* Tom Spurgeon’s epic post-NYCC post is a must-read. It chronicles the biggest comics publishing announcements and analyzes the show-as-phenomenon angle as well, and it spends at least as much time talking about Brian Bolland as it does about the party scene, which displays the correct priorities.
* Kiel Phegley interviews Grant Morrison about the state of his ongoing Batman run. Nothing particularly juicy here, just the sort of stuff admirers of that run should enjoy mulling over and chewing on.
* Remember, The Great Slasher Research Project of ’10 continues! Please go and contribute. You know, it’s really bizarre, the affinity I feel for slasher movies given how few of them I’ve actually seen. I think there’s something to be said about how I love the slasher supercuts people have done on YouTube stringing together all the kills from a given franchise. Boiling a story down to a killer stalking and killing people over and over…there’s something strangely and darkly magical about that.
* I missed this NeilAlien post on the state of Doctor Strange under the reign of Brian Bendis, mostly because I hate NeilAlien’s headline-only RSS feed I guess, but it’s pretty great. There’s certainly a delicious irony to BMB, of all people, talking of the need to prevent Doc from becoming a deus ex machina.
* Spurge is right, this Mike Bertino cover is swell.
* I’m excited about the release of my chum Zach Oat’s Pop Sculpture, a how-to book for would-be makers of toys and statues. What I’ve seen of the book is hell of attractive, and Zach and his co-authors know of what they speak.
* One of the Deheza twins has left the wonderful dream-pop outfit School of Seven Bells. A) That should make for a pretty different experience than the version of the band with the dueting twin sisters; B) It’s kinda funny given that School of Seven Bells was itself formed when Benjamin Curtis left a band he was in with his sibling, the Secret Machines.
* LOVE AND ROCKTOBER Swipe file?: Readers of Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories in Love and Rockets will no doubt find something…familiar in Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculpture installation off the coast of Cancun. Maybe we can get Daniel Ash to play an underwater show there? (Via LondonKdS.)
I took the liberty of forwarding the last item to Beto’s wife… sheesh!
Thanks for your continuing support for the GSRP of 2010.
Even though we’re only halfway through, there’s already one interesting result. Despite the whole Final Girl concept being the most widely recognized and dominant critical tool for discussing slasher flicks, the response to the project suggests that there is no wide consensus that a final girl character (or its small group or final male analog) is a necessary characteristic of a slasher film.
This, of course, might change as more responses come in. I’m keeping the door open for responses until the 20th.
COOP: Right???
CRwM: I think Clover’s Final Girl concept is to slasher films in micro what Clover’s sexuality/gender-focused approach to horror was to horror films in macro. Useful, but neither necessary nor sufficient.