Prison Pit: Book 2

Johnny Ryan, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, July 2010

116 pages

$12.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

“OPERATION: RAPE LADYDACTYL. BEGIN.”

It wasn’t until I read those words on the screen of a computer operated by a robotic antagonist of Prison Pit‘s main character Cannibal Fuckface that I realized just how far Johnny Ryan was going to go with this series. Obviously it was already beyond violent; obviously it was already beyond sexually vulgar as well, what with Volume One’s maggot-fellatio fade-out. Obviously Volume Two was already filled to bursting with literally nauseating body-horror transformations and mutilations brought to life (and death) by Ryan’s never better, never nastier pen art. But an extended sequence in which our anti-hero is forced against his will to hunt down, attack, maim, and graphically rape-murder a creature that’s distinctly female even for all its monstrousness, one that screams in agony…for the first time I realized that Prison Pit isn’t a fusion-comics exploration of awesomeness in all its forms, but a horror-comics exploration of awfulness–of violence that maims and kills not just body but soul. Ryan is willing, even this early in a series I imagine will be able to last as long as he wants it to, to completely invert his instantly-iconic warrior, to make the audience root against him desperately, to feel dick-shriveling revulsion at his violence and pity for his victim. “That fucking sucked,” CF says when it’s all over. Understatement of the year. This book is a masterpiece of awfulness.

* Big new books from Ben Katchor and Daniel Clowes on the way from Pantheon next spring. The Cardboard Valise is Katchor’s first book in ten years plus, while Clowes’s Mister Wonderful will apparently include 40 new pages.

* Whoa, Fantagraphics is rereleasing Hans Rickheit’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Chloe through its Eros imprint? I wish it were being done by Fanta proper–the fact that it isn’t explains why I didn’t know about it until today–but even still, run, don’t walk, to get that book. Rickheit’s a major talent and that book is something erotic and special. It’s like a dirty secret.

* Spectacularly talented alternative cartoonists: They’re just like us! Kevin Huizenga rents random popular comedies and genre movies from the library!

* I’m glad this worked out for all concerned, but still, threatening a licensed publisher of a franchise over infringing the copyright of your fan-film based on that franchise? How would that work, exactly?

* Alyssa Rosenberg considers A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, world-building, and emotional wiggle room.

* These Brian Ralph sketches sure look like Daybreak collected-edition cover mock-ups to me…

* The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Blu-Ray. Don’t know why that never occurred to me before.

* Nor had it ever occurred to me to look for the Predator soundtrack album, which apparently is only now coming into existence.

* Tom Ewing is right: that new Arcade Fire song is not hot. Personally, I tuned out when they rhymed “sprawl” with “shopping malls,” like a Bad Religion album cut. I wouldn’t go quite as far as Mike Barthel because I think it’s perfectly legitimate to remain aghast at a lot of what goes on in suburbia even as an adult; I just think it’s bloated, boring music and trite lyrics delivered with irritating vocals, which is what I’ve always thought of the Arcade Fire.

* Real Life Horror: When I, a proven fool or worse on such matters, talk about politics on this blog these days, it’s usually in the horror-tinged context of torture or the action/sci-fi framework of a militarized Republican party. But of course these two phenomena are not unrelated. And now we can perhaps add a third category, as articulated by Jim Henley: the degree to which the ugly bigoted sentiments of a swathe of the American right are now being made manifest as actual discriminatory policy, from already nationwide attempts to thwart the construction of mosques anywhere for any reason, to attempts to revise or reinterpret (or repeal?) the 14th Amendment so as to deny birthright citizenship to so-called “anchor babies” on the basis of no one knows what exactly. To a degree, we’re all the blind men feeling the elephant when it comes to the darker forces at work in American political life today. Well, here we have a movement that supports the government’s ability to imprison and torture its perceived enemies at will; that makes a habit of arming itself and discusses this as a potential way to redress its grievances with its political and governmental opposition; and which seeks to abrogate basic constitutional rights for minority ethnic and religious groups deemed insufficiently American. What does that elephant look like to you?

Spoon

“Who Makes Your Money”

from Transference

Merge, January 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

Restraint can be so sexy! Listen to the minimalist groove of this song: It’s mostly a tight pencil sketch of a drumbeat and a three-note keyboard hook that sounds like fingertips just barely grazing the keys. The bass comes in not much more often than every other measure, just enough to keep the low end a presence in your mind. There’s a rhythm-guitar…undercurrent, is the best word for it. Every once in a while there’s a little textural sizzle that fades in and out. Even the vocals are deployed with the minimal sufficient force: The titular refrain is so underpronounced that I spent my first listen to the song thinking it was called “Who Makes You Mine.” And perhaps with that in mind I thought this was a song about dark, possessive sexuality–a misconception that did not change one iota when I found out the real title, by the way. It was only when I made a point of seeking out the lyrics that I discovered it’s actually a song about being a slave to the wage, not a slave to love. But with an arrangement this exquisitely perched on the precipice between sensuous and ominous, it works either way.

* I interviewed Grant Morrison and Adam Egypt Mortimer about their upcoming film Sinatoro for Comic Book Resources. Because it’s so early in the game they are in large part limited to enthusiasm and hyperbole, but they’re pretty self-aware about that. I liked this bit:

We wanted to do something that took the language of movies and brings it into the 21st century. One of the things I was saying over the weekend was this idea that most of us have been playing video games and grew up watching MTV and music videos. The art that we’ve absorbed has changed. The way we look at things and the way we tell stories is a little bit different than how it used to be. I like the idea of introducing that back into the basic Hollywood narrative. Taking some of that, and all the building blocks we’re familiar with – the boy-meets-girl, the revenge story, the thriller, the murder mystery, the crime story – and combine all that together. It”s a little like what I did with Batman and Superman: take all the things we love about cinema and then put them together again in a slightly new way which still fulfills all the [original] functions. It still makes you laugh and cry and sing and dance.

* Clive Barker says Volume III of his Abarat young-adult fantasy series will come out in September 2011. Given that what would have been the ending in most YA fantasy series took place at the end of Volume 2, I suppose it’s no shock it’s taking this long to ramp up to the next installment.

* Since I am increasingly pessimistic about the economy in general and the long-term structural changes being made that will adversely effect the creation of art in particular, I’m always game for discussions Tom Spurgeon’s thoughts on the future of comics retail in a piece on five comics news stories to watch:

It’s take your pick of portents: the absence of a vital retailer selling new comics at Comic-Con the way Comic Relief used to underlines the notion that owner of the majority of comics’ best shops are getting older, there’s never a guarantee that these businesses change hands without causing major differences in what they’re able to do, and I’m not sure there are enough up and coming retailers to play the same role as the generation of retailers now in that 55 and over club. Price increases, continued horrific scheduling strategies, a ridiculous and inflexible start-up model, over-publishing and the slight discombobulation that is likely to arrive with an upswing in attention to digital comics strategies are making things more difficult for the system just at the time when everything should be done to make things easier. As second downswing in the economy will likely drive lot of folks to reconsider what they do, and comics seems less likely to escape a second generally fallow period coming so quickly on the heels of the first.

* I am enjoying Robin McConnell’s Inkstuds roundtable on “fusion comics,” aka the New Action plus some other mixed-genre/style stuff, with Frank Santoro, Brandon Graham, and Michael DeForge as we speak. Here are Frank’s notes for the interview. Obviously a lot of this material excites me as well, and I love all these artists bringing non-traditional influences to the table. It makes for exciting art, and exciting discussions between artists. As for criticism…Honestly? I do worry a bit, from a look around the blogosphere on any given day, that rise of fusion/New Action gives people the critical cover they’ve long secretly craved to talk only about genre, to the exclusion of non-genre work. (I oughta know!) Oh, I dunno, I’m a scold these days. Maybe it’s just that I’ve always proceeded from the notion that this stuff is legit to talk about, and so it doesn’t fire me up, like, eight years into talking about comics professionally and semiprofessionally. I’ve got my own issues, like.

* CRwM waxes eloquent on John McTiernan’s Predator and Die Hard, two films that undercut the Action Hero, examining the varying degrees to which they do so. Check the comments for TroyZ’s take on the matter as well.

* The Ten Video Games Roger Ebert Should Play. I’ve never been heavily invested in what Ebert thinks and this has not changed with his recent renaissance, but a) It’d be interesting if the collective Green Lantern power of the Internet wills him into liking video games after a prolonged period of philistinism, and b) this list doubles well as a Ten Video Games Sean T. Collins Should Play list.

* I’d forgotten how good the cover for Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur #29 was; Ruaraidh Bruce reminds us with a cover version at Covered.

* I love Rickey Purdin “What I Got at [Comic Convention X]” posts, because Rickey Purdin loves getting comics.

* I briefly want to draw your attention to a couple of other Internet ventures for which I am responsible: Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts, consisting of cool pictures of people wearing t-shirts;

* and Bowie Loves Beyonce, consisting of cool pictures of David Bowie and Beyonce.

* It’s been a while, for medical reasons, but I would like Serge Gainsbourg’s “Cannabis” (via Nate Patrin) to provide the soundtrack for all my future usages of the titular substance. I suspect it would be impossible not to feel like a cool dude with all the right moves under such circumstances.

* An LCD Soundsystem/Hot Chip/Sleigh Bells tour? Oh, indeed.

* It’s Eddie & the Cruisers’ world–we just live in it.

Exit Wounds

Rutu Modan, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2007

168 pages

$16.95

Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly

Buy it from Amazon.com

What a lovely-looking book Exit Wounds is. Rutu Modan’s skillful take on the Clear Line style elicits strong “performances” from her characters, creates an inviting depth of field, and holds her frequently sumptuous colors quite well. Her staging is rarely as dynamic as that cover image, but when it is, hoo boy, fabulous stuff. Overall I feel like she’s doing with the Clear Line what Emmanuel Guibert tried but failed to do in an inkier style: Take real life and gradually subtract detail until what remains is paradoxically even livelier.

The story? Eh. It’s your basic alternative-comics “young person’s personal epiphany enabled by unexpected, brief, intense, difficult relationship with other young person” story, a template established by the likes of I Never Liked You, Black Hole, and Ghost World, gone supernova with Blankets, and since utilized to varying degrees of success by Adrian Tomine, Danica Novgorodoff, Blaise Larmee, Paul Hornschemeier, Dash Shaw, Hope Larson, Bryan Lee O’Malley, the Tamaki sisters cousins, Natsume Ono, Inio Asano, and so on and so forth. This particular variation is uninspired and, literally, unsurprising. When their personalities clashed; when they fell into an uneasy rapport that slowly grew into an easy one; when they argued and made up; when they staved off emotional disaster by having ill-advised sex; when they stormily split up; when they capped off the book with a highly symbolic interpersonal act–each of these elicited a “yep, that’s pretty much what I expected” from me.

The affair is sprinkled with light commentary about Israel’s social, economic, ethnic, and denominational stratification. It’s subtle, thoughtful stuff, focusing on the way that both the state’s inherent construction and its predicament vis a vis its neighbors and occupation-ees constantly juts into people’s personal lives in mostly quiet, mostly unpleasant ways. That and the sumptuous art is probably what got the book over with so many readers and critics. But to me, it’s a little like getting a molten chocolate cake with no molten chocolate inside. It’s not quite a hollow experience, like one of those chocolate Easter bunnies where it’s just a thin layer of yummy and then a lot of air–the cake is substantial and sweet. But without the molten chocolate that a less predictable, more alive story would provide, you still feel like something’s missing.

BACKDATED FOR EASE OF BROWSING

I enjoyed Pitchfork’s list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. The decision to limit the list to one song per artist opened things up to tons of songs, probably even whole genres, that would have been excluded if folks like Bjork and Beck and Radiohead each had five songs a piece or what have you; moreover it started a whole different set of discussions than “‘Let Down’ should have been ranked higher than ‘Creep,'” which is probably what you’d have gotten otherwise. Still, as with any exercise of this sort, there are bound to be lacunae, oversights, goofs, choices you’d have made differently, artists you’d have better represented, and of course outright crimes against all that is holy. LOL srsly the closest thing I have to a substantive philosophical criticism of the list is that in the end, the voters admittedly went with comfort for their #1; given that the list has frequently been positioned as a statement about indie music today, read into that what you will. In my case, seeing the #1 vote-getter (no spoilers here!) simply reminded me that my 1990s were different from those of a lot of other critics–less “indie rock,” more “alternative,” electronic, heavy, and industrial.

So in the interest of showing my ’90s off a bit, here, in alphabetical order by artist, are 80 wonderful songs from that wonderful decade for music that didn’t make Pitchfork’s cut. I applied three rules in making this list:

1) Like Pitchfork, I limited myself to one song per artist.

2) If an artist made Pitchfork’s Top 200 list, I couldn’t use them–in other words, I wasn’t adjudicating whether “Donkey Rhubarb” would have been a better pick than “Windowlicker.” (Although it is.)

3) Pitchfork very helpfully and very smartly included two or three “see also” suggestions with every entry, in order to give relevant sounds/scenes/artists that much more props. I didn’t let this rule out artists who were thus listed, but I did let it rule out the individual songs that were cited. As a practical matter this meant that several songs which all things being equal I’d have included on any Top Whatever List didn’t end up making it in, because the song Pitchfork had suggested as a “see also” was so clearly the right choice–“Stars” by Hum, “Gett Off” by Prince, “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check” by Busta Rhymes, “Jump Around” by House of Pain, and “Unsung” by Helmet all come to mind. But more often than not I had the leeway I wanted.

So there you have it. There was a lot of great music made in the days of my youth; here’s some of it, in convenient video form. I hope you enjoy!

1. 1000 Homo DJs – Supernaut

2. Christina Aguilera – What a Girl Wants

3. Alabama 3 – Woke Up This Morning

4. Tori Amos – Silent All These Years

5. Fiona Apple – I Know

6. Archive – So Few Words

7. Backstreet Boys – Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)

8. Ben Folds Five – Army

9. Bizarre Inc. – I’m Gonna Get You

10. Blahzay Blahzay – Danger

11. David Bowie – I’m Deranged

12. Butthole Surfers – Who Was in My Room Last Night?

13. Cake – The Distance

14. Mariah Carey feat. Ol’ Dirty Bastard – Fantasy

15. Johnny Cash – Delia’s Gone

16. Cypress Hill feat. Erick Sermon, Redman, and MC Eiht – Throw Your Hands in the Air

17. The Dandy Warhols – Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth

18. Deftones – Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)

19. DJ Kool – Let Me Clear My Throat

20. DNA feat, Suzanne Vega – Tom’s Diner

21. Erasure – Always

22. Everything But the Girl & Deep Dish – The Future of the Future (Stay Gold)

23. Faith No More – Mid-Life Crisis

24. Fishbone – Unyielding Conditioning

25. Folk Implosion – Natural One

26. Peter Gabriel – Digging in the Dirt

27. Garbage – Vow

28. Genius/GZA – Duel of the Iron Mic

29. GusGus – Believe

30. Sophie B. Hawkins – Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

31. Michael Jackson – Remember the Time

32. Junior M.A.F.I.A. – Player’s Anthem

33. King Missile – Detachable Penis

34. KMDFM – Juke Joint Jezebel

35. Kool Keith – Sex Style

36. Korn – Blind

37. Lenny Kravitz – It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over

38. LL Cool J – 6 Minutes of Pleasure

39. Lords of Acid – The Crablouse

40. Nick Lowe – The Beast in Me

41. Madonna – Vogue

42. Manic Street Preachers – Faster

43. Marilyn Manson – The Beautiful People

44. Ricky Martin – Livin’ La Vida Loca

45. Meat Beat Manifesto – Asbestos Lead Asbestos

46. Metallica – The Unforgiven

47. Ministry – N.W.O.

48. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin – Grey Cell Green

49. Pantera – This Love

50. CeCe Peniston – Finally

51. Photek – K.J.Z.

52. Pigface – Chikasaw

53. Placebo – Pure Morning

54. The Presidents of the United States of America – Lump

55. Primitive Radio Gods – Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand

56. Primus – Jerry Was a Race Car Driver

57. The Prodigy – Poison

58. Rage Against the Machine – Freedom

59. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Give It Away

60. The Rentals – Friends of P

61. Rollins Band – Liar

62. Roni Size/Reprazent – Share the Fall

63. Ruby – Salt Water Fish

64. Sade – No Ordinary Love

65. Salt-n-Pepa feat. En Vogue – “Whatta Man”

66. Seal – Killer

67. Sloan – Money City Maniacs

68. Snap! – The Power

69. Soul II Soul – Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)

70. Soundgarden – Rusty Cage

71. Sparkle feat. R. Kelly – Be Careful

72. Britney Spears – Baby One More Time

73. Sugarcubes – Hit

74. Sunscreem – Love U More

75. Teenage Fanclub – Is This Music?

76. Temple of the Dog – Hunger Strike

77. Tool – Aenema

78. U2 – The Fly

79. Whale – Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe

80. White Zombie – More Human Than Human

* The first paragraph of Douglas Wolk’s Comic-Con column contains a pretty good summary of the difference between us, I think. Contemporary nerd culture’s enthusiasm is a bug, not a feature, and being a nerd sure as hell was oppositional in my day. Damn you and your well-adjustedness, Douglas!

* Rick Trembles reviews The Human Centipede in his inimitable cartoon style, making the strongest case for it I’ve read so far.

* Would you like to spend your Friday afternoon reading a long David Bordwell essay about Herge and the clear line? You bet you would.

Paper Blog Update Supplemental Postcard Set Sticker Pack

Anders Nilsen, writer/artist

self-published, November 2009

16 pages, 7 postcards, 1 sticker

$10.95

Buy it from Anders Nilsen

A slice of history here: This minicomic/postcard set/collection of beautiful drawings of bird heads labeled with names like “Beyonce,” “Mister Peanut,” and “Paul Wolfowitz” contains the very first of Nilsen’s “Monloguist” strips. Monologues for the Coming Plauge, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes, The End, and even Nilsen’s blog itself wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the first few strips in which blacked-out stick figures spoke dialogue jotted down during Nilsen’s conversations with friends on a trip to Switzerland. (“I think it’s bad, looking at the ass. I don’t mean spiritually, either,” says a figure I’m reasonably sure is Sammy Harkham.) It’s fascinating to see how rapidly all the tics and tropes that have made this style of Nilsen’s so quietly haunting develop: the blacked-out mistakes, the seemingly random distortion or deconstruction of the Monloguist, the sudden shifts from banal observations and list-making to gaze-into-the-abyss despair and back again. But the illustration work included here, including a fascinating postcard image of a deer and some boulders nestled in the strange branches of some bizarre alien-looking tree, offer ample evidence of the raw chops with which Nilsen complements his experimental zeal. I dare say that if you send any of the postcards to anyone, you’re liable either to get married or never hear from them again. A fascinating little package from a serious best-of-his-generation candidate.

Foals

Total Life Forever

Sub Pop, June 2010

Buy it from Sub Pop

Buy it from Amazon.com

Now here’s a weird one. Foals’ debut album serves a very specific purpose for me: Its standout tracks echo and enhance restless, caffeinated creativity. A breakneck pace provided by tight, crisp drumming; yelped vocals from singer Yannis Philippakis; repeated, high-pitched, distortionless eighth-note guitar riffs played with such precision you feel like the band’s multiple guitarists are hitting the strings with tiny glockenspiel mallets; unexpected saxophone bleats and blasts, strategically deployed…it’s the perfect accompaniment to when you’ve got so much energy your leg is twitching and it’s all you can do to to actually type instead of simply pounding on the keyboard, hoping to get your point across through sheer force of will. For me it’s that nervous urgency that separates Foals from the army of angular-guitar also-rans who’ve occupied UK indie for the past however many years. Songs like “Cassius,” “Red Socks Pugie,” “Olympic Airways,” and particularly “Balloons” have an originality of tone and force of execution that, for me anyway, makes them a lot more worth returning to than your average I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gang of Four product.

So what to make of a follow-up record where there’s pretty much none of that? I suppose that given the flack the band received for a) being late to the post-punk revival party, and b) earning, through simple instrumental proficiency and clarity, the “math-rock” sobriquet and all the approbation that comes with it despite being uniformly four-four, a change in direction was all but inevitable. And I suppose that since the band’s previous slow jams were more to be endured than enjoyed, there’s no way I’m going to connect with this less kinetic, more groove-oriented album the way I did with its predecessor.

But here’s the thing: What they’re doing here is less immediately useful to me, but it’s still interesting, simply because it’s so weird! Do you want to hear what post-punk Go-Go might sound like? Check out “Miami”! Do you want to hear skinny Englishmen funnel lyrics cribbed from the Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms” into some weird Morris Day swing? Check out “Total Life Forever”! Do you want to hear a Discipline-era King Crimson take on Fleet Foxes? Check out “Blue Blood”! Most of the album is a fairly unremarkable attempt to create a sound as panoramic and pretty as Antidotes was mostly inward and aggressive–cf. lead single “Spanish Sahara”–but sprinkled throughout all that is such a strange set of vocal and musical approaches that I’m a bit dumbfounded. It left me feeling enough critical goodwill toward the band that they could throw in their most nakedly crowd-pleasing Bloc Party-type jam yet, “This Orient” (a big soaring chorus invoking “this Western feeling” and everything) and I end up really, really digging it instead of cringing.

I’d probably have preferred the band tighten up even further, damn the critical torpedoes and full speed ahead, emphasis on speed. And indeed this thing really could stand tightening up even if they are gonna move away from “Balloons.” But there’s a groovy weirdness in here I can get behind on the relatively rare occasions when it pops up, and I hope they double down on it next time around.

* Frank “The Tank” Miller talks Holy Terror, his now-Batman-free vigilante vs. al-Qaeda graphic novel, which he says he should be finishing next month. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Today on Robot 6: Tom Brevoort on Marvel’s latest “tie-ins for variant” swap.

* Today the five-minute trailer for Kenneth Branagh’s Thor that Marvel debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con leaked onto the Internet for a few hours. (It used to be here but is no longer.) It was pretty good. Firmly in the spirit of the 21st-century Marvel approach to any and all of its properties to be sure, i.e. filtering them through military-industrial-espionage-action tropes, but it’s not like I was expecting Asgard and its denizens to be done in Speed Racer style. Ang Lee scared the experimentation right out of Marvel movies, at least somewhat justifiably so. Asgard looked big and unearthly, at least, and the Destroyer–one of the all-time great villain designs, like Jack Kirby presaging the Cenobites–was great, and I look forward to seeing fight choreography that revolves around the use of a war hammer.

* Yet all that being said, I still find myself far more entertained by an entirely different comic-book movie trailer, one for a book I’ve never even read: Stephen Frears’s adaptation of Posy Simmond’s Tamara Drewe. What on earth could be drawing me to this movie? What could it possibly, possibly be?

* Guillermo Del Toro will indeed direct a 3-D adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness with James Cameron now producing, which seems to mean that yes, it’ll get made. Shrug.

* A great way to get a sense of fanboy conventional wisdom on any given topic is to read what the big horror sites say about it. In the process of reporting that They may hire Damon Lindelof to rewrite Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, Dread Central shits alllllll over Lindelof and the Lost finale–like, to an M. Night Shyamalan degree. So I guess that’s where Nerd Culture comes down on that. NEEDS MOAR NANOTECHNOLOGY!!!

* Sean P. Belcher wasn’t nuts about Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour. The way he talks about it makes me think he had a hard time with aspects of it in the same way I did, namely not connecting with the supposedly knockout emotional content. And like me he feels obligated to couch this caveat in as complimentary language as possible, because the overall project was so innovative, entertaining, and endearing.

* Suddenly I’m a lot more sympathetic to Con Flounce: Tom Spurgeon and Tom Neely have both written rather soul-crushing con reports that give credence to the notion that the Hollywood contingent really, truly is crushing the the comics out of Comic-Con.

* Here’s your requisite on-the-other-hand: Peggy Burns’s upbeat report can be summed up thusly: Drawn & Quarterly sold through all but one measly boxful of comics, and the report contains the phrase “COMIC-CON LIKES COMICS” in all caps. So, y’know, it’s entirely possible for an event involving 130,000 people to result in different experiences for different people, even people keenly interested in precisely the same aspect of the show.

* But the Toms have me concerned over a couple of things. First, I’m concerned about the future of the show’s comics content. Not the comics-that-are-also-movies stuff, I don’t think Marvel’s going anywhere and nor are all the little outfits who are happy to serve as IP farms, but the comics-that-are-comics stuff, from self-publishers like Neely to retailers whose presence used to be my favorite single section of the show. The news that in the absence of Comic Relief and with a smaller Bud Plant booth there basically wasn’t a go-to comics retail area is the most disturbing single thing I’ve heard about the show ever. If you can’t maintain a place where people at the show can go to buy pretty much any of the comics they might be interested in buying, which is how that area used to function, then that’s a major structural failure for the show. And needless to say, a comics show without a vibrant small-press and alternative comics presence isn’t a comics show I’m interested in.

* But that leads me to the second thing I’m concerned about, which is that due to the kind of person I am, I never paid enough attention to this all along. See, I am an all-purpose nerd. I love going to Comic-Con to talk to Jordan Crane and load up on all the Fanta and D&Q debuts and get Bowie sketches from Jaime Hernandez and all that wonderful stuff. But in all honesty, if all that were gone, I’d still enjoy the show, because I also love superheroes and hearing announcements about the future of the Batman books and catching previews of big action-fantasy blockbusters and seeing people in costume and geeking out over Lord of the Rings replicas and on and on and on. I’m not like either of the Toms in that I don’t find any of that stuff infuriating and that it is, in part at least, something that excites me about art and culture.

* So I guess what I’m saying is that in retrospect, I should have stuck a big fat caveat lector atop my dismissal of the post-show pique that flares up after each year’s Con. Don’t get me wrong, I do think a lot of that stuff really is just pique (and pandering for hits). And in fairness to myself, whenever I talk to people who haven’t been to the show, I warn them that there are lots of people who are just not constitutionally suited to that level of crowd and media and visual overload, so it’s not like I’m totally head-in-the-clouds about the inhospitability of the show for some people. But I’ve been far too willing to ignore the fact that there are people with perfectly reasonable and even noble expectations for the show for whom those expectations are now going unmet.

* In other Con news:

* Sean Belcher caught a bunch of Grant Morrison newsiness I missed or forgot: He’s still planning a Wonder Woman story, he’s still working on Multiversity which will include a Frank Quitely issue that Sean says will be the Charlton/Watchmen riff though I don’t know the source for that, he’s planning a big joint project with Geoff Johns.

* Here’s everything Kiel Phegley did at the show.

* Guillermo Del Toro says inter-studio politics between MGM, New Line, and Warner Bros. are responsible for delays to The Hobbit and his subsequent departure, not just MGM’s financial problems.

* They’re making another Battlestar Galactica prequel series called Blood & Chrome, a webisode-type affair set during the early days of Bill Adama’s military career in the First Cylon War. I still haven’t bothered finishing the first season of Caprica so it’s tough for me to get too excited about this.

* Man, Frank Santoro’s Silver Surfer strip for Strange Tales II is gonna be something else.

* So say we all, Cameron Stewart.

The Comics Section from the Panorama

(aka The San Francisco Panorama Comics Section)

Keith Knight, Jon Adams, Michael Capozzola, Gabrielle Bell, Daniel Clowes, Ivan Brunetti, Alison Bechdel, Gene Luen Yang, Art Spiegelman, Ian Huebert, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Kim Deitch, Seth, Erik Larsen, Jessica Abel, Heather Brinesh, Katrina Ortiz, Carson Ellis, Jon Klassen, Jon Scieszka, Adam Rex, Mac Barnett, Jenny Traig, Kevin Cornell, writers/artists

McSweeney’s, March 2010

18 pages

$10

Buy it from McSweeney’s

Buy it from Amazon.com

Everything’s coming up newsprint! Originally included with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #33–the “McSWEENEY’S HEART NEWSPAPERS” project The San Francisco Panorama–and now conveniently sold separately because McSweeney’s knows its audience, The Comics Section hews pretty closely, intentionally or not, to its conception as a newspaper’s funny pages. There’s that same lack of a unifying aesthetic or visible editorial hand, that same variety in tone and quality, and that same presence a strip or two that leave you totally baffled. How does it work as an argument for the preservation of the newspaper as a format? Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. I’m not here for the Wednesday Comics-style newsprint nostalgia, I’m here for the comics. And the strong ones are strong enough that I don’t mind having spent the necessary scratch.

Look, Ware and Clowes just tower over this thing, let’s get that established right away. Ware’s centerfold spread is a luscious thing, with those bright blue and pink colors he used for the cover of Acme #19 and an inviting assortment of strips about young-brainiac-turned-adult-divorcee Putty Gray and his enamorata Sandy Grains. You can start pretty much anywhere on the spread, flip the thing in pretty much any direction, just letting your eye go where it wants and reading accordingly, and it works. (Compare and contrast with Alison Bechdel’s tribute to the game of “Life,” which forces you to rotate the entire broadsheet with seemingly every panel to little discernible aesthetic effect and much upper-arm exhaustion.) As you might expect, several of the “punchline” panels here are real punches to the gut; I’ll never get enough of Ware’s sense of “humor,” the way he just puts despair where the jokes would go. Ditto Clowes, whose provides the section’s opening salvo, a nasty little science-fiction spoof called “The Christian Astronauts” with as funny and fuck-you of a final panel as anything in Wilson.

There are two other stand-out strips in the section. Kudos to Adrian Tomine for writing a strip about a superhero named Optic Nerve that’s just an out-and-out autobiographical satire of how badly comment threads comparing him to Daniel Clowes get to him and how all things considered he’d probably rather be hanging out with his wife than wasting his time in this thankless field. He doesn’t care if navel-gazing and superhero satire are the two things most likely to get your brand of alternative comics ridiculed on the Internet these days, you know? That’s what he wants to do, and dammit, that’s what he’s doing. And it’s funny! And kudos to the Editors for thinking to include Erik Larsen, of all people: He uses his Savage Dragon character for a light superhero satire at least as effective as Tomine’s, and it’s clear from inking, coloring, and choreography that he simply cares a lot about cartooning, which makes a two-page broadsheet spread arguably an even more effective showcase for what he does well than an ongoing series well into the 100s. And now that I think of it, I liked Seth’s page as well. The more I see of his stuff, the more the disconnect between his in-real-life look, his ruminative pacing, and his slick cartooning intrigues me rather than puts me off.

The rest? Eh, I can take it or leave it. Mostly leave it, I suppose–I don’t know why Kim Deitch laid out his story basically backwards, I don’t know why Jessica Abel’s adventure-strip pastiche selected a relatively inert portion of the adventure to depict, I didn’t think very many of the non-full-page strips (Knight, Adams, Yang, Brunetti) were funny at all. But then, for years, I only read The Far Side.

* Carla Speed McNeil and Grant Morrison agree: Let fiction be fictional. These are stories, not rulebooks. (Evan Dorkin apparently agrees too.)

* Ron Rege Jr’s “Math Comics” are now up on What Things Do. The more Rege comics made accessible to as many people as possible, the better.

* Jesus, is this what Paul Pope’s Battling Boy is gonna look like?

* Comics Comics’ Nicole Rudick takes a look at Russian comics.

* Douglas Wolk interviews Paul Cornell about Knight and Squire and Action Comics. Here are two back-to-back sentences from the piece: “We love Robo-Lois. Death appears at the end of the Gorilla Grodd issue.” SOLD

* Darren Aronofsky’s RoboCop remake is dunzo, sunk by the same MGM financial woes that have scuppered the Daniel Craig-model James Bond franchise and delayed box-office sure-thing The Hobbit to the point where directors are leaving and stars are publicly tweeting their doubts that it’ll get made.

* The trailer for Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch had me at using “The Crablouse” by Lords of Acid for background music. “The Crablouse,” for crying out loud! Pure ’90s trailer music, and my favorite Lords song to boot. Wait, what’s that? Oh, right, the movie! Well, it looks like fun, like an amalgam of all the other moderately boundary-pushing nerd-friendly action movies of the past several years, and it’s also a Zack Snyder movie, and I’ve enjoyed many of the former and all of the latter. I also think this trailer helps better contextualize what Watchmen ended up being. Like, if the line-up is A) Dawn of the Dead, B) 300, and D) this trailer, and Watchmen is C), then you probably have a solid idea of what Watchmen is. (Via Sean Belcher.)

* I dream of a world in which TCJ.com can do something, anything without taking pot/kettle shots at the rest of the comics blogosphere in such a way as to call further attention to its own lameness. Still, an international comics blog aggregator is an interesting enough idea…but again, given the site’s track record for its domestic coverage, I’m skeptical. (Via Flog.)

* Here’s a pretty solid piece by Adam Sternbergh on the rise of nerd culture, or more specifically fanboy culture. It has a lot of the stuff that sprang to my mind in the time between reading the headline and clicking the link–the internet facilitating the rise of a mass geek culture from previously isolated pockets, the rage with which dissent from the nerd consensus is greeted, and so on. To that I’d add Matthew Perpetua’s critique, which is that contemporary nerd culture crudely seeks to establish its masculine bonafides at every possible occasion–the emphasis on the supposed rules of pseudoscience rather than the more fluid and feminine magical approach I talk about in that McNeil/Morrison link is a big part of that–and reacts to flattery of even the most empty and mercenary sort by preexisting cultural gatekeepers (in the immortal words of W.P. Mayhew) like an old bitch dog gettin’ its belly scratched. That said, I think Matthew exaggerates the extent to which “fanboys are the new bullies.” I’d be really surprised if the ratio of kids singled out for months-long campaigns of cruelty by their peers for being too smart and too attached to fantastic fiction vs. those thus singled out for not being nerdy enough were anything but absurdly lopsided. And stuff like G4 can suck as hard as the day is long, but it’ll never touch the insane cultural hegemony of the National Football League.

* “Sun” by Caribou is one of my favorite songs of the year so far, and now its video is one of my favorite videos of the year. (Via Ryan Catbird.)

CARIBOU – Sun from Caribou on Vimeo.

How to Destroy Angels

“The Space in Between”

from How to Destroy Angels

The Null Corporation, June 2010

Download it free or buy it from How to Destroy Angels

Buy it from Amazon.com

It’s the way this song — from Trent Reznor’s new band with his wife Mariqueen Maandig and his frequent collaborator Atticus Ross — does and doesn’t sound like a pair of his previous band’s songs that strikes me. Lyrically, you could do a line-for-line swap with Nine Inch Nails’ “All the Love in the World” and literally not miss a beat — that’s how deeply Maandig has apparently internalized her husband’s aesthetic. (Example: “Watching all the insects march along / Seem to know just right where they belong” vs. “Blinding light illuminates the scene / Try to fill the spaces in between.” Try it!) And indeed the music itself is very NIN, albeit not so much the “return to rock radio” pummeling of “All the Love in the World”‘s source album With Teeth as the ominous droning and knowingly tinny, clicky programming of subsequent records like Year Zero and The Slip. And all that is fine — I am a big, big NIN fan and learned long ago that you don’t switch on Reznor’s latest record expecting to be surprised by a new set of thematic concerns.

But the bigness of “The Space in Between”‘s final chorus — twice as long as the first iteration, beefed up with echoey overdubbed harmonies, lifted aloft on the crest of a guitar that’s suddenly gone from a drone to a roar — reminds me of an entirely different NIN song, and one of my favorites at that, precisely because it is surprising: the title track from The Fragile. That song starts quiet and ominous, then reveals its intent with at-the-time stunningly kind and direct lyrics, then blossoms into an unexpectedly big chorus the second time around, then cuts away for a bridge and Reznor’s most emotional guitar solo to date before exploding into an absolutely massive third and final chorus — a chorus of Reznors given the full “Freddie Mercury treatment,” a whole new set of lyrics screamed near the top of Reznor’s range on top of the original lyrics, a shift to a major key, the works. “The Space in Between” echoes “The Fragile”‘s structure but never gets to that tear-down-the-sky point, cutting off abruptly after chorus #2. The result? I listen to the song on loop, waiting and waiting for that missing final section, for a catharsis that never comes — which is a very Reznor concept. Well played.

* And now: Morrisonia!

* You heard it from me at Robot 6 first: A Joe the Barbarian movie is in development with the folks who made Clash of the Titans.

* Three bits of good Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely news I missed/forgot to mention: Absolute We3 is on the way with ten new pages, Morrison is confident about the prospects for a collected Flex Mentallo, and Dwayne McDuffie is writing an animated adaptation of All-Star Superman.

* Sea Guy Eternal is on the way as well.

* IGN talks to Morrison about Batman Inc. It sounds like fun, which is probably something that needs to be said more often w/r/t Morrison’s Bat-books. They’re fun! Meanwhile, given my increasing interest in the narrative potential for the non-narrative tropes of videogames (all praises due to Scott Pilgrim), I’m obviously loving this quote:

So many comics are still inspired by Hollywood movies, (many of which are now inspired, in turn, by comics in that pop-will- eat-itself way), and by extension a kind of approach to narrative which dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics and the fundamentals of Greek Drama, almost two and a half thousand years ago, in the name of our dear lords Hermes and Zeus Almighty!

It occurred to me, immersed in my 50th hour of Just Cause 2, how far beyond that silent audience, proscenium arch, here’s some well-paid ‘actor’ pretending to be someone else experience we’d gone and how very timidly other forms of storytelling entertainment had reacted to the challenge of the beast in their midst, this ultimate choose your own adventure playground that in some cases simulates ‘life’ and terrain so effectively it’s like actually like going on vacation (how many gamers know the geography of Silent Hill as well as their own town? Do streets and locations from Liberty City, Panau, or Saints Row, turn up in the dreams of other gamers like they do in mine? I’ll lay odds they do. These amazing virtual environments appear in my memories as real as Chicago or London. Paris, Venice, New Delhi, Jogjakarta or any of the non-CGI cities I’ve been to.

Although many current video games are constructed on a narrative spine which follows the basic action movie hero-beats-baddie script, it’s never that aspect of the player’s interaction with the virtual environment that’s important. I know I tend to skip the cut scenes in games without losing any awareness of the arrow of narrative progression. Batman Inc. is an attempt to do a comic influenced by the storytelling structures, images, senses of scale, movement and perspective and so on that I’ve absorbed from games. The experience of actually being Batman in the Arkham Asylum game was profoundly eerie and I’d love to find a way to capture that depth of involvement and identification with the character and environment. I’m not sure how much of this I’ll be able to realise but this is where I’m beginning my thinking on what might make Batman Inc. different from other books.

* Finally, here’s another pretty great, and pretty blunt, quote from Morrison’s spotlight panel:

Me and Geoff Johns sell lots of comic books at DC, and no one’s ever said ‘Don’t do that,’ because they know it sells good. There are certain segments of fandom that say that my work is difficult, but it’s the best-selling stuff in the business and has been for 20 years. So I’m not going to change.

(Via JK Parkin and Kevin Melrose.)

* ICv2 has a few more details about the biggest story of the show, Fantagraphics’ deal with Disney to collect Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse strip.

* Here’s a look at Top Shelf’s spotlight panel. That’s an extensive coming-soon list.

* Jesse Moynihan will send you his Comic-Con minicomic for free.

* Here’s concept art for the upcoming American Godzilla reboot. I dunno, it’s a painting of Godzilla, whoopedy dee.

* I took a look back at my coverage of last year’s Con and was interested to see which projects announced back then still haven’t seen the light of day. Rafael Grampa’s Furry Water and his AdHouse art book and Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion and Killjoys top the list. Also, Geoff Johns’s All Flash series didn’t quite manifest as planned, though between Flash and Speed Force I guess we’ll see all of the intended material eventually.

* As longtime readers are no doubt aware, I’m habitually skeptical of post-Comic-Con flounce posts, like this one from Videogum’s Gabe Delahaye. In my experience they almost always stem either from wildly unrealistic expectations–like that the show should automatically lay itself out before you in the form best suited to your needs and that its failure to do so is a reflection of its shortcomings rather than yours–or from a professional mandate which requires immersion in the show’s gaudiest/most exploitative aspects or which treats it as an opportunity for cultural anthropology on nerd culture at its worst. In reality, it’s perfectly easy for a normal person, or even Eisner Award winning comics journalist Tom Spurgeon, to attend the show, even cover the show, in precisely the way they most enjoy. Yes, the show is huge, and crowded, and increasingly saturated with distasteful Hollywood types; and yes, nerd culture is an aesthetic morass in many ways these days. But whaddyagonnado? Alvin Buenaventura still had a table, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez were available for gushing over, you could buy original art from the Beguiling, you could get limited edition He-Man toys, there was a torso-sized Infinity Gauntlet on display, Liv Tyler walked around disguised as V for Vendetta, and 130,000 people were there to enjoy the products of people’s imagination, even if some of that imagination has been commodified and stuck in flyer form into hotel bathroom mirrors. Ultimately, I’m with Matt Maxwell: “Yes, it’s coarse and crass and unforgivable, but there’s times that you find yourself stepping into a shoe that happens to fit you perfectly.” I will always self-identify as a nerd and I will always be glad that Comic-Con exists.

* In non-Con news:

* Chris Mautner takes a look at Fantagraphics’ fall/winter catalog. Moto Hagio, Dave Cooper, Los Bros Hernandez, Steve Ditko, Walt Kelly, Jacques Tardi, Johnny Ryan, Jason, David B., loads more.

* I’m never not in the mood for stories about relict African dinosaurs.

* Jason Adams liked Salt, but his and Matt Zoller Seitz’s points of comparison don’t exactly move it to the top of my to-do list.

Neighbourhood Sacrifice

Steph Davidson, Michael DeForge, Jesjit Gill, writers/artists

self-published, 2009

12 pages

$2

See sample images and buy it from Michael DeForge

Bam bam bam bam bam–with each turn of the page, this cheap newsprint zine hits you with a powerful image as big as the trim size will allow. The images–a quick google search for the artists’ homepages reveals I’m out of my element at trying to deduce who did what based on their other work, for the most part, though I think I at least recognize DeForge when I see him–are tailored for maximum impact. Maximum awesomeosity, if you will. You’ve got DeForge’s trademark slimy monsters, seemingly constructed out of bits of thousands of other beasts–like if Shub Niggurth were made of her 1,000 young. You’ve got massive, realistically drawn altars laden with occult and Egyptian kitsch. You’ve got a guy looking into the mirror to see a melted-faced monstrosity staring back at him; turn the page and another guy’s cutting his cubist-looking face in half with a sword. Heck, the thing opens with a pretty hilarious selection of newspaper comic titles given DeForge’s heavy-metal typography treatment. (My favorites are Ziggy, which uses a sword for the “i” in the style of The Legend of Zelda, and Hi and Lois, whose letters are used to form a grinning skull.) It’s a delirious, this-goes-to-eleven experience, over almost as soon as it begins.

* Your quote of the day comes from Grant Morrison:

Of course, the floor soon opened up for a lengthy fan Q&A where the first question drew out “Grant Morrison: Fiction Theorist” as a young man asked how old characters like Bruce Wayne and the various Robins were supposed to be. “It doesn’t matter. You must understand these people aren’t real,” Morrison said to laughter. “Batman is a mythical figure. I’m being funny, but I’m not being funny. They don’t live in the real world. It’s like this theory I’ve been developing – you know what they always say about kids? That kids can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. And that’s actually bullshit. When a kid’s watching ‘The Little Mermaid,’ the kids knows that those crabs that are singing and talking aren’t really like the crabs on the beach that don’t talk. A kid really knows the difference.

“Then you’ve got an adult, and adults can not tell the difference between fantasy and reality. You bring them fantasy, and the first thing they say is ‘How did he get that way? Why does he dress like that? How did that happen?’ It’s not real. And beyond that, when you’re dealing with characters, they exist on paper. They’re real in that context. I always say they’re much more real than we are because they have much longer lives and more people know about them. But we get people reading superhero comics and going, ‘How does that power work? And why does Scott Summers shoot those beams? And what’s the size of that?’ It’s not real! There is no science. The science is the science of ‘Anything can happen in fiction and paper’ and we can do anything.

“We’ve already got the real world. Why would you want fiction to be like the real world? Fiction can do anything, so why do people always want to say, ‘Let’s ground this’ or ‘Let’s make this realistic.’ You can’t make it realistic because it’s not. So basically Batman is 75 years old, and Robin is 74 years old. They don’t grow old because they’re different from us. They’re paper people.”

* Douglas Wolk talks to Gary Groth about Fantagraphics reprinting the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse.

* The Infinity Gauntlet is gonna be in a Marvel movie, Thor most likely.

* Marvel Studios now has the rights to the Punisher.

* Jeff Parker talks Red Hulk. I’ll give it a shot.

* In non-Con news:

* Frank Santoro waxes rhapsodic about Matt Kindt’s Revolver.

* Every time someone from one of the big publishers chides someone for analyzing publicly available sales numbers because they’re supposedly wildly inaccurate, I think “Okay–release the real numbers, then.”

* Someone got stabbed in the eye with a pen over a seat in Hall H. People, nothing you can see in Hall H is worth stabbing anyone in the eye with a pen over, and I say that as someone who saw the sneak preview of the Lost pilot in Hall H.

* Over at Robot 6 I interviewed Chester 5000 XYV‘s Jess Fink and Incredible Change-Bots Two‘s Jeffrey Brown about their upcoming Top Shelf releases.

* I also posted a one-page preview of Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. III: Century #2 – 1969.

* Wow: Fantagraphics and Disney are teaming up to release the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics. Given Disney’s relationships with both Boom and Marvel I’m a little surprised, but only a little. I imagine that if you walk into a conference room with an armful of the Complete Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Popeye, Krazy & Ignatz, etc., you probably walk back out with a handful of contracts.

* Congratulations to Tom Spurgeon for his much-deserved Eisner Award win last night. Glad to see Joe Sacco pick up a trophy, too.

* Spurge’s reports from the floor continue to be very comics-focused and very entertaining. For the second time he notes bad news for Fantagraphics, this time that they were shut out at the Eisners, which Fantagraphics does not ever deserve to be.

* The women of Drawn & Quarterly. That’s quite a line-up to field.

* Mark Ruffalo is Bruce Banner and Jeremy Renner is Hawkeye in the upcoming Avengers movie. It’s a strong cast, certainly. I have to say, it’s feeling really good to have been a Renner fan since Dahmer these days.

* Here’s a trailer for the long-gestating DC MMORPG. It’s a post-apocalyptic scene in which the few surviving villains, led by Lex Luthor, basically wipe the floor with the few surviving heroes, led by Superman. I understand that a six-minute vignette in which Deathstroke strings Batman up with Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth and beats him with a baseball bat until a jealous Joker blows them both up with a rocket launcher, followed by Lex Luthor stabbing Superman to death after the Man of Steel was poisoned by the kryptonite-booby-trapped corpse of Wonder Woman, isn’t going to ameliorate a lot of people’s concerns about where DC is today, aesthetically. That said, really impressive sense of scale, action choreography, stakes, and even lighting with this thing. If you like your superheroes hilariously grim and gritty, or just wanna see what a big giant rumble with the iconic characters might look like in a semi-realistic setting, check it out.

* The red-band trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse spinoff Machete is almost Crank-level crazy. (Via Topless Robot.)

* I am not at all sold on the Thunderbolt Ross Red Hulk as a concept even when Jeph Loeb isn’t writing him, but Gabriel Hardman sure can draw the shit out of him and just about everything else (Atlas #3 was really somethin’), and I’ve got some faith in Jeff Parker, so I’ll check out the team’s newly announced Hulk run with the character.

* Emma Frost cosplayer hates Tom Neely.

* Darkseid cosplayer killed Jim Lee.

* In non-Con news:

* Matt Zoller Seitz gives Salt a rave review, and suddenly I’m interested in Salt.

* My interview with Strange Tales II editor Jody LeHeup is up at Marvel.com. Sample quote:

Marvel.com: How similar was the project to something like the Bizarro books that DC did a while ago?

Jody LeHeup: It’s very similar, but there are some very important differences. In that book, there were no writer/artist stories for some reason. For example, I remember looking at that book-which I enjoyed very much by the way-and wondering why Jaime Hernandez, for example, didn’t write the story he drew. And it was like that throughout. In STRANGE TALES the opposite is true. Most contributors are writer/artists, which I think makes for a different kind of story experience. The other difference is that there is a lot of young and new talent mixed in with the veterans of indie comics. So there’s this exuberance or vitality to the STRANGE TALES stories that I’m very proud of.

Also, Benjamin Marra, Sheldon Vella, and Ty Templeton have been added to the line-up.

* Grant Morrison is launching a new ongoing series called Batman Inc. This will see Bruce Wayne “franchise” Batman out to a bunch of people. That’s pretty rad.

* Morrison’s also writing an independent film called Sinatoro. It looks neat. “Rad,” “neat,” yes, I’m very insightful today.

* Joss Whedon is directing the Avengers movie. Unless something in my life radically changes between now and then, this will be the first Joss Whedon thing I’ve ever watched.

* Ben Jones designed an ice cream truck!

* Tom Devlin ships Kristen Bell and Taylor Kitsch. “Your show gets cancelled, you do a guest spot on a show that everyone stopped watching about the time you show up and, whammo, you’re gone. See ya later, Ex-Oh-Ex-Oh. Man, Jessica Alba would have a crazy crowd at this thing. Keep her away from that John Byrne. Ha. Is he even still alive?” Glorious.

* Your quote of the day comes from Tom Spurgeon:

I heard some complaints from fellow comics reporters that there wasn’t more media coverage of comics from people at the show. I don’t know, maybe this obnoxious to say out loud, but it seems to me if you’re media and you don’t think there’s enough coverage of comics, maybe just do more coverage of comics?

* In non-Con news:

* I was really hoping this would happen: Dan Nadel reviews Blaise Larmee’s Young Lions. It’s a fine comic, which Dan addresses; it arises from a mindset in which, intentionally or not, the discussion and aura surrounding art/artists/making art has a place of primacy over actual works of art/actually making art, which Dan also addresses. Somehow I feel like this Nate Patrin piece on music critics talking about Pitchfork reviews of music instead of the music being reviewed is relevant here.

* PictureBox has announced the winners of its Thor Know Prize contest. Here’s Jim Rugg’s submission:

* I’m serious, Zack Smith is fucking killing me. Idea machine.

* The next time you’re tempted to dismiss Direct Market comics as a cultural irrelevancy because the most popular only sell like 125K copies, think of indie rock. Way more people bought Siege #1 than LCD Soundsystem’s last record.

* Can you imagine anything more horrible than deciding who is and isn’t a real pop music fan?

A Sunny Day in Glasgow

Nitetime Rainbows

Mis Ojos Discos, March 2010

Buy it from Mis Ojos Discos

Buy it from Amazon.com

Oh man, I love that this happened. I hit play to listen to “Nitetime Rainbows,” the lead and title track for this EP (extracted from last year’s pretty colossal full-length Ashes Grammar). Immediately there’s this sonic…vista, I guess you’d call it. Alternating between high soaring notes and low humming notes, held and stretched via god-knows-what heavily processed instrument, creating this beautifully vast and glowing space in my head. And I think to myself, “Wow, this sounds like what the Rainbow Bridge level in Mario Kart would sound like if you were standing there on the starting line.” Only then do I remember that hey, this song has the word “Rainbows” in the title.

That opening section is so strong, the portrait it paints so clear and complete, that the rest of the song still feels like the slow unraveling of potential contained within the introduction. That’s the intelligence of Ben Daniels’ and Josh Meakim’s songwriting at work. Structurally, “Nitetime Rainbows” is a series of interlocking but still discrete sections, shifting from one to the other with each new instrument introduced–a Byrds-style guitar line; a beat that sounds like you’re hearing it from several houses over; ethereal chirping wordless vocals–or each element dropped–the whole jangly schmear pretty much eliminated in favor of the distant-sounding bassline from the intro, with only an echoing whirr to accompany it–or each melodic shift up or down. At long last almost everything stops for just a beat or two, until the vocals return at their clearest yet, and an insistent dunk-dunk-dunk rhythm grounds everything in a way that feels sure and certain–to quote The House Next Door, a retrospectively inevitable destination. The finish line!

What I like about this EP is the way the rest of it reflects what’s going on in the title track. “Daytime Rainbows” and its doo-doo-doing vocals and sunny guitar feels like what the title implies–a looser, freer, brighter answer to the “Nitetime” version. “So Bloody, So Tight” takes the rhythmical chiming of “Nitetime”‘s guitars off into a synthier direction, which “Pianos Lessons” follows up on even more directly, its Krautrock repetition depicting what the Rainbow Bridge might be like for the drivers.

A trio of “Nitetime Rainbows” remixes closes out the EP, beginning with the Buddy System remix, which shuffles around the original’s constituent parts. Benoit Pioulard’s impossibly huge-sounding “Acid Wash Edit” blows out the original intro into gigantic, distorted rumblings, feeding into solar-wind gusting and whistling. Finally, Ezekiel Honing’s remix strips away all the lushness and fullness, reducing it to an eerily disjointed succession of sporadic handclaps, breathing sounds, a heartbeat, a repeated two-note riff, a hum like some ancient machine, and eventually a mournful acoustic-guitar strum. It’s the “Nitetime” to Pilouard’s all-“Rainbows” remix–the starfield surrounding the Rainbow Bridge.

Does it all sound very Court of the Crimson King, very Roger Dean? It ought to. It’s spectacle, not through prog virtuosity but through sheer sonic architecture–meaning both size and structure. It’s big, big music, of the sort that invites whatever worldbuilding the psychedelic part of your brain is capable of. Since Nintendo has been my mind-alterer of choice for the past year or so, that’s what I see: a ribbon of light winding its way through space. Double rainbows all the way across the sky, folks. So intense! And isn’t wonderful that music can do that?