Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Lose #2 by Michael DeForge, published by Koyama — the breakout artist of the year.

DeForge’s actual comics, as contained in these two issues, are straightforward, funny, and sharp as a knife. Inside, he wields a precise line to create character designs that read like a slightly more avant-garde version of what you might see on a post-millennial Nickelodeon cartoon. The storytelling and punchlines are always crystal-clear even as the material bounces back and forth between long-form, surreal horror stories and laser-precise gag strips….In issue #2, virtually all the page space is devoted to a long and no-fucking-around nasty horror story about a little kid who manages to domesticate a large spider whose brethren are simultaneously ushering in a quite lethal and disgusting plague-style demise for his uncaring family and abusive classmates. Imagine Skyscrapers of the Midwest weaponized and you’re almost there….DeForge has landed himself on my must-watch list.

Click here for a full review; unfortunately, this comic is out of print and unavailable.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Black City by Matthew Dear, released by Ghostly — perfect for when all you want your music to do is quietly bounce, bubble, and brood.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Love and Rockets: New Stories #3 by Gilbert Hernandez and Jaime Hernandez, published by Fantagraphics — career-best work from cartoonists with two of the best careers in the medium.

On Jaime’s “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers”:

…ever since I read it, when I think of it, I just keep thinking to myself, “Poor [name]. Poor, poor [name].” It makes me want to cry! Cry for an imaginary person I’d never read about until a few pages earlier. (It’s the flipside of feeling proud of the entirely imaginary Hopey Glass for becoming a teacher’s assistant, I guess.) Such power!…I will never forget reading this book.

On Gilbert’s “Scarlet by Starlight”/”Killer * Sad Girl * Star”:

the brutal exploitation of children at the center of “Scarlet by Starlight” — delivered in a grotesquely matter-of-fact panel, savagely angry and awful — is echoed by the far milder but still insidious sexualization of “Killer * Sad Girl * Star” later on in issue #3…and, of course, it compliments and reinforces Jaime’s “Browntown”/”The Love Bunglers” suite in that same volume.

Click here for a full review of Jaime’s contributions to the issue and click here for a full review of Gilbert’s contributions to the issue; click either one for purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is A Reality Tour by David Bowie, released by Epic — a double-live retrospective of pretty much every single phase of a career that may well now be over, performed with evident glee.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez, published by Fantagraphics — Gilbert Hernandez vs. Gilbert Hernandez, to the death.

I’ve never seen a cartoonist so thoroughly dismantle–discredit–his own artistic preoccupations.

In High Soft Lisp, Gilbert traces the relationship history of Fritz Martinez, the ultimate sex goddess in a career full of them, and in so doing reveals that her every fetish outfit and sexual free-for-all is fruit from the poisoned tree. Lots of characters in this book enjoy the living shit out of Fritz’s sexuality, not least Fritz herself, but to a man and woman they’re revealed to be creepily predatory about it, embracing the worst in themselves and encouraging the worst in Fritz. And here’s the thing: What have we been doing over the hundreds of pages we’ve spent watching Fritz adorably and kinkily fuck her way through the post-Palomar cast of Beto’s comics? What has Beto been doing? What does that say about all of us?

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

* Craig Thompson says “Habibi production is stuck in limbo.” In a good way, I hope?

* Mike Mignola tells CBR some more about his forthcoming Hellboy plans, including collabos with Kevin Nowlan, Richard Corben, and his own bad self. I especially enjoy the news that he may start treating Hellboy like an altcomic in terms of numbering; rather than label things “issue #2 of 6” or whatever, he’ll just start from #1, and they’ll come out when they come out, and the stories will finish when they finish. Hell yeah.

* Murderers’ Row: Sammy Harkham, Gabrielle Bell, Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga.

photo by Dan Nadel

* Tucker Stone has his “WE are the walking dead!” moment. This is a great column on some of the year’s worst comics, worth both reading and just scanning through the horrifyingly awful panels Tucker picked out to illustrate. And seriously, stop buying terrible comics. (I do straight-up enjoy those last two images, though.) Moreover, right near the top of the piece Tucker rattles off a rock-solid best of 2010 list that covers superhero comics, alternative comics, and “fusion comics” alike. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Hey, Closed Caption Comics’ Ryan Cecil Smith has his own blog! (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* This episode of a geek podcast named Bear Swarm! leaves no doubt that it is an episode of a geek podcast with a name like Bear Swarm!, if you know what I mean, but it also features a lengthy, geekish interview with George R.R. Martin about the Song of Ice and Fire novels, so I do recommend listening to that part.

* Eve Tushnet on Eyes Wide Shut and the pleasure of finding pleasure in occasionally less-than-pleasurable art:

I don’t think I’ve been nearly attentive enough about restraining this tendency in myself: the tendency to summarize, to grade. To say, “This movie was fantastic in ways x, y, and z, but ultimately failed/succeeded because q.”

It’s that “ultimately” which I need to work harder to avoid. Art is not an exam! You don’t pass or fail.

* Mark Bagley is returning to Ultimate Spider-Man, one of my favorite superhero titles for years and years on end now. I think it’s safe to say that his work for DC showed that Ultimate Spider-Man is where he belongs, although let’s be honest, David LaFuente creams anyone else who ever drew that book.

* In further news related to the good Brian Bendis comics, They’re making a TV show out of Alias. I’m not confident it’ll be any good, based simply on the track record of adaptations of any and all genre comics. It occurred to me yesterday that I could list all such adaptations I consider to be genuinely creatively successful on one hand and still have fingers to spare.

* Pure Sean crack: Ta-Nehisi Coates slags superhero movies for their smallness, praises The Lord of the Rings for its bigness. I’m telling you, I remember so vividly the 20-minute sneak-preview I was able to attend after the Cannes Film Festival, when they were screening the Mines of Moria sequence for critics. I went with a skeptical friend, and we left astonished. The instant Legolas fired that arrow and we traveled with it as it traversed that vast chasm and hit that orc, who then plummeted into the abyss, I realized: They’ve gotten the scale right, for the very first time in the history of fantasy cinema.

* Speaking of Coates, I understand why American fiction writers used to be so smitten with the idea of ex-Confederate soldiers righting the wrongs inflicted on them and theirs by Union thugs. I don’t understand why they’d still be smitten with it today. Or maybe I do, sad to say.

* Finally, a little Real Life Horror (and let’s face it, for the next two years that could be the name of any given Congressional Beat column) for your weekend: My congressman, the odious, racist (and not incidentally IRA-supporting) Peter King, will be heading up a McCarthyite committee to “investigate” American Muslims come the next Congress. Fuck this asshole, fuck anyone who thinks this is a good idea, fuck this failed-state country of ours, hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the Tylenol.

I read a couple of interesting things about Sleigh Bells and their excellent album Treats today today. My pal Matthew Perpetua is right to note that unlike a lot of the artists and microgenres that are playing around with how their music is recorded, Sleigh Bells isn’t doing so to evoke the past, but to emphasize the intensity of the present. Yet critics often invoke the past when talking about Sleigh Bells anyway — not in terms of era, a la chillwave and the ’80s, but in terms of age groups, an age group all of us used to belong to: teenagers.

In writing up the record for Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2010 list, Tom Ewing says: “The most convincing take on Treats— the one which makes emotional sense to me– is that it’s a kind of teenpop: the mess, posturing, chaos, and unrelenting immediacy of an adolescent’s headspace crushed into two-minute blurts.” I don’t find this take convincing at all. Mess and chaos? Sure. But posturing? Not so much.

Here’s what I mean: Two nights ago I was driving home from the middle-school chorus Winter Concert my wife, a music teacher, conducted. Every year she takes requests from the kids and writes her own choral arrangements for pop and rock songs they’d like to perform in the spring concert, and this year, naturally, some girls in her classes requested Justin Bieber. She turned them down flat, because she had literally promised the boys she wouldn’t make them do a Justin Bieber song. Middle school boys, it turns out, haaaaaaaaaaaaaate Justin Bieber, the same way middle school boys have always hated pop culture performed by young men but aimed at young women. In my day I hated the New Kids on the Block and Beverly Hills 90210; a few years later I’m sure it was N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys; today it’s Biebs and Twilight; I know that when I was very young in the early ’80s, I could sense how the older boys hated Duran Duran. Fast forward a few years into full-fledged high-school adolescence and the battle of the sexes angle was less important, but the desperate need to define yourself by what you weren’t into as much as what you were was, if anything, even more keenly felt. Fuck jock music like the Dave Matthews Band and the Grateful Dead, fuck poseurs like the Offspring and Stabbing Westward, fuck even too-cool snobs like Pavement and Sonic Youth. As a kid who very much self-identified as Alternative my story’s no doubt a bit different from those with different tastes, but I think “this is good and THAT SUCKS” is universal for teenagers no matter what genre you’re really into. Even the ballyhooed egalitarianism of Top 40 radio, I think, is predicated on the fun of yelling “ewwww!” and changing the station when that song you can’t stand comes on.

It took me until after I graduated college and discovered David Bowie to free myself from all of this, to be willing to break it all down, to realize that my identity wouldn’t be threatened by an easing of definitional barriers but strengthened by it. Now I’ll try anything, and I write off nothing out of hand, on “principle,” to maintain my posture. (To be clear, I realize this is itself a posture of a sort!) I mean, still fuck the Offspring and Stabbing Westward, but fuck them for not being very good, not for failure to be appropriately authentic, you know?

And so I can appreciate and enjoy Sleigh Bells for all they bring to the table and for all the disparate genres from which they bring it — the bluntest, least subtle beats from hip-hop and riffs from metal and hardcore, the Rainbow Brite sing-songy vocals from disposable girl pop, the meta-trickery with recording and dynamics from noise and industrial. And I’d love to live in a world where a broad swathe of teenagers were open enough to all of that to make “teenpop” an accurate characterization. (As opposed to “pop a small handful of teens might like” — there are always gonna be outliers with good ears, even if they’re not consistently put to use. To pat myself on the back for a minute, I remember bumping into an old high-school classmate on the train and getting to talking about music, and he said to me “Jesus, you listened to Aphex Twin in high school!” with something approaching awe. This was true, and good for me, but at the same time I hated Depeche Mode and New Order.) But that’s certainly not the world we live in. The kids who might get into the aggression and power of the gigantic beats and towering riffs would have no idea what to do with Alexis Krauss, and the kids who might enjoy the sweet singing about wondering what your boyfriend thinks about your braces would turn the thing off the second the distortion kicked in. For pete’s sake, the Sleigh Bells album’s title track alone swipes the guitar sound from both “How Soon Is Now?” and “The Thing That Should Not Be” — in teen terms it’s like if the Hetfields Hatfields invited the McCoys to their family reunion!

It’s a very, very rare pair of teenage ears that can even tolerate liminality, let alone appreciate it. And this is not to say that boundaries can never be blurred — I feel like kids my age were on the leading edge of a cohort that completely collapsed the wall between liking rock and liking rap, even aside from Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys and even before you got to the Limp Bizkits and Linkin Parks; I listened to as much A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. Yet these were all their own lines drawn in the sand, too: “Rap is not pop — if you call it that, then stop,” remember? So maybe this is why the Bieber incident leaped to mind when I read Ewing’s “teenpop” comment: My guess is that the hardest boundary to erase would be the one that separates music that teen listeners feel is gendered in some way. Thus I think the best we adults can do is characterize Sleigh Bells as pop that reminds adults who know better of feeling like a teenager. But — well, you know.

Far, far more convincing to me was Mark Richardson’s earlier Pitchfork review of the record, which compared it to Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey, among other mostly less vicious records, in terms of how it expanded his conception of what “loud” could mean in music. I made that same comparison myself the other day. And Ewing himself did too, actually, when he compared the record to the likes of Prodigy and Lords of Acid. These were hugely ear-opening comments for me, helping me understand not just what I was reacting to in Sleigh Bells, but also what I was always enjoyed so much when listening to Psalm 69 or Voodoo-U or whatever the case may be: The thrill! As Matthew put it in his post today, it’s about taking some awesome sound and making it not just sound but feel as awesome as possible — like putting a great colorist on a great superhero artist, you know?

This is the territory where I think we can tease out what makes Sleigh Bells pop — adult pop, but pop — when much of what it’s drawing from really isn’t. Take Ministry. Lately I’ve been listening to the live version of their song “Burning Inside” almost constantly. The insanely ominous beginning actually makes me laugh out loud, it’s so thoughtfully put together in how it conveys cartoonish, apocalyptic evil: Massive bowel-shaking low-end rumbles, portentous pauses, ghostly human voices fading in and out, a warning siren, and finally the clicking and clacking rudiments of a rhythm, all before you’ve heard the first pound on the drum or distorted riff. And once those kick in, forget about it: It’s pure anger and disgust. But the key thing is Al Jourgenson’s vocals, which chant every word on the same not-quite-a-note through a vast field of distortion. They’re not spat out or shouted out, they’re emitted, like one of those disconcerting sci-fi/fantasy images in which some entity blasts energy not out of its fingers or hands or even eyes bout out of its mouth. There’s something robotic or demonic about it — not human at all.

Compare that to Nine Inch Nails’s “Wish,” a not at all dissimilar song and one that invited a lot of derisive comparisons at the time it came out. (I remember reading letters to the editor in the local paper about what a Ministry rip-off Broken was.) The stop-start riff and breakneck tempo and overwhelming hatred for everyone and everything are more or less consistent between the two songs, although as usual Al adds a sort of supernatural/mystical/eschatalogical angle, things raining down from the sky and so on, that it would take Reznor a while to get to. But whereas Jourgenson’s vocals are processed into becoming almost an additional buzzsaw guitar, Reznor is clearly a singer. There’s a body and a soul to what he’s doing; I think that’s what made him a sex symbol and what made Nine Inch Nails, for all its nihilistic aggression and self-loathing, fuck music for a lot of people, whereas Jourgensen’s sex references in Ministry, and even far less dark, more smutty side projects like Revolting Cocks, were almost resolutely non-erotic.

Alexis Krauss, in her way, is doing to the Ministry template of power and loudness what Reznor did to it in his way: She’s humanizing it, making it relatable and accessible to people beyond Ministry’s audience of gleeful misanthropes. With Trent and Alexis, women/men want them and men/women want to be them (take your pick!); I worshiped Al, I connected and still connect (intensely!!!! four exclamation points!!!!) with what he was doing, but I never wanted to be him. Reznor brought personal emotional intensity and erotic heat to the equation, Krauss brings joy, play, what Cosmo Kramer might call “unbridled enthusisasm,” but it’s the same principle: taking this sonic juggernaut and putting the spotlight on its pilot, in so doing conveying the notion that you could sit in that pilot seat yourself.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is The ACME Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, published by Drawn & Quarterly — the single best comic I have ever read.

What makes a life? Is it the narrative we assemble in retrospect from the sights and sounds we remember best? Is it like comics in that regard, a combination of words and pictures stacked together to tell a story? To what degree do we act as our own cartoonists, then, picking and choosing the right combination of words and pictures to tell the story of ourselves we most want to hear? Is it possible that the way we misremember things tells us more of that story? What about the words and pictures we skip entirely?

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

* I’m proud to present Superheroes Lose, a new tumblr in which I’ll be posting comic covers and promotional art featuring superheroes losing. In part I’m doing this because I think these things are unintentionally hilarious; in part I’m doing it because I have some half-baked ideas on what these things meeeeeeeean, and having a lot of them in one place may help me shake those ideas loose.

* That being said, I’m quite excited about the image above even aside from its Superheroes Loseworthiness, because I think it means that the Hulk — the plain old Bruce Banner green Hulk — will be involved in a major, Avengers-driven (was that redundant?) Marvel event for the first time in the modern event-comic era. (World War Hulk doesn’t count — that was really a Hulk comic blown up big, and the event angle came from fighting the Illuminati, not the Avengers, Marvel’s modern flagship team.)

* Here’s a heck of a find: a live-action short-film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole by director Rupert Sanders. As best I can tell it’s sort of smushing several scenes from different points in the book into one long thing, so it’s not necessarily the most accurate adaptation (especially if you have Keith’s first encounter with Eliza memorized panel by panel), but it’s fine work regardless, atmospheric in a way these things usually aren’t and true to the spirit of the thing. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Johnny Ryan (!!!) interviewed Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore about The Walking Dead for Vice, with suitably juicy results. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books imprint is now a going concern, with comics by Tom, Gabrielle Bell, and Jon Lewis. Check it out.

* Tom Spurgeon reviews Two Eyes of the Beautiful II by the very talented Ryan Cecil Smith of Closed Caption Comics fame.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates on the appeal of superheroes — and supervillains — to marginalized groups beyond traditional geeks.

* I’m linking to ComixTalk’s 2010 digital/webcomics roundtable — featuring such august personages as Heidi MacDonald, Brian Heater, Brigid Alverson, Gary Tyrrell, Lauren Davis, and Larry Cruz — because it features my chum Rick Marshall of MTV Splash Page saying very, very complimentary things about Destructor, but even beyond that it’s stuffed with links to comics that come recommended by the participants and as such strikes me as a great way to launch a lazy pre-holiday weekend afternoon’s reading in a couple of days.

* Matthew Perpetua doesn’t like the gratuitous use of rap patois in hip-hop reviews, and the inconsistent application of stage names depending on the genre being talked about. I think in both cases this stuff is mostly showoffy; it’s interesting to see the differing directions that takes depending on whether or not hip-hop’s in the spotlight.

* Congratulations to The Country Club for mashing up Super Mario Bros. and Grand Theft Auto juuuuuuuuust about perfectly. I laughed out loud on the train at the ending. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Presume not to instruct Curt Purcell on matters pertaining to the Groovy Age of Horror when recommending Scissor Sisters videos, for he is subtle and quick to post far, far more pertinent giallo videos. Here endeth the lesson. Seriously, music people who read this blog, if you enjoyed the video for “Invisible Light,” you must click that link and watch Curt’s videos. Nude for Satan, ladies and gentlemen. (But aren’t we always?)

* Slowly George R.R. Martin turned, step by step, inch by inch…

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Autumn, Again by A Sunny Day in Glasgow, self-released — a little cauldron out of which love songs are poured.

Click here for a full review of the song “Drink drank drunk”; click here to download the entire album for free from A Sunny Day in Glasgow.

‘Nuff said.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Death Trap by Lane Milburn, self-published with a Xeric Grant — looks like a creature feature, feels like something far more unsettling.

Everything he does well, he does as well as he’s ever done it here: Immersive environments, crosshatched and “lit” to look like they were constructed from solid smoke. Weird, ugly monster designs that connote some sort of infectious sickness of reality as much as they do simply somethin’ scary….And perhaps the most finely tuned sense of queasy, bottom-just-dropped-out horror and madness you’ll find in comics this side of Al Columbia.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, released by the Null Corporation — Reznor’s finest instrumental suite yet is both warm and cold, like a computer rotting.

Click here for a full review of both the album and the movie for which it forms the soundtrack; click here to download a free sampler or the full album from the Null Corporation.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi, published by Fantagraphics — a furious comic, furiously cartooned.

With the exception of the introductory story, this entire book features three tiered panels per page. In superhero comics this format is known as “widescreen”; it connotes power. It’s powerful here, too, but it’s a power to oppress and crush rather than soar or punch in action-movie style. They’re like miniature trenches.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.

X’d Out
Charles Burns, writer/artist
Pantheon, October 2010
56 pages, hardcover
$19.95
Buy it from Amazon.com

Even more so than in Black Hole, the images Charles Burns creates here are small, dense, and inescapable. An abundance of tightly gridded pages filled with repetitive head-on close-ups or point-of-view shots. An avoidance of establishing shots unless they’re designed to mimic what our protagonist Doug sees, nine times out of ten with him on the left-hand side of the panel, our eyes’ transit across the image locked to his own. Narrow rectangular panels consisting of nothing but unbroken fields of disembodied color — some conveying something clear, like maroon panels for the drug-induced unconsciousness brought on by maroon pills, others whose meanings are less clear but no less demanding of our attention, denying us access to anything but that particular color for that particular panel. The recurring use of photographs, sealing a single moment in time. The arising of recurring images unbidden into Doug’s head, single glimpses of scars, cigarette burns, black cats, fetuses, a nude, holes. The way those images weave themselves in and out of both his ostensible real life amid art-punks in the late ’70s and his dream-state/hallucination/extradimensional excursion/whatever it is, and the way that implies that they’re some sort of indelible fabric binding his existence together, like his life could be reduced to these eggs and holes in the wall and black-haired women and black-haired cats and drowning animals. The images are stronger for Burns’s more intense focus on the finite and discrete, on individual moments and objects. Their gravitational pull colors and distorts everything else we see. In much the same way that Doug’s plastic Tintin mask carves away extraneous detail until all we’re left with is the idea of a face, X’ed Out is a story of how both memory and dreams boil our lived experience down to the iconic essentials, however unpleasant they may be. This book could just as easily and accurately have been called 0’d In.

Page five of “Destructor Comes to Croc-Town” is now up on DestructorComics.com. And remember, you can read the whole story so far by clicking here.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Wilson by Daniel Clowes, published by Drawn & Quarterly — a comedy-of-cruelty masterpiece.

I don’t think the kaleidoscopic array of styles in which Daniel Clowes drew Wilson says much of anything. I think that’s the gag….Draw it how you will: Wilson’s always there, in medium close-up more often than not, a wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression of guileless wonder on his face more often than not, saying something fucking horrible almost constantly. No matter how you shake and dance, the last two drops go in your pants; no matter whether he’s detailed or abstracted or realistic or cartoony or full-color or two-tone or black-and-white or whatever the hell, Wilson is a massive, massive tool.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information; click here for a roundtable discussion of the book with the Savage Critics.

If ‘n Oof
Brian Chippendale, writer/artist
PictureBox, October 2010
800 pages
$29.95
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com

Hey, have you played the new Brian Chippendale game yet? I’m only exaggerating slightly when I say that reading each successive Chippendale/PictureBox graphic novel is like getting a new installment in your favorite video game series, one that shakes up the gameplay but still feels like an immersion in the original spirit you loved. From Ninja‘s giant-sized hardcover presentation, bright, buoyant black and white art, and slip-sliding layout; to Maggots‘ furtive samizdat scrawled-on-a-used-book origin, dense dark panels, and hiccuppy panel flow; and now to If ‘n Oof‘s doorstop thickness, manga-digest trim size, buddy-action-comedy tone, and one-panel-per-page design, they’re all uniformly and unmistakably Chippendale in story, art, and tone, but vastly different in terms of the sensory effect reading them has. They’re experiential, is what I’m saying–as much about the act of reading as about what is read.

If ‘n Oof has been billed as the most accessible of the three, and for good reason. There’s no tricky snake-style panel layout to follow: Every page is a splash page! The consequent ability of Chippendale to pretty much know for certain how the reader’s experience will be paced–there’s only so much time it’ll take you to take in each standalone image and either look at the next one or turn the page–enables him to perfectly mimic the beats of an action comedy: an out-of-nowhere save by an offscreen ally; “I’m gettin’ too old for this shit”-style takes when something particularly outlandish presents itself; big spectacular drawn-out leaps through high-rise windows to safety. There was one (hugely important to the story!) reference to Die Hard so explicit I laughed out loud, and hard–not least because it was an enormously emotionally effective reference to boot! Working in this format provides Chippendale with mainstream visual and rhythmic touchstones previously unavailable to him, and it pays off.

Chippendale appears to sense this, and returns the format’s favor by providing his most straightforward story yet. In place of the disjointed purgatorial wanderings of Maggots and the sprawling Deadwood-style story of a criminalized community of Ninja, you’ve got a pretty easy to grok post-apocalyptic sci-fi buddy road movie, with big-eared If and his tiny, mute companion Oof marching through various dangers en route to safety. There are none of the graphically violent or sexual asides or interludes with which Chippendale peppered his earlier works, either; aside from a memorably but not particularly shockingly gross encounter with a tribe of marauding monster-men (It Came from a Mat Brinkman Comic!!!), the violence here is mostly action-blockbuster R-rated level. And even in terms of individual visuals, there are images here that use a smoother line and more traditionally detailed construction than I’ve ever seen from the author before–vast cathedrals that look like something out of Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage, long hallways that evoke the robotic geometry of Yuichi Yokoyama, fields of flowers that wouldn’t look out of place as the endpapers of a Charles Burns comic. They’re impressive moments, but they’re also funny moments for how accessible they are, as if Chippendale was saying “You think I need to do this jagged-edge markmaking shit all the time? Think again, pal.”

But as breezy and adventurous and action-packed and funny and fun as it all was, I started to wonder: “Where’s the bite?” For all his emphasis on comics-as-play, for all his character designs that look like a cross between forgotten He-Man villains and those little pink M.U.S.C.L.E.S toys, for all his obvious love of genre, Chippendale’s comics have a not-so-secret scathing heart–an indictment of contemporary capitalism, the way it disregards and dehumanizes individuals with the bad fortune of getting in the way of what its robber-baron bureaucrats consider progress. Was that going on here? Turns out the answer is yes after all, thanks to the slow-burn reveal, over the course of many chapters, of a familiar-feeling, haunting science-fiction trope. I’m not going to spoil it here, but suffice it to say it calls into question the notion of whether there really ever is breezy, adventurous, action-packed, funny fun to be had. Knowing the optimism Chippendale has displayed in his real life, to say nothing of the ending of Ninja, I suspect his ultimate answer would be “yes there is”–but it ain’t gonna be easy, and that’s even true in his most user-friendly game yet.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is There Is Love in You by Four Tet, released by Domino — as full in its restraint as How to Dress Well is barren in its release.

Click here to download it from Amazon.

Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Curio Cabinet by John Brodowski, published by Secret Acres — quietly ecstatic horror.

I’ve been writing about the similarity between the horrific and the sublime for (God help me) over a decade now, but it’s rare for me to come across a comic that makes that connection as frequently and as subtly as John Brodowski’s Curio Cabinet….The message is both troubling and comforting: It implies a connection between the individual horrors we experience and the very fabric of existence, yet it also suggests that perhaps an enlightenment is possible whereby this waking nightmare can be appreciated, if never fully understood. More like this, please.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.