* Fantagraphics has acquired William S. Burroughs’s long-lost graphic novel Ah Pook Is Here, a collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeil. I think I speak for everyone when I say SMASH THE CONTROL IMAGES SMASH THE CONTROL MACHINE
* Also on Robot 6 today: Mint Lisa Hanawalt SPX badges;
* Mint Marvel Minimates cosplay;
* and, regardless of whatever else about the project is mint or not, mint Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark set design.
* The crack team of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are going to turn Stephen King’s Dark Tower series into a movie, then a TV series, then another movie, then another TV series, and presumably so on until it’s all done. As longtime Attentiondeficitdisorderly readers can no doubt guess, I have deeply mixed feelings about this. The idea of The Dark Tower is one of the best things King has ever done; glimpsing it from afar via the various, relatively low-key references and connections to it in his work prior to the mid-’90s was absolutely thrilling; the original version of The Gunslinger is probably his best pure prose; here and there throughout the series he does fallen-world post-apocalyptic science-and-sorcery as well as anyone has ever done it; everything else is 100% pure garbage, the worst things I’ve ever read by him, among the worst things I’ve ever read by anyone, powerfully awful enough to almost destroy my interest in reading anything by him again. Also, y’know, Howard/Godsman. But who knows, maybe the bullshit will get lost in translation and you’ll be left with the fairly compelling genre mash-up weirdness that’s the novels’ skeleton.
* Quote of the day #1 comes from Brigid Alverson: “I would ask them to redesign the original to include Wonder Woman, rather than giving the girls their own logo. But then, if I start thinking about it real hard I’ll start worrying about other causes like pay equity or health care and education for girls in developing countries, and I just get all distracted.”
* Quote of the day #2 comes from Tom Spurgeon: “Every day I grow more suspicious that this particular game hasn’t already been lost, and that the comics industry has completed its transformation into an industry that has given up on every modest means of making money independently for the dubious honor of generating the occasional flash flood of money for others, hundreds of people sustained by the hope, no matter how impractical, that they will be one of the lucky, tiny few allowed to benefit.”
* Quote of the day #3 comes from Josh Marshall, on the Real Life Horror tip: “This is the standard approach of race haters and demagogues. They keep stirring the pot, churning out demonizing rhetoric and hate speech. Then some marginal figure does something nuts and suddenly … oh, wait, I didn’t mean burn Korans. Where’d you get that idea from? We were just saying that Islam is a violent, anti-American religion and that American Muslims should stop building their mosques and focus on apologizing for 9/11 and maybe get out of America. But burn the Koran? No way.”
* More Real Life Horror: Congratulations to President Obama for winning for the United States government the right to kidnap, imprison, torture, and murder people with impunity. Thank goodness he and his relative decorum and presumably shamefaced public silence on these issues will never be replaced by anyone whose party and supporters unapologetically endorse and full-heartedly embrace the use of these powers against anyone deemed an enemy, or else we’d be in real trouble someday!
* Let’s end things on a cheerier note: Matthew Perpetua’s interview with Greg Milner continues, touching this time on the Loudness War between New York radio stations Z-100 and WPLJ. Many Morning Zoo DJs died to bring us this information.
I think you’re exaggerating how bad The Dark Tower was overall. Not the second half, sure volumes 5 to 7 pretty much fit the phrase “100% pure garbage”, but even if they weren’t Gunslinger-amazing I thought the second, third, and fourth books were pretty great (actually I think the fourth book *is* just about Gunslinger-amazing). There was plenty of terribleness in that series, but I thought it was almost exclusively contained to those last three.
I read and blogged my way through those books on a daily basis for almost two months–I linked to the index above–and I PROMISE you I am being totally sincere when I say that other than the positive points I mentioned, I truly feel that it was 100% pure garbage. Call it 85% pure garbage overall, no matter where in the series you are. The Drawing of the Three is at least as idiotic as Song of Susannah, say.