* Above you’ll find the image I meant to put at the top of my review of Henry & Glenn Forever this morning. Attentiondeficitdisorderly regrets the error.
* This was a blast: Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, Brian Hibbs, Abhay Khosla, Douglas Wolk, David Uzumeri, Chris Eckert and I discuss Daniel Clowes’s Wilson. I tried to go to bat for the thing; let me know how I did.
* Today on Robot 6: a quick look at several recent pieces on superheroes and race.
* Tom Spurgeon joins Matt Zoller Seitz in kicking superhero movies around, more or less, and like Seitz he does so from the position of someone who’d like to see something that even remotely approximates Jack Kirby on his worst day. Where Spurge diverges from Seitz, if I’m reading him correctly, is in saying that the tendency of the better superhero movies to be seen (even rightly seen) as such based on the strength of a single strong performance or small number of visually memorable moments is a feature, not a bug. This despite the fact that I believe Spurgeon has much less use for superheroes overall than does Seitz, though my hoped-for Sean/Spurge/Seitz slumber party has yet to materialize for me to gauge this first-hand. Spurgeon docks points for Seitz’s theoretical wider range for the genre, which Tom sees as crazytalk given not just Hollywood’s tried-and-true template for making money from superheroes, but the shallowness of the genre itself.
* I particularly liked this bit:
I think Iron Man 2‘s step back from record opening box office and the mediocre US box-office performance for Kick-Ass indicate the end of the genre’s initial, immense grace period, a new act in their development that was probably instigated by the 1-2 punch of the first Iron Man movie and Dark Knight. Those two movies were immense pleasures for their respective, gigantic audiences; it’s hard to imagine success for too many movies that don’t provide at least a rough equivalent of their thrills — or movies that don’t seem to work that way not being viewed as something most people can see six months later at home.
In other words, we’ve reached Peak Nerd. My personal spin on this is that given the failure of Watchmen to convincingly carve out a space in the superhero movie genre akin to what The Godfather did for gangster movies–a failure of both interest and ability on Zack Snyder’s part–The Dark Knight and Iron Man 1 are going to be seen to be as good as it gets–the perfect excuse not to go see some movie you’re interested in but suspect will offer you diminishing returns by comparison. (For what it’s worth, no, I haven’t seen Iron Man 2 yet, but it’s family circumstances that are to blame, not a lack of interest–though given the choice I’d probably first go see an entirely different movie about an iron person, the restored Metropolis.)
* This news is both exciting and depressing: Did you have any idea that the Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section in The Believer is now up to its fifth installment? I didn’t remember that the first had come out!
* I already linked to this, but you really should take whatever amount of time it takes you to read Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Brian Hibbs. Even aside from the subjective but/and/and-therefore fascinating portrait it paints of comics retail circa 2010, I just think that in general, more people should agree to do interviews in which the stated goal of one of the participants is to cordially poke holes in the positions of the other. This is particularly true in comics, where that virtually never happens. Good on Brian and Tom both for doing this.
* Grant Morrison, Batman, interview, you know the drill. I have to say, I re-read the last six issues of Batman and Robin this morning for an assignment, and they are simply delightful–a buoyantly, brightly dark series of mysteries filled with weird villains and exciting action scenes. It’s the ongoing Batman comic you always wanted to read if you ever were interested in reading an ongoing Batman comic.
* Zak Smith’s alphabetical rundown of the D&D Monster Manual is over. Heartbreaking.
* I’m always up for someone pointing out how poorly written Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis was. The flamethrower thing amazes me with its awfulness every time I think about it.
* Bizarro Supergirl? Sure, I’ll eat it. I really do believe that Bizarro is a top-ten-of-all-time idea from the superhero genre.
* A John Williams blog-a-thon? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via The House Next Door.)
* I have no idea what these hugely impractical giant robot-monster things from something called Mazinga Z are, but they’re gorgeous.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates slaps President Obama around a bit for being a luddite scold at a recent commencement speech. Hey Mr. President, maybe if you weren’t so busy trying to find a “sensible middle ground” on fucking Miranda rights, we wouldn’t need to be entertained or distracted or diverted so much!
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