* We will never exhaust Jack Kirby’s contribution to art and ideas.
* This oughta be fun: Pitchfork counts down the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. Only one song per artist, which makes it something different than a real Top 200 Tracks countdown, but different doesn’t necessarily mean “worse.”
* Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist #1: Now appearing in its entirety at What Things Do. What a treasure that site’s turning out to be.
* There used to be a review of the script for Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness adaptation right here, but now there’s not. Not sure what that means, and god knows you can’t trust these sorts of things anyway, but it sure sounded like the creature-feature action flick you were worried it was gonna be, and I don’t trust del Toro not to screw it up just that badly. (Via Jason Adams.)
* DC’s Source blog reveals the division of labor for the Batmen starting this fall: Dick Grayson will star in Tony Daniel’s Batman, Scott Snyder’s Detective Comics, and Peter J. Tomasi’s Batman and Robin, while Bruce Wayne will star in Grant Morrison’s Batman Inc. and David Finch’s Batman: The Dark Knight.
* I’m quite pleased that the time differential between the release of a new Jason comic in Europe and the States is now on the order of two months.
* My friend Zach Oat loved Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which now that I’ve seen Scott Pilgrim and The Expendables is solidly on top of my to-do list. (Sorry, Inception.)
* Nice, chewy posts on a couple of comic-art traditions from a couple of talented comics artists: Frank Santoro on naturalism and Tom Kaczynski on melodrama.
* Today on Robot 6: Cartoonists and the Criterion Collection: perfect together! Featuring Matt Kindt, Scott Morse, Jason Latour, R. Crumb, Adrian Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, Bill Plympton, Frank Kozik, Seth, Scott Campbell, and more.
* Jiminy Christmas, look at the Eric Vincent colors on this old Love and Rockets collection. This is what I want the ’80s to look like.
* A giant-monster movie made on the cheap called Monsters? Sure, I’ll eat it.
* Robyn covering Bjork’s “Hyperballad.” Oh my goodness. (Via The Missus.)
* I’m quite late to this party I know, but you certainly want to watch director John Hillcoat’s video for the Nick Cave outfit Grinderman’s “Heathen Child.” It’s the sort of video where when the chorus kicks in, the tits come out. It’s like, wait, the people who made this crazy thing, which looks like the work of people who’ve watched nothing but True Blood and Tim and Eric for the past three years, made that tedious, polite adaptation of The Road and recorded its generic-Oscar-bait score? Can we swap out that version of them for this version of them and try again?
How is that audience not freaking out to “Hyperballad”?
And I think I liked that Grinderman video more than I liked CRANK 2. (Which I wanted to like more but didn’t, sadly.)
I don’t have much faith in Del Toro to do anything brilliantly. With love, yes, but for a man who gets so much praise for his imagination I tend to find his films rather less imaginative than I would like.
I’ve read the Del Toro penned Mountains script that was doing the rounds a year or so ago. It was okay, weirder than I thought it would be, true to the Lovecraftian spirit in style and structure but also slightly flat – predictable, too obvious. A decent director could probably do something with it, but I worry that Del Toro isn’t that guy.
Matt: 🙁
Zom: “for a man who gets so much praise for his imagination I tend to find his films rather less imaginative than I would like.” RIGHT???? I think both Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth had a grand total of three different monsters each, just for example.