Monsters

Ken Dahl, writer/artist

Secret Acres, 2009

208 pages

$18

Buy it from Secret Acres

Buy it from Amazon.com

Gross-out sex-life autobiography has a storied history in alternative comics, but it’s sort of a St. Olaf story. (Crumb is repeated first as tragedy, than as farce.) Folks with sufficient cartooning chops are afforded ample opportunity to Tex Avery themselves out, which I do appreciate. And of course there’s the thrill we get from coming across someone with no internal censor–to paraphrase Hesh Rabkin, between their brain and their pen, they have no interlocutor. But it’s very, very, very well-trod territory, and you can count me among the people who came across Joe Matt’s Spent and thought “Well, that’s enough of that.”

So it took some persuading for me to give Ken Dahl’s Monsters the story of his life with herpes, a shot. Another comic about some creepy artist type’s loathsome behavior around and toward women? Drawn with confrontationally ugly underground-style depictions of everyone involved and hyperactive exclamation-point-ridden lettering? Coupled with enough grand-guignol lesion close-ups to trigger my skin-growth phobia like wo?

Wrong wrong wrong! I enjoyed the heck out of this book. For starters, I was giving Dahl’s art short shrift. Jeepers this guy is accomplished. I don’t point this out nearly often enough, but as a non-artist, I really get a thrill out of good cartooning because it’s so beyond my ken. To develop a visual vocabulary and deploy it consistently page after page…I mean, man. Anyway, on the most basic level, Dahl’s bobble-headed, adenoidal characters are crafted with an assured, flowing line that trails off into feathering wisps for a hint of vulnerability beneath the slickness. Moreover, they are an instant visual signature, serving both to deflate the angst and self-absorption of his story and satirically skewer the various alt lifestyles of which he is a tangential part. (For what it’s worth, I think the mockery–of everyone from Christians to vegans–is one of the less considered parts of the book, but still, no one comes out of this looking like an angel.) But more importantly for the book, they’re a template from which he can deviate for extravagant, almost Tom Neely-esque sequences, in which Dahl’s emotions and/or his infection literally explode from within and take over in monstrous fashion.

But for me, the most interesting thing about Monsters is Dahl himself. Turns out he’s not a creep at all! He has no idea how he got herpes, had no idea he had it when he gave it to his girlfriend, and commits a grand total of one genuinely douchebaggish actions in the entire course of the book. Instead, he obsesses on his condition to a psychologically debilitating degree, sealing himself off from having a healthy social life or any kind of romantic relationship for years. In fact, while the “educational filmstrip” facts’n’figures sequence about herpes simplex is the book’s ostensible centerpiece, for me the real tour de force was the ending, which in a quick one-two punch upends what I’d thought was going on with both the story’s plot and its moral. Dahl turns out to be far more victim than victimizer, and the deft way in which he teases that reversal out of our expectations for a book of this sort is its best trick.

* By far my favorite set of responses to Heidi MacDonald’s end-of-year/decade survey comes from Sparkplug’s Shannon O’Leary, and not just because she’s a rare voice of sanity regarding Battlestar Galactica‘s breathtaking finale. O’Leary digs in and unpacks the fallout from Diamond’s decision to raise its order minimums in such a way as to essentially extinguish the presence of the small press in the Direct Market. I’m grateful, because it was only after reading Heidi’s survey that I realized I’d all but forgotten that this even happened–that’s how quickly and totally I internalized the notion that unless you’re a really lucky person in a big city or college town, you can’t get those comics in comic shops anymore, it’s just a given. That’s your story of the year, I’d say, much more so than the big moves at Disney/Marvel and Warner/DC, where very little has happened yet and I imagine the main effect will be to cut out some ingrained nonsense.

* What’s more, Diamond’s move has made Internet retail presences, webcomic set-ups, small-press shows, and small-press-friendly websites all the more important to an entire mode of expression. Case in point–I’m not sure you’d be seeing so many excellent altcomix, like this little number from Frank Santoro, online these days if the DM were still open to it at all. The move has made Internet retail presences, webcomic set-ups, small-press shows, and small-press-friendly websites all the more important to an entire mode of expression.

* What I’m most concerned about in 2010 is how Diamond, the economy, and the short-term-profit-maximizing policies of the big companies will jointly shape the fates of the ’00’s new breed of publishers. Bodega’s already taking the year off; whither Buenaventura, PictureBox, Sparkplug, Secret Acres, AdHouse?

* Today on Robot 6: Michael Kupperman’s rejected New Yorker comics and Matt Groening’s music festival.

* I have no brief with Ti West’s The House of the Devil, but releasing a VHS version as a promo item is a great idea, and its mimicry of vintage ’80s VHS packaging is impeccable, as any Portable Grindhouse owner could tell you. It’s the back cover that really gets it over.

* The Sinestro Corps War really was very well done. And it pulled Curt Purcell back from the brink!

* Ben Schwartz and Tom Spurgeon talk B.P.R.D., the best ongoing superhero comic of the decade. It’s a rambly thing that talks as much about Otto Binder and Alan Moore as it does about Hellboy, but you won’t mind much. What’s fascinating to me is that Schwartz got into the series as recently as the Black Goddess arc, which was the most recent one (until today’s release of King of Fear #1). I played catch-up with Hellboy in, oh, 2002? 2003? and then started following all the Hellboy-verse books from there, so it’s interesting to see the impact they can have on someone who reads a big chunk in a short time frame. After all, it’s been telling one large story since Davis and Arcudi came aboard, so it’s probably like plowing through an HBO show on DVD. Two things I wish they’d gotten to are 1) the degree to which both BPRD and Hellboy have become about the characters’ failure to do what they’re trying to do, and 2) that wonderful scene in The Black Flame where the evil CEO enters his boardroom in full flaming-skull supervillain regalia and calmly tells the board of directors “You’re all fired”–one of my all-time favorite comics sequences, up there with the end of the World’s Fair issue of ACME, the beach scene in Diary of a Teenage Girl, the locust sequence in Skyscrapers of the Midwest, the lizard-tail sex scene in Black Hole… Also, Tom, I don’t suppose Ben convinced you to count B.P.R.D. and Hellboy (and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) as superhero comics for your best-of-the-decade shortlists, did he?

* A Masters of the Universe art show? Oh, indeed. The world of He-Man is deathlessly weird, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink amalgam of stuff that’s cool to eight year olds. It’s the closest this country’s come to the bizarre childhood entertainment franchises of Japan, I would say. (Via FarePlay.)

* Three things that are cool-looking enough that I’m not even going to show you a sample image, you’ll just have to click for yourselves: Kevin Huizenga’s “Famous Ghost,” Josh Cotter’s Xmas commission, and Tom Neely’s “I just figured it all out…”

* Matt Maxwell’s latest decade-in-review installment tackles the history of his reading and writing about comics. I’m second only perhaps to Heidi MacDonald in getting a kick out of trips down comics-blogosphere memory lane.

* Poor Curt Purcell. Curt, if I’d known you’d gone into your project of reading each and every event-comic tie-in title actually expecting to be entertained more often than not, I could have warned you, like the wizened old local at the end of the first reel of a horror movie.

* Rob Bricken’s review of Avatar makes me feel like maybe he and I linked up the neurons in our respective headtails. Now we’re bonded for life.

* Only problem is that I’m clearly already ponytail-to-ponytail with Tucker Stone, if his Best Comics of 2009 list is any indication. Sample quote: “There’s scary, and then there’s horrifying. After reading Cockbone, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a third thing that’s even worse.”

* Con War comes to Texas.

Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Life

Bruce Paley, writer

Carol Swain, artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

136 pages, hardcover

$19.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Pencil is not an easy medium to publish in for a cartoonist–just ask the superhero artists whose work looks like the proverbial cake left out in the rain when “digitally inked” or colored right off the original pencils. But Carol Swain makes it look easy, and I think it’s because she’s figured out a way to spot blacks with a pencil. Those sooty shadows and clouds and night skies and manes of wild hair suffuse her work in Giraffes in My Hair with a sort of negative-image glow, popping her foregrounded figures off the page with a barely-there white aura. Couple it with her ever-shifting angles and it’s a damned effective way to create a sense of space and depth, reminiscent of similarly adroit strategies by Jeffrey Brown and Ben Katchor. If Swain’s jarring close-ups make her panels less immersive than theirs, her porous gray shadings make up for it with atmosphere–an inviting softness, tinged with just enough smokiness to remind us that what’s going on here isn’t entirely pleasant. The overall effect works so well that I really had to stop myself and peer at her pages to figure out what made them tick. I was too busy being propelled along by the effortlessness of the art.

So Giraffes, a collection of anecdotes from Bruce Paley’s teens and twenties on America’s countercultural fringe, is a breezy read. But it’s one rooted in an almost unchanging nine-panel grid with sparse, nearly monotone narration. At times this allows the comics to tip over into bluntness, particularly with the ending to some of the stories: The tale of how Paley avoided Vietnam ends with a shot of the Wall; a story of New York City’s ’70s heroin scene ends with Death itself offering us a bag of smack. But in general, the art and the writing are a perfect fit. Swain’s art rarely calls attention to or gets in the way of itself, and in that it meshes seamlessly with Paley’s deadpan “here’s what happened” narrative style, his reluctance to overstate or oversell the import of the anecdote reminiscent of Harvey Pekar’s. (Of course, Pekar’s work rises and falls on the strength of his collaborators–Paley’s got Swain, so there’s not much falling to do here.)

Yet at the same time the presence of that subtitle indicates a unifying theme, which makes Paley’s storytelling choices all the more interesting. The first story shows an 18-year-old Paley ditching college and leaving home to hitchhike cross-country with his girlfriend, but the home life that led him to drop everything and drop out is relegated to a quick line of dialogue and about half a page upon his return from the journey. As hippies give way to punks we suddenly discover that Paley’s a habitual heroin user, but we never see his introduction to the drug. A story about an ill-fated attempt to import drugs from overseas sees Paley casually mention time spent in Tangiers, but up until that point his adventures had been strictly domestic. In some graphic memoirs these lacunae would be maddening; here’s they’re sort of the point.

Paley’s not claiming anything spectacular about the life he lived or the stories he plucked from it. The way he tells it and Swain draws it, living on the edge feels like an interchangeable commodity with Pekar’s life as a civil servant. An interesting conversation with the janitor may be replaced by doing speedballs with Johnny Thunders, but the game’s the same: get by, find a little happiness when you can, and cling to the stories that comprise your life, the recounting of which has a value all its own.

* Wow, this is really something: Like half the cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live is doing a fundraiser for the off-Broadway adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Money well spent for a variety of reasons.

* Powr Masters 3 and If ‘n Oof: on the way in May!

* Over at Robot 6 I rounded up some notable posts in the great “Did comics stink in 2009 or is it just me?” debate.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Jog on Death Note, one of the great entertainments of the comics decade.

Avatar is a so-so movie that I highly recommend you see in as big and expensive theater as possible. My evening at Avatar cost me in the neighborhood of $30 all told, and had to be scheduled half a week in advance, like an in-demand local theater production or something. I do feel like I got my money’s worth, even though everything that everyone says about the movie is 100% true. It’s a deeply impressive visual experience tied to a deeply pedestrian script. But you don’t ride the Cyclone for the character arcs, do you? Seeing the movie in 3D on the biggest IMAX screen in New York State that isn’t for a museum seems to me the ideal way to see it. So yeah, thirty bucks well spent. Even though I very much doubt I’d even want to watch it on a television. Because here’s the problem: It’s only ever good enough.

The one thing it does inarguably well is take advantage of the 3D canvas to work with vertical scale. Worm’s-eye and bird’s-eye shots of the kind of landscapes that would simply boggle your mind were they real abound–you peer up and down floating mountains thousands of feet in the sky, you get a view of a tree the size of the Sears Tower. Fantasy and fantastic fiction generally sorely need to use their Y-axis, and Cameron gets that right, no doubt. It’s obviously the perfect use of his genuinely fantastic 3D technology. You’re not getting shit flung in your face, you’re not simulating an amusement-park ride, you’re as close to being in there, or up there, or down there, or out there, or whatever, as movies can get.

But. While they’re not as obnoxious and ridiculous as you probably thought they were when you first laid eyes on them after all the hype, those blue alien designs really are dullsville. Smurf Gollum Jar-Jar Omaha the Cat Dancer people in loincloths and dreadlocks with your basic “here’s what James Cameron synthesized from reading about tribal customs” worldbuilding undergirding them. That’s all.

(Regarding a related issue, I’m not the kind of person who’s easily offended by the supposed racial overtones of fictional races. The Gungans didn’t bother me, and neither did the Orcs. Of course, in neither of those cases did the storyline hinge on the kind of racial dynamic we’ve actually seen here in real life, with white dudes coming in and knocking an indigenous people out the box to steal their land and resources. Even still, aside from a slightly cringeworthy bit where everyone gawked at the newcomer and some silly hula-hula dancing, it didn’t really rub me the wrong way. I mean, it’s too rote to be upsetting.)

I’d been similarly skeptical about the creature designs–they all just looked like a mess of colors and limbs with very little thought to how they’d actually evolve and function. Seeing them in action makes them a lot more persuasive–nearly all the lifeforms we see, the fauna at least, look and feel like they’re part of a consistent ecosystem. Even there, though, I was frustrated by the lack of imagination. There’s a monkey species, a lion species, a dog species (that barks!), a horse species (that our main character, Jake Sully, actually calls horses!), and then some dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are my favorites, you can get away with dinosaurs, but I couldn’t help but feel like they could have done better with the rest. Meanwhile–prepare for geekiness–all of the animals have six limbs, except the Na’vi, the humanoids we’re involved with here. Are they supposed to be on an entirely separate evolutionary chain? I don’t think so–if the six-limbed monkeys, ostensibly the world’s equivalent of the primates several limbs over from us here on Earth, weren’t enough of a clue, the plotline about the interconnectedness of all life on the planet would argue against it. So you’re left drawing the conclusion that they have four limbs because it’s easier that way.

It’s sort of unfair to compare the movie to The Lord of the Rings, in that Tolkien had one of the most unique minds in literary history while James Cameron, um, doesn’t. But when you look at Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, which share with Avatar the same special effects team, you can see how weak and doughy the world of Pandora is compared to the world of Middle-earth. Watching the behind-the-scenes material on the LOTR DVDs, you see time and again Peter Jackson rejecting sketches and designs for the various creatures that inhabit that world because they’re too fanciful, they wouldn’t work. No such guiding intelligence was at the helm here, so bring on the six-winged four-eyed rainbow dinosaurs.

Alright, to heck with it, let’s compare it to Lord of the Rings. The reason those movies succeed so well as action cinema is because all the combat is so rooted in a sense of location and direction. I could sit here and describe to you the Battle of Helm’s Deep like I was transcribing it from the screen, that’s how well delineated each state of the fighting is and how clear the consequences for each major turning point are. The same is true of the attack of the Uruk-Hai at the end of Fellowship, and even the wide-open Battle of the Pelennor Fields in Return of the King. When the Rohirrim reform the line and charge the Haradrim, it’s crystal clear what’s happening and why. (The one exception in all three films is the warg fight, for which they just didn’t have time to devise an intricate fight plan, and for which they apologize on the commentary track–but since it’s the exception, that chaotic lack of choreography ends up working for it. It stands out as a frantic, nasty battle.) With Avatar you just have a bunch of swooping and charging. There’s the slightest nod to taking advantage of positioning at the very beginning of the climactic battle, and then it’s all flying around and running around and shooting around. And there’s a big ground charge where I kept waiting for what the trick or surprise would be, but was shocked to discover that there wasn’t one. It’s exactly what it looked like it would be. It’s frustrating, because think of Aliens or Terminator 2–Cameron once knew how to stage action within a visually described environment. Here he seems to be hoping the 3D will do the trick for us. It doesn’t.

Then there’s the writing. Over the past few days I’ve given some thought to how important it is to care about, flesh out, and even empathize with your villains. This is because I’m a couple eps deep into season two of True Blood, and there’s a storyline involving an evangelical megachurch pastiche that is just sooooooo boring, because you can tell that everyone involved with the show bleeds with contempt for these people and has no interest in making them interesting, appealing, or sympathetic. They’re just cardboard cutouts. They’re called The Fellowship of the Sun, which is funny, because the last time I saw TV antagonists this dull and this much a waste of my time they were called the Baltimore Sun and I was watching The Wire Season Five. Vampires and drug kingpins who’ve murdered dozens of people were painted in a much more sympathetic, and not coincidentally alluring and compelling, light than some asshole godbotherers and hack editors respectively. If the filmmakers don’t care enough to even try, why should I?

I’m almost tempted to say this about Avatar, in which the military guns-for-hire who evolve into the movie’s villains are just a faceless bunch of rapacious barbarians led by General Goony McGoonerson. One-dimensional barely cuts it. But it’s hard to get too worked up, because there’s really nothing going on with any of these characters. Everyone zigs when you expect them to zig, zags when the plot needs them to zag. People have the changes of heart you expect them to, make the heroic sacrifices you expect them to, misunderstand what you expect them to and then overcome those misunderstandings when you expect them to. Never once did I feel any attachment to anyone in the movie, or any investment in their fate, beyond whatever lizard-brain response run-of-the-mill “good vs. evil/underdog vs. empire” conflicts can muster.

The one surprise is just what a full-throated endorsement of treason the movie ends up being, and how full of visceral hatred it is for the despoiling of the environment and the invasion of small countries by big countries. I got a big kick out of all of that–it was so in-your-face it was admirable–but not enough to overcome how well it paid to expect the expected from the rest of the flick. Also, we’ve been there once before with Paul Reiser, who was funnier and sleazier and tougher to predict.

And there’s more, of course: plot holes regarding the escape of our heroes from captivity, a boring score (dammit I am so sick of that), shots that stunned but never seduced (I counted three what I would call “visually poetic” shots or cuts in the entire film–lots of gosh-wow, very little damn). On the other hand I never got bored, which given its running time and predictability was definitely a peril–it does draw you in, and I didn’t even get up to use the bathroom. Like I said, it was a good way to spend my time and money, a fun film, a demonstration of what someone with Cameron’s budget and all the CGI and 3D tech now at filmmakers’ disposal can do. I just can’t wait for someone to actually do it.

* Robot Roll Call! Here’s a round-up post I did featuring links to everything that went up during Robot 6’s big anniversary weekend. Lots and lots and lots of cool content, something for everyone I daresay.

* My favorite of the bunch is our list of The 30 Most Important Comics of the Decade. Part One I already mentioned; Part Two contains my write-ups for The Complete Peanuts, Kramers Ergot, Art Out of Time, Daredevil, and Blankets–all in a row! But you’ll have to click to see where they all fell on the countdown. And check the comment thread for a “editorial cartoons aren’t comics” argument preserved in amber from the McCloudian past like one of those Jurassic Park mosquitos.

* I greatly enjoyed Douglas Wolk’s conversation with Tom Spurgeon about Invincible Iron Man. It really is a conversation, and that’s what makes it one of my favorite pieces in Tom’s holiday interview series on the books of the decade thus far. To paraphrase what Tori Amos’s Jungian mystic once said about me and my wife, the rocks in Tom’s head fit the holes in Douglas’s.

* Here’s another post I cheered for: David Uzumeri’s look back on 2009, by way of responding to the oft-advanced notion that the year really uniquely sucked for comics and/or superhero comics. He just piles up evidence for the case against. On a related note, Jeff Lester did a bang-up job with his post on the origin of comics burnout.

* The thing I loved about Jog’s Best of 2009 post is that he spends as much time talking about the books he missed as he does the books he loved. A great idea! You get almost as much of a picture of the state of the art from the former as you do from the latter. The thing that bummed me out about the post is that two of his top five were books I haven’t even read (through no lack of trying on my end, in my defense), meaning my own list is probably a big lo’ shit sandwich.

* Elsewhere, Jog and I have a quick back-and-forth about our differing reactions to the differing works of Naoki Urasawa.

* MOAR DECADE IN REVIEW FROM MATT MAXWELL

* Yep, I’m gonna have to see Pontypool.

* Matt Rota is great.

* If you’re looking for good music you haven’t heard, you could do a lot worse than to download Matthew Perpetua’s “Lost ’00s” mix, featuring gems that were largely overlooked over the past 10 years. You really can’t go wrong with Muscles and In Flagranti, I can tell you that much. I’ll tell you what, it’s a bit of a bummer that I’ve become friends with Matthew, because for years he was my source for music I could impress my friends with that no one else had ever heard of, but what the hell can I impress him with? My extensive Pigface collection? (It’s pretty impressive.)

Big Questions #13: A House That Floats

Anders Nilsen, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2009

44 pages

$9.95

Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly

My sincere hope is that a couple years from now the collected Big Questions will lodge itself at the top of future Best of the Decade lists on the strength of material largely published the previous decade, like Jimmy Corrigan and Black Hole before it. Certainly Nilsen is a capital-M Major Talent, a real world-beater for his generation, but the book by which he will be defined has not yet been released. The two Monologues for… books from Fantagraphics delight me with their weird existentialist stick-figure stand-up comedy, but talk about an aquired taste. Dogs and Water might pick up steam in the post-The Road world, but it’s always gonna read grim, and its strange release pattern–first as the fattest stapled pamphlet you ever saw, then a slightly revamped version in hardcover–threw folks for a loop. Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow devastates virtually anyone who reads it, but its hodgepodge hybrid format, arising from its tragic origin as a travelogue-turned-eulogy, makes it a tough item to classify. The End could end up topping my personal Best of the Decade list, but it’s a one-shot Ignatz-format pamphlet. I could see his mythological comics for Kramers Ergot clicking but there’s just not enough of them.

But soon, along will come a thick hardcover of this monumental series, tracing its evolution from xeroxed minicomics sold at a table alongside Jeffrey Brown, John Hankiewicz, and Paul Hornschemeier comics, through its adoption by D&Q, into its status as one of the only regularly released alternative serials in North America. It’s as fragile and frightening as any of Nilsen’s many, many comics about the baffling horror of senseless death, but it’s also a funny-animal book stuffed with subplots and side-stories and borderline gag strips about wisecracking birds. It works as a showcase of pure cartooning as well as even Nilsen’s most abstract, “pure comics” stuff from MOME or The End, but in the service of a sad and searing realism whose beauty is apparent to any reader even remotely open to altcomics work–certainly I’d stack this issue’s cockpit sequence against anything else this year for sheer stunning loveliness. It functions as allegory, but then turns around and acknowledges its own allegorical nature, and ads enough detail and twists to hold up as a real-deal semi-adventure. It manages to capture and cry for the world’s cruelty, yet hold alive the hope offered by cooperation and community and small kindnesses, even those arising from bare enlightened self-interest, as well as anything this side of Deadwood. I laughed, I cried, in the space of this issue alone. Big Questions is a great comic.

The Ganges material in Tucker Stone’s installment of Tom Spurgeon’s decade-in-review interview series is pretty great. I like all the attention he pays to how the mere size of the page Huizenga’s working with for the Ignatz format gives him latitude he doesn’t have in Or Else or Fight or Run–that’s a pretty terrific point, especially considering how much the Ganges comics depend on reproducing certain effects across the space of the page. Jesus, can you imagine “A Sunset” as appearing in Ganges rather than Or Else? Drooooool

But let’s face it, I came here to kvetch about Tucker’s latest hand-waving about the futility of making value judgments as critics. He responds to Tom Spurgeon’s (accurate) assessment of people who summarily dismiss non-genre comics as “ignorant” by more or less attacking the very idea that anyone should read anything but what they’re already reading, labeling those who’d argue otherwise “boring assholes.” It’s similar to how, during the SPX critcs roundtable, someone mentioned the critical discourse, and he equated it to people on YouTube calling each other cunts.

First of all it dodges Tom’s specific point, which is that it really is ignorant to dismiss comics like Ganges as boring out of hand. Yes, all criticism is subjective, everyone’s coming at everything from different places, but if you can’t say “Ganges isn’t boring,” there’s no point to writing about comics at all. “Comics culture,” as everyone from Wizard to the The Beat to the San Diego Comic Con to me understand it, is “comics plus genre work from other media,” which is an indication of how hard non-genre comics have to fight to gain a foothold. It’s big problem, and Tom’s not wrong for pointing it out.

Secondly, Tucker tries to back up his argument by reversing it, saying it’s just as stupid to harass big Anders Nilsen fans into reading Batman. But that’s a strawman. Can you find anyone (besides maybe Rob Clough and Domingos) who dismisses genre the way so many superhero fans do the reverse, so that you would even have to harass them? Gary Groth loves Jack Kirby, Art Spiegelman wrote a book about Jack Cole, Joe McCulloch has read every Garth Ennis Punisher comic, and Tom Spurgeon has waged years-long campaigns on behalf of the Luna Brothers and Lee/Kirby Thor. On the other hand it’s almost impossible to avoid best-of lists that don’t include anything further afield than Mark Waid’s Irredeemable. It’s a problem in one direction; it’s not a problem in the other direction.

I mean, if you met someone who only watched superhero movies, you’d think that was weird and dumb, and you’d be right, and saying so wouldn’t make you a boring asshole, it’d make you a person who was right. Moreover, saying so does not mean you’ve extrapolated that they’re some horrible CSI Miami-watching mouthbreather or anything else about “who they really are” or whatever. You’re just a critic, addressing what people are saying about specific comics, which is a valid thing for a critic to do.

Finally, Tucker’s coup de grace is the fact that most of the audience doesn’t really care about critics or critical approaches to what they enjoy reading anyway. But so what? Most of the people in the theater with us at Up in the Air yesterday have never read Pauline Kael. But criticism is not therefore an egomaniacal waste of time, any more than making art that most of the audience for that art form doesn’t really care about would be. Kevin Huizenga shouldn’t hang it up just because he’s not Jim Davis; similarly, we shouldn’t crumple up the idea of analyzing art and arguing for standards and throw it in the trash because many people would just rather read/watch/listen and then do something else.

Is Up in the Air the first movie about the Great Recession? Because I’ll tell you what. Whether or not the movie succeeds for you largely depends upon how charming you find George Clooney, how sexy you find Vera Farmiga, how adorable you find Anna Kendrick, and how glorious you find cameos from Sam Elliott. I enjoy Clooney, Farmiga is very sexy (although: Permission to speak freely? Bummer about the body double), Kendrick is indeed adorable (and quite talented–she’s been one of the highlights of the Twilights), and Sam fucking Elliott, man. Even though Jason Reitman’s directorial choices are usually strictly functional, and when they’re not (as in the flyover-view credits sequence) they overstay their welcome, there’s more to a movie than that: These folks are fun to spend time around, and that’s a big part of what can make a good movie–just the pleasure of sitting in front of people whose voices and smiles and faces draw you in. So I enjoyed it even if I rarely was blown away by its “Fight Club and Office Space: Ten Years Later” take on soul-crushing corporate culture. Except when, repeatedly, it put you right there in the room with men and women being fired. The level of unemployment and underemployment in this country right now is, frankly, nightmarish, and the inattention paid to it versus the daily Dow Jones rollercoaster is scandalous, and the culture that spawned it is a form of sociopathy. Speaking as someone who was laid off twice before he turned thirty, and has seen it happen to his wife and around three-quarters of his closest friends, I think people devastated by the fear, grief, and shame of losing your job so that your bosses can make more money need to be shown in cineplexes nationwide over and over again until they’re at least as much a part of our national pop-cultural conversation as billionaire superheroes and gorgeous young urban professionals who need to learn something about love.

* It’s a big big day at Robot 6, aka the blog that pays me, because it’s our 1st anniversary. So both at the blog’s page and on the main page of Comic Book Resources you can find tons and tons of goodies, including sneak previews of Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft, Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales, Matt Kindt’s Super Spy: The Lost Dossiers, Stuart & Kathryn Immonen’s Moving Pictures, Matt Maxwell & Luis Garagna’s Strangeways: Red Hands, and Parker / Pak / Van Lente / Buchemi / Hardman’s Incredible Hercules. Many many thanks to Eric Reynolds, Jacq Cohen, Paul Baresh, Chris Staros, Brett Warnock, and Leigh Walton for hooking me up with the Fantagraphics and Top Shelf previews!

* Also, Guy Davis drew us an anniversary card. It’s Christmas all over again!

* Finally, I had a great time helping to put together our list of The 30 Most Important Comics of the Decade. The first installment includes my write-ups for Civil War, Achewood, and New X-Men.

* Elsewhere, there are great alternative comics being posted on the Internet everywhere you look. Here’s some terrific new work from Kevin Huizenga and Noel Freibert. What Freibert’s doing in particular, I could stand to see a lot more of.

* Jim Henley proclaims the triumph of geek culture to be “The THING of the Decade.” But because he’s Jim Henley he does it in such a way as to NOT make you feel like Fred “The Ogre” Palowakski.

* Since I’m too intimidated to even peep into the great Matt Zoller Seitz’s days-long rollout of essays on the decade in film, I’ll instead link to this clean and simple list from Peet Gelderblom at Setiz’s old site The House Next Door. I love it, even for the placement of the films I haven’t seen, just because of what I imagine them being like. Is there anything sadder than the fact that I haven’t seen Mulholland Drive yet? Me?!?

* More holiday interviews on the books of the decade at Spurge’s: Chris Mautner on Scott Pilgrim and Tim Hodler on In the Shadow of No Towers. The latter’s the first of these interviews to focus on a book the interviewee doesn’t care for.

* I linked to this in passing yesterday, but here’s the Robot 6 crew’s Best of 2009 post.

* More decade in review from Matt Maxwell, mostly on his favorite and least-favorite superhero material.

* Disney owns Marvel.

* Real-Life Horror: According to rightwing polling outfit Rasmussen, Americans would love to torture the underpants bomber. Happy New Year!

* Not Real-Life Horror: My friend Matthew Perpetua concocted a little flight of fancy about what would happen if a gaggle of Pitchfork bands were hired to play covers at the Insane Clown Posse’s Gathering of the Juggalos. Sample quote: “I probably wouldn’t be alive today if Will Oldham hadn’t rescued myself and Antony and shepherded us to safety on a John Deere tractor.”

* Coming soon: Night Business #3!

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Vols. 1-3

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Takashi Nagasaki, writer

Based on Astro Boy: The Greatest Robot on Earth by Osamu Tezuka

Viz, 2009

200 pages each

$12.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

I take back everything I said about Naoki Urasawa. Well, okay, no I don’t, but everything I said about Naoki Urasawa definitely does not apply here. Finally, one of his series contains visual elements that exist for more than simply conveying the information of the story as clearly and dramatically as possible. And I didn’t think that was in the offing, by the way, since in the first few pages you get a “guy with a gun turns a corner, does a half-turn and whips the gun at the camera” sequence that struck me as an unimaginative, un-comicsy rip from the cinema. But a few pages later our straight-laced, sad robot detective Gesicht informs a robot-maid wife that her robot-cop husband has been killed in the line of duty, and Urasawa gives us a series of close-ups of the grief-stricken robot’s machine face, which, of course, never changes. And blam, I was hooked.

In Pluto, a contemporary-superhero-comics-style “reimagining” of a classic < i>Astro Boy story by Osamu Tezuka, Urasawa uses the presence of robots as embodiments of surrealism. From the bereaved wife’s static expression, to the towering North No. 2 in his judge’s robe, to sinister Brau 1589’s mangled scrap heap of a body, to a revamp of Astro Boy (aka Atom) that makes him less like a jaunty short-pantsed slugger and more like an eerie kid out of The Shining, they’re the flourish of Weird, the touches of visual poetry, that I always wanted from my limited experience with Urasawa’s work. That his line and design sensibility is otherwise such a just-the-facts affair only heightens their “thing that should not be” effect.

And they seem to have unleashed more where that came from. The series of murders that are the series’ central mystery are themselves like staged art installations, sort of like the theory that holds the Black Dahlia’s murder as a macabre Surrealist masterpiece. Elsewhere, jagged black lines emerge from transmission static as a literal representation of despair; a huge black thing slouches half-unseen through the smoke and sand of a war-ravaged Persian town, the sight of it driving a young boy mad; traumatic memories of war are represented by indistinct flurries of the violent clash of robotic limbs, or a decontextualized and repeated offer of money for bodies; a sentient teddy bear sits immobile, a puppet master at the mercy of whoever moves it around; a tiny figure is captured leaping from rooftop to rooftop in the final images recorded by a dying robot, its blurry body silhouetted against the sky.

You add all this to Urasawa’s usual page-turning panache, and suddenly what had felt like mere proficiency gains the power to haunt and to move. There are the usual resonances with and/or swipes from other genre-art touchstones: Brau 1589 is Hannibal Lecter with microprocessors, there’s an Iraq War riff as is custom with science fiction that wants to be taken seriously this decade, and the plot–super detective believes that other super beings of his acquaintance are being hunted by a serial killer so he travels around to warn them with varying degrees of success–is straight-up Watchmen Chapter One. Plus, the whole thing is an adaptation of a story about Japan’s Mickey Mouse/Superman cultural juggernaut. (“Flying boy robot in shorts” is the extent of my knowledge of Astro Boy, so what Urasawa is taking from Tezuka narratively or visually is beyond me.) But instead of coming across like button-pushing, all of this, and all the chases and clue-hunting and races against time and unsuspected reversals that are Urasawa’s thriller trademarks, now feels like ammo in the arsenal of someone taking aim at some big old-fashioned sci-fi questions about war, technology, human rights, friendship, childhood, and that old chestnut, what it means to be human. The thing that fills me with delight here is that when you look at that robot maid just standing and staring, unable to express her emotion, you get the sense that for once, this master penciller and plotter doesn’t have all the answers.