* Absolute must-read of the day: Curt Purcell interviews the living shit out of Night Business and Gangsta Rap Posse creator Benjamin Marra. Marra throws bombs left and right, and names are named. Where most “indie comics are wishy-washy autobio crap” provocateurs take jabs at Clumsy or “My Sex History,” Marra comes gunning for Maus and Jimmy Corrigan. Shit gets REAL, son. (For the record I strongly disagree with his assertions in that regard, though the stance feels performative, of a piece with his comics themselves.)
* The Expendables trailer! Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Rourke, Austin, Couture, Roberts…magnificent and utterly ’80s. It’s like if you added a bunch of ampersands to Tango & Cash. Get it while it’s hot–Lionsgate has been yanking ’em down. (Via Topless Robot.)
* Afrodisiac trailer! In the words of Clay Davis, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. I’ve seen the book and it’s as good as it looks. It’s awesome to see Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca at a publisher that knows what to do with them. (Via AdHouse.)
* In this quick piece Tom Spurgeon hints at one of my big concerns engendered by the cancellation of Vito Delsante and Rachel Friere’s high-school dramedy FCHS: What the heck kind of business are we in where a project like that can’t find an audience? This isn’t John Hankiewicz’s Asthma we’re talking about, it’s a book described by the creators as “90210 meets Archie.” Something’s very wrong here.
* Nick Bertozzi talks to CBR’s Alex Dueben about a lot of things. Apparently he took his Stuffed! gig as a response to editorial feedback that his own comics are too complex, which is fascinating to me. There’s also an update in there about his long-gestating Lenny Bruce bio with Harvey Pekar. And he feels like choosing to do comics at age 27 makes him a late bloomer, which strikes me as a deeply unfortunate consequence of the premium placed on youth in this medium. We could use more late bloomers like Nick Bertozzi!
* Geoff Johns As readers’ Qs at CBR. Black Manta!
* I’m really happy that Brian Bendis and Mike Oeming’s Powers is coming back–like Ultimate Spider-Man, it’s been really good for a really long time even as some of Bendis’s more high-profile projects have left me flat, but its erratic schedule has pushed it even further off most people’s radar than USM. Here’s a report on the books’ 10th anniversary panel at the Baltimore Comic Con. Wow, ten years of Powers, and ten years of Planetary too, right? Those two books anticipated pretty much this entire decade. (Well, maybe more The Authority than Planetary.) The modern age of superhero comics is getting old.
* Comics Journal assistant editor and smart person Kristi Valenti talks about comics and comics criticism. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) This paragraph is killer:
You can use academic and critical tools to critique comics, such as close readings, theory, and thorough research. I think, though, that there’s a lot of what I dub “bad academia” going on: people who don’t bother to learn the material and technological history behind how comics were produced (fortunately, there are now excellent sources such as Men of Tomorrow and The Ten Cent Plague for that), so they don’t put comics in the proper context–theory for theory’s sake, divorced from the actual comic; bad comparisons based on lack of breadth of knowledge (Johnny Ryan is like Chris Ware, because they’re both alternative); people who feel guilty or ashamed for liking comics, and so use their academic credentials and training to justify it, or people who have a pet area of study and use comics to justify it (Blackest Night is like Paradise Lost); etc.
* Rickey Purdin’s doing a month of horror sketches again. Yay!
* If you ever want to know why the world is in such shitty shape, just remember that people in positions of authority, like government officials and newspaper reporters, don’t have the first fucking clue what they’re talking about.
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