* I’d like to thank once again the men and women of Closed Caption Comics for their guestblogging efforts here at Attentiondeficitdisorderly over the past week or so. A new CCC comic on their table at a small-press show is an inevitable (if occasionally wallet-busting) highlight of my comics year, and I was truly honored that they swung by. In case you missed it, here are their contributions:
* Chris Day got crafty and built a box for his guitar pedals.
* Noel Freibert both demonstrated and questioned the appeal of Baltimore’s Otakon anime convention cosplayers and plugged a cool-looking print sale.
* Ryan Cecil Smith showed off a bunch of bizarre shit you can buy in Japan and reviewed Shkariki! by Masahito Soda and Kamui Den by Sanpei Shirato.
* Molly Colleen O’Connell showed off some new work (and some cool world-music and No Wave videos).
* Conor Stechschulte unveiled a none-more-black animated skull.
* Zach Hazard Vaupen posted a page of comics all over the goddamn internet, and posted some more comics besides.
* Next time I need guestbloggers I’m gunning for either all the surviving members of the mid-’60s Marvel bullpen or a full Fort Thunder reunion, including the guy who built bicycles. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
* Tom Spurgeon and an all-star array of commenters and commentators select the 25 Emblematic Comics of the ’70s. It’s the sort of act of reconsideration and reclamation that really has been the work of critics and anthology editors over the past few years. It’s just occurring to me now, but the manga and reprint explosion of the ’00s was to comics what the birth of digital downloads and the iPod were to music–a massive expansion of what art is available and acceptable to consume.
* Today on Robot 6: Cameron Stewart is as cartoony as he wants to be.
* Pitchfork selects the Top 50 Music Videos of the 1990s. Gun to my head? “Coffee and TV,” “Everlong,” “Closer,” “November Rain,” “No Surprises,” “Freedom ’90,” “In Bloom,” “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe,” “Been Caught Stealing,” and the Beavis and Butt-Head version of “Liar.” Man did I ever cry when I first saw “Coffee and TV.”
* Can you even imagine a Hellraiser movie bad enough to persuade Doug Bradley not to play Pinhead in it?
* Real Life Horror: So maybe that cryptozoology TV show that Flash artist Francis Manapul participated in captured footage of an entire school of Pacific Ocean sea monsters (cadborosaurus for the initiates among us) off the coast of Alaska?
* Rich Juzwiak liked Piranha 3D an awful lot. Oh, great, there’s another movie to add to my to-watch list, which still includes Inception, Scott Pilgrim, and The Expendables, and will soon add Centurion, and would include Salt most likely if it weren’t already five films long.
* Matthew Perpetua on three–count ’em, three!–Steely Dan songs. Did I win the lotto today or something?
* I’m very excited to be able to get a new album by A Sunny Day in Glasgow for absolutely free, but given how things are going in the arts I can’t help but be bummed out by thinking that they probably stand to make the same amount of money off this one that they likely made off the two albums they sold for money.
* Jeeziz, look at this Matt Furie cover for The Lifted Brow #7.
* Michael Moyer on apocalypse as ego:
The desire to treat terrible events as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself has roots in another human trait: vanity.
We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet–with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. “It’s part of the fundamental limited perspective of our species to believe that this moment is the critical one and critical in every way–for good, for bad, for the final end of humanity,” says Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special.
I’ve been saying that for as long as I can remember. (Via Zoe Pollok.)
I think you should bump Scott Pilgrim up to the top of the priority list. It may not be around in theaters too much longer… *tenderly weeps in the corner*…
Hellraiser without Doug Bradley is so much of a joke that they might as well get Zach Galifianakis to play Pinhead now.
“Didn’t I say I wanted them flayed? I didn’t say I wanted them lightly contused, there is a big difference between flaying and contusions. I swear to God this is why I hate working with you people, I really don’t understand how Leviathan can explain keeping you assholes on the payroll.”
While, you know, yeah, re our special specialness and the end of the world, I think it’s worth bearing mind that we do in fact have nuclear weapons, and that catastrophic climate change might well be a real possibility. Technology doesn’t “appear” to have given us the means to fuck things up, it *has* given us the means, and being alert to that fact isn’t merely egotistical, although I grant you that ego does have a part to play.
I suppose what I’m saying is, so what? That there’s vanity and ego tied up in apocalyptic thinking isn’t exactly news. It’s something we should keep in mind, for sure, but a glance at any millennial cult, rapture enthusiast, or radical Green lays that out pretty clearly. I suppose it’s another way of keeping sight of Western culture’s unhealthy anthropocentrism and our own individual vanity, but in my view it’s equally if not more important to keep in mind that we do live in genuinely worrying times. Fabulous, exciting, liberated times (if you live in the West) also, but worrying times nonetheless.
Shags: It’s POSSIBLE Amy and I may go see it tonight. It’s a rare movie that Amy both CAN and WANTS to see in a theater, so I’ve held off on a couple of occasions where I could have seen it by myself (for free), hence the delay. That and my vacation/family stuff.
Tim: Beardhead?
Zom: Nukes are a gamechanger, sure. I don’t think anyone anticipates anthropogenic climate change literally ending life on Earth, however, though it’ll certainly end it for a lot of people unfortunately. But in the main I think the article was written at least as much in response to sort of magical signposts of the end of the world like 2000 and 2012 and fundamentalist Christian or Muslim millennialism as to genuine threats to human existence, hence my reaction to it.
I think I’m more interested in the side-effects of saying “These were the books of the ’70s” than the act of reclaiming work. Like the thought of a work that is “of” a decade being automatically of high quality — I don’t think Panther’s Rage is good, it’s just of its time — or the ways in which most comics readers still process questions like that through a superhero point of view.
I’m sort of generally fascinated with the idea of endorsement right now, and what that means. I made a side remark the other day about Karl Kesel’s Daredevil being very different than the Milleresque Daredevil and I got four e-mails thanking me to some degree for mentioning Kesel’s awesome run — I didn’t like Kesel’s Daredevil, I just thought it was obviously different in tone.
Man, there’s stuff crawling around the bottom of the ocean that’ll crawl up once humans are long gone. I don’t believe for a moment that nukes won’t mess up human life on the planet but good.
*All* life, however? I don’t think so.
Tom: Aw, rats. Of course that’s what you meant, my bad. I’ve just immersed myself so deeply in critical writing of that sort that my default position is to see the spotlighting of old/forgotten work as an attempt to draft its positive aspects back into the discussion/tradition/practice of comics. It’s Dantoro’s world, we just live in it.
Now, I happen to think that this has led to some folks being way too forgiving of such work’s faults, pampering the bathwater with the baby as it were–Spider-Man: Fever, anyone?–but that’s probably for another time.
I wouldn’t worry about Centurion. It was only so-so. You’d probably have a better time with a few episodes of Rome.
Yeah, but you didn’t like Doomsday either, right? And I LOVE Doomsday.
This is true, but while I didn’t like Doomsday I did admire its energy. At least there was something for me to hate on. Centurion just kind of sat there. Granted, I saw it in the middle of a film festival so I was probably a little burnt out by then.