* Fort Thunder reunion! Much more at Tom Spurgeon’s place.

* Here’s a long, fun interview with Jim Woodring by Jason Heller of the Onion A.V. Club:

I had an experience when I was in my 20s. Someone read the I Ching for me. No one had ever done that for me before, and I didn’t know anything about the I Ching. I still don’t very much. But at this one reading, the couplet was, “Dragons wrestle in a meadow / Their blood is black and yellow.” That and the explanation that accompanied it made me realize something about a conflict that had been raging inside me ever since the age of reason. I had never, ever identified it before, or had it identified for me. I’d never seen it before. All of a sudden I realized there were these two aspects of myself that were completely unintegrated, and that that was the source of virtually all of my trouble. It was a huge, eye-opening experience for me. That interests me a lot, the question of people being at war with themselves.

(Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Chris Ware writes an essay on book design for GQ:

As far as real book designers go, I’ve only met a few, but they strike me as thoughtful, well turned-out, and desperately cutthroat people. What surprises me the most is how shamelessly art directors rip each other off; a clever cover will sometimes be imitated as quickly as two or three months after originally appearing. Book designers, you should know, have to be ready to create something new, exciting, and original almost every day in order to eat, and a certain degree of burnout smokes out the weaker specimens; I can’t imagine coming up with cover after cover without at some point resorting to an out-of-breath take, intentional or not, on someone else’s great idea. This urge toward ever-freshness brings the profession perilously close to that of fashion, and the worst examples of such greet us at the grocery store checkout among the tabloids, gum, and ring pops.

(Via Tom Devlin.)

* Lex Luthor faces off against Death of the Endless from Sandman, written by Paul Cornell? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Jason has a blog! (Via Fantagraphics.)

* Paul Pope draws the Beatles.

* Here’s a fun new Fight or Run comic from Kevin Huizenga. Shoulda ran!

* I’m glad to see Matthew Fox of Lost get an Emmy nomination. He was pretty fabulous.

* More comics-blog posts should begin with the sentence “Have you been fretting about what to get Sean T. Collins for his birthday?” I accept cash, of course.

Where’s Waldo? The Fantastic Journey

Martin Handford, writer/artist

Candlewick, 2007 (this edition)

32 pages

$7.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Buy all six Waldo books as a set for like $30

I didn’t give a lot of thought to comic art or illustration as a kid. Which in many ways means “mission accomplished” for the comics artists and illustrators I came across, I suppose. For readers that age, you want form to follow function–an exciting comic should look exciting, a funny comic should look funny. It wasn’t until I was much older that I was able to appreciate the books that had lodged in my head because their art did something more. The Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series, illustrated by Stephen Gammell, was one example. Those pictures looked like the evil they depicted somehow leaked into the real world and corrupted the art itself.

The other big one, for me, was Where’s Waldo?, particularly this third volume in the series, which when I was a kid was called The Great Waldo Search. This is the one where Waldo travels through “the realms of fantasy,” as the slipcase of the six-volume set of Waldo books I bought for Christmas puts it, so that naturally put it more in my wheelhouse than the other two volumes that were available at the time I first came across it. And obviously Martin Handford’s loose, goofy character designs and slapstick sense of humor aren’t a world apart from the majority of cartoon art kids are offered. But what I found–and continue to find–so mesmerizing about this one is the way Handford conveys, in these eye-meltingly dense two-page spreads, a sense of permanent chaos. Each scene is a virtual (and in one case literal!) sea of jostling, arguing, fighting, laughing, playing, sleeping, eating, jumping, falling, flying, running, sliding, shouting, bodies. Streams of water, billows of smoke, rivers of fire defy gravity and snake around and through half a page. A single action causes a domino effect that brings dozens of warriors low. People celebrate a victory over the characters to their left, completely oblivious to the damage about to be inflicted on them by the characters to their right. Massive schemes to defeat rivals are always just on the verge of coming to fruition or heading for disaster. More than any other artist I can think of, Handford conveys a world of action, decision, coincidence and consequence within each image. You get the feeling that the conflagrations you’re seeing on each spread could last forever, an endless flow of action and reaction. In fact, the only other artist I know of who’s experimented with this sort of thing is Brian Chippendale.

And might there be a message in here, too? Fully half of The Fantastic Journey‘s twelve scenes involve armed conflict between rival groups. You can get lost in the maniacal detail and humorous quasi-violence of their battles for minutes on end, but an even larger part of their visual appeal is that the combatants are basically color-coded: Blue monks of water vs. red monks of fire, ferocious red dwarves vs. vaguely Asian knights who look like a weaponzied deck of Uno cards, evil black knights vs. green-skinned forest women, two enormous armies of dueling pastel knights, a posse of blue-uniformed monster hunters stalking their prey underground. The one exception pits villagers in rainbow-colored clothes against equally gaudy giants. A seventh spread involves four teams of ballplayers–blue, green, peach, and red–whose sport is just about as violent as any of the the actual battles. A state of obviously absurd conflict based on completely arbitrary distinctions? Come for the devilishly difficult puzzle aspect, stay for the impeccable visual satire.

* 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.

Werewolves of Montpellier

Jason, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, June 2010

48 pages

$12.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

You have to be a real expert in Jason-character physiognomy to even be able to tell that the lonely expat main character in Werewolves of Montpellier is sometimes wearing a werewolf mask. After all, the guy’s an anthropomorphized dog at the best of times. In the end, that ends up being the gag. You’re not some uniquely unlovable monster, you’re just a guy with problems, like anyone else–like the woman you love, for example, who cultivates a studied air of Audrey Hepburn cool yet still can’t prevent her girlfriend from cheating on and then leaving her. The problem with the book’s titular antagonists, it seems, is that they’ve dedicated their entire lives to their big problem, and are willing to kill and die for it. The violence that results is as random and awful as it always is in Jason comics, but the overall message about how to handle it–get over it and move on–is delivered with uncharacteristic humorous bluntness. There’s no percentage in making yourself more alone than you have to be.

* Oh dear: “I asked all I met at WETA when ‘The Hobbit’ starts shooting. Reply? ‘You tell us.'” —Sir Ian McKellen. A far cry from his previous optimism…

* Look, PictureBox got a fancy new website and a fancy new blog!

* Another day, another fantastic interview with Wally Gropius author Tim Hensley, this one conducted by Chris Mautner and focusing on Hensley’s personal life and background, painfully so.

* Bookmarked for when I have half an hour (!) to kill: Anders Nilsen interviewed by Royal Jelly.

* This week I was struck by how two of the best single-issue superhero comics of the year a) came out on the same day, and b) were about their ostensible hero’s arch-enemies. Douglas Wolk takes a look at them, or the writing at least: Action Comics #890 by Paul Cornell and Pete Woods, starring Lex Luthor, and Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 by Matt Fraction and Carmine DiGiandomenico, starring the Mandarin.

* Nitsuh Abebe tackles CocoRosie and the reaction thereto. Apparently I know a lot less about this band than I thought and there are all sorts of obviously controversial issues at work here about which I feel unprepared to speak, but a big part of the column gets at something I was saying about the band a while ago, which is that on a basic level it really isn’t that hard to figure out why their music might not appeal to a lot of people.

* Which point is germane to comics thusly: Lately I’ve talked a bit about how I’m bummed there isn’t more discussion of alternative comics online. Should I really be all that baffled? Perhaps whoever coined the very term was right, and the reason these things are called “alternative comics” is because they represent an alternative to mainstream/popular taste. The bookstore boom, the sudden explosion of coverage of graphic novels in the mainstream press, the manga boom, the webcomics boom, and the parallel rise in critical fortunes of massively popular hip-hop and pop in the music-crit field has, I think, given the impression that quality and popularity automatically overlap more than they do. Fringe culture is exactly that.

Closed Caption Comics #8

Erin Womack, Pete Razon, Lane Milburn, Zach Hazard, Mollie Goldstrom, Chris Day, Molly O’Connell, Ryan Cecil Smith, Andrew Neyer, Erin Womack, Eric Stiner, Conor Stechschulte, Noel Freibert, writers/artists

Closed Caption Comics, February 2009

80 pages

$8

Buy it from Cinders Gallery

Maybe you can buy it at the Closed Caption Comics blog someplace too, beats me man

This is the kind of comic that makes me excited to be into comics. The eighth installment of the Baltimore-based CCC’s flagship anthology resembles nothing so much as a great early Wu-Tang Clan posse cut, with all eleven (!) members contributing powerfully cartooned, hungry-feeling work that’s alternately funny, frightening, and fearless. Me being me, I was particularly struck by the issue’s sometimes dueling, sometimes intertwining apparent themes of horror and sex. In that regard the standout piece was by Conor Stechschulte, who turns in an absolutely brutal story of a circle-jerk gone horribly awry, augmented by his pitch-perfect evocation of a shadow-soaked suburbia. But on the flipside I laughed hard at the dirty jokes from Zach Hazard and Chris Day, the bathroom humor from Hazard and Andrew Neyer, and the monster-comic goofs of Lane Milburn (impeccably, muscularly drawn as always). Noel Freibert serves up maybe his most left-field EC Comics-inspired story to date, with some genuinely unpleasant and painful imagery; its rawness, ugliness, and reliance on bare, ropey line is like some sort of cross-artist call-and-response to the esoteric, almost mystical loveliness of the images concocted by Erin Womack, or the strange…I wanna say floral body-horror of Molly O’Connell. Eric Stiner channels Tom Gauld, Ryan Cecil Smith channels Brian Ralph channeling Tatsuo Yoshida, Mollie Goldstrom comes across like a maximalist John Hankiewicz, and Pete Razon submits some funny scribbles to round out the package. 80 pages, eight bucks, renewed faith.

* I don’t like leading with Real Life Horror items, but this piece on the New York Times’ treatment of waterboarding blew my fucking mind:

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.”

That’s totally, mind-meltingly insane, right? Just an abject capitulation of any possible concept of journalistic ethics to outright barbarism, right? Like we’re living in some awful nightmare? It’s not just me? (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Anyway.

* Today on Robot 6: It’s Kevin Huizenga’s new book, The Wild Kingdom!;

* Dennis Culver finishes his gallery of Batman rogues;

* Michael DeForge draws Scott Pilgrim;

* and Jeff Parker, Gabriel Hardman, and–and this is key–the Hulk on Hulk? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I really dig the left-field questions J. Caleb Mozzocco asks Wally Gropius genius Tim Hensley in his Newsarama interview. (Via Alvin Buenaventura.)

* Neat, a Noel Freibert interview (by Nick Gazin of Vice) and a Noel Freibert comic.

* If there’s one thing Hollywood cinema has taught us over the past several years, it’s that collectively it’s better at making trailers than it is at making actual films. So this is meaningless as a gauge of whether or not the movie will be any good, but yes, the trailer for Let Me In, the remake of Let the Right One In by Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves, is pretty good. (Via Jason Adams.)

* The RZA filtering his favorite old kung-fu movies through scratchy old soul samples, Marvel Comics, the drug trade, and inside jokes involving his Staten Island neighborhood to create a new sound for hip hop? An artistic triumph. The RZA paying tribute to his favorite old kung-fu movies by shooting a straightforward tribute to them in what looks like a bunch of people’s backyards? Maybe, maybe not. Still and all, here’s the trailer for Wu-Tang vs. the Golden Phoenix. (Via Topless Robot.)

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan’s contribution to the Covered blog was fortuitously timed, eh?

* The best thing about anything that puts Tim and Eric content in front of doctrinaire nerds, like Rich Shivener’s list of 8 Great Cinco Products for Topless Robot, is the ensuing comment-thread ragegasm. Well, that and the excuse to watch “It’s Not Jackie Chan” again.

* I probably should have mentioned this before, but Bowie Loves Beyonce is a going concern again.

* This very prog cover for Kanye West’s latest single, which samples King Crimson’s “20th Century Schizoid Man,” is officially the first Kanye West anything I care about. (Via Mike Barthel.)

* Over the past couple of days the entire Internet posted this compilation of The 100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time and it made me laugh really, really hard. “I don’t give a tuppenny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meatheaded shitsack.” (Via the Missus.)

* If I could make something sound like Sloane made “Money City Maniacs” sound, I’m not sure I’d ever stop making things sound like that. (Via Nate Patrin.)