Powr Mastrs Vol. 3
CF, writer/artist
PictureBox, October 2010
112 pages
$18
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com

When thinking of CF’s revisionist-fantasy series Powr Mastrs, two things usually spring to my mind: Its psychedelic visual flourishes — both the precision and strength with which his wire-thin pencil line imbues them and the way such visuals feel like a natural part of any fantasist’s vocabulary — and its graphic sexuality — equal parts disturbing and erotic, serving perhaps as a substitute for violence, one that’s actually capable of shocking a modern audience. Unfortunately for me that’s often all I think about when I think about the series. But in re-reading all three volumes in preparation for this review, lots more jumped out besides. For one thing, this is a funny comic! From Subra Ptareo’s would-be monasticism to Jim Bored’s futile attempts to get someone, anyone to free him from his prison to the Sub-Men’s shenanigans, it’s frequently LOLtastic. It’s also a lot less rambly and more focused than I remember it: The overarching plot, about Mosfet Warlock’s weird science and various other characters’ attempts to use it for their own ends and/or seek revenge for having been its unwilling guinea pigs, establishes itself right quick and is a constant presence. And back to the sex for a second: It’s hot stuff! And it’s kinky in a way that feels genuine, which takes guts as well as perviness — the naughty part of this volume feels like it emerges from considered contemplation of dominance and submission and how much fun they can be even as they look fairly awful to outsiders. Meanwhile the specifics of CF’s SFF here — the biomechanics, the spellcraft, the bestiary, the economy, the worldbuilding, the whole nine — feel singular and yet still intelligble. What a pleasure to watch an artist make genre come to him and his interests and obsessions rather than the other way around.

* Busy day on Robot 6 today:

* Jason Aaron tells Alan Moore to go fuck himself;

* Marvel was Joe Quesada’s Watchmen;

* John Boehner is the new Beta Ray Bill;

* and most especially, this Françoise Mouly interview is comprehensive and awesome. RAW, The New Yorker, Toon Books, Crumb gossip, personal history, the works. Must-read of the day.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Dirk Deppey.

* At long last, The Complete Pogo is about to join Fantagraphics’ ridonkulous reprint line-up. Updates on a lot of other late books of note in there as well, including various Nancy-related efforts.

* There’s something really heartwarming about the creative process for Axe Cop.

* The Star Wars series hits Blu-Ray in Septmember. It’s not clear if the original versions of the original trilogy will be a part of either the three-disc original-trilogy set or the 9-disc set for the enchilada. My hunch is that they’ll do it to please the nerds (and I include myself in that number), but there’s no predicting George Lucas.

* Nerdery at its finest: Zak Smith crowd-sources 60 different D&D dice-roll results for what getting smacked with something called “The Hammer of Exorcism” could do to you. I can’t decide which one I like best: The bit where the possessed victim develops a new orifice that swallows the hammer and allows him to subsequently extract it for use a la Videodrome, or your basic run-of-the-mill vomit hose.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones reviews Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma’s surprise hit series Morning Glories. I haven’t read it, but what Zom says roughly aligns with what I have a hunch I’d think of it based on what I’ve heard about it.

* For some reason, the common desire to wish the sins of America into the cornfield manifested in the bowdlerized Huck Finn now being produced and the bowdlerized Constitution read aloud in Congress today didn’t occur to me until Andrew Sullivan pointed it out.

* Real Life Horror 1: Animals are dropping dead all around the world.

* Real Life Horror 2: Glenn Greenwald presents the story of 18-year-old American Gulet Mohamed, tortured in Kuwait and barred reentry into the United States because he’s on the no-fly list, both for crimes he never committed.

* The final installment of Christopher Allen’s Top 50 Albums of 2010 list contains one of the sharpest takes on Sleigh Bells I’ve ever come across. I also like his emphasis on the fun of Girl Talk, like it’s a game you play on road trips.

Here is a commercial for furniture retailer Raymour & Flanigan:

Here is the video for “Luchini” by Camp Lo:

Page 12 of “Destructor Comes to Croc-Town” is now up.

* Well, shit and double shit: George R.R. Martin was hospitalized on Christmas Eve with the urinary tract infection from hell. Fortunately, he’s okay; unfortunately, the “big announcements” he’d planned for HBO’s TCA reception (why whatever could they have been!!!) are kaput. Get well soon, George.

* You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell! Poor Steve Lyons does what he can with a thankless task.

* There’s a passage in my friend Ryan “Agent M” Penagos’s exit interview with outgoing Marvel Editor-in-Chief and reigning Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada that I find very revealing about the man’s approach to his job: He sees his tenure and the projects he helped develop as the Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns he didn’t have it in him to produce as a cartoonist.

* Springboarding off Fantagraphics’ Complete Carl Barks announcement, Graeme McMillan asks what it means that Disney is publishing comics starring its characters through publishers other than Marvel. The long and the short of it is that Disney sees Marvel as being not in the comics business, but in the Marvel business. That’s consistent with their approach to many of their other brands: It’s not like they made Jim Henson start building all the puppets for their theme parks or had Pixar do Tangled for them. But it also tells you something about what Marvel’s approach to comics will likely be for the foreseeable future.

* Elsewhere, Graeme and Jeff Lester ponder at length why Axel Alonso got the Editor-in-Chief gig at Marvel over Tom Brevoort, who’s both more visible to the public and more integral to the company now-flagship Avengers franchise and nearly all of its big line-defining crossover events. But I don’t think it’s a mystery at all, frankly: Brevoort has said multiple times that he had no desire to take that job. I also don’t think it’s any mystery what Quesada will be doing, as it’s what he’s already been doing for quite a while.

* DC goes day-and-date digital with its Batman Beyond ongoing series. I note these things because they seem noteworthy, not because I have any idea what they really mean. I also note that I hear a lot of these series have had problems actually coming out day-and-date even when announced as such, particularly at Marvel.

* Gosh, Yanick Paquette has come into his own as the artist for Batman Incorporated.

* Cliff Chiang does Jaime Hernandez doing the Archies, basically.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan does Jeffrey Brown doing MMA.

* I haven’t seen Gareth Edwards’s much-lauded first-person giant-monster romance Monsters, but what little I’ve heard about it makes him sound like a pretty good choice to direct the next American Godzilla remake. Then again, wasn’t that basically what Cloverfield was? I mean that as a compliment by the way.

* Good news: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an FCC fine against boobs and butts on NYPD Blue.

* Real Life Horror headline of the day: “Severed head full of bullet holes found dangling from bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, official say.”

* Real Life Horror photo of the day: I’m not posting it here because even though it’s not graphic, its immediate implications are disturbing enough that doing so might be hurtful to some readers. But basically, a family photo snapped by Filipino city councilman moments before he was shot to death reveal his assassin with gun drawn and pointed directly at him right behind his unsuspecting family, and you can see it at the link. (Via Heidi MacDonald via Ivan Brandon.)

* My Representative, IRA supporter and anti-Muslim bigot Peter King, is the new head of the Homeland Security Committee; he says the New York Times should be indicted under the Espionage Act. He is a terrible person, and a dangerous one.

* Lighter-note time! Hahahaha, Tom Ewing reviews “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme for Popular, the blog on which he reviews every UK #1 single ever. A number-one hit that misattributed leadership of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Raphael!

* Three music videos of note today:

* My gosh, what a song “Film Music” by Family Fodder is! (Via Douglas Wolk, through whom I first heard it a while back.)

* Here’s the hugely enjoyable video for master pasticheur Destroyer’s late-period Roxy Music homage “Kaputt.” (Via Ryan Catbird.)

Destroyer – Kaputt from Merge Records on Vimeo.

* Finally, this one’s unembeddable so you’ll just have to click through: Wubba wubba wubba, goodbye, God bless, not only in the USA but in the UK too, it’s Hercules & Love Affair’s “My House.” Perhaps only my wife, who hears me sing “Everybody Everybody” on the daily, has any idea just how ready I am for Club MTV/House of Style nostalgia. (Via Pitchfork.)

Perhaps the idea is to kill off non-white characters as fast as Grant Morrison can create new ones.

Crickets #3
Sammy Harkham, writer/artist
self-published, December 2010
52 pages
$8
Buy it from PictureBox

In the past I’ve said the the solo alternative comic-book anthology series works great as an opportunity for developing cartoonists to experiment in front of an audience on a regular basis. That’s certainly true. But it also works great as a showcase for a confident, experienced cartoonist to show off his chops at a manageable but still considerable length — a star turn, if you will. Think the last two issues of Eightball, for example. And think Crickets #3. The bulk of this self-published issue of Sammy Harkham’s solo showcase is occupied by “Blood of the Virgin,” the story of a week in the life of a harried young father and hack in the stable of a fictionalized version of Roger Corman’s American International Pictures who really wants to make films, goddammit. It’s Harkham’s longest and richest exploration yet of his go-to themes: family as a series of unignorable demands on one’s time and emotions, and ethics and morality as a manifestation of how we deal with those demands. It offers him a seamless way to integrate the horror and trash-cinema influences he’s long displayed in comics like “Poor Sailor” and “Black Death” with the literary fiction he’s always championed as editor of Kramers Ergot but which has been overshadowed by that anthology’s artcomix and genre pastiches, not to mention his own. It gives him a shot at an Ignatz Series-style canvas in terms of trim size and two-color printing. It offers us page after page of his deeply pleasurable cartooning, which in its feathery line and dot-eyed clown-nosed character designs and alternately sinuous and bulbous lettering recalls old-timers like Gray and Segar and young turks like Crane and Huizenga while aping none of them. It enables him to sneak in non-narrative, artcomix-influenced visual flourishes completely diagetically — fog enshrouding a neighborhood during the small hours, a mushy plaster cast making a melted nightmare out of someone’s face, frank and kinky depictions of sexuality. It’s basically a just plain terrific alternative comic.

* Another huge news day: Axel Alonso is the new Editor-in-Chief of Marvel; Joe Quesada is now focusing solely on his Chief Creative Officer (read: multimedia) duties; Tom Brevoort has been promoted to Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing. The end of a ten-year era, although if any editor can be said to represent continuity with Joe Quesada’s approach it’s probably Alonso. The moves made by Quesada in the early days of his reign played as big a role in my getting back into comics as anything this side of Highwater Books, so I’ll miss him and wish him well.

* Related: Brevoort sounds off on DC’s “drawing the line at $2.99” pricing initiative. He paints a picture of a Marvel-Disney relationship that’s very different from that of DC-WB.

* DC is finally releasing a Flex Mentallo collection. Of course, I’ve had a Flex Mentallo “collection” on my hard drive for a while now, but still, awesome!

* YES: Curt Purcell on the relationship between Laura Roslin and Bill Adama in Battlestar Galactica.

* Frank Santoro is having some kind of art show in West Hollywood starting January 20th, it would seem. If I were in West Hollywood, I’d go to this.

* Joe McCulloch on the Batman comics of David Finch (and Scott Williams). I thought the Finch written/illustrated Batman: The Dark Knight #1was good silly fun, for what it’s worth.

* Here are two very different Best of 2010 lists from Ben Morse and Ryan Sands.

* Wow, Michael Hoeweler draws a mean Robyn. (Via Shaggy.)

* Anders Nilsen presents “The Allegory of the Apartment.”

* Spider-MODOK as designed by Gabriel Hardman? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio is joining Jane’s Addiction. Uh, okay, sure. One thing many critics are wrong about is the greatness of Jane’s Addiction up through and including Ritual de lo Habitual, that greatness being very very great. I understand that Perry and Dave’s subsequent self-parodic antics cast a long shadow, but man, before that? Goth Zeppelin.

* Would you like to hear Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” as rendered through the dulcet tones of Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV? I don’t see why you wouldn’t! (Via Cindy Hotpoint.)

1) Through some strange alchemy, Susan Cooper’s The Grey King has caused me to stop worrying and love the ending of Lost.

2) I wonder if Kanye West has ever listened to Pulp’s This Is Hardcore.

* Here are links to the three Carnival of Souls posts I did over the break through today: post-Christmas/blizzard, pre-New Year’s, post-New Year’s.

* Here’s a guide to all of Robot 6’s big 2nd anniversary special content, including some cool stuff involving yours truly;

* And here’s Comic Book Resources’ Top 100 Comics of 2010, all in one place. This also includes a list of the list’s participants, which I think is helpful.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Bill Sienkiewicz is telling the story of his (mostly) unpublished collaboration with Alan Moore Big Numbers;

* Becky Cloonan is posting pages from her unpublished Tokyopop book East Coast Rising Vol. 2;

* and DC Comics makes a slew of announcements: all ongoing series are $2.99, letters pages are returning, Peter Milligan on Red Lanterns, and Sean Murphy on an American Vampire spin-off. That’s a pair of shots fired in the PR war, hopefully a step in the right direction for the Direct Market on pricing, a sign that Green Lantern is joining Batman as the two core franchises of the DCU, and a sign that American Vampire is joining Fables as the two core franchises of Vertigo.

* The Comics Journal has launched The Panelists, a new group blog featuring Derik Badman, Alex Boney, Isaac Cates, Craig Fischer, Jared Gardner, and Charles Hatfield. That’s a formidable crew.

* Dark Horse’s Facebook page hosts a very useful and thorough guide to the state of Mike Mignola and John Arcudi’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics.

* Which reminds me that the use of Facebook for PR was, along with now largely confirmed claims that the iPad is a digital-comics gamechanger, one of the big hobbyhorses of the late great Journalista blogger Dirk Deppey. “Seriously, what idiot ‘advertises’ their event solely on a website that requires registration to see the advertisement?” The kind of idiot who wants to advertise on the country’s most popular website, I guess.

* Chris Allen and Alan David Doane think that good superhero comics are the very least we should expect and demand. I see their point, although a good superhero comic is a good comic, after all.

* From good to bad: Graeme McMillan and the Comics Alliance crew explain what made some of 2010’s worst superhero comics so awful — very little schtick, lots of dragging very bad writing and art choices into the light of day and investigating what went wrong. Well done.

* If you’ve ever wondered what a smart critic with zero experience with any comics or video games would think of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, check out Edward Copeland’s review. He situates the movie in the (500) Days of Summer/Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist sphere, as you might expect, and preferred the rom-com stuff to the fighting and video-game stuff, as you also might expect.

* I’d need to reread the Fourth World saga to be sure — it’s been a few years — but I’m pretty sure that, contra Tim O’Neil, Jack Kirby’s Anti-Life wasn’t fascism, or more accurately it wasn’t just fascism — it was war. I cribbed that from Tom Spurgeon and I think it squares — after all, anti-fascist superhero comics from the World War II generation were a dime a dozen, but the Fourth World Saga stood out for a reason. Regarding Tim’s contention that Morrison’s Anti-Life is less powerful a concept than Kirby’s because it’s imposed rather than embraced, I think that’s probably true, but there certainly are people who want to impose Anti-Life’s real-life equivalent and it’s a valid avenue of exploration.

* Tom Spurgeon’s interview with the comics critic and journalist David Brothers helped me get at something I’ve often found frustrating about Brothers’s work. He’s a fine writer who brings welcome eye-on-the-ball focus and deserved indignation to his commentary on industry ethics, diversity issues, and business practices, but I’ve been frustrated by his tendency to focus so much on superheroes and other fantastic-action genre work and his occasional lapses into his particular character-specific version of “Wolverine would never say that!” But regarding the former, Brothers reveals that he only this year started reading Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez — and what a year to start! — and regarding the latter, he owns up to “basic fan entitlement.” In other words he’s young and (like all of us, hopefully) growing as a writer. Read the interview for his smart rejection of “hey, true art takes time!” defenses of late books and for a great bit on superhero comics’ civilian fashions (although I strongly disagree with his contention that “part of being an adult is wearing a shirt that has buttons on it every once in a while”):

The lack of attention paid to fashion in comics is baffling to me. We all pay a certain amount of attention, time, and money on what we wear, but you wouldn’t know it when you look at mainstream comics. Guys still wear Solid Colored T-Shirt and Latex Tight Jeans, with maybe a loose, formless leather jacket on top. Women wear Solid Colored Belly Shirt/Baby-T, Low Rise Jeans, and Visible Thong Straps. Belts, jackets, suspenders, and even something as simple as logos tends to be almost nonexistent, barring the relatively few artists who take the time to do it right.

The visible thong thing really is the post-millennial equivalent of ’70s and ’80s shirtless vest-wearing street toughs and ’90s mullet-based hairstyles.

* Can you imagine a world in which Lord of the Flies, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Waiting for Godot, Rear Window, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were in public domain as of this year? Yeah, neither can I. Fuck Thank you very much, Congress!

* Real Life Horror 1: I’m always up for reading about the giant octopus of that washed up on the shores of St. Augustine in 1896.

* Real Life Horror 2: Here’s a wonderfully written history of the bubonic plague by writer Mark Sumner on, of all places, Daily Kos.

* Real Life Horror 3: It’s always worth pointing out that my Representative, Peter King, supported IRA terrorism, especially given that he’s planning McCarthyite investigations of American Muslims who didn’t.

* Real Life Horror 4: The political blogger Digby has been doing yeoman’s work reporting on American law enforcement’s willy-nilly use of painful, frequently lethal tasers on non-violent non-criminals.

* Real Life Great Job: I can’t believe that one of the candidates for Republican National Committee Chairman is named Reince Priebus. Are we sure he’s not a Tim and Eric character? What do Prance Stuard, Bilb Ono, Doug Prishpreed, and Dun Dorr have to say about this?

* Cinema just got a lot less convincingly simultaneously genteel and dangerous.

* Whoa oh oh oh, ohhh.

* Oh, so that’s what’s up, Michael DeForge.

* Speaking of DeForge, who apparently never stops drawing, he has a funny new strip up at Vice.

* I’m glad to hear that I played some small part in getting Curt Purcell psyched about blogging about horror again.

* Speaking of: I can’t help but be a bit disappointed with the (leaked and/or official depending on what post you’re reading) video for Kanye West’s monster, especially given such recent direct points of comparison as the clips for Scissor Sisters’ “Invisible Light” or West’s own “Runaway.” To the table occupied by the former’s dizzyingly trashy recreation of giallo and other groovy-age staples and the latter’s go-for-baroque parade of sexual, racial, and self-mythological neurosis, “Monster” brings a cornucopia of played-out “sexy dead model” visuals I saw in a fashion magazine, like, ten years ago. Moreover I think the whole sentiment behind “Monster” loses something when removed from the self-loathing draped all over My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; conflicted tracks like “Runaway” contain both sides of Kanye’s macho-asshole schtick in the way that the tough-guy songs just don’t. Finally, once you’ve read Nitsuh Abebe’s suggestion that Nicki Minaj should have been represented by a shapeshifter rather than a pair of good/evil twins, you really can’t unsee it. It’s like (as I’m fond of mentioning) when I learned that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was supposed to be filled by Pete Clemenza until it fell through over a wage dispute with Richard S. Castellano.

* Happy birthday to my favorite author, J.R.R. Tolkien. I love you, Professor!

* Finally, HOLY SHIT

* Inspired by discovering that Fred Van Lente is using the Runaways’ arch-nemeses/parents the Pride as the villains in this week’s Iron Man Legacy #10: Are the people like me who are big fans of largely abandoned superhero teams like the Runaways or the Agents of Atlas or the Seven Soldiers of Victory due to the quality of the recent runs that (re)introduced them the equivalent of die-hard devotees of largely abandoned old superhero teams like the Secret Defenders or the Champions or the Suicide Squad or the West Coast Avengers? Is it different because Runaways, Atlas, and Seven Soldiers were varying degrees of genuine critical darling while those earlier books weren’t? Or am I forever doomed to spaz out over the prospect of a Gorilla Man/Nico team-up the same way some people lose they shit any time Hercules and Angel hang out?

* Has the rise of “geek culture” as a cultural force so omnipresent that Patton Oswalt feels the need to ramble on in Wired about how in his day geeks had to walk to the Android’s Dungeon uphill both ways led to an improvement in the comfort and safety of geeky kids from bullying and ridicule? I’d really like to know the answer to that one.

Ring in 2011 with the eleventh page of “Destructor Comes to Croc-Town.”

* Happy New Year!

* In case you missed it over the holiday weekend, I posted my list of The 20 Best Comics of 2010. It was really some year.

* I also uploaded a three-part mix of the Best Songs of 2010. That’s always one of my favorite projects to do.

* Meanwhile, my blog-away-from-home Robot 6 celebrated its 2nd anniversary yesterday with a slew of sweet stories…

* Obviously, none was sweeter than the announcement that Fantagraphics will be publishing the complete Carl Barks Disney duck comics. That announcement was a long time coming, so kudos to everyone on both ends who made it happen, especially Chris Mautner and Jacq Cohen. And kudos to Gary Groth and Fantagraphics for landing not one but two of the most anticipated projects of the year, between this and the Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics. I can’t wait!

* Also on Robot 6, I interviewed Brecht Evens about his eye-catching new book The Wrong Place. There’s an anecdote about a disco ball you really want to read. And you really want to read the book, too — Evens is clearly one to watch.

* I also interviewed the great Ben Katchor about his upcoming book The Cardboard Valise. This was one of the great thrills of my cartooning-interviewing career. I say it over and over, I know, but there’s nothing else in the world like Katchor’s comics.

* My colleague JK Parkin interviews Chris Pitzer, publisher extraordinaire of AdHouse Books. Between Afrodisiac, Duncan the Wonder Dog, its publishing and charitable efforts on behalf of Josh Cotter, and the creation of AdDistro, AdHouse had a hell of a year. Actually I think you can say that on behalf of just about every alternative comics publisher of note, which speaks to just how strong a comics year it was. Also, I either forgot or never knew that AdDistro is picking up Birchfield Close and Benjamin Marra, so that’s good/old news.

* You see a lot of jaw-jaw about comics “selling out,” i.e. going through all their available copies at the distributor level. You basically never see a publisher explain what that means with hard numbers. So a round of applause is due to Archaia Editor-in-Chief Stephen Christy for doing exactly that in this intriguing interview with Michael May. The authors of the books in question, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard‘s David Petersen and Return of the Dapper Men‘s Jim McCann, chime in as well. Another independent publisher with a rock-solid year, but that’s likely to be true any time you have the combined PR clout of McCann and Mel Caylo behind you.

* Brigid Alverson runs down the year in digital comics. Her opening paragraph reflects everything I’ve heard unofficially from the big publishers, which is that the iPad completely changed how they see digital comics.

* I caught a couple of newsy bits in Robot 6’s survey of creators on the year that was and the year to come:

* Dan Nadel says PictureBox is collecting Tales of Greenfuzz by Will Sweeney and has a new Yuichi Yokoyama graphic novel called Garden on the way;

* James Kochalka says Top Shelf is working on an iPad app;

* and John Rogers says Vertigo recently changed its residual structure to the implied detriment of creators.

* I also liked Gail Simone’s analysis of the effect that high price points for individual monthly comics had on consumers’ reading and purchasing habits.

* The whole Robot 6 crew lists our respective favorite/best comics of 2010. Chris Mautner and I may be the same person; I’ll get back to you on that.

* Meanwhile, you can see what pretty much everyone who works for Robot 6, Comic Book Resources, and Comics Should Be Good has been reading lately in our latest, giant-sized What Are You Reading column. The big news there on my end is that I’ve got enough of a comics-review cushion right now to dig back into Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence. Fantasy books whose big confrontations consist almost solely of infodumps have no right to be that evocative.

The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd: A Work of Satire and Fiction
Benjamin Marra, writer/artist
Traditional Comics, December 2010
24 pages
$3
Buy it from Traditional Comics

This is one of the most vicious and effective works of satire I’ve seen in comics in I don’t know how long. I say that as someone who pretty much loathes political and editorial cartooning of all stripes — an endless nightmare of preaching to the choir, taking complex issues and boiling them down to ideas and images with all the subtlety and insight of blowing the raspberry. By contrast, Benjamin Marra’s stroke of genius in The Incredibly Fantastic Adventures of Maureen Dowd lies not just in picking an unusual target, but in the pinpoint accuracy of hitting it — in knowing his target back and forth and hoisting her by her own petard. Dowd is justifiably infamous for her egregious gender stereotyping, which nearly always is done to portray conservatives as macho-man action figures and liberals as lactating girly-men (which means BAD), unless they’re women in which case they’re mannish (which also means BAD). In this regard and in many others — her use of schoolyard-taunt nicknames, her concoction of humorous dialogue between political players– Dowd herself basically is a political cartoonist, as she herself has said, and yes, I mean that pejoratively. Thus when I see her dolled up like some Cinemax super-spy sexpot, gun tucked in her garter belt as she balances writing a hard-hitting exposé of the Valerie Plame affair with getting ready for her big date with George Clooney — double-barreled mockery that hits her hard both for what she is and what she isn’t — I’m reminded of the words of countless Law & Order judges responding to hubristic defense attorneys objecting to how Jack McCoy just snuck excluded evidence into the proceedings: “You opened the door, counselor.” Revenge is sweet; my own political heel-turn of several years ago, time wasted believing this kind of horseshit and enabling the bloody-minded fools to whose benefit it redounds, makes it all the sweeter. Oh yeah, it’s also a traditionally kick-ass Ben Marra action comic. Keep your eye on his inks — there are places where it’s so thick and slick and shiny it’s almost Charles Burns territory. Fantastic.

Just like last year, here’s a three-part mix I made featuring some of the best songs of the year. This year they’re almost kinda sorta themed: The first disc is mostly dancey, the second disc is mostly heavy, and the third disc is mostly, I dunno, ruminative. I hope you enjoy all three! And if you do, be sure to seek out and purchase stuff from the artists themselves. They deserve your money!

DOWNLOAD VOLUME ONE
Scissor Sisters – Night Work // LCD Soundsystem – Drunk Girls // Kylie Minogue – Get Outta My Way // !!! – The Most Certain Sure // Caribou – Sun // Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – In Motion // Underworld – Always Loved a Film // School of Seven Bells – Dust Devil // Pantha Du Prince – A Nomad’s Retreat // Delorean – Infinite Desert // Teengirl Fantasy – Cheaters // Hot Chip – One Life Stand // Goldfrapp – I Wanna Life // Robyn – Dancing on My Own // Underworld – Scribble

DOWNLOAD VOLUME TWO
How to Destroy Angels – The Space in Between // Kanye West – Power // Glasser – Apply // Meth Ghost and Rae – Criminology 2.5 // Amusement Parks on Fire – Flashlight Planetarium // Serena-Maneesh – I Just Want to See Your Face // Interpol – Lights // Liars – Scissor // Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – A Familiar Taste // Spoon – Who Makes Your Money // Big Boi – Shutterbugg (feat. Cutty) // The Knife – The Height of Summer // Caribou – Hannibal // Sleigh Bells – Infinity Guitars // David Bowie – Battle for Britain (The Letter) [Live] // Liars – Scarecrows on a Killer Slant // The Knife in collaboration with Mt. Sims – Colouring of Pigeons // Kanye West – Lost in the World (feat. Bon Iver)/Who Will Survive in America

DOWNLOAD VOLUME THREE
LCD Soundsystem – Dance Yrself Clean // Robyn – Fembot // Best Coast – Boyfriend // School of Seven Bells – I L U // Drake – Karaoke // Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – Hand Covers Bruise // Four Tet – Love Cry // How to Dress Well – Can’t See My Own Face // A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Moments on the Lawn/Drink Drank Drunk // Liars – Proud Evolution // Antony & the Johnsons – I’m in Love // A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Nitetime Rainbows (Acid Wash Edit by Benoit Pioulard) // School of Seven Bells – Bye Bye Bye // Azure Ray – Dancing Ghosts // Bat for Lashes – Let’s Get Lost (feat. Beck) // Goldfrapp – Voicething // Underworld – Louisiana

Fantagraphics to publish the complete Carl Barks duck comics