* Grant Morrison is writing the relaunched Superman series Action Comics, with Rags Morales as artist. It looks to be a continuity-light account of Superman’s earliest days as the Earth’s first superhero. (In DC’s soon-to-be-scrapped continuity, many of Superman’s real-life Golden Age of Comics contemporaries were active during that period in the in-story world, but Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman didn’t come along till a few years ago, which leads to this weird phenomenon where dozens of people were flying through the air shooting lasers at Hitler, then they all disappeared for sixty years, then Superman came along and for some reason he’s a bigger deal than people who were fighting in World War II, then came back through the magic of time-travel through an alternate reality or something like that and are fighting side by side with the newcomers in the 21st century. Superman really oughta be the DC Universe’s first famous superhero, even if that means no superheroes fought Hitler anymore.)

* Absolutely killer piece by Ken Parille on Chester Brown’s Paying For It for The comics Journal, constructed as a conversation between a neutral interviewer and three imaginary people with different points of view on the book. This way, instead of having to deal with the inherent equivocation of “on the one hand/on the other hand” takes on the material — whether drawing all the prostitutes in basically the same faceless brunette way is the understandable attempt to hide their identity he says it is or itself an act of dehumanizing sexism, say — he can articulate both of them forcefully. I wish he’d tackled the rushed, book-ending revelation that Chester’s been exclusive and in love with with the same prostitute for years now — that’s the richest thing in there and it’s completely blown past; it’s the book’s biggest shortcoming as a narrative, quite aside from critiques of Brown’s conduct or political program — but other than that, terrific work.

* Another great TCJ piece, this one a visual essay on the aggressively unremarkable face of Silver Age Superman by John Hilgart. Says Hilgart of the Superman/Clark Kent dichotomy, “He is the world’s most generic man, unidentifiable as himself.”

* Frank Quitely draws Alan Moore. That’s channeling some Drew Friedman shit right there.

* Lately Jordan Crane has been updating his comic Keeping Two, which is now almost a decade in the making, on his webcomics site What Things Do. It’s a masterpiece, that’s all I can say. I reread the whole thing so far just now, and cried. There’s a panel…ah, I can’t even say.

Tags: Carnival of souls, comics, links

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