* Is Green Lantern the psychedelic superhero movie we’ve been waiting for?
* Dave McKean’s new sex comic Celluloid looks lovely,
* I thought this was kind of neat: There are so many Marvel writers located in Portland that for the company’s latest creative summit, the New York-based editorial staff flew there instead of the other way around.
* Here’s an excellent critique of Chester Brown’s Paying For It by Douglas Wolk that echoes many of the thoughts and complaints I had about it. Douglas is harder than I am on Brown’s cartooning here, though, which is as beautiful as ever.
* Buy some Zach Hazard Vaupen originals and prints and comics and help him pay his rent!
* TJ Dietsch on Grant Morrison’s JLA and its lessons for superhero team books:
Morrison didn’t put the team together by having our heroes looking at pictures and weighing their options or all meeting up by happenstance and deciding to join forces, THEY WERE JUST THERE! I’d like those potential super hero team writers to take note of this too. We don’t need to see how the team is put together. It’s boring. Just put them together and if questions arise (or better yet, if mysteries abound) answer them as you go. I don’t want to see how next season’s Steelers come together, I want to see them play football!
* Trent Reznor and Karen O. covering Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”? Oh, indeed. Actually, who cares about Karen O., it’s Trent Reznor covering Led Zeppelin, a prospect that would thrill me equally at any time between now and about 1992.
* Missed it somehow, but Dan Nadel catches that Fantagraphics is publishing some Guy Peellaert graphic novels. Peellaert is best known (to me anyway) as the guy who painted the cover for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.
* Ben Morse and Kiel Phegley dig into the series finale of Smallville. I watched the last 20 minutes or so, making that the first 20 minutes of Smallville I ever watched; Darkseid possessed John Glover and was killed by a montage, and the part of 10 years of audience expectations vis a vis Tom Welling in a Superman suit was played by a tiny CGI man in the sky.
* Real Life Horror: Jared Loughner, the man who killed six and injured 12 during an attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was found legally insane. I wanted to point that out since the day it happened I jumped to the conclusion that the shooting was politically motivated, and I was wrong.
* Bruce Baugh on Victor Frankenstein and genius youth.
Tags: Carnival of souls, comics, links, movies, music
This is me rather noisily agreeing with Dietch about origin setups. Just say “Here they are” and get on with, sez I, and that would be an improvement in the vast majority of cases.
Insane and politically motivated don’t need to be mutually exclusive. We won’t get a chance to explore how specific or incidental the target of his rampage was, but I mean…shooting up a speech isn’t exactly the most psychologically-sound behavior, whether the guy was primarily politically driven or not.
I have a fondness for the “Getting the team together” stories if done well. The examples of looking at pictures obviously are boring in comics but Ocean’s 11 style where they go get each team member, or even the “Team members show up one by one” surprise thing most recently done in Fast Five are great and I wouldn’t want to see them go away.