* Go support Team Comics Comics!
* It’s an interview with Grant Morrison. Money quote:
I tend to only read comics written by friends or people I’ve known. And I’m not a great comic reader. I get a bunch of DC stuff sent in a box every month, and I’ve got a friend in town who runs a store, and he gives me stuff every now and again. But I’m not a big comic reader, so I tend to read people like Warren Ellis or Alan Moore. People I’m familiar with, or that I’ve met, or that I’m friendly with. Like Mark Millar or whoever. It’s more on the basis of who I know rather than who I like.
(Via JK Parkin.)
* I’m actually dreading the conclusion of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to handle it.
* Hey, wanna by some pages from Ron Rege Jr.’s masterpiece Skibber Bee Bye? (Via Tom Devlin.)
* It’d be relatively easy to believe that the notion that comic shops with creepy stuff on display or creepy people in their employ are a barrier to female readers was some kind of Comic Shop Guy-style self-loathing comics-community stereotype, but no, it’s true, they’re a barrier to female readers as Hope Larson’s survey of some of them confirms. My wife and I haven’t gone to many comic shops together, but I can tell you that the creepy one–the defunct Village Comics–is the only one she ever talks about. Bad impressions last, and a few topless Nazi women in a display case at the checkout counter can go a long way toward making someone never want to visit any comic shop again. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* This Ken Parille piece on monologues, soliloquies, and thought balloons vs. speech balloons in Daniel Clowes’s Wilson is really worth considering when reading that book.
* Topless Robot’s Merrill Hagan returns to the Disturbing Moments in Kids’ Movies well with predictably unsettling results. Points of interest: The Flying Monkeys get their due; “Remember me, Eddie? When I killed your brother?” beats the death of the squeaky shoe; at least one moment cited is genuinely emotionally devastating rather than just scary (“Arthax, you’re sinking!”); and Jesus Christ, that scene from Superman III where the lady gets sucked into the computer and turned into a cyborg is like something out of Hellbound: Hellraiser II. That scene scared me so badly as a little kid I wouldn’t go into the TV room alone in case the TV switched on by itself and showed me that scene again.
* It’s like “Xanadu” meets corpse paint meets vampires meets the video for “Call On Me” by Eric Prydz. Goldfrapp are great.
Oh yeah.
My wife has gotten into funny books through me, and is as familiar with the non-superhero stuff as anyone, though she has definitely tried the capes just to check it out. She’s one of those women’s studies broads, and a domestic violence lawyer nowadays, so I snuck the Brad Meltzer stuff in her pile of books, just to see what she thought. “This is what people READ?” Funny.
She has totally learned to love comics, though, and is especially fond of Jamie Hernandez and Alan Moore, and she loved 100 bullets (don’t ask me).
But anytime we go into a DM-type shop, I don’t know, she dresses pretty slutty and the conversation between the three or however many dudes who hang out at the shop just sorta dries up and she feels pretty ogled. Not that this is so new, I guess, but being in a one room shop just made it feel so…focused, I suppose. I’ve been with her, of course, and it was awkward feeling to me, and I have almost no awareness of the people around me, usually. Their suprise is palpable, and it is pretty obvious they feel like whatever they were talking about can no longer be explored in the mixed company. I have been in the stores alone, obviously, and mostly these guys are just talking about the toy resale market, or how cool the hulk’s color is, maybe they just feel self-consciously nerdy with her there, but it does come off real creepy.
The adult-only porn shelf directly underneath the action figures probably didn’t help.