies.

* God knows I’m a sucker for good World of Warcraft blogging, so I dug this little Matt Maxwell piece about a particularly well-imagined and exciting final boss of a particular part of the game. Besides effectively communicating the baroque, multifaceted maneuvers you need to pull off to survive the fight to a noob like me, he also emphasizes how a good game will catch you off guard even when, as is the case with many WoW players, you’ve been hacking away at it for a very long time. Also there are giant insects.

* Curt Purcell’s epic comparison of Blackest Night and The Great Darkness Saga continues with an examination of that most underappreciated of tools available to the cosmic-comic artist: the generic planetscape establishing shot.

* Having finally watched the final three parts of Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas’s five-part video essay on the evolution of the modern blockbuster via the summer movies of 1984 and 1989, I have to say it really only lives up to the latter half of that particular billing. If there is a case to be made that the smaller movies they talk about–pioneering indie films like Do the Right Thing and sex, lies and videotape; teen movies like Heathers and Say Anything; mainstream Hollywood movies with no explosions like Field of Dreams and Dead Poets Society–did any sort of cross-pollinating with the big movies they discuss–Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, The Abyss–to lead to “the modern blockbuster” as we know it, they don’t make it. Nor do they specifically cite Batman as the kick-off for the way we think of Summer Blockbusters today, which is always how I’d remembered it; nor do they discuss what kind of audiences went to these movies, which I figured was where the linkage with all the teen movies they were talking about would come. But that said, it’s still a fun tour of what made all these flicks tick, and anything that touts the brilliance of Tim Burton’s Batman, still the best superhero movie ever made by a comfortable margin, is okay by me.

* Alright, alright, I’ll go see Paranormal Activity if it comes out anywhere near me this September. You win!

Soldier X #1-8

Darko Macan, writer

Igor Kordey, artist

Marvel, 2002-2003

32 pages each

$2.99 each

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit Robot 6.

* So like I said, I’ve been guestblogging over at Robot 6. My first post was on a little story you might have missed about Disney buying Marvel. Oh, hadn’t you heard?

* There have been a lot of silly reactions to the news, the most popular being the comment-thread favorite that Disney will somehow water down or neuter Marvel into a family-friendly affair. (Heaven forbid!) I think this is quite obviously nonsense, as the relatively (not completely, but relatively) untrammeled creative trajectories of Disney-owned ABC and Miramax and Hyperion (and even Pixar, in a way) would attest. A slightly more sophisticated and therefore even more baffling idea is that Disney’s going to come in and, necessarily, shake up a moribund superhero line–see Ben Schwartz at The Comics Reporter for one such argument. I just can’t figure out by what standards Marvel’s superhero line is in trouble. Sure, you may not like what Quesada, Bendis et al have done by tying the whole Marvel U. together with black-ops shenanigans, but look at how the comics sell! Particularly relative to the competition, by which I mean “the entire rest of the North American comics industry,” Marvel could barely be doing better. I’m all for a theoretical Marvel Comics that’s a mass-market juggernaut on par with Twilight or something, but for now Disney has a roc-sized bird in the hand–why go after the two in the bush?

* My second Robot 6 post was about the slightly more low-key story of PictureBox going digital via the iPhone comics app Panelfly. Honestly, this one was a big surprise to me too. I also took note of Nick Bertozzi’s adaptation of The Awakening by Kate Chopin and offered my comic picks of the week in the regular “Can’t Wait for Wednesday” column.

* Proof that God may exist after all: Rambo 5 has been greenlit. This sequel to my favorite movie of 2008 will see John Rambo doing battle with Mexican druglords and human traffickers in order to rescue a kidnapped young girl. The big question is which real-world issue Stallone will be gunning for here: illegal immigration, or the killing fields of Juarez? Given his apparent politics you might expect the former, but given Rambo I’m leaning toward the latter.

* I’m currently two videos deep into a five-part video essay called A Tale of Two Summers: The Evolution of the Modern Blockbuster. Analyzing the summer movies of the pivotal years 1984 and 1989, it’s written by Aaron Aradillas and edited by the great Matt Zoller Seitz. The first 1984 segment tackles the rise of MTV and music-video-style editing, the Reagan Era zeitgeist, and the birth of the new teen movie in Risky Business and Sixteen Candles. The second 1984 segment chronicles the birth of PG-13 and the concomitant rise of the “cynical spectacle” of “dark escapism” as Hollywood’s “summer blockbuster default mode” with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Dreamscape, Gremlins, and Red Dawn. I don’t think I’d ever seen or even heard of Dreamscape before, nor, for some reason, did I realize that Temple of Doom could just have easily been called Indiana Jones and a Series of Shots of People Falling from Great Heights. Lotsa lulz to be had in the editing, too–I particularly liked the juxtaposition of Prince’s “Dearly beloved” speech from Purple Rain with the gawking, apocalypse-fearing crowd surrounding Dana Barrett’s building at the start of the final act of Ghostbusters. 1989 promises to be juicy as heck.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Neverland by the under-read, underappreciated Dave Kiersh. Dave could easily be an altcomix hero for the Tumblr generation.

* Jeffrey Brown’s doing more cat books!

* Hans Rickheit is touring in support of The Squirrel Machine!

* Ceri B. keeps explaining to me what is up with World of Warcraft. As is frequently the case, the next big WoW thing solves a combination of in-world and real-world problems.

* Frank Santoro continues interviewing Ben Katchor. Well, he continued doing so in 1996, but here are the results.

* I enjoyed watching David Allison trip the light fantastic across Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter and one single splash page from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One, with some City of Glass and Criminal thrown in for good measure. I can’t wait for his copy of Asterios Polyp to arrive just to see what new heights of blogging-as-performance-art he’s inspired to aim for. I’m expecting animated gifs and embedded Basement Jaxx songs.

* I always marvel at Jog’s ability to keep his sentences under control when he writes long reviews–mine run me all over the place, like I’m trying to walk a manic Great Dane. Anyway, his review of Inglourious Basterds; if mine was about the film’s violence, his is about pretty much everything else. Indeed, the bipolar nature of the rough stuff in the film that so entranced me seems to have confounded him. See what you think.

* Jason Adams salutes Soldier of Orange, a Paul Verhoeven film from the long-ago year of 1977.