* Can comics be scary? Josh Simmons, Richard Sala, CRwM, Karswell, Kimberly Lindbergs, and myself attempt to answer the question, courtesy of Curt Purcell.

* Kate Beaton does The Great Gatsby.

* Photographic recreations of Charles Burns’s Black Hole yearbook portraits by Max Oppenheim. I can barely look at this.

* Lost is on tonight. Why not take one last look at last week’s Lost thoughts discussion before joining us again tonight?

* One of the all-time great MCs, Guru of Gang Starr, has died in what sounds like a deeply sad, John and Tom Fogerty-style state of estrangement from both his former creative partner DJ Premier and his own family. Tragic on any number of levels. Guru rapped like he was sitting on a high-backed armchair, calmly but firmly explaining the hard truth to you. Man, the internal rhymes in the first verse of “You Know My Steez” (bonus points for the THX-1138 recreation):

Rest in peace.

* The first annual Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, or C2E2, was held this past weekend. Apparently attendance was unexpectedly light, and sales were subsequently spotty, but beyond that the show appears quite well received.

* Regarding the attendance figures, I’ll say this: 1) I figure San Diego casts a long shadow over the other big shows. Given several years of widely derided Chicago cons, a new con in Chicago will probably have to wait a while before attracting some of what could be seen as its natural constituency back from Southern California.

* 2) The Con War storyline may be Reed’s best friend, in that it’s difficult to look worse than Wizard tends to. Simply releasing an honest attendance figure already puts them a step ahead of the game, and I figure there’ll be plenty of “oh man this is so much better than Rosemont” buzz going around the city by this time next year.

* Beyond that, as Tom Spurgeon notes, it obviously crushed Wizard’s concurrent Anaheim show in terms of fan and media buzz. But that’s to be expected given the near-total lack of industry support for Wizard’s shows following Gareb Shamus’s decision to pit his Big Apple show head to head against Reed’s New York Comic Con, and the much-rumored behind-the-scenes antics that followed that decision. Without the publishers playing ball, there’s nothing to buzz about, after all.

* Beyond Heidi and Tom’s aforelinked ruminations, my colleagues at Robot 6 have posted three catch-all round-up posts for Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.

* Announcements that caught my eye: Steve Rogers: Super-Soldier by Ed Brubaker and Dale Eaglesham; a street-level Marvel crossover miniseries called Shadowland; more Ultimate [Cryptic Noun] minis by Brian Michael Bendis; Powers going (arrrrgh) bimonthly; Jonathan Hickman saying that Secret Warriors has a natural end-point coming up before issue #30, making it almost a manga-model run; Casanova moving from Image to Marvel/Icon with new colors; maybe the strangest-sounding X-Men line relaunch ever.

* Ah, I thought I remembered Frank Miller saying Batman was out of his anti-terrorist graphic novel, but that the book itself was going ahead without Batman anyway–in fact, I thought that when he said at MoCCA that he wasn’t doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore, he meant he was abandoning the whole idea. But it sounds like he’s not, and like Xerxes, the 300 prequel, is proceeding apace. Good news.

* Now that I’m finally allowing myself to follow news about the production of A Game of Thrones on HBO, I’m pretty surprised to discover that one of the two female leads has been recast following the completion of the pilot, while the other is the subject of persistent recasting rumors herself. Now, shit happens, even on great fantasy projects–Peter Jackson recast Aragorn after shooting started, after all. And supposedly HBO suits are still making all the right noises about the pilot being good. But it’s weird.

* Hope Larson’s adapting A Wrinkle in Time! That’s a good match.

* I’m glad to see Doctor Strange superfan NeilAlien is on my side re: the dialogue in Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man: Fever #1.

* John Allison does the ’80s X-Ladies.

* John Cassaday drawing Superman covers? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Johnny Ryan gets darker and darker, if that’s possible. It’s like Prison Pit is infecting his strip work.

* Speaking of dark, Renee fucking French.

* The comics Dave Kiersh has been posting on the New Bodega blog over the past week or so are like the perfect cross between his old, wistful stuff and his more recent teenspolitation-type things.

* Wow, that’s a beautiful (and ominous!) Batman & Robin #12 variant cover by Andy Clarke.

* It’s weird that cryptozoology expert Loren Coleman reprinted this whole article on his own site–slightly less weird than the time he heavily implied that the reason the Destination Truth guy wasn’t gonna do as many cryptozoology episodes of his series was so he could be a sex tourist in Asia, but still weird–but please don’t let that put you off this very cool piece on, among other things, how escaped snakes and crocodiles from medieval menageries helped give rise to reports of dragons in England. It gets a little wild and wooly after that part, but the material on actual animals is delightful.

* See if you can guess the plot point mentioned in Ed Gonzalez’s review of Tom Six’s The Human Centipede that made me decide that no, I won’t be seeing this movie.

* The video for “Drunk Girls” by LCD Soundsytem looks like it was pulled from the Joker’s Director’s Series DVD. I feel like this is what unlucky henchmen have to deal with all the time. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* Finally, on Saturday the Missus and I went to see Eric Whitacre conduct a program of his work at Carnegie Hall. Christ, what beautiful music. He word-premiered a piece that moved me to tears based on its sheer loveliness alone; how often can you say that?

The Arrival

Shaun Tan, writer/artist

Arthur A. Levine, 2006

128 pages, hardcover

$19.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

(Before I begin the review, can you believe this book came out four years ago? I swear I thought I was a year at most behind this particular curve. But comics barrels headlong through its Golden Age and you have to run to keep up sometimes.)

Don’t let the sepiatones fool you. This fine, captivating wordless graphic novel re-strange-ifies the immigrant experience, shaking it free of elementary-school field-trip/filmstrip nostalgia and making it something scary and wonderful again. Taking place in a fantastical, almost Expressionist city filled with incomprehensible writing, bizarre architecture, and creatures that look like they evolved in a world where Jim Woodring’s Frank stories are the central creation myth, it powerfully conveys that traveling far from home, all alone, to a place you’ve never been before, where you know no one and don’t speak the language and aren’t even guaranteed a place to work or sleep, is extremely risky…but also worth the risk. I don’t think it had occurred to me how weighed down by cliche such narratives have become until I read The Arrival, but with each of Tan’s dreamlike or nightmarish twists on the pitfalls and miniature triumphs of his suit-wearing immigrant protagonist, I marveled anew both at his inventiveness, and at how effectively he burrows down through a million PBS documentaries to get to the core of emotion in each vignette.

Me being me, I was hit hardest by Tan’s depictions of the things that caused each character to flee his or her native country: representing persecution as faceless giants in hazmat suits, sucking people up with enormous vacuum cleaners; representing ruinous war as happy men in conical gnome hats happily marching out of a city, their feet crossing ever more harsh landscapes, giving way to a tableau of skeletal remains, and culminating in just one of the me, badly wounded, returning to a city that’s totally destroyed. But there’s cute business too, like our protagonist’s short, ill-fated stint putting up posters; and there’s genuine joy in seeing him slowly form the makings of a new community of friends with his neighbors and co-workers. Tan’s neo(magic)realist art is particularly good at the latter: He puts us in the place of the protagonist as his new friends directly address him, drawing us in with their gaze and gestures, as intimate as his massive splash pages and spreads are intimidating.

Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about what Tan does in The Arrival is that despite its provenance as a children’s book, he keeps the action on the knife’s edge, the danger of failure (or worse) radiating from our worried, harried hero at every turn. I really wondered whether things would work out for him or not. The effect is enveloping. I imagine this will make the eyeballs of little kids and parents who pick it up from the library melt out of their skulls, it’s so lush and lovely and fully conceived an act of visual worldbuilding. Well worth a read, a flip-through, and a read again.

* Sean on Dead Tree alert: I have a piece on Grant Morrison’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne in the new issue of Maxim, featuring a lovely young lady with brown hair whose name eludes me on the cover. It’s on page 34, I think. Woo!

* Speaking of Morrison, here he is being interviewed by Comics Alliance, io9, and MTV Splash Page, all on the topic of Batman. If I were the assistant principal at time-displaced Tom Spurgeon’s middle school I would make him copy all these by hand for detention. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* They are softening a bit about releasing a Nightbreed director’s cut on DVD. Just a bit, though. Apparently the names being collected by Barker’s official fan site are having some effect, so if you think you’d buy a copy and you haven’t done so already, please email them with an intelligently written message of support. It’ll help!

* Diamond and the comics retailers it distributes comics to are talking about moving new comics day to Tuesday, bringing it in line with music, movies, and books. How about just getting in step with every single other form of media and not shipping everything a day late when there was a holiday the week before? That is the romper room-est thing about this romper-room industry.

* Ed Brubaker’s writing another Captain America spinoff miniseries. Fine with me!

* Gene Philips has me ever-so-slightly reconsidering my position on Desmond from Lost.

* Oh man, Virgil Partch. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Yesterday I finished A Feast for Crows, the fourth and at this point latest book in George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, which is being adapted on HBO as A Game of Thrones. Holy shit, you guys, these books. Anyway, I decided to put aside the prospect of hunting down and reading the three prequel novella’s he’s written and just dive right into the Song of Ice and Fire sections of the internet. This means I finally got to read his story about Jaime Lannister, aka the Kingslayer, fighting Cthulhu. Good golly miss molly. WARNING: The Ice and Fire-verse characters in the story are situated in-continuity, so the story’s spoilery for all the way up through the third book in the series or so. That said, it’s also awesome.

* Thom Yorke covering “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division! This had me so excited that by the time the main keyboard melody kicked in I was laughing out loud. Had I been there I would have totally and completely misplaced my shit.

* Two big posts on Robot 6 from me today. First, it’s the new batch of MoCCA 2010 sketches in my David Bowie sketchbook!

* And here’s my MoCCA haul!

* Also on the MoCCA beat:

* Tom Spurgeon smacks around that superhero panel featuring Jaime Hernandez, Frank Miller, Dean Haspiel, Paul Pope, and Kyle Baker. I think there were a few problems here: First, you had a few different “one of these things is not like the other” panelists in there, depending on which direction you wanna go in; second of all that’s too many people on a panel for cartoonists of most of their magnitude, all of whom could have easily held down a panel on their own–poor Xaime couldn’t get a word in edgewise; and thirdly, I’d rather hear those particular cartoonists talk about anything but superheroes, and I really like superheroes!

* Rob Clough’s MoCCA con report is indeed as good as Tom says, comprehensive in scope and laser-focused in its observations and recommendations. The show can and should improve.

* Secret Acres was really unhappy with MoCCA this year. Leon and Barry voice a complaint I’ve also heard from a prominent retailer who attended the show: Individual artists have basically been priced out of tables entirely. That shouldn’t happen for all the obvious reasons, but after seeing all the empty space at this year’s show, it seems it also shouldn’t happen for revenue’s sake. The SA guys suggest a sliding scale for table rates, free admission, and a better system for awarding choice locations to earlier purchasers. Plus, they’ve placed an open call for minicomics submissions they can host at their own table next year.

* I’m flat-out amazed by the brutal drubbings Gareb Shamus’s Wizard World comic cons, specifically its Chicago show, are receiving in the local press on the eve of Reed’s rival C2E2 show this weekend — and Wizard’s own Anaheim Comic Con, debuting this weekend as well. I’ve said for a while now that given the stigma attached to Wizard within the industry (especially after the showdown with Reed began), Shamus’s strategy, to the extent one can be discerned, was to first to glom off the positive public awareness of the phrase “Comic Con” (taking a page from Reed’s playbook in fact), and then to take advantage of the credulity and ignorance of local and mainstream coverage of comics to land fluff pieces during all his shows. But it turns out that model couldn’t withstand the very first Wizard/Reed head-to-head match-up. There’s nothing so vapidly fluffy you can’t land it safely into the New York Times‘ comics coverage, so who knows, but that aside, this can’t augur well for the Big Apple/NYCC showdown this fall. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Back to Robot 6: This Mark Millar kerfuffle about Marvel ripping off his vampire mutant storyline is the funniest comics story in I don’t know how long. (Marc-Oliver Frisch has his number, methinks.)

* My pal TJ Dietsch’s account of being seduced by Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges, one of the first alternative comics he ever read, is fascinating to me. That’s really strong material and I’d imagine it could have this effect on a lot of people. Also, I’m glad to hear someone else say that the first issue is the least impressive of the three.

* Geoff Johns answers questions about Brightest Day, The Flash, and Green Lantern. I’m looking forward to it all.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost round-up makes me glad I stopped reading Alan Sepinwall’s coverage of the show a few years back when it became apparent he was waiting to not be entertained, and makes me nervous that something I really want to happen isn’t going to happen.

* Rest in peace, Peter Steele. I can’t pretend to have been a huge Type O Negative fan, but the deluxe edition of Bloody Kisses is really something special–gigantic songs drenched in doomed glamour and leavened with just enough tongue-in-cheek humor to let you know Pete and the gang were in on the joke. Just ask Trent Reznor, whose three tweets on Pete’s passing were exactly the kind of eulogy I was looking for. I mean, really–being a goth is funny! Steele got that, even as he got the power of all the sex’n’death’n’outcast stuff that made the lifestyle appealing in the first place. He knew it went hand in hand. That’s why I love “Christian Woman” so much: It’s a nine-minute, three-part epic about a religious woman masturbating to the crucified Jesus Christ on her wall, and they understand that this is both sad and pathetic and loathsome and touching and funny and angry and sexy and creepy all at once. I saw Type O at Ozzfest one year, and they were super-heavy and super-hilarious, ending the set with a joke as memorable as the songs. Godspeed doesn’t seem to be the right word to use, but oh well.

Here’s the missing line from yesterday’s Carnival of souls:

* I really appreciated Stuart Berman’s review of the newly remastered rereleases of Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, insofar as it saved me some ducats by explaining why it doesn’t really stack up against the infamous 1997 “this goes to 11” in-the-red remastering.

There you have it!

* Things are cookin’ in this week’s Lost thoughts discussion. Check it out!

* Frank Miller isn’t doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore. Rats!

* J.H. Williams III drawing and writing the new Batwoman ongoing series? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Tom Spurgeon laments the dawn of the $3.99 For Monthly Comics Age. Personally I thought the $2.99 price point was ridiculous, too. A 22-page sliver of a story with virtually zero re-read value on its own? No thanks. As I told Geoff Grogan at MoCCA, a choice between dropping four bones on some random Avengers issue or dropping it on something like Pood is no choice at all. I can’t even get into the spirit of buying stuff from Frank Santoro’s lonboxes, much as I tell myself I’ll give it a shot virtually every time I go to a show. I can’t get past “I’m not getting a whole thing, I’m just getting a part of a thing.”

* Peggy Burns presents maybe my favorite MoCCA photo parade ever. Funny from the very first joke.

* I’d forgotten to keep track since you can’t get a separate RSS feed for it, but Zak Smith’s I Hit It With My Axe is up to its fifth episode. Turns out it really is fun to watch a bunch of weirdo friends jackass around playing D&D in efficiently edited installments–having briefly spent time in such a group of weirdo friends jackassing around, albeit not an efficiently edited one, I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.

* New Kevin Huizenga comics!

* New John Hankiewicz sketches!

* New Afrodisiac t-shirt!

SPOILERS ON THE WAY SO LOOK OUT

* Now this is podracing!

* Alright, so what did we have in this episode. We had cameos from Michael and, extensively, from Libby. These are the kinds of cameos that I personally really love on this show–not Arzt or whoever, not even various Others types, but the characters who really mattered back in Seasons One and Two, before (I think) the game plan for the remainder of the series was fully firmed up. It’s important to me to feel like those characters and their plights matter as much in the world of the show as they mattered to me as a viewer, you know?

* And even beyond that, I was always awfully fond of Michael, whose downfall was one of the first signs we got, along perhaps with Locke’s devolution from Jungle Wolverine to neurotic button-pusher, that the show was willing to really sully its heroes, however temporarily.

* I also liked Libby. We’ve still got a few more feet of Libby mystery to dig through, of course–we have no idea why she was in the mental hospital in the “real” universe, or whether it was really just coincidence that she bumped into Desmond and gave him a boat. I always assumed she was one of Widmore’s agents, like Abbadon or perhaps Mrs. Hawking. But this gave us some cross-dimensional closure on her and Hurley’s truncated love affair, which was one of the show’s least convincing and therefore somehow most convincing romances. And Cynthia Watros, who should wear sundresses as often as possible, gave a bedraggled, barely-keeping-it-together performance that was touchingly optimistic despite it all. I really wanted things to work out for her here, you know? I’m glad they did, more or less.

* So what else did we have? We had Ilana blowing the fuck up! Hahahaha! I can’t believe they went to the “old dynamite from the Black Rock blowing someone the fuck up unexpectedly” well once again, and that it worked as well as it did. My jaw dropped like a cartoon character’s. Again, I assume we’ll get a little more detail on Ilana at some point, but Ben’s assessment seemed accurate: The Island was done with her. I still wonder if “the Island” is a separate entity, in terms of exerting influence on what happens, from Jacob and the Man in Black, but I take his point. Anyway, good, I wasn’t much of an Ilana fan, and I think giving her this kind of ending gives her more oomph than she otherwise had.

* We had a full-fledged, no messing around, seriously guys on the Internet we’re making this as clear as we possibly can ANSWER! The whispers are dead people stuck on the Island. So it turns out is really is purgatory, for some people at least. Let me know when Lostpedia is finished going through all the whispers’ appearances and figures out who was probably whispering in each one and why. This explanation works fine for me, if you were wondering, though I imagine “ghosts” will be unacceptable to the LOST IS SERIOUS BIZNESS crowd.

* We had Fake Locke tossing Desmond down a well! Hahahahaha! Poor guy. Somehow I think things will work out for him anyway. I know this wasn’t the same well Locke went down couple seasons ago, but given all the tunnels and passageways under the Island, I wonder if Desmond can turn the donkey wheel without being teleported?

* We had Ultimate Richard/Ben/Miles team-up! Can’t wait for the walking-through-the-jungle banter that combo will serve up.

* Crap, I feel like I’m missing some more stuff I was really excited about! Dammit.

* No bad guy in Hurley’s flashsideways, did you notice? Unless you count Chang/Candle/Halliwax.

* Jack’s resignation of the presidency went down a little more smoothly than I’d worried it would with me. I don’t wanna see him turn into the happy wanderer, that’s my concern about a Jack who can let go, but I’m glad they’re directly addressing that failure has consequences, and his change of behavior makes sense.

* The owner of a fried chicken fast-food chain sponsoring the humane society? Yeah, right.

* Desmond’s a GQMF in addition to being a timecop. It was fun watching him traipse around the flashsideways, all blithely bringing people to consciousness and shit–but it was even more fun watching that get flipped on its head when he ran over a man in a wheelchair. He’s being positively Jacobian in his serene weirdness in both worlds.

* Haha, I take a contrarian’s pleasure in watching Desmond a) get tossed down a well, and b) run over a cripple.

* Dr. Linus on perv patrol. Love it.

* I found the swagger of Fake Locke and the silence of Dark Sayid good and sinister in this episode. I particularly like how Sayid’s now all but an extension of Fake Locke, answering only to him, even speaking only to him.

* Basically, what I want to communicate is that a lot happened in this episode! It was all over the place, fast and furious, and at nearly every pre-commercial cliffhanger, since I was watching it via TiVo and fastforwarding through the commercials, I worried that was the end of the show, since they’d packed so much in. They even added an “extra” flashsideways segment, if you will. Last week I expressed skepticism that the Desmond episode meant we’d arrived at the “okay, it’s on now” segment of the season, but I stand corrected, apparently! Edge of your seat stuff.

* The Diary of a Teenage Girl: The Play is extending its run through May 1st. If you live in or near the city you should see it.

* Brian Chippendale on Captain America and the teabaggers. ‘Nuff said, to coin a phrase.

* My buddy Rickey Purdin went to MoCCA and all he got was like a million comics.

* Tom Spurgeon on Todd Hignite & Jordan Crane on Jaime Hernandez.

* Gorgeous retro-paperback comic cover designs from Fonografiks.

* I love that A Game of Thrones has a “language creator” on staff.

* Oh yeah, had I not mentioned Spinoff Online?

* Lost tonight! Give last week’s Lost thoughts one more once-over, then come by later for this week’s discussion!

* My MoCCA report is up at Robot 6. I’d gotten really excited for this show for no discernible reason–it was quite aside from selling my own comics there, honestly–and though I know others might have had different expectations and results, I personally was not disappointed. I had a lovely time.

* Frank Santoro found the show nice, nice, not thrilling, but nice.

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan broke it down in terms of the CCS style vs. Fort Thunder, with extra observations on the Scandinavians and the “new action”eers. (Isaac, “the New Action” was a Bill Kartalopoulos coinage.)

* My chum TJ Dietsch approaches the show from the valuable perspective of a genre-comics reader using the festival as an excuse to dip his toes into the wilder and woolier material.

* Tom Spurgeon had a good post rounding up reaction from afar.

* Strange Tales 2 is a go! Hornschemeier, Gurewitch, Brown, Cloonan, Kupperman, Santoro, presumably many more, all of whom I will likely interview.

* Marvel has dropped Diamond as its book market distributor and signed up with Hachette instead. Another large publisher’s move to a bona-fide book distributor was described to me by someone who would know as akin to “backing the money truck up to the doors and dumping piles of cash in,” so I’d imagine this will do good things for Marvel’s heretofore anemic bookstore sales. Spurge has analysis. Because I am an asshole, I would also like to take this opportunity to say “toldja.”

* Heidi Mac scanned the promo for Charles Burns’s upcoming book X’ed Out. How do you follow up a beast of a book like Black Hole?

* Read Soldier X online for free! Seriously, do it.

* They’ve enlisted the Predators reboot writers to write a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe screenplay. (Via Jason Adams.) My fellow He-Fan Rob Bricken has further thoughts. There’s no way a live-action He-Man movie captures the wonder of He-Man unless They go back in time and have the Wachowski Brothers do it instead of Speed Racer.

* Paul Cornell, author of the late, lamented Captain Britain and MI-13, will be writing Action Comics. He takes over from Marc Guggenheim, whose run on the Superman title is exactly zero issues long.

* Eve Tushnet on The Lost Boys. That was my first R-rated movie too! Holds up. “I’ll pray…I never need to call you.”

* Whoa, Marc-Oliver Frisch makes this Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange comic sound pretty good. Frazer Irving!

* Real Life Horror: Connecticut’s Roman Catholic bishops want to cover up child rape and they need your help!

* The life lesson I learned during the one (awesome) campaign of D&D I played years ago? Never trust a Mind Flayer.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat is now Attentiondeficitdisorderly. I figured I’d make it easier for the publishers of the world to use quotes from my reviews as back-cover blurbs–“Attentiondeficitdisorderly” has a nice pithy ring to it, while “Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat” sounds like something someone would say during an Ambien hallucination.

Coverage of Lost, Tom Neely, and Clive Barker will continue as scheduled. Thank you!

Visit the Partyka table at MoCCA tomorrow–underneath the big clock on the back wall opposite the entrance, right across the table from Sparkplug–for not one, not two, but THREE Sean T. Collins minicomics:

SURPRISE ADDITION! HOT OFF THE PRESS! It’s CAGE VARIATIONS VOL. 1, three interlocking tales of unspeakable depravity and unshakeable despair, featuring the art of Matt Rota!

This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll, this is THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THE COCAINE–it’s David Bowie drug abuse, occult imagery, and Nazi dilettantism as you like it, featuring the art of Isaac Moylan!

And of course the classic MURDER, an anthology of space-age adventure, suburban ennui, and serial killing featuring the art of Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, and Josiah Leighton!

Supplies are super-duper limited, so act fast!

Looks like I will have not one but two new minis at MoCCA. Look for a surprise on Saturday afternoon!

* Secret Acres has a blog! At the link you’ll find their plans for MoCCA and the whole rest of the year. (Via Theo Ellsworth.)

* Isaac Moylan has a blog! At the link you’ll find a page from his strange, NSFW superhero-ish comic.

* I’ll tell you what: If this weren’t MoCCA weekend, I’d be sorely tempted to hoof it northward for the Boston Comic Con. Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Michael Golden, Mike Mignola, Eric Powell, Joe Quinones, Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Starlin, Cameron Stewart, Ben Templesmith, and J.H. Williams III could put a real hurting on my Bowie sketchbook.

* I forgot all about the Thirty Days Gallery curated by the Family Bookstore of Sammy Harkham fame. Maybe I’ll check it out this weekend. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are performing there tomorrow!

* Tom Spurgeon has updated his post on the 2010 Eisner nominees with his thoughts on them. Since it perhaps behooves me to elaborate on what I thought rather than chiming in with a douchey one-liner, I’ll say this: You probably don’t need me to tell you how frustrating I find the year-to-year prominence of adequate-to-good front-of-Previews titles versus the actual best comics of the year. That’s the same complaint everyone has about every award show every year–well, the Oscars at least, and the Emmys to an extent; no one’s cared about the Grammys since at least as long ago as Metallica and Guns n’ Roses lost to Jethro Tull.

But I think what’s uniquely flummoxing about this year’s nominees is that it’s pretty easy for all of us to put together a list of Eisner-bait DC/Marvel/Dark Horse books from the year that was, based on the typical Eisner nomination pattern. A few squeaked in there–J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart got individual nods for their Detective Comics stuff, there’s the usual slew of Vertigo books and big-name artists who mostly do covers rather than interiors, The Walking Dead made it in there, Ed Brubaker appears to have joined the “what he does gets nominated” pantheon, etc. But so many of the obvious “Eisner books”–and regardless of their actual merits I think Batman and Robin, Wednesday Comics, Ex Machina, Strange Tales, Invincible Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror are very much “Eisner books”–were passed over in favor of comics regarded as junk even by junk fans, or as popcorn fare at best. It sort of rips the band-aid off of how arbitrary the process is even at the best of times, how non-rigorous the standards being applied are.

Here are some of the books I used for research for the David Bowie bio-comic I did with Isaac Moylan. It’ll be on sale tomorrow at MoCCA at the Partyka table–cheap!

—

Blake, Mark et al, eds. Mojo: David Bowie Special Edition. London: EMAP, 2003.

Bowie, David. Station to Station. EMI, 1976, remastered 1999. Compact disc.

____________. Young Americans. EMI, 1975, remastered 1999. Compact disc.

Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin, 1999.

Crowe, Cameron. “Bowie to Tour: ‘No Gimmickry.'” In Rolling Stone, January 15th, 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

______________. “David Bowie: A candid conversation with the actor, rock singer and sexual switch-hitter.” In Playboy, September 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

______________. “David Bowie: Ground Control to Davy Jones.” In Rolling Stone, February 12th, 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

Hoskyns, Barney. Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution. New York: Pocket, 1998.

Paytress, Mark and Steve Pafford. Bowiestyle. London: Ominubs, 2000.

Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2000.

Rock, Mick. Blood and Glitter. London: Vision On, 2001.

Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. London: Little Brown, 1996.

Welch, Chris. We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song 1970-1980. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1999.

Spider-Man: Fever #1

Brendan McCarthy, writer/artist

Marvel, April 2009

21 story pages

$2.99

(UPDATE: Now with fewer hideous mixed metaphors)

I went into Spider-Man: Fever with absolutely no brief with Brendan McCarthy, not even his Solo issue a few years back. All I knew is I liked the looks of the preview images floating around the Internet–I mean, I would–and wanted to see more. See more I did: McCarthy’s scribbled psychedelia, powerfully augmented by his and Steve Cook’s woozy glowy neon colors is a thing of gooey beauty. He’s even calling the style “glo-fi,” much to my delight!

Would that the surrounding comic were equally delightful, but it’s a pretty perfunctory rehash of Bronze Age rehashes of Silver Age storytelling. An avalanche of knowingly stiff dialogue, which turns out to be as numbing as the unknowing variety, crushes whatever action hasn’t already been flattened by the surprisingly inert physicality McCarthy cooks up for Steve Ditko mainstays Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. (Nice-looking Vulture, though.) There’s even some embarrassingly cringeworthy African-American dialect, for that true late-’70s feel. I’m as happy as anyone to have a Spider-Man comic featuring a mystical poetry-reciting dog-god named Pugly, but when it comes to reading the thing instead of just looking at it, turns out I oughtn’t have gone beyond those preview images for the glo-fi thrill I wanted.

(Interview link via Jog.)

* Happy 20th Birthday, Twin Peaks.

* Best of luck to Malcolm McLaren as he joins the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle in the Sky.

* Congratulations to this year’s Eisner nominees, apparently selected by pulling names out of a hat. (No offense to the worthy ones–you know who they are.)

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Tom Neely’s Vegan Police t-shirt;

* Siobhan Magnus’s Edward Gorey tattoo;

* and Ty Mattson’s Lost posters.

* More new Dave Kiersh!

* I always look forward to visiting the PictureBox table at MoCCA.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost follow-up keeps things relatively meaty this week, most notably with a fans-vs.-creators concept.

Isaac Moylan and I will be selling copies of our David Bowie bio-comic The Side Effects of the Cocaine at the Partyka table at this weekend’s MoCCA Festival. And I will generally be prowling around, Bowie sketchbook in tow. If you see me, please say hello!

* Calling all Lost commenters: This week’s thread is right here. Sorry for the mental hiccup!

* Congratulations to Matt Maxwell, Gervasio, and Jok on the completion of Strangeways: The Thirsty. This comic was a pleasure to read.

* Matt’s almost always worth reading when he’s writing about comics-related issues at length, and over the past day or so he’s served up a couple of doozies. First, here he is on comics and the iPad. Among many other things he, like many other folks I’ve read, take Joe Quesada to task over his claim that the increased accessibility of digital comics via Marvel’s iPad app will drive more people to comic stores. To me it’s pretty clear that Quesada’s saying this because he has to in order to placate his understandably nervous retailers. Direct Market retailers are vital to comics, don’t get me wrong, and I want them to weather the storm. But with the exceptions we all know and love, they are a reactionary group at the best of times, and I’m sure this vocal constituency has equally strong advocates within Marvel. They have to be the only thing that’s kept Marvel and the rest of the comics companies from jumping into the digital world with the same totality as, say, music companies and iTunes. He’s gotta make the right noises.

* And here’s Matt on Greg Rucka’s departure from DC and Batwoman. I’m positive Rucka’s being honest when he says he’s fired up and ready to go vis a vis getting back into creator-owned work again, and that’s awesome. But as Matt puts it:

Looking at this, it’s clear that Batwoman was his baby (if you’ll pardon the double entendre) and for him to simply walk away, drama or no drama, is not a small deal (even if [he’s] insisting that it’s not a big one).

*Anyway, over at Comics Alliance you can read the entire transcript of Rucka’s WonderCon panel, where this bomb was dropped, to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

* My Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson is all over all the MoCCA announcements and debuts and panels and parties and whatnot. Just click the MoCCA tag and keep scrolling. In terms of stuff that’s caught mine eye, Fantagraphics is packing in a lot of guests and new books.

* Speaking of conventions, it seems pretty clear that the plan behind Wizard’s relentless con expansion is to piggyback off the goodwill and audience interest generated by larger, better comic cons (the rebranding from “Wizard World” to “Comic Con” wasn’t a coincidence), and then to piggyback again off the press generated by those shows among reporters who don’t know any better (this LA Times article being a case in point), all through a series of local con-promoter proxies at minimal cost to Wizard proper. You, dedicated comics fans, are not the target, unless you’re in a market that doesn’t have recourse to those other shows, in which case the hope is that you’ll grin and bear it.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Mike Mignola about the next two Hellboy stories, The Storm and The Fury, which will apparently be to Hellboy what King of Fear is to the B.P.R.D.

* Dan Nadel’s Art in Time is out! Yay!

* Tom Brevoort’s X-Men preferences strike me as eminently reasonable.

* Real-Life Horror: We murdered Iraqis and reporters and Rob Humanick picking up the “Links for the Day” torch that The House Next Door appears to have permanently and regrettably dropped.

* Speaking of THND, founder emeritus Matt Zoller Seitz serves up another of his trademark video essays, this one a 25-minute pondering of Dennis Hopper. Click the link for Seitz’s introduction, then take a little time to watch the video. What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say–he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bull-SHIT, man!

* Your quote of the day:

We are born into structures of law and tradition which were invented by men who were dead long before we were born. All our lives, we struggle against their vast, ubiquitous and posthumous powers.

—Zak Smith, Playing D&D with Porn Stars

* Your entire post of the day: “Proud of Being Ignorant” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I am linking to that post as hard as I possibly can.

SPOILER WARNING

* I like Desmond; I’ve never loved Desmond. Despite a consistently warm and compelling performance from Henry Ian Cusick, one of the seemingly countless casting coups that I think really saved the show’s bacon once things started getting truly baroque, Desmond’s the kind of character I’d call “Internet-beloved” and mean it as a sneer, I’m afraid. He strikes me as what people who hate Jack wanted Jack to be: A hero. Desmond will never let anyone down, which is what makes him much less interesting to me than Jack. I’m glad he’s in love, but that doesn’t really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with umpteen million star-crossed couples; I’m glad he can time-travel and dimension-shift with greater ease than the rest of the cast, but that also doesn’t really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with smoke monsters and psychic children and immortals and people who see dead people. I liked Desmond best in Season Two, when he was the crazy Scotsman in the Hatch injecting himself with drugs, listening to Mama Cass, and trying and failing to escape the Island where he’d lived a hallucinatory hermetic life as the only thing keeping the world from ending.

* So I don’t dread Desmond episodes; I dread the aftermath of Desmond episodes. I’m just not fully on board with the rapturous reception all his episodes get–at least two of them are usually held up as potential “Best. Episode. EVER”s, and I’m not feeling it. My quick, dismissive post last night was just an attempt to dodge the deluge of “OMG!!!!”s I knew was coming; I couldn’t even close my computer down fast enough to avoid a few, and Todd VanDerWerff’s review is probably the apotheosis of the form: “If you did not like “Happily Ever After,” then I’m pretty sure we can’t be Internet friends anymore.” Rats!

* But, you know, I did like the episode. It was fine. In the immortal words of History of the World Part I: “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.”

* Aside from my general lack of “DESMOND FTW” vibes, my biggest problem with it–and this is what I was getting at with that one-line post–is that it’s pretty much exactly what I expected. Veteran time-jumper Desmond is the first to figure out that the flashsideways timeline is a bogus existence created by (according to Daniel) the detonation of the nuclear bomb by the Dharma Bums, and now he’s going to try to persuade the castaways to abandon their new, fake lives for the old one. Like, duh, right?

* Admittedly, that first moment when Charlie opens his eyes underwater and smilingly puts his hand on the glass sent a little shockwave for me. It’s one of the show’s most memorable images. But of course, it’s an image from another, earlier episode. Whatever revelatory juice we were supposed to get from the discovery that these aren’t the lives the characters are supposed to be leading was undercut, for me at least, by the fact that that was my assumption from the jump.

* So, unlike the “I want ANSWERS” crowd VanDerWerff rightly rails against in his review, I was perfectly satisfied with the volume of answers we got in this episode. It seemed like a lot to me. Moreover, anytime Lost does one of its big super-science experiments–like throwing some switches and forcing Desmond to quantum leap through the stargate in arguably the cheesiest effects sequence the show’s done so far–I feel like I am getting an “answer” even if you end up just having to shrug your shoulders and roll with pseudoscientificity of it all.

* I also had no beef with spending all that time in the flashsideways universe rather than on the Island. Like I always say, I like these characters, and since the core of who they all are has remained consistent from the main universe to the new one, I never feel, as apparently many people do, that these flashsideways sequences are a waste of time we could be spending on the “real” characters and the answers they seek. These are the real characters too, as far as I’m concerned.

* Specifically, I was thrilled to see Desmond receive not just the approval, but the friendship, of Charles Widmore. I’m a sucker for when grown men are kind and cooperative to each other in fiction, it really hits my buttons, and seeing them smile at each other and warmly hug, their real-reality animosity vaporized, was a treat.

* So too was the part when he got really angry at Desmond for losing Charlie: I thought we were gonna see the old, awful Widmore come out, but his ultimate punishment was just making Desmond tell his wife himself. Chuckle!

* I also really enjoyed the return of Charlie Pace. Is it just me, or has Dominic Monaghan grown as an actor considerably since the start of the show? I find him really convincingly dissolute and puckish; if he were older I could see him going toe to toe with the reigning Manchester junkie-rockstar champ Shaun Ryder. (PS: “You All Everybody” needs to be transported back to about 1994 and released as a single.) It warms the cockles of my heart to see a drugged-up rock star break on through to the other side for real, you know?

* I also got a big kick out of the return of George Minkowski. Poor Fisher Stevens: Everyone was so excited to see him join the cast, but he stuck around for all of an episode before biting it. (Zoe Bell too!) He was so unctuous here he made me uncomfortable through the television screen. Well done!

* Some guy on Twitter spoiled the return of Daniel Faraday for me, so I was kind of left flat by that. (If you’re wondering how any of these return appearances could surprise me to begin with given that they’re all in the opening credits, I cover up the lower third of the screen until the “Guest Starring” section is finished in order to avoid getting spoiled by the show’s own credits.) I mean, I like Jeremy Davies fine in that role, and I liked seeing how he accessed those same mannerisms through the filter of a brilliant musician who’s basically happy rather than a brilliant scientist who’s basically miserable. I just wasn’t bowled over by it, is all.

* Eloise is always fun, isn’t she? A Harry Potter harridan. Perhaps the one aspect of this episode’s mythology advancement that did take me by surprise was that she’s apparently a timecop in this reality as well. I thought the show was clever to present her as this intimidating but ultimately kind lady, only to flip a switch the second she hears Desmond nosing around about something that might trigger his memories of the original reality–boom! out comes the hardass.

* Finally, just because I’m not head-over-heels for Desmond doesn’t mean I wasn’t glad that he managed to score a date with Penny despite an entire reality built on the premise that they’d never met. If I were Penny I would have been blowing my rape whistle and spraying him with mace the whole time, but whatever, good for those two crazy kids.

* So yeah, like VanDerWerff and unlike the ANSWERS!!!!1!! crowd, I had no problem with the flashsideways reality dominating the show, and enjoyed a lot of it. It’s just that at long last, this was a case of the show zigging exactly where I expected it to zig, zagging where I expected it to zag. It’s a bummer is all.

* Over on the Island: This is kind of picayune, but I think casting that dimpy dude from cereal commercials or whatever as one of Widmore’s scientists was the first big casting mistake I can remember the show making in a long time. I’m just not scared of or impressed by a guy who looks like a chipmunk. Casting Debbie from Singles as Dark Tina Fey is fine, though.

* After all these years, Sayid actually is a badass! Sure, it took the Lost equivalent of demonic possession for him to successfully infiltrate anything other than Shannon’s vagina, but give the guy a hand.

* A friend of mine was all psyched up after the episode, saying that it was the show declaring “Alright, it’s on”–but I don’t see it, certainly not any moreso than all the episodes where Jacob or Fake Locke revealed their motives and goals. I mean, Desmond has his quantum leap and returns all beatific and doo; over in the flashsideways timeline it’s pretty clear what he’s up to, but on the Island? First he’s joining the Get-Along Gang with Widmore, then he’s just as pleased to wander off with Sayid after Sayid ices the two Widmorians and (in what I assume was a pretty bad move, aka classic Sayid) lets Zoe run away. That’s intriguing, certainly, but it’s far from “a-ha! Now we know what the endgame will be.”

* So there you have it. My little one-liner was more a response to the response to the episode than to the episode itself, which I liked fine. I’m sorry about that; that’s lame behavior and it’s not the kind of thing I’m glad to have done. But like I always say, I’m always trying to find a way to approach the art I like that maximizes my enjoyment, and kicking against the pricks late last night wasn’t that way. Turns out gettin’ a good night’s sleep and then writing about the episode this morning was, so thank you for your patience!