* The latest Comics Comics Cage Match is up, in which Frank Santoro, Dan Nadel, and Tim Hodler slug it out over David Heatley’s My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down. (Dan and Tim are for it, Frank is agin it.) The comment thread features guest appearances by Tom Spurgeon, Dash Shaw, Heidi MacDonald, and yours truly, wherein I say the following:

I haven’t taken a look at my copy of the collection yet, though I was kind of gobsmacked to find out about the censoring of “My Sex History.” It seemed to me that the whole point of that strip was to be completely un-censored. It’s the sexual autobio equivalent of a real splatterfest like Dead Alive, where the constant, vulgar spectacle of it all takes a Louisville Slugger to your brain until it’s beaten into a new way of reacting to what you’re seeing. The over-the-top-ness is the point. Isn’t it?

I should also add that I always wished he didn’t label his dream comics as “dream comics.” They’d be much more interesting without that disclaimer.

* There’s a new Watchmen poster and a new Watchmen trailer. I will probably enjoy this film.

* Mikey Way gets it. And yes, I know it’s annoying when people put it that way.

* Runaways like Goonies for the superhero-movie era? Sure, I’ll eat it. There’s no reason why Nico or Gert or Karolena can’t be some kid’s first crush object a la my imaginary relationship with Andy. The Scott Pilgrim movie will probably blow this door open anyways.

* My experience with Friday the 13th is entirely limited to watching the “all the kills” montage, so I’m not attuned to whether the upcoming remake/reboot/reimagining/rewhatever whose trailer you can see here represents an affront to the original the way the Texas Chainsaw and Halloween remakes seemed to. Not an affront, that’s not the right word–just a needless modernization, I suppose. This appears to be shot in that same dreary hyperrealist style, to swipe an adjective from CRwM, but I don’t see why you can’t use a franchise whose only goal was to provide jumpscares and the dubious pleasures of gore and T&A and hypocritical moralism to do all of that over again but with the tools of the modern filmmaker at your disposal. (I think most of the other iconic horror films that have been remade thus far had a lot more going on that the Jason movies, you know?)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.