* This was supposed to go up yesterday and didn’t for some reason. Beats me!

* SLG’s Dan Vado and (even more to the point) Street Angel‘s Jim Rugg both disagree with my insinuation the other day that SLG didn’t do right by Street Angel. Thanks for the clarifications, guys!

* I know I’ve disagreed with some of the Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? gang’s positions on alternative comics, but while there’s some stuff I think they get wrong, I’m really enjoying what they get right: an attitude of wide-eyed discovery and awe when it comes to reading cool comics with little attention (digs on traditional altcomix aside) paid to tribal allegiances. Dig, if you will, Brandon’s post on Joe Casey and Nathan Fox’s sleeper sensation Dark Reign: Zodiac (man, Casey’s work really takes off when he’s paired with a good artist–seems like a truism I know, but for serious), or Sammy’s Baltimore Comic-Con haul report (Tatsumi belies the anti-literary comics stance somewhat, no?). I do think, from time to time, that my reliance on book-formatted comics–really my weapon of choice no matter what genre you’re talking about–causes me to miss out on some weird and wild finds out there. Maybe I do need to go longbox-diving at a show at some point–I hope I get half as much out of it as the Serious Comic Book Readers seem to.

* Continuing his recent hot streak, And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM applies game theory to the deathtraps in the Saw series. I haven’t seen a single Saw movie (which, as we know, makes me a terrible horrorblogger) and I still think this post is epically awesome.

* Bookmarked for later use: Eve Tushnet reviews Paranormal Activity.

* The best thing about my chum Ben Morse’s post on the titles he’d have revived for DC’s Blackest Night skip-month stunt is that several of them are actually more plausible candidates than the ones that are actually getting revived. JLI is practically a no-brainer.

* Robot 6 roundup: Michael Jackson wrote a graphic novel and Jon Favreau’s not directing The Avengers.

* Absolute must-read of the day: Curt Purcell interviews the living shit out of Night Business and Gangsta Rap Posse creator Benjamin Marra. Marra throws bombs left and right, and names are named. Where most “indie comics are wishy-washy autobio crap” provocateurs take jabs at Clumsy or “My Sex History,” Marra comes gunning for Maus and Jimmy Corrigan. Shit gets REAL, son. (For the record I strongly disagree with his assertions in that regard, though the stance feels performative, of a piece with his comics themselves.)

* The Expendables trailer! Stallone, Statham, Li, Lundgren, Rourke, Austin, Couture, Roberts…magnificent and utterly ’80s. It’s like if you added a bunch of ampersands to Tango & Cash. Get it while it’s hot–Lionsgate has been yanking ’em down. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Afrodisiac trailer! In the words of Clay Davis, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit. I’ve seen the book and it’s as good as it looks. It’s awesome to see Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca at a publisher that knows what to do with them. (Via AdHouse.)

* In this quick piece Tom Spurgeon hints at one of my big concerns engendered by the cancellation of Vito Delsante and Rachel Friere’s high-school dramedy FCHS: What the heck kind of business are we in where a project like that can’t find an audience? This isn’t John Hankiewicz’s Asthma we’re talking about, it’s a book described by the creators as “90210 meets Archie.” Something’s very wrong here.

* Nick Bertozzi talks to CBR’s Alex Dueben about a lot of things. Apparently he took his Stuffed! gig as a response to editorial feedback that his own comics are too complex, which is fascinating to me. There’s also an update in there about his long-gestating Lenny Bruce bio with Harvey Pekar. And he feels like choosing to do comics at age 27 makes him a late bloomer, which strikes me as a deeply unfortunate consequence of the premium placed on youth in this medium. We could use more late bloomers like Nick Bertozzi!

* Geoff Johns As readers’ Qs at CBR. Black Manta!

* I’m really happy that Brian Bendis and Mike Oeming’s Powers is coming back–like Ultimate Spider-Man, it’s been really good for a really long time even as some of Bendis’s more high-profile projects have left me flat, but its erratic schedule has pushed it even further off most people’s radar than USM. Here’s a report on the books’ 10th anniversary panel at the Baltimore Comic Con. Wow, ten years of Powers, and ten years of Planetary too, right? Those two books anticipated pretty much this entire decade. (Well, maybe more The Authority than Planetary.) The modern age of superhero comics is getting old.

* Comics Journal assistant editor and smart person Kristi Valenti talks about comics and comics criticism. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) This paragraph is killer:

You can use academic and critical tools to critique comics, such as close readings, theory, and thorough research. I think, though, that there’s a lot of what I dub “bad academia” going on: people who don’t bother to learn the material and technological history behind how comics were produced (fortunately, there are now excellent sources such as Men of Tomorrow and The Ten Cent Plague for that), so they don’t put comics in the proper context–theory for theory’s sake, divorced from the actual comic; bad comparisons based on lack of breadth of knowledge (Johnny Ryan is like Chris Ware, because they’re both alternative); people who feel guilty or ashamed for liking comics, and so use their academic credentials and training to justify it, or people who have a pet area of study and use comics to justify it (Blackest Night is like Paradise Lost); etc.

* Rickey Purdin’s doing a month of horror sketches again. Yay!

* If you ever want to know why the world is in such shitty shape, just remember that people in positions of authority, like government officials and newspaper reporters, don’t have the first fucking clue what they’re talking about.

Sulk Vol. 3: The Kind of Strength That Comes from Madness

Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist

Top Shelf, September 2009

64 pages

$6

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

I still don’t get where this whole “Jeffrey Brown can’t draw” thing comes from. I mean sure, if your standard for artistic excellence is Neal Adams or something, you’re gonna be like WTF, but as always I’m ignoring those people and talking about altcomix fans who should know better. I’ve said this before, but compare the work of Brown (full disclosure: I like him a lot personally) to that of any of the ultra-lo-fi slice-of-life humor/pathos diarists who’ve emerged in his wake and he’s just doing so much more–with how he arranges space in his panels; with how he adds line upon line for shading, depth, and detail; with the expressiveness of his characters; with how even his action pastiches are genuinely dynamic and fun to follow; with how he bounces from genre to genre with the same “here’s something I thought was funny about this topic” good humor. Especially in the outright humor stuff, he’s like your funny friend bullshitting.

That’s not necessarily to say that everything he does is for everyone. As in previous genre-parody works like Incredible Change-Bots, the sci-fi/action/fantasy hodgepodge of Sulk #3 presupposes simultaneous knowledge of, affection for, and skepticism of the kinds of stuff he’s swiping from/at, plus (obviously) an appreciation of Brown’s visual approach to the material. It’s an acquired taste: The ribbing might be too gentle for people who wanna see an indie stalwart get some yuks at the expense of elves and unicorns, while the irony might be tough to stomach for po-faced “new action” fans. Indeed I think the reason why Brown’s Bighead books (including Sulk #1) are the strongest of his work in this area is because this kind of parody is more familiar with superheroes than with any other subgenre; you can “get it” easier than you can when you’re dealing with pirates or D&D or Godzilla or boy geniuses as you are here. Meanwhile the MMA-based Sulk #2’s 80-page fight scene was easy to grok as an exercise in ways drawing combat and writing the combatants’ interior monologues. The anchor point in The Kind of Strength That Comes from Madness is much harder to locate.

I suppose it just comes down to what you think you might want to see in a comic. Do you want to see an adorable, realistically depicted stag smack his antlers against a tree and then stare at the reader, demanding to know “DO YOU STILL WANT TO TANGLE WITH ME?” in giant capital letters? Do you want a ground-eye-view parallel to Brown’s memorably poetic giant-monster rampage comic from Mome in which a couple of moron brothers take the opportunity to make a “looting list” out of their weekly grocery list and then smack the dying reptile around with a baseball bat? Do you want to read lines like “A vampyre! It’s exactly like a vampire, but far more dangerous,” or hear small-city residents thank goodness that the giant monster is attacking their town instead of big important places like New York or L.A.? Do you want the occasional visual digression about boobs or beards or babies? I know my answers at least.

* Kevin Melrose notes that Alaskan legislators are making moves in the direction of labeling cartoons and computer-generated images that depict minors in sexual situations as child pornography. Gross, loathsome art is still just art, not a criminal act.

* Lots of news-of-note for superhero comics fans came out during last night’s Diamond Retailer Summit–Kiel Phegley has a full report. The Invincible developments sound particularly intriguing, and I’m as curious as anyone to see how Marvel wraps up its years-long meta-plot with their upcoming Siege miniseries.

* Hey, my occasional collaborator Matt Rota has a blog! This cat can draw, man. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Fantagraphics says Johnny Ryan has drawn 30 pages of Prison Pit Vol. 2 for a projected Summer 2010 release. Hot damn. Meanwhile Chris Mautner reviews Prison Pit Vol. 1, along with Hans Rickheit’s The Squirrel Machine.

* And while I’m linking to Fanta’s twitter, looks like they’re working on a collection of Megan Kelso’s Artichoke Tales. Man, talk about years in the making!

* Here’s a loooooong interview with Mike Mignola about the state of the Hellboy and B.P.R.D. universe. You don’t often see Mignola sounding off about his franchise the way, say, Brian Bendis gets interviewed about Marvel or Geoff Johns gets interviewed about Blackest Night. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Go check out PictureBox’s new stuff, including Cold Heat Special #6.

* A new ToyFare comes out Wednesday, and with it a new installment of Twisted ToyFare Theater, which I co-write. Be there.

* Blair is childish! I don’t know why I didn’t see it before her bad behavior around Bree. I’d been looking at her attempts to recreate her high-school dominance just in terms of fear of failure in a new environment, but (provided the writers connect the dots) what’s playing into it at least as much is that she’s just not a grown-up.

* Crazy pathetic cartoonish Georgina is a let-down. Plus, I wanted Georgina and Vanessa to solve their impasse the only way they know how: with lovemaking.

* Holy shit, Chuck giving Blair a massage in black silk pajamas. Me and Charlie, eyeball to eyeball. The man in the black pajamas. Worthy fuckin’ adversary, dude. Worthy fuckin’ adversary.

* Vanessa dropped the Scott bomb on Dan pretty unceremoniously. It was done as part of a funny mix-up scene rather than built up to as a life-changing detonation. Interesting choice.

* I loved Serena’s post-Carter revelation, post-Brooklyn Botanic Garden wedding-failure moping. The Thinker with cleavage.

* The Human Turtleneck stood up for himself pretty nice there as he was hunting for Scott with Lily, I thought.

* “By the power vested in me by having recorded Daydream Nation…”

* MOST of the cast is now officially related. Rufus, Lily, Dan, Jenny, Serena, Eric, Scott, and Chuck. It’s like the Brady Bunch!

* Anyone else catch Carter’s Long Good Friday impression there at the end?

* Shuffling Scott, Carter, Bree, and Georgina offstage in one fell episode. Wow. As my friend Ben Morse put it, every fourth episode of this show is like a season finale. Will they rotate new cast members back in?

* Chuck kissing a dude in the next-week teaser!!!!!!!!!

* Altcomix con conga! MoCCA is moving to April while Desert Island and PictureBox are launching the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Fest this December. I’m looking forward to both. For what it’s worth, I remain pretty stunned by the subcurrent of resentment toward MoCCA following this past summer’s sweat-soaked show. It seems like that peeled the lid off a lot of preexisting displeasure with the con and the umbrella organization.

* My other Robot 6 post today gave thumbs up to Monster Brains’ awesome video game and pinball art galleries.

* Good news: Jack Staff is being relaunched and rebranded as The Weird World of Jack Staff, an even more explicitly anthology-style series featuring Paul Grist’s veddy British superhero universe. Grist promises to get things under control schedule-wise, but I’ll see it when I believe it, if you will.

* Bad news: AdHouse has cancelled the publication of Vito Delsante and Rachel Friere’s FCHS due to low preorders. I like Vito and AdHouse’s Chris Pitzer both a lot personally and thing Friere’s art is gawjuss, and I hope this works out to everyone’s relative satisfaction.

* My pal Jason Adams caught a lot of interesting stuff in his daily linkblogging post today. To wit:

* This is apparently old, but it’s new to me: 13 writing tips from Chuck Palahniuk.

* The Let the Right One In remake Let Me In is being produced by the revivified Hammer Studios. Jason noted this because this PR seems to indicate the movie’s being filmed on a soundstage, but I just assume it means parts of the movie are being filmed there, not all of it.

* Finally, I’m bookmarking this piece on the difference between the original and theatrical cuts of Paranormal Activity for when I finally see the goddamn movie. (Which joins a list of as-yet-unseen-by-me films that includes The Hurt Locker, Gamer, A Serious Man, Zombieland…dammit, I’m seeing New Moon before I see any of those, aren’t I?)

* Speaking of Zombieland, this pretty awesome post by CRwM at And Now the Screaming Starts calls the movie a feature-length version of the “Merry Looter” scenes from flicks like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later, which is a wonderful term to add to the lexicon; it then goes on to compare Zombieland‘s eschatology with Thundarr the Barbarian and Adam Rapp & George O’Connor’s First Second graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer. Lateral thinking at its finest!

* And speaking of Paranormal Activity, the triumphalist tone of this Bloody Disgusting article on the flick’s $7 million limited-release haul this past weekend really has me scratching my head. Mr. Disgusting’s argument is that We the Horror Hardcore are the people who made this possible. But isn’t it abundantly clear at this point that the film’s ever-widening release and ever-mounting receipts have nothing to do with the horror grassroots (beyond, of course, the benefit any movie can derive from rave reviews online) and everything to do with an extremely well-planned and well-executed release plan by the studio? If you honestly think that Paramount fully intended to bury this movie until the demands of rabid Bloody Disgusting readers “forced” them to make it their big Halloween horror movie of the year, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

* The Secret Origin of Gary Groth. Jesus, can you imagine being Gary Groth and going to “Robert E. Lee High”?

* Tom Spurgeon lists five truths about comics he holds to be self-evident, possibly in error. His points about loving serialized comics and disliking comics as a social scene definitely both inform his analysis of comics overall, in my experience, so it’s definitely worth reading his reasons why he finds this to be so.

* Rickey Purdin shows off the latest additions to his Watchmen and ninja sketchbooks. Not simultaneously, alas.

Cold Heat #7/8

BJ & Frank Santoro, writers

Frank Santoro, artist

PictureBox, September 2009

48 pages

$20 (hey, it’s a limited edition of 100)

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Copacetic Comics

Radiohead threw me not when they made their shift into electronic music with Kid A–I’d been listening to Aphex Twin since I was a sophomore in high school, yeah that’s right, I’m an IDM OG, or at least as close as we got to one on L.I.–but with the two albums after that, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief. I now listen the heck out of those records (okay, more Hail than Amnesiac), but the band’s sudden lack of interest in providing the big, sweeping, soaring moments of catharsis they were still doing as late as “How to Disappear Completely” and “Morning Bell” struck me then and now as a willful avoidance of their own strengths. Now they’re doing that sort of stuff again on In Rainbows and all is well with the world, but I do wish that more people would acknowledge that guitar rock or no guitar rock, that was the big, not-entirely-successful risk they took this decade.

Something similar is going on in Cold Heat #7/8. For about 4/5ths of this limited-edition double-issue installment of Santoro & Jones’s punk-rock sci-fi saga, the psychedelic vistas and geometric reveries that were the series’ aesthetic calling card are largely abandoned. In their place is a comparatively straightforward, albeit tongue-in-cheek, international espionage quasi-parody involving cynical jetsetting journalists, deadpan quip-dropping CIA agents, sinister pharmaceutical conglomerates, crooked conspiring politicians, and Castle, the small-town American fuck-up who’s unwittingly unravelling the plot. Silence is rare, with more voluminous dialogue and lots of those little labels Santoro likes to drop in. It’s the sort of thing some combination of Stephen Soderbergh, George Clooney, and Matt Damon might release in a limited September theatrical run, or what you might see in one of the Coen Brothers’ seriocomic conspiracy-caper flicks if they were given an effects budget and asked to throw something spacey in there now and then. There’s even some broad comedy about the U.K. rock press and a celestial poker game involving not-exactly-dead rock star Joel Cannon being invited to play a hand with Jimi, Janis, Jim, and John. (Jerry opted to kick it in the hot tub.)

This ain’t your father’s Cold Heat, long story short. Honestly it’s so different in tone it feels more like a particularly off-model Cold Heat Special than a Cold Heat proper. And it may not be the droids you’re looking for–at least until the very end, where Castle searches for her kidnapped journalist lover, running through the streets of Rio in a wet bathing suit, fleeing the psychic and physical attacks of the evil Senator Wastmor’s puppetmasters. That’s the sort of dreamlike/nightmarish imagery you’ve come to expect from Cold Heat, and it’ll be interesting to see if there’s more of that in the offing, perhaps wedded to the new potboiler-parody structure we’re seeing here. Here’s hopin’.

* Those FTC fines for bloggers who don’t disclose freebies are neither fines nor for bloggers nor about freebies. At least that’s what FTC assistant director Richard Cleland tells PRNewser, but what does he know. I’m still pretty certain this is meant to force comics reviewers to reveal just how they got their hands on that copy of the Archie/Veronica proposal issue, anyway. Why the resistance? What are you hiding? (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Well this is interesting, to me at least: CBR interviews Jim Rugg and C. Allbritton Taylor on their upcoming post-punk action period piece One Model Nation without any mention of the fact that C. Allbritton Taylor is Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols. A little different from how Tyrese Gibson or Gene Simmons’s kid are playing it. (Jim, if you’re reading this, it’s my fault you were misattributed as both writer and artist for this book in the little bio at the back of Strange Tales #2. I’m sorry to you both!) Via Jim Rugg’s blog, whose banner image is this awesome fucking thing:

* Yessssss: Kevin Huizenga is doing Prison Pit fan art. Here’s hoping this ends up as awesome as his Powr Mastrs tributes. (Via Spurge)

* The Descent and Doomsday director Neil Marshall is doing a 3-D horror movie about people exploding called Burst. (Produced by Sam Raimi.) Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Today at Robot 6, 90 cartoonists gave Harvey Pekar head, Peter Bagge made a deal with FOX, Marge Simpson posed for Playboy, and C.B. Cebulski was caught on camera with Paris Hilton.

Ganges #3

Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist

Fantagraphics/Coconino, September 2009

32 pages

$7.95

Buy it from Fantagraphics, eventually

You wanna talk about a gateway comic? How ’bout handing this sucker to anyone who’s ever had trouble falling asleep? The whole thing is dedicated to nothing more or less than reproducing the mental and physical sensations of insomnia. Ironically it’s Huizenga’s most action-driven comic this side of Fight or Run or the video-game bits in Ganges #2. In order to evoke the insomniac mind’s uncontrollable wanderings, Huizenga takes Glenn Ganges’s mental avatar and sends him on a series of Cave-In-like explorations–dipping him into water, sucking him down the drain, walking him up a tree, bouncing him off thought balloons, floating him along on sleep bubbles. At one point he mentally fends off invisible burglars; at another he’s armed with a bow and arrow, or a machine gun, taking aim at his own wiredness. Combine it with one of the most effective uses yet of the Ignatz series’ two-tone color palette–here a cool small-hours blue–and the experience is almost tactile, as though you’re physically tunneling through the mysteries of your own mind. It’s only when Glenn finally gives up and gets out of bed that the gutters switch from black to white and everything instantly feels less dense, less close; naturally, removed from the million-miles-a-second flow of his Glenn’s thoughts and reset in the real world, the action switches from complex reverie to straightforward cutesy business involving playing music late at night and freaking out when the cops show up about the noise. The mastery of tone is deeply impressive.

Look, I’m always gonna be up front about how I think the “Gloriana” issue of Or Else, #2, is the best thing Huizenga’s ever done. That thing hit me with the force of a revelation, and so I tend to be deaf to the claim that he keeps getting better and better. (Particularly regarding Ganges #1 and its disastrously wrong take on the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”!!!!!!1!!111!) That’s as good as he’s gotten. But it’s obviously true that each new release proves just how much he’s mastered the stuff of comics, and how thoroughly he’s staked his claim on chronicling areas of contemporary American human experience few if any other cartoonists are going anywhere near. It’s pretty darned exciting.

* Today I used my newfound Robot powers thusly:

* In this Robot 6 post I pointed to some recent statements by Marvel’s Joe Quesada and Tom Brevoort on how they determine what can and cannot be done with characters by writers and editors outside their core series.

* in this post I directed everyone to Curt Purcell’s astonishingly sleazy Flickr gallery of paperback and fumetti covers. This thing’s a marvel.

* And in this post I linked to Joe the Barbarian artist Sean Murphy’s bitchin’ deviantart gallery.

* Meanwhile, over at Marvel.com, I’ve got Strange Tales Spotlight interviews up with Tony Millionaire and Max Cannon. Catch me after hours at a con someday and I’ll tell you about the parts of Tony M.’s interview that ended up on the cutting room floor.

* In the course of reviewing the book and the movie of The Surrogates, Joe McCulloch ponders “The New Action” vs. “The New Mainstream.” I think there are many clear points of distinction, but the largest is that “New Mainstream” books seem to me to have been created with the express goal of reaching a particular, and theoretically large, audience. The “new action” comics? I doubt it.

* Ceri B. flags some freaky shit from World of Warcraft. Faceless Old Ones and the extradimensional insects that worship them–all this week on Town Talk!

* Real-World Horror #1: Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Rumsey Taylor reviews Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple. If you’ve ever seen video or heard audio from Jonestown’s final 24 hours, I’m guessing you yet to shake off the almost magisterial horror of what happened.

* Real-World Horror #2: This New York Post story on Wallace Souza, the Brazilian true-crime TV host who hired hitmen to commit murders he would then cover on his show and is now on the run, contains so much cinematic bizarrity in its five short sentences I hardly know where to begin. It ends with the phrase “if he has fled into the rain forest, he may never be found.” Good Lord.

* Real-World Horror #3: How do I know that the Zazi terror plot has authorities in New York genuinely frightened? The security level in Penn Station is as high as I’ve seen it since 2003. Packs of police in full armor stand around holding machine guns, armed NYPD officers patrol Long Island Rail Road trains all the way out into Suffolk County, and military K-9 units sweep through the lobby of my office building on top of the station. Well, at least I get to see some cute doggies.

* God bless my friend Jesse Thompson for helping to put together this montage of great movie laughing scenes. That bit from The Money Pit where Tom Hanks reacts to the bathtub falling through the floor is my single favorite scene in any comedy ever.

The Mourning Star #1 & 2

Kazimir Strzepek, writer/artist

Bodega, 2006 & 2009

Vol. 1: 220 pages

Vol. 2: 256 pages

$13 each

Buy Vol. 1 from Amazon.com

Buy Vol. 2 from Bodega

Of all the alternative action-adventure comics I’ve been lumping together in discussions for the past couple years, Kaz Strzepek’s The Mourning Star is the ripest candidate for crossover success. His cartooning is clear and appealing, with endearing, often adorable character designs and well-choreographed action sequences, reminiscent of the work of Brian Ralph without Ralph’s ars gratia artis, printmaking-derived design sense. Strzepek’s world-building–in the sense of both “backstory” and “readily understandable physical environment”–is top drawer, recalling everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Tolkien to The Road Warrior to The Dark Tower without coming across like a rehash of any of them. While its blend of an obviously personal vision with universally accessible ideas and visuals puts it more in line with Scott Pilgrim than Powr Mastrs, the involvement of Highwater vets Randy Chang and Jordan Crane in its production leaves little doubt as to its altcomix cred. It’s like a post-Fort Thunder Bone.

In reading The Mourning Star‘s first two volumes back-to-back recently, what struck me hardest wasn’t the admittedly rock-solid introduction to the characters and world provided by book #1, but the time we spend with its villains in book #2. It’s very easy and tempting for one’s grown-up, self-aware genre art to willfully return to a black-and-white conception of protagonist and antagonist. And I don’t blame anyone for doing it! The point of escapism is to escape, and giving your villains big black hats is a welcome relief from the shades-of-gray nightmare we live in day to day. But taking the time to depict villainy as the result of relatable choices is rewarding in its own way. In Volume 2, we discover through Strzepek’s seamlessly natural dialogue that the Rule aren’t just sinister, unfeeling killers–although they’re that, too. They’re people who banded together in The Mourning Star‘s postapocalyptic world for security and safety and who believe their brutality is what can continue to ensure this. They have leaders whose approval they sometimes crave and whose orders they sometimes resent. They have medics to heal them when they get hurt, and equipment that breaks down. They’ve got seasoned veterans and wet-behind-the-ears rookies. They tell each other urban myths. They jockey for position and remember their lives before they became the barbaric rulers of the cities and wastelands. In short they’re just like anyone who’s ever shored up an evil regime–potentially normal guys and girls who at some point lost or deactivated their ability to empathize, who don’t mind ordering or supporting the murder of people they don’t know. Maybe that’s why I’m rooting even harder than ever for the good guys to beat them in the end.

* Due to freelance-related stuff that would taint me even worse than my usual conflict-of-interest calvacade, I won’t be reviewing Daredevil #501, the official start of Andy Diggle and Roberto de la Torre’s run on the title. Leave us say, however, that fans of the Bendis/Maleev and Brubaker/Lark runs should at the very least give the new team until the end of this particular issue to win them over. My goodness! Greg McElhatton agrees.

* I am 100% behind Adrien Brody starring in Predators. That makes me feel like it might be a real movie instead of just some stupid studio sequel bullshit. Then again, Christian Bale was in Terminator Salvation. (Via AICN.)

* The Missus’s sojourn amongst the Internet’s female-fandom contingent has revealed to me that Eli “The Bear Jew” Roth has set off a firestorm of fapping for ladies nationwide, which is totally awesome. Only slightly less entertaining is the fact that Roth is cowriting a kung fu movie with the RZA that the Wu-Tang mastermind is slated to direct. It’s called The Man with the Iron Fist (at least until Disney-Marvel’s lawyers get involved) and it joins Roth’s full slate of “who knows if they’ll ever get made” movies, along with the Grindhouse spinoff Thanksgiving and the giant-monster movie Endangered Species and the Stephen King adaptation Cell (which I think is officially off the table at this point). All I know is that as long as he keeps wearing wifebeaters in his on-screen appearances there won’t be a dry seat in the house. (Via Jason Adams, whose Rothlust puts that of The Missus’s Twilight-fan cronies to shame.)

* The League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ murderers’ row of horror bloggers–myself included–talk about their favorite horror movies.

* Kiel Phegley selects his favorite posts from The Cool Kids Table’s first year of blogging.

* Jeet Heer presents a nice concise summary of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy strip and its impact on comics. It’s really a public service. For comics readers like me for whom classic strips played hardly any role in our evolution as fans of the medium, the appeal and import of Nancy is the kind of thing that needs some explanation. Most of the strip’s devotees talk about it in ways that take a preexisting knowledge and appreciation of it for granted, something you don’t really see in similar cases like Krazy Kat or Peanuts.

* The Masters of the Universe Society? Oh, indeed. I don’t even care that it’s kind of a cheap shot at nerds, or that He-Man’s a reference that people in the Gossip Girl writers’ age group are a lot more likely to make than people in the Gossip Girl characters’ age group. “The madness and genius of Skeletor. That is correct–I said genius.” Indeed. Indeed.

* Just how many cast members did Hilary Duff coincidentally bump into during the course of this episode, anyway? Small island!

* Wow, they’ve gone to the “character with a secret identity” well twice so far this season. And they’ve done it before with the British aristocrat last season, and Georgina, and that dude who grifted with Poppy. I’m starting to wonder if aliases really are this common among the upper crust.

* Still, I’m appreciating how much better they’re doing at introducing new semi-permanent cast members into the mix. Haha, remember that artist last season? Carter, Georgina, Nate’s girlfriend, the Duffster, and even Brother Scott all put that clown to shame. I feel like you could go interesting places with any of them. I still don’t understand why they haven’t made Serena’s brother into a main-main character by now, though.

* Did anyone catch what motivated Jenny to start exercising her divine right of queens at the end? Was it just because she was pissed at Blair for stepping in? At any rate it seemed pretty obvious, as it should have been to Jenny, that publicly abdicating the throne would lead to a power vacuum someone would rush to fill. She should have set herself up as a benevolent dictator all along.

* I really enjoyed watching Nate trick Dan by encouraging him to ask Duff out, then laughing about it under his breath, simply because it was new. When was the last time Nate got to do something that wasn’t an on-again off-again romance or rebelling against his family? It was just a pleasure to get to see him do something different. Chase Crawford gets the short end of the stick because Nate is pretty much just the “Not Chuck or Dan” character. I’d love to see him fleshed out some more.

* Tyra Banks? As a character? ThaFUCK? Just when I had successfully weaned myself off of America’s Next Top Model! Okay, maybe I’m just a little upset at the dropped ball that was showing her and Serena after a sleepover night and not having them wake up in bed together. Okay, maybe a lot upset.

* “So, Jenny, we’re cool with the whole sexual-assault thing now?” “Totally, Chuck. These things happen!” Part of me is still pulling for a Comedian/Silk Spectre I-style post-sexcrime romance.

* As the Missus put it: “Jesus, Serena, why even bother wearing a skirt?” Seconded!

* Chuck, and Ed Westwick, just gets more and more magnificent with each passing episode. Chuck Bass is the Sol Tigh, the Omar Little, the Al Swearengen of Gossip Girl. Amy and I will hit the little rewind button on the TiVo remote and simply rewatch him turn his head or arch his eyebrow and just laugh and laugh with delight. And holy shit, Chuck’s speech to Blair at the end was amaaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaazing. What a fucking stroke of genius for Chuck, like God, to take Blair’s despair as a sin against him! Dammit, Blair Waldorf–if you can make it with Chuck Bass, you can make it anywhere!

* Today at Robot 6, I showed off and ran down my SPX haul. Beautiful, isn’t it?

* A threesome on Gossip Girl? Pray for MMF, people!!! (Via Jason Adams.)

* Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian has been expanded to eight issues. This looks to be very, very pretty, and given Morrison’s heretofore unabashed embrace of heroic fantasy as a means of uplift, its “tween’s toys come to life in a fantasy world” plot could get interesting, presuming Morrison’s approach goes beyond “hey, that’s awesome!”

* You saw ’em there first: Fantagraphics previews its Previews listings for January 2010.

* My Robot 6 confrere Chris Mautner reviews R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis. Sounds like it’s notable for its un-Crumb-ness in large part.

* Oh hey, pictures from Neil Marshall’s Centurion! With all the movies I’ve dropped the ball on lately, I’ll be damned if I whiff on this one.

* Artist L. Nichols presents block-printed portraits of He-Man and She-Ra. They have the power.

* Real-Life Horror: The government appears to have neglected to destroy tapes of the interrogation of detainee Mohammed al Qahtani. Of course, the only things more depressing than the videotaped spectacle of a man being tortured at the hands of American agents will be the Obama Administration’s Bush-like attempts to suppress its release, and the full-throated endorsement of the videotaped behavior by conservatives should those attempts fail.

* On a cheerier note, Who doesn’t love sentient plants?

Cold Heat Special #7

Michael DeForge, writer/artist

PictureBox, September 2009

12 pages

I don’t remember how much it cost

Browse the Cold Heat shop, where it’ll probably end up eventually

Band logos are an interesting thing, and when they succeed at visually representing a band’s musical and aesthetic project, a pretty awesome thing. Which makes a lot of old-school heavy metal logos a baffling thing–instead of offering a clear, brandable distillation of the band, they’re often illegible to the point of incomprehensibility. (Spend some time on Obsidian Obelisk and you’ll see what I mean.) I suppose this is a tip of the hat to the uncommercial, underground nature of much of that music–it’s so not for you that the masses can’t even make out the band name. (“Songs for the deaf–you can’t even hear ’em!”) My favorite recent example of this aesthetic cropping up in comics is Rinzen’s title design for Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100, which combines past stabs at shaping the word “BATMAN” into a logo with an unmistakable and acknowledged metal vibe.

Michael DeForge’s Cold Heat Special combines this with a project that stretches the boundaries of “comics” in much the same way as Kevin Huizenga’s minicomic Untitled. That book was little more than page after page of scribbled, rejected names for Huizenga’s then-upcoming solo series Or Else. And though its contents were almost entirely text, it was at least as much intended to be viewed as read; like any comic, its contents accrued meaning through sequential juxtaposition, building into a memorable exploration of the creative process and the by-definition arbitrary nature of assigning signifiers to the signified.

DeForge’s work here is different, to be sure. For starters, it’s very, very metal: His eye-meltingly ornate band-logo versions of the names of various Cold Heat characters (including, of course, the pivotal noise band Chocolate Gun) frequently rely on motifs that evoke thorns, spikes, bodily fluid, scales, horns, lightning, fire, and in one memorable case a fist with the name spelled across the knuckles in spilt blood. It’s a far cry from Huizenga’s no-nonsense all-caps lettering. It’s also a far cry, in a lot of ways, from the aesthetic I tend to associate Cold Heat with: the hazy sensuality of shoegaze. It’s way more Cannibal Corpse than My Bloody Valentine. (There’s also at least one explicit homage that I caught–the lettering for Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality, not to mention 1000 Homo DJs’ Supernaut EP.) But what this explosive, offensive, savage designwork does get at is the importance of POWER to the Cold Heat project: The violent power wielded by the sinister Senator Wastmor, the emotionally liberating power of Joel Cannon’s music, the self-discovery of internal power by our heroine Castle, and so on. It also reinforces Cold Heat as a sort of samizdata, an attempt to recreate the magic of the “lifeline music” that got us through our teenage years and the handmade, ramshackle media, from zines to mixtapes, that chronicled that community. Logos like these are meant to communicate just how important and immediate and irrepressible the art they’re a stand-in for is to its makers and consumers. In the context of Cold Heat, they make more sense than you’d think.

* Today I made my debut as a permanent member of the Robot 6 blog’s roster. I kicked things off with an auspicious story: the 40th anniversary of Monty Python.

* Alan David Doane interviews two of the best/most important/my favoritest people in alternative comics, Tom Spurgeon and Eric Reynolds.

* Dash Shaw ponders the mainstream/alternative/genre/autobio/whatever divide which has been much discussed in these parts of late. I would say that a) I do indeed think genre work has more critical currency in alternative comics circles right now than it used to; b) there’s a difference between “indie” and “alternative” which plays into what I’m saying in (a); c) I don’t dig using altgenre/”new action” comics as a cudgel against autobiography or nongenre alternative comics any more than I enjoy using alternative or literary comics against genre or superheroes or whatever. If you must set up a conflict of that nature, use good comics against bad comics–there are plenty of both on every side of every divide.

* Oh wow, a Dragon Wars: D-War Rifftrax! This may give me the excuse I needed to get the D-War DVD…

* Where the Really Wild Things Are: Check out Josh Simmons’s too-hot-for-Vice WTWTA tribute comic.

* I love Dave Kiersh’s art.

* Seeing Nick Bertozzi draw naked ladies takes me back to my A&F Quarterly days.

* Dig the fancy new trade dress for Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s very good Invincible Iron Man, designed by Rian Hughes.

* Lego David Bowie, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s Dance era, by the looks of it.

* Looks like I’m gonna get to see Paranormal Activity in the theaters. Still torn about this whole pseudoviral thing, but kudos, it’s gotten the movie some attention, I suppose. The movie’s also playing along with a pretty awesomely diverse array of horror movies at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s third annual “Scary Movies” festival.

* By all means download Matthew Perpetua’s “Best of Ghostface Killah” mix. There’s just nothing else out there like Tony Starks.

* If you read any SPX report this year, make it Jog’s: Subtitled “Comics and Connecting Fabric”–in that order for a reason–it’s mostly an excuse to review nearly everything he got at the show, including a bunch of Cold Heat comics, Driven by Lemons, Ganges #3, James McShane’s Archaeology, that weird “fuck you Craig Thompson” minicomic, the Buenaventura three-for-all, Jonathan Chandler’s 2BY2, and Marvel Fanfare #40 featuring holy shit David Mazzucchelli:

* Frank Santoro’s brief report contains some gems too. For example, this was apparently the first time Frank met John Porcellino, but they’ve been corresponding for sixteen years! Also, there was a couple of the original “Gloriana” Supermonster issue by Kevin Huizenga for sale at the PictureBox table?!?!

* The Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? crew continues weighing in on SPX: Here’s Sammy’s second post, and here’s site quasi-editor Brandon Soderberg commenting downblog. Both guys (Sammy a bit more stridently) decry what they perceive as an unthinkingly oppositional stance on the part of the independent comics community regarding “mainstream”/Big Two/superhero comics. Which I suppose is true for some people? Maybe? Gary Groth, for example, though I don’t think anything Gary does is reflexive, except maybe arguing with Tom Spurgeon. Indeed, when Sammy slams Jeffrey Brown’s loving Transformers parody Incredible Change Bots as poorly drawn and irony-filled and therefore acceptable to the indie-comics hoi polloi in a way that unnamed sci-fi comics pioneers aren’t, or works in a sarcastic dig about how the only pamphlet-format comics that are cool to this crowd are published by Fantagraphics, I start to detect an oppositional militancy of a different kind. And one that’s largely waging war against an army of strawmen to boot: Judging from the Critics Roundtable, for example, Gary and Rob Clough’s “no superheroes please, we’re critics” stance is a minority position, while the notion that indie people don’t like pamphlets is belied by all the hoopla about the Buenaventura and Ignatz lines, Cold Heat, etc.. I totally agree that the new wave of altgenre comics is thrilling in part for how it doesn’t take a purely oppositional stance, but the extent to which by virtue of their existence they’re taking slaps at Clumsy or Blankets is by far the least interesting thing about them to me.

* I got my Uzi back, you dudes is wack, face it, The Horror Blog is back! And spending the month asking various horror luminaries to list their top ten horror films to boot.

* The astroturfed “word of mouth” release pattern for Paranormal Activity continues, with a bunch of added towns and a contest to add more. Whatever works, man, though particularly after reading Jason Adams’s report on the bungled midnight sneak preview I almost went to, I’m a little sour on the way the studio’s handling this, even though in principle I think any deviation from the standard “how it does on Friday night opening night basically determines its entire future” operating procedure ought to be applauded.

* Ceri B.’s month-long series of short sharp shocks on horror continues with a concise salute to Kyle Reese’s concise explanation of how the terminator works in the first Terminator film. Weirdly, I was just re-reading my T1/T2/T4 review roundelay last night, and it too centered on the effectiveness of that speech.

* Kevin Mutch and Andrei Molotiu debate the readability of abstract comics. Can they work as “stories,” i.e. things you sit down and read by proceeding from beginning through middle to end, or are they best experienced as “ambient comics,” i.e. by flitting in and out and back and forth through them at your leisure, accruing an understanding in dribs and drabs rather than in one discreet read-through? I think I’m on Team Andrei here–I have yet to dive into his Abstract Comics anthology, but in my experience (Hankiewicz, Nilsen, Cotter, Mattotti) abstract comics are not as attention-deficit-disorder-defying as Kevin makes them out to be.

* Part Charlie White, part David La Chappelle, part “when you see it, you’ll shit bricks” internet meme, the horror photography of Joshua Hoffine stages scenes based around various familiar horror tropes, sometimes with a no-beating-around-the-bush tip of the hat to famous works, often with an admirable willingness to go there when it comes to linking horror to fairy tales’ menacing of children. Here are a couple strong images:

* The Love & Rockets Facebook page’s photo gallery is indescribably awesome. It’s the kind of thing where there’s a picture of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez with Paul Westerberg and it isn’t even close to the coolest photo. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Punk as fuck, circa 1982.

From left to right, that is, I shit you not, Glenn Danzig, John Singleton, Beto Hernandez, and Nina Hartley. Other photos feature Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky, Russ Meyer, Hank Ketcham, Sergio Aragones, the Flight of the Conchords, Vampira, and Michelle Shocked. Jiminy Christmas, go become a Fan and browse the whole thing. (Via Mike Baehr.)

Cold Heat Special #6

Chris Cornwell, writer/artist

PictureBox, September 2009

24 pages

I think it was $10

Buy it from Copacetic Comics

Chris Cornwell is the joker in the Cold Heat deck. The only Cold Heat Specialist who doesn’t create his installments of the spinoff series in collaboration with Cold Heat-proper cocreator Frank Santoro, he’s also the farthest afield from CH‘s usual tone of wistful, sensual menace and transcendence. His first CHS involved an assassin whose dayjob was rock stardom and the evil Senator Wastmor piloting a giant minotaur robot. Similarly, this issue is summed up by that gorgeous, iconic cover, featuring some kind of robed Satan worshipper rocking out; this leads into an opening sequence in which a band comprised of monsters “rehearses” by destroying their own equipment in a montage that reminds me of Yacht Rock’s take on Van Halen in terms of sheer half-parody/half-salute comedic rockitude.

Indeed the whole comic feels a bit like a montage. There’s that opening Monsters of Rock sequence’ a credits-spread scene of a nude Senator Wastmor getting drunk and drowning in an ocean of his own puke’ a “secret history of Cold Heat” story (really the core segment) about one of Wastmor’s ancestors attempting to sacrifice a beautiful girl to his demonic masters in colonial days before being thwarted by alien protectors; a near-abstract spacetime-rupturing transition sequence linking that centuries-old adventure to the present-day viewing of a Chocolate Gun videocasette by other aliens; and a glimpse of how the aliens’ power affects CG lead singer Joel Cannon juxtaposed with how Cannon’s music effects Cold Heat heroine Castle. Got all that? It can be tough to follow, particularly toward the end of the book, but following it doesn’t appear to me to be the point. It’s more a case of latching on to isolated images and impressions, meaning that Cornwell in his goofy slapstick way is mimicking the more lyrical approach of Santoro and Ben Jones in Cold Heat itself. And he can do it, too–he’s got the visual chops to bounce back and forth between slick cartooniness (the cover, Wastmor’s bender), rough-edged Fort Thunder/Closed Caption Comics-style monstrousness (the band, the aliens), non-narrative visual-driven psychedelia (the transition sequence), and on the last two pages, a glimpse of Cold Heat‘s trademark music-as-emotional-salvation leitmotif. Plus the book is as lovely an object as the CHS series has seen so far, with that killer, please-make-it-a-poster cover and two gorgeous color pin-ups literally pasted to the inside covers. If only every comic-book franchise had this kind of quality control.

* So! You’ve all read:

– My con report (check out the comment thread for Rob Clough and Xaviar Xerexes’ thoughts, too)

– Johanna Draper Carlson’s Critics Roundtable panel report

– the transcript of the New Action panel

– and listened to the recordings of the New Action and Critics Roundtable panels that I posted

Right? Good, now we’re all caught up.

* Very interesting: Sammy at Are You a Serious Comics Book Reader? appears to be the ideal audience for that New Action panel I did. You could tell this from the books he got at the show–Benjamin Marra’s Night Business is heavily touted–but also from his take on the panel itself:

At a place dominated by sad-ass comics about exes and your parents dying, it’s shocking to see comics creators that want to have fun, hopefully “indie” will start to mean “independent” again and not simply “everything but super heroes”.

But! The closest that panel came to an argument occurred when I asked the panel why they didn’t feel the need to visibly react against the “mainstream,” superhero-dominated action-adventure comic tradition, either in the negative way that the likes of Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware did, or really even in any way at all. While Shawn Cheng argued that the omnipresence of nerd genres in today’s culture obviated the need to comment on them for or against and Ben Marra stated that he loves superhero comics, albeit not contemporary ones, Frank Santoro literally pounded on the table while arguing that we shouldn’t be discussing superhero comics at all–it’s an instant turn-off to the new generation of comics readers, he said. So even if the sort of negativity directed toward superhero-style storytelling by the original altcomix generation is less prevalent than it once was, the newfound openness to superhero-style storytelling Sammy detects isn’t universal–in Frank’s case, at least, it’s more a sense that that genre shouldn’t be the lens through which we view what we’re doing, good, bad, or indifferent. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* In terms of con reports, I enjoyed Chris Mautner’s six observations, and Rob Clough’s interesting take on the proceedings, which included musings on the way that webcomics, college comics education programs, and the fall of straightforward indie-genre comics coupled with the rise of the “New Action” variation of same have all gone into shaping the show.

* Heidi MacDonald notes that attendance was up a whopping 19%. I’m glad to see I wasn’t hallucinating!

* In Heidi’s longer report, she (like Rob) summarizes several panels, as well as reflects on how the Team Comix generation of alternative comics creators has largely abandoned the show for New York City book deals and Act-I-Vate strips, leaving it in the hands of a different generation. But I would disagree with how she (and to an extent, Rob) characterizes that transition:

SPX (and MoCCA, but I haven’t been to APE or TCAF so I can’t say what the sitch is there) is now the province of the very young and aspirational, and their work is even more personal. As CCS, SVA, MCAD, SCAD, and other art schools turn out class after class of highly competent and well-informed art students, it’s become a bit more of a pageant, in some ways. Young cartoonists get their Xeric, put out a perfect book, spend a season or two as the deb of the year and then…some will go on, some will just become memories in the shoe box.

On a basic level I don’t get how they can be both more aspirational and more like pageant contestants ending up in the shoebox of history, but that’s not the main thing. It seems silly to say I have a philosophical difference with Heidi over this, but that’s the closest description I can come to regarding the primacy she frequently affords youth and ambition in terms of who and what matters in comics.

Here’s the thing: The core table presences at SPX are still Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, and Drawn & Quarterly, the former two of which were staffed this year by Gary Groth & Kim Thompson and Chris Staros respectively–veterans, to say the least. Meanwhile, PictureBox, Buenaventura, Bodega, Sparkplug, and AdHouse may seem like the new wave, but guys like Dan Nadel, Frank Santoro, Alvin Buenaventura, Randy Chang, Dylan Williams, and Chris Pitzer have all been fighting the good fight in the alt- and artcomix trenches for a long time now. At the Ignatzes, the big award-winner was Jordan Crane, who made his bones when I was picking up cheerleaders and just keeps getting better. Since I started going to SPX again with the move to the new hotel, my big discovery was Geoff Grogan’s Look Out!! Monsters–Geoff’s a lot of things, but he’d be the first to tell you that a young turk isn’t one of them. Frank Santoro and Dustin Harbin are in many ways two emblematic East Coast altcomix figures right now; neither of them is some fly-by-night college boy. And that’s even before we get to the the fact that the guests of honor this year were Gahan Wilson, Carol Lay, and John Porcellino.

Of course the place is stacked to the rafters with kids makin’ comics (many of whom are doing so online in a way that the old folks never dreamed of), and that youthful enthusiasm is part of the lifeblood of comics just like it is in any other art form. But I don’t think it’s necessary or desirable, or even accurate, to make a grand statement about how they’ve inherited the SPX earth, to contextualize things in terms of “Look out, us fogeys, the torch has been passed, the kids are coming up from behind.” Characterizing things that way is bad for fogeys and kids alike. It leads to regrettable phenomena like successful, talented cartoonists spending valuable panel time discussing a freaking Hi & Lois comic. Who cares what the Hi & Lois guy thinks about your awesome, popular comics? Unless you’re setting up a narrative of old guard versus new blood, what difference does it make? Do you, folks! It’s not a contest, it’s not a beat-the-clock situation, and where your work shows up or how old you were when you made it matters much, much, much, much, much less than whether or not it’s good. This should be truer at a small-press expo than anyplace else.

But if you’re talking about SPX primarily in terms of the social scene–who saw and was seen, who made the drive and who didn’t, who has the best hotel-room parties, who went on the karaoke expedition, who closed out the bar, who went to the award show where they gave out beer bottles–then it stand to reason you’re going to focus primarily on the youthful and strong-livered, rather than, oh I don’t know, dudes like me who literally collapsed from exhaustion on his hotel bed at the stroke of midnight-thirty, or all the folks with young kids. But that’s a distortion. Comics is an artform, not a hang.

This may even out some as the days pass, but I’ve read way more about the fact that the karaoke joint was closed than I have about what people thought about the books they got at the show, other than some perfunctory stabs at a “book of the show,” which is as much about Heidi’s “pageantry” concept as it is about art. I wish I saw more posts like Johanna’s panel report, or Chris Mautner or Rickey Purdin’s “here’s what I bought” write-ups–both of which are sort of awe-inspiring in just how much compelling stuff there was to purchase and read at that show–than photo parades of folks holding beers. I think that focus offers a distorted view of what SPX is, what SPX means, and why SPX matters. SPX and altcomix in general may be full of the young, but it’s not a young person’s game.

* My guest in the Strange Tales Spotlight today is Jim Rugg.

* For those of you keeping score at home, I think I’ll be ponying up three more SPX posts: A Carnival of SPX link post (hurry the fuck up Jog, I’m on a deadline here), a “here’s what I got” post (which, honestly, are the most important posts, because they’re about comics!), and probably, because I’m a glutton for punishment, a transcription of the Critics’ Roundtable panel.

* This seems like news a lot of you can use: Sammy Harkham is facilitating the sale of original art from Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror. Make him an offer, Simpnerds!

* “Is this a musical table?”: They can nominate him for all the Oscars in the world, but to me, Richard Jenkins will always be Agent Paul Harmon, Bureau of Tobacco, Tobacco, and Tobacco, from David O. Russell’s Flirting with Disaster–one of my all-time favorite comedies, and one of my all-time favorite comedic performances. Lebowski-level shit, dude. Anyway he’s going to be in Cloverfield director Matt Reeves’s egregiously titled remake of Let the Right One In, Let Me In. So I’m interested.

* Yeah, you’re gonna wanna peruse Curt Purcell’s gorgeously sleazy Flickr gallery of vintage paperback covers. Trash! Go pick it up!

* Holy shit, Nine Inch Nails’ Broken movie is on YouTube? Um, how is that possible? Trent Reznor was torture porning when torture porning wasn’t cool.

* Paul Pope adapts Dune, Wednesday Comics-style. Lovern Kindzierski’s colors kill.

* You should check Renee French’s blog every day, because every day she posts things like this:

* My friends at The Cool Kids Table celebrate their one-year blogiversary once again with a cover gallery of comics they loved over the past 365 days.

* Ceri B. kicks off a month of daily horrorblogging with a post on a killer paragraph from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”

* Real-Life Horror: Meet Fouad al-Rabiah, the innocent man we knowingly tortured for the express purpose of extracting false confessions. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Do I ever just stop and say what an amazing, consistent blogger Aeron Alfrey of Monster Brains is? Eye-popping images day after day after day. Today’s gallery is the latest in a series of posts on monstrous video game art. God how I loved Karnov and Rygar! You really, really need to stick Monster Brains in your RSS reader.