* Today on Robot 6: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as potential action-movie gamechanger. I love the word “gamechanger.” Gamechanger gamechanger gamechanger. If everyone stopped saying “throw under the bus” and started saying “gamechanger” I’d be so much happier. And it’s a shame, because “throw under the bus” is such an effective turn of phrase. I guess that’s why everyone says it. Wow, this has nothing to do with Scott Pilgrim and action movies anymore, does it.
* Whoa, Frazer Irving on Batman and Robin #13.
* Geoff Grogan has changed the title of his upcoming comic about a blue-skinned superwoman from Mystique to Fandancer. Probably a smart move. The Mouse sees all, Geoff!
* The ever more blog-prolific Josh Simmons has started a new blog for The White Rhinoceros, “a racially-oriented psychedelic fantasy comic currently being serialized in Mome.” Well, this should prove to be not at all troubling in any way!
* Jesse Moynihan is deploys his trademark blend of heady mysticism, two-fisted combat, and take-this-job-and-shove-it dialogue in “New Age Fights,” a new strip for Vice, which under the watchful mustache of Nick Gazin has definitely become a keep-your-eye-on-it destination for comics.
* Matt Seneca is now reviewing comics for Newsarama, so please adjust your “reading Newsarama” levels accordingly.
* The Mindless Ones are going through all the Bat-villains alphabetically, belatedly making up for the unfortunate omission of Amygdala but otherwise gloriously geeky fun.
* Real Life Horror: “Albert Fentress, the former Poughkeepsie schoolteacher who killed and cannibalized a Town of Poughkeepsie teenager in 1979, will remain locked in a mental hospital for at least two more years, a Dutchess County prosecutor said.” I think they should count themselves extremely lucky this person was caught only one murder deep into his career as a killer.
* Real Life Horror 2: When you see the lengths to which the British Conservatives are going to address their country’s use of torture–and I don’t know enough about British politics to judge how sincere or legit this effort is or will be, I just know it’s a million times better than what we’ve seen here in the States–it’s hard not to resent the Obama Administration, to say nothing of American conservatives.
* Semi-Real Life Horror: I like cryptozoology, I like Flash artist Francis Manapul, so I see little reason I wouldn’t like Beast Legends, a Canadian cryptozoology TV show that utilizes Manapul to illustrate mythological and cryptozoological creatures. (That’s Manapul on the left.)
* Zak Smith has the best ideas. If you have ideas, you should compare them to Zak Smith’s first to make sure they’re worth extracting from your own brain.
* I recently watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War and started reading a bit more about the conflict, and one of the things that struck me hard and immediately is that Ulysses S. Grant is a fucking monster of a general, a fine writer, and a person to be studied and celebrated. That simplifies it, of course, but it’s certainly closer to the truth as we can understand it than the narrative even a Yankee like me was fed, where Grant was a drunk fuck-up who lucked into beating a reluctant warrior-poet who was in every way save his eventual defeat Grant’s moral and tactical superior. Moreover, it seems pretty clear to me that the “Lee > Grant” bubbe meise is the product of a concerted century-long effort to delegitimize both the cause and effect of the War, the ramifications of which are still at work in fairly obvious ways today. With all that in mind I’m happy to see Grant moving up in the rankings of the best and worst presidents. His presidency was a mess in a lot of ways, but I think the opprobrium directed toward him was never commensurate with his administration’s sins and had more to do with psychological payback.
* Meanwhile, the godawful atrocious comment thread at the aforelinked Matthew Yglesias post on Grant reminds me to point you to this brief, interesting discussion of comment-thread culture. I’ve never had a lot of comments here, but I’ve tended to really enjoy them; this reached its apex during the Lost discussions of this past final season. I’m super-proud to have in some way inspired the level of discourse in those threads. I’m not sure what exactly I did to shape it here, but back when I was a mod on the Wizard board–which wasn’t the ADDTF comments, to be sure, but was hella civil compared to comparable outlets–we rained hard on troublemakers and dickheads, with the result that the community quickly became self-policing. That’s an approach I’d love to see replicated pretty much everywhere.
* I straight-up loved Madballs.
White Rhino is going to be disturbingly glorious.
Check this link out
http://www.jimgoad.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=news;action=print;num=1069058596
for a whole bunch of drawings and story bits going all the way back to 2003.
BONKERS/can’t wait.
My little brother had the eyeball one … our goal one summer was to break it open and see what the weird liquid stuff was inside.
Wow, Madballs! Now I’m going to lose an hour looking up images of Garbage Pail Kids and M.U.S.C.L.E. Men and M.A.S.K. toys. Beats working.
As for Grant, I just finished (thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent posts) James McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” which, yeah, if you need a single-volume Civil War book, that’s the one. I followed it up with Rick Geary’s little volume on the Lincoln assassination – a combination I wholeheartedly recommend, as it picks up pretty much exactly where McPherson lets off. Grant was fascinating. His memoirs are next on my list. If anyone can recommend a particular book about Sherman’s March, too, I’d be grateful.
The reason why Grant is a tricky figure to idolize is because he is often credited with the creation – or at least was a strong early proponent of – the strategy of “total war,” i.e. using superior numbers and frighteningly high attrition rates to tear down the opponent through sheer brute force. He won the Civil War because he knew that when push came to shove the North had more young men (and more heavy industry) than the South. Now, it’s obvious that with the machine gun and the murder industrial complex just getting started, mass attrition warfare would have come along sooner or later with or without Grant. But in the history books I read in high school (however accurate they may actually have been) he gets the credit for this questionable development, and whether or not he helped free the slaves the massive casualties of the Civil War can easily be seen as a prelude to the 20th century, and that’s the narrative we learn in school.
Jeez, Sean, was it something I said?
Tim, I’m not sure that view really holds up anymore – I definitely recommend checking out “Battle Cry of Freedom.” McPherson gives a really clear and detailed account of the war, and he spends a lot of time on causes (about 300 pages of lead-up) and tactical shifts. Grant certainly doesn’t come off the way he seems to have in your textbooks. One thing’s for sure, though: after reading that book, it’ll be a lot harder to justify a qualification like “whether or not he helped free the slaves.”
Jeff, I must have accidentally junked your first comment doing a sweep for the spam that’s become an epidemic on this blog due to my shitty platform. Back now, though!
Tim: I’m with Jeff in thinking that that’s a pretty grievous mischaracterization of Grant’s role. “Mass attrition warfare would have come along sooner or later”–the thing is, it already HAD come along sooner than Grant. Due to a combination of advanced technology, inadequate tactics, and occasionally awful generalship, casualties on both sides of the war were already astonishingly high literally years before Grant got anywhere near control of the Union army. What he DID do when he got there was take the fight to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and never let up. Previous commanders had allowed Lee to stick-and-move to an almost comical degree, even when Lee was reeling from defeats and could have been finished off. THAT’S where the numbers game you bring up entered into it for Grant. He knew that if he gave Lee’s army chase, never letting up, and managed to avoid any catastrophic defeats in the process, Lee would eventually run out of men–especially if Sherman succeeded in cutting off the Deep South with his march through Georgia and South Carolina, which he did.
Actually, Sherman’s a much better candidate if you want to pin the birth of total war on a Civil War figure. Or perhaps Nathan Bedford Forrest for his mass summary execution of black Union prisoners. Heck, Lee kidnapped free black citizens of the North during his incursion and had them shipped South as slaves. Plenty of recrimination to go around.