(Is it a good idea to do these rundown-style posts, instead of breaking each one up into its own li’l individual post? I wonder. Maybe people just say “Oh Christ, enough!” and skip these things. I dunno.)
In the “Eat This, Matt Hawes” Department (story courtesy of Newsarama), Joe Quesada has had his contract extended, sharp X-book editor Mike Marts has been promoted, extremely ecumenical Tsunami chieftain C.B. Cebulski has been made the head of a new talent department with indie-friendly David Bogart, and Axel “Shouldn’t Be Doing Superheroes” Alonso has been promoted and given even more books to run. Looks like things at Marvel aren’t going so bad after all!
Eve Tushnet (link courtesy of Dirk Deppey)joins NeilAlien in demolishing a recent stupid anti-superhero screed, an in so doing references Dostoyevsky often enough to prove she’s a true Daughter of Eli. Seriously, this is some erudite stuff; in the spirit of my rant from yesterday, we superhero boosters need more Eve Tushnets.
Eve also begs to differ with my take on Kurt Busiek’s and Alex Ross’s Marvels, and you know what? She’s right. People who are ignorant of Marvel’s complex character history are actually the ideal audience for this book, because it puts them in roughly the same befuddled-cum-awed position as the everyman who’s witnessing all the superpowered events in the book. I thought of this briefly as I wrote my dismissal of the book the other day, but ignored it, to my detriment. I still have plenty of problems with Marvels, but they’re attributable to flaws in pacing and dialogue (can we stop calling them “The Marvels,” for Pete’s sake? If you’ve come up with a euphemism for superheroes–marvels, capes, costumes, powers–it’s best to not beat the damn word into the ground), not to the need to be familiar with the whole history of the Marvel Universe. That’s unnecessary, ultimately. (No pun intended.)
Bill Sherman worries about trying to get through the 600-page colossus known as Blankets. Don’t worry, Bill–it’s as readable a comic as you’ll ever come across, and you should blow through it in a couple of hours.
(Eve, you should read it, too–I’d love to hear what you think!)
Speaking of Blankets, you can watch this TCJ.com thread, ostensibly on the subject, continue to disappear up its own asshole, in the memorable words of The Missus. It’s depressing how readily the most intelligent and well-read group of comics fans on the Internet will mire itself in stupid petty pissing matches. This goes double when they do so instead of engaging the text and images of one of the most important comics in recent memory.
A far more productive TCJ.com thread can be found here. In it, Comics Journal editor Milo George (at the behest of yours truly) thoroughly explains the reasons behind the Journal’s idiosyncratic review policy. It’s an extremely worthwhile post; speaking from experience, many problems people have with the Journal arise from simple ignorance of how the magazine is actually run, so transparency of this level is extremely enlightening.
In a roundup post of his own, Big Sunny D thoughtfully responds to a recent Four Color Hell post praising Warren Ellis’s revisionist superhero books of the late 90s and early aughts. Sunny argues that, entertaining and influential though these books may be, they’re ultimately flat character-wise, simplistic politically, and a dead end when it comes to the wide variety of image and emotional affect of which superhero comics are capable. As proof, I’ll offer Ellis acolyte Mark Millar’s Trouble (boy, I sure have fun kicking that book around, don’t I?), which, stripped as it is of the black-ops and meta-humans and evil Anglo-American neo-fascist government officials that were the bread and butter of the Ellis/Millar widescreen-superhero books, reveals just how lame the stuff that’s left can be. (I also agree with Sunny’s contention that Grant Morrison’s hilariously ambitious New X-Men mops the effing floor with The Authority.)