* The theme for today at Robot 6 was people interpreting other people’s work. Besides this impressive sneak peek at an upcoming theatrical adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl…
…there’s also Tony Millionaire doing Achewood, Ryan Dunlavey & ToyFare’s excellent comic-strip mash-ups, and Dustin Harbin’s Dune book club–featuring art by Paul Pope, Dustin, and lots of other folks.
* Speaking of Paul, I love his dirty drawings.
* Tom Spurgeon reviews The Best American Comics 2009. Heck, Tom Spurgeon reviews a comic!
* Curt Purcell gives Blackest Night its midterm progress report. He’s not that impressed. That’s fine. What’s irking me (and Curt’s not guilty of this so much as the reviewers he links to, who fall all over themselves to find inventive new put-downs) is the fashionable new response to Johns’s work among many comics critics, which is that he likes Hal Jordan too much and therefore he stinks. I’m sorry but the idea that he likes Hal Jordan more than, say, Grant Morrison likes Bruce Wayne or Kal-El is ludicrous.
* Keep posting Cold Heat stuff on your blog and I’ll keep linking, Frank Santoro.
* Jeet Heer discusses what he thinks The Comics Journal has done well lately, and by implication what it’s done not-so-well. I think they’re simply at the mercy of whoever wants to do reviews and criticism for that publication anymore. I love that they’ll pay me to talk to Josh Cotter for an hour, but I’d rather read something and post a review of it that same day than read something that’s a few months old and watch the review come out a few months after that. I’ll be curious to see if the new site gets involved in the day-to-day discussion again.
* My wife is pretty. And pale.
Hi Sean,
Just to clarify: in my post I focused on the strongest essays and interviews from the recent Journal. But that doesn’t mean that all the stuff I didn’t talk about (“by implication”) is uniformally bad. Some of it is quite good but it doesn’t cohere in the same way. What I like to see in a magazine is a governing sensibility or a sense of a common discourse. The Journal used to have that but now is too all over the place. You’re right that the major reason for this is that they are at the mercy of their contributers to some degree. And the Journal has made a valiant attempt to recruit the best bloggers out there, yourself included, but this has proven hard, for the reasons you outline. As a web-journal they will be more successfull, I think.
Thanks for the kind words, Jeet. I don’t know why I said “by implication,” because in point of fact you actually came out and said what you found less effective, and that’s what I was thinking of. Brainfart I guess.
I suppose the Journal’s big strength, the freedom it gives its writers, is also its big weakness, in that this benign neglect can lead to that scattered feeling you describe. I think whether or not this changes when they move online depends on the bloggers and contributors they select. Which is duh territory, but there you have it.