It’s been a while, hasn’t it? And that’s probably telling. I watched the pilot a little before it aired, on DVD. I waited a couple weeks before watching the next two episodes back to back, on TiVo. Then I waited until last night to watch the next three episodes in a row as well. Now, Caprica isn’t a show the Missus has any interest in, so watching it live isn’t an option, in all fairness. But the same could have been said of Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos, and in those cases I’d just wait until she went to bed–nothing could stop me from watching new episodes the night they first aired. Part of that was fear of getting spoiled the next day, which I’m not as concerned about regarding Caprica, since no one I know seems to be talking about. (That’s probably telling, too.) But mainly, I’m just in no hurry to watch the show. Last night’s three-episode marathon felt almost like homework.

Why? Jim Henley was close, but not quite there, when he talked about how unlikeable the characters are. I can get around that–where would The Sopranos have been without unpleasant people? What I have a harder time with are characters who are unexciting. It occurred to me sometime last night that Caprica has no Starbuck, no Baltar, no Bill Adama (well, you know what I mean), no Colonel Tigh, no Six, no President Roslin, no Apollo…no one whose continuing adventures I’d be excited to see, regardless of their level of bastardry. No one whose smiles or rages intrigue me, no one who makes me laugh, no one who makes me cheer, no one who makes me shudder. Instead it has a lot of people in expensive clothes, hiding how they really feel all the time, until it finally comes out in some big scene of melodrama, which ultimately feels just as contrived as their buttoned-up anal retentiveness elsewhere.

It’s just very difficult to get invested in Daniel and Elizabeth Graystone’s troubled marriage when we’ve never seen what would make either of them worth sticking around with. It’s difficult to feel for Joseph Adama’s plight as a man torn between two cultures when we haven’t seen what he’d really contribute to either. It’s tough to really get into the semi-villains like Sam Adama and Sister Clarice when the only thing that elevates them from cliche is an equally contrived tweak of conventional mores–look, the gangster is GAY!/look, the religious zealot is a SWINGER! Sasha Roiz’s Sam is probably my favorite performance on the show–he wears those clothes gorgeously, his eyes are intelligent, he comes across as the most at home in the show’s ersatz Coppola tones–but he’s still hampered by the rote construction of the character. Sister Clarice I’d be happy to never see again. James Marsten’s Barnabas is even more dire.

I’m also increasingly convinced that starting the show with the death of children was a big mistake. Where can you go from there, tonally? The answer, as it turns out, is pretty much nowhere–it’s just been a dour, sour show ever since. I can’t remember laughing a single time, or being on the edge of my seat. I think the one episode that managed to buck this somewhat was the fifth, “There Is Another Sky.” Between Graystone finally pitching the Cylon to his board of directors as the ultimate pet/slave, setting up the technological revolution that we viewers know will eventually lead to the destruction of civilization, and the lost avatar of Tamara Adams discovering she’s all but indestructible in the virutal world within which she’s trapped, we finally had genuine thrills–moments that weren’t mired in the inability of a bunch of jerks to properly process their grief. I mean, it wasn’t perfect–the Tamara stuff felt really Matrix-y and dated, while a third storyline involving the cultural customs of the Taurans left me scratching my head as to how almost all of the interplanetary differentiation and strife present here disappeared in time for Battlestar. (I assume the First Cylon War served as a great unifier, but it’s still weird that Bill Adama never talked about this stuff when it we’re being told it’s such a formative element of his young adulthood.) But it was something. In a weird way, it was where the series probably should have begun. Last night’s episode was a step backwards, unfortunately. I hope they can get things moving again.

* Behold: The Secret Origin of Destructor.

* New York Noise is a terrific music show that airs on New York City’s public television station NYC TV, focusing on local bands, local labels, local video directors, and formerly local members of all three categories. The list of artists I love that I first discovered through this show is really just outrageously long, but the best example I can think of is when, in the course of back-to-back videos, I heard the music of Klaus Nomi and Antony & the Johnsons for the very first time. My wife and I sat there like someone had just detonated an atom bomb in our heads. Seriously, New York Noise has been a vital lifeline to the city’s musical bounty for me for years. Unfortunately, the channel has suspended production of the show. Please sign this petition, join this Facebook group, and email Mayor Bloomberg about it. I’ve done all three and hope you will too. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Lost links: Some intriguing catches in Whitney Matheson’s weekly “best of the Lost comments” post, and here’s a working link for Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly follow-up post (thanks, Jesse M.).

* Stuart Immonen draws a mean Ben Grimm.

* Don’t know how I missed this when it first appeared, but I enjoyed Ted Naifeh’s Gary Numan and David Bowie-influenced Batman sketchbook.

* One of my favorite bloggers, Jon Hastings lists his top 20 films of 2009.

* Real-Life Horror #1: The Obama Administration is reportedly considering trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military tribunal rather than a civilian court after all. Land of the free, home of the brave.

* Real-Life Horror #2: Matthew Yglesias ponders the differing reactions to those who murder while Muslim versus those who don’t.

* Your quote of the day comes from Mike Barthel:

If our indie bands are going to be pretentious and juvenile, why must they be either tweely earnest or blue-collarly retro?  Why can’t they instead evoke that particular feeling of driving mournfully around the suburbs at night in between rewatching The Crow?

Amen!

* Recently on Robot 6: Sweet Batman & Robin art from Cameron Stewart and Andy Clarke, Hope Larson on Mercury (via Kiel Phegley), and Eliza Dushku departs from Wizard Worlds Anaheim and Toronto.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s comment-based Lost follow-up reveals that fannish tensions are running high right now, something I wasn’t aware of at all.

* I’m filing this Tom Spurgeon review of Daniel Clowes’s Wilson away for later use.

* The character of the week at We Are The LAW is Orko! I never hated him. Here’s Rob Bricken doing him 8-bit-style, while TJ Dietsch’s version made me laugh out loud.

* Wowsers, this SOTA Toys statue of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon is pretty terrific. Also eldritch, tenebrous, cyclopean, etc.

* Renee French is creepy: part 3,892 in a continuing series.

* Well, how about this: The Strange Tales hardcover comes out today, and with it come the release of my final three Strange Tales Spotlight interviews for Marvel.com: Nick Gurewitch, Brian Maruca, and James Kochalka. That first one’s even a bit newsy: There are more Perry Bible Fellowship comics and more Marvel-Gurewitch collaborations in the offing. But for me, these three interviews represent the last leg of my literally years-long involvement with the project, which has now seen me interview all thirty creators involved with the book. What a pleasure!

* Christopher Handley’s attorney Eric Chase explains the nebulous legal Calvinball that led him to plead Handley out in his comics-related obscenity case. Turns it the “I know it when I see it” standard makes cases like these difficult to defend, which Chase feels is precisely the most dangerous effect of that standard. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Recently I saw people linking to some dopey-sounding essay about Why Don’t Jews Write Fantasy; Spencer Ackerman responds to this call for a Jewish C.S. Lewis and a Jewish Narnia by pointing out the existence of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the Marvel Universe. That’s pretty brilliant. I mean, I know everyone talks about how superheroes are by and large the creation of American Jews, but locating them in the fantasy tradition that way, as a unique alternative to the epic fantasy of Tolkien or the allegorical fantasy of Lewis or the sword and sorcery of Howard and so on, strikes me as very smart. I know there are better-educated consumers of fantasy reading this blog–perhaps you’d care to chime in on this in the comments.

* I’m as excited as Sparkplug is to see John Hankiewicz’s Asthma placing so highly in a pair of recent Top 100 Comics of the ’00s lists. That is a major, major work, woefully underdiscussed.

* Cameron Stewart is posting black and white pages from Batman & Robin #9, and they’re striking. Those blacks are really powerful and multidimensional.

* Josh Cotter has started up his annual experimental-comics project March Hare. Guy’s good.

* The quote of the day is from Zak Smith: “The main points of the game are: hanging out with your friends, inventing strange things, and problem-solving–all of which are maturity-scalable activities.”

* Congratulations to the same-sex couples of Washington, DC, who could get married starting today.

* I feel like Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost post is a little off this time around. I don’t know that waxing philosophical about how the Allies did terrible things in World War II too is a particularly illuminating point of comparison here, you know? VanDerWerff also tries to shunt the “good vs. evil” debate into the “destiny vs. free will” one, but given who he feels represents each side, that sure is stacking the deck; he then takes the “destiny vs. free will” thing and pins it to a particular line in the first episode of this season in a fashion that strikes me as out-and-out Doc Jensen-y. But hey, if Lost has taught us anything, it’s that everyone has an off week.

* On that note, swing by this week’s Lost comment thread if you haven’t already. The joint is jumpin’!

SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT

* And Sayid gets beaten again! Has he ever won a fight? Was there a touch football game with Walt in the early days he managed to come out on top of or something?

* Dogen and Lennon, we hardly knew ye.

* I’m gonna go ahead and attribute Sayid’s dirty deeds in this episode to the aforementioned “darkness growing inside him.” Sayid is someone who’s done a lot of terrible things, though mostly during his offscreen years with the Republican Guard, but he was obviously extraordinarily repentant about that. Moreover, until tonight I really hadn’t seen him do anything unforgivable on the show itself. (I’d have shot Young Ben too. Baby Hitler, if they ever invent time travel, I’m coming for you, asshole.) The point is that the show has never framed Sayid as a bad person deep down–they’ve framed it that he thinks this is the case, but they’re always showing us evidence to the contrary. So it’s a big leap for him to suddenly be walking around smirking about murder, something he’d never ever done before no matter who he was in the process of killing–hitmen, golfers, Others, future archvillains, you name it.

* But Sayid’s corruption makes me wonder what the heck Richard was talking about last season when he warned Sawyer and whoever else that if he took Ben to be healed in the Temple, he’d never be the same. Obviously there’s some other kind of process at work with Sayid than whatever saved Ben, since Ben is clearly not in thrall to the MIB the way Sayid is (or the way crazy Claire is). What we’re seeing from Sayid is more similar to the cold evil of Rousseau’s teammates when she was in that kill-or-be-killed situation with them long ago.

* I’m also wondering how separate the Others community seemingly overseen by Dogen at the Temple was from the Others community ostensibly run by Ben and Richard at the old Dharma Village. Based on tonight’s evidence, the Temple Others really were servants of Jacob, doing his will and often being quite shady in the process. But they still seem miles away from the neck-snapping, boat-detonating, Walt-kidnapping, Sawyer-shooting, Charlie-hanging, Juliet-branding, Michael-blackmailing, Charlie-drowning antics of Ben, Tom, Ethan, Goodwin, Miss Klugh, Mikhail, Pickett, and the rest of that crew. Was Jacob down with all that? We’ve gotten the impression that the MIB was, I dunno, impersonating Jacob in that cabin for quite some time–was Ben getting orders from the wrong guy without knowing it, or was he getting orders from Jacob but twisting and perverting them, or is Jacob just as much of a creep as the MIB?

* I suppose it’s also worth pointing out that Ben didn’t seem to make the connection between the smoke monster and Jacob’s arch-enemy back when the monster became Alex and talked to him. It seems like he’d thought of the Monster as “The Island” in some way, up until the moment Fake Locke transformed into the Monster, killed those dudes in the base of the statue, then transformed back and admitted they were one and the same. So obviously Ben was in the dark about what was really going on for a long time.

* Come to think of it, Ben’s dead mother appearing to him was the first step of his life of crime, right? So MIB’d been monkeying with him for a very long time.

* Anyway, back to the episode itself:

* I can’t be the only person who kind of enjoyed watching the smoke monster wreck shop in the Temple, right? First of all, killing Others is always fun, and the more the merrier. Secondly, I was kind of disappointed in the Temple as a set. The use of an outright namedrop from the mouth of Hurley is not enough to offset how syndicated-ripoff-of-Indiana-Jones it felt. Compare and contrast with the wondrous ’70s EPCOT specificity of the Hatch–the Temple comes off generic and unimaginative. I don’t mind leaving it behind. But mostly, yeah, kill those Others!

* Crazy Claire isn’t just crazy and/or evil, she’s also obnoxious. That’s not a bad choice for that role.

* There aren’t a ton of characters who could sustain a whole episode of Lost without any Sawyer or Jack material in it. Sayid’s one of a very few.

* Nadia’s pretty.

* I was pulling hard for Eko or Jin being related to Sayid’s brother’s money mess, and thus was about 50% disappointed. But Keamy was a nice surprise! What a creepy, unpleasant man. Kevin Durand, yet another example of the show’s nigh-flawless villain casting. Great to see him back. And I’d forgotten until I hit Lostpedia just now to look up Durand’s name that his underling, Omar, was his underling in Widmore’s mercenary crew, too.

* No Other in Sayid’s flashsideways, though. I suppose Keamy fulfills that role in a sense. Or perhaps there’s some narrative significance to Others appearing with Jack, Locke, Kate, and Claire, but not Sayid…

* So how did Jin go from being held up in customs to Keamy’s freezer? Does the presence of Keamy mean that my long hoped-for connection between Jin and Eko in L.A. won’t happen? Does it mean that Widmore is involved as well?

* I’m wondering what the hell Sawyer and Jin were sitting around talking about while Fake Locke and Claire destroyed the Temple. Perhaps Jin was able to convince Sawyer that if crazy Claire thinks following Fake Locke is a good idea, it’s probably a bad idea.

* Recently on Robot 6: Lots of Avengers news, to match lots of Avengers news elsewhere. That is a lot of Avengers product. If I were Tom Spurgeon I’d now deliver a funny “whodathunkit” gag about the Avengers and Green Lantern being the biggest franchises in comics.

* Rob Bricken hoists plagiarist Nick Simmons with his own petard. If you read any single post about this whole debacle, make it that one. But if you want, you can throw in Tom Spurgeon’s depressing analysis of the moral relativism of many young artists and fans commenting on the matter.

* Oh God! Oh Christ! Oh Jesus Christ! A Muppet Wicker Man! The ending, as you’d expect, is a killer.

* I always enjoy Chris Butcher’s Previews liveblogging: Part One and Part Two, for your pleasure.

* HBO has officially greenlit A Game of Thrones Season One. I’m looking forward to it, even though I don’t have HBO.

* Just a reminder: I typically have my weekly Lost thoughts post up by, oh, 11:30pm Eastern time at the absolute latest, frequently way before then. (I tend to watch it starting at 10 rather than 9, hence the delay.) I’ve really enjoyed the comment-thread discussions lately, and the more the merrier.

Naoki Urasawa’s Monster Vols. 4-5

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Viz, 2006

200+ pages each

$9.99 each

Buy them from Amazon.com

By now it’s clear that that sore-thumb final chapter of Volume Two, where Tenma briefly brings sunshine into the life of a mercenary and his heretofore damaged adopted daughter, isn’t the exception, but the rule. Monster, it seems, will be not just about Tenma’s game of cat and mouse with Johan, the serial killer whose life he saved, nor even just about that plus the parallel chases of Inspector Lunge as he hunts for Tenma and Johan’s sister Nina as she too hunts for Johan. Instead it’ll be like, I don’t know, The A-Team, where Johan, Lunge, and Nina’s quests will intersect with a variety of conflicted medical professionals, memorably evil criminals, memorably humane ex-criminals, shadowy governmental agents, and so forth in each “episode.” We’ll bounce them off our leading players, an incremental revelation will be proffered to the heroes, an epiphany will be reached by the guest stars, someone will be murdered by Johan or his minions, and the cycle begins anew. A lot of this is Velveeta, but I’m never not racing through it to find out how this ties into the increasingly byzantine and red-herring-laden backstory of Johan, or who’ll get capped and how and why. It helps that Urasawa bothered to situate the story not just in some generic “present day, local location” setting, but in post-Cold War Germany and its medical community; like the realistic backgrounds provided by his studio, the details of reunification, the far-right underground, the role and status of immigrants, the expertise and moral dilemmas of its doctor characters–they all give the story weight, depth, and shading even at its broadest and most black-and-white. It’s getting a little hard to keep track of all the square-headed middle-aged men with pointy noses, however, which is what makes the few character designs that deviate from that norm–the balding, hulking, doughy serial killer Jungers, for example, his eyes whited out by the reflection off his glasses–such a pleasure to encounter. In that same spirit, Monster seems a saga of simplistic structuring shored up by entertainingly complicating wrinkles.

In one scene in Shutter Island, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Federal Marshal Edward Daniels interrogates a jovial but visibly on-edge patient at the mental institution to which he’s been sent to investigate the disappearance of a patient. In order to buy time to pass Daniels a clandestine note, the patient asks his partner Chuck to get her a glass of water. When he returns with it, she picks it up and starts drinking it. In the next shot, she’s just miming drinking it and putting it down–there’s no glass there at all. In the next shot, she puts it down, empty. In the next shot, it’s half full. None of this is ever noticed by any of the characters. I doubt it was noticed by very many people in the audience.

That, in one sequence, is why I love seeing Martin Scorsese movies. You know, maybe it’s my immersion in comics that’s leading me to call this out–my increasing conviction that greatness stems from using as tools the facets of your medium others see as mere props. But when I sit myself down and place myself in the hands of someone like Scorsese, there’s a good chance that he’ll, say, be deliberately sloppy with shot-to-shot continuity–the positions of the actors’ bodies don’t line up properly, their mouths aren’t synced with the dialogue, snippets of time will disappear like miniature jump cuts–simply to show that something’s…not…quite…right. It’s not some jittery effect, what back in the Natural Born Killers days people used to call MTV editing; the effect is every bit as classic-Hollywood as the cliffs and towers straight out of Hitchcock, deep focus shots straight out of Welles, or the mightily effective, star-of-the-show contemporary-classical score. It’s just a sign that the filmmaker is in control of his medium, and is going to spend the next couple hours using it. It’s not a guarantee of success, necessarily–I understand that people’s mileage with late-period Scorsese varies, and I understand why. But it’s a guarantee of effort. It’s a sign that if the movie fails, it’s not failing because it’s trying to do something else but falling short. It’s doing what it wants to do.

What does it want to do? Two things most importantly, I think. The first, which is another reason I enjoy Scorsese movies, is showcase performances. This starts with his lead. Leo has his detractors, obviously, but in much the same way that his Departed castmate Matt Damon has parlayed his vacant all-Americanness into a career of playing cold-blooded killers, DiCaprio has taken the pinched features of his aging babyface and, in his collaborations with Scorsese at least, transformed himself into a little ball of seething guilt and rage. He’s like Hollywood’s Red Lantern. I empathize with manner in which his characters constantly battle back the knowledge that they’re not up to the task at hand, whatever it may be. Daniels, with his nightmares and his nightmarish memories constantly bleeding into one another, constantly looking like a drowned rat, may be the apotheosis of that type.

Beyond that, I wish I could remember who I read saying that the movie veered dangerously close to Martin Scorsese’s Circus of the Stars, but you say that like it’s a bad thing, whoever you are! Jackie Earle Haley out-Rorschaching Rorschach, Elias Koteas being creepy and grotesque, Max Von Sydow (who has been old for close to 40 years, somehow) being a good German, Ted Levine sending out sonar echoes of Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs being another super-obvious reference point for Marty) as the spectacularly bloody-minded warden, Ben Kingsley as bald and sinister as ever…I do not mind attending this circus, no siree. Emily Mortimer and Michelle Williams both impress and discomfit in their roles as the women Daniels sets out to rescue as well.

Which leads us to the other thing Shutter Island wants to do, a high-wire act linking Scorsese’s straightest thriller since Cape Fear with genuine, real-world horrors. I say by all means let the corpses of Dachau be used to frighten and terrify. Let the execution of the guards by the American liberators go on and on like a sick joke, unfolding horizontally as if each soldier patiently waited his turn to slaughter the slaughterers. Linger on the frozen bodies as they pour out of the cars of a freight train like a glacial waterfall. And later, dig into the horror of the murder of children. Cover the actors with their blood, carry around their bodies, wade into the water in which they drown and float. Make your whole movie about the mind’s inability to cope with horror, to the point where the end comes like blessed relief and the rollicking delivery of the twist feels like a blade cutting away the bad parts. Don’t we have enough monsters?

* Recently on Robot 6: Jim Woodring’s moleskine, Lisa Hanawalt’s t-shirt, Jim Lee’s cover, and Scott Pilgrim’s soundtrack.

* More Destructor art over at We Are The LAW, from David Paggi, Rob “Topless Robot” Bricken, Ryan “Agent M” Penagos, and Matt Powell.

* Renee French is so good.

* A Frank Santoro golden oldie, straight outta PULSE! magazine.

* I really dug “The Symbiote’s Effect on the Mind” by Aaron Zvi Felder. Be sure to click through and read the whole thing.

* Arthur Magazine has launched a new dedicated webcomics portal with the latest installment of Jesse Moynihan’s very good GWC.

* Brian Ralph does Jack Kirby!

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You is doing a Stanely Kubrick retrospective. ‘Nuff said.

* Is pacifism objectively pro-fascist? Is any one thing ever objectively pro-any other thing? George Orwell once thought and said so, but changed his mind.

* Consume NeilAlien’s ultra-rare first-person look back at his ten years of comics blogging with relish, my friends. His fellow comicsblogging O.G. Steven Wintle has more.

* There’s a MAJOR catch in this week’s Lost comment round-up at Whitney Matheson’s Pop Candy, in terms of something that eagle-eyed viewers caught in this season’s second episode but which turned out to be a production error rather than a clue.

* Turns out those hilarious statements from Icarnate creator/Bleach plagiarizer Nick Simmons I linked to the other day were bogus. Here’s his real statement, which is only barely an improvement.

* The star bloggers of The Atlantic‘s web presence–Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows–are revolting against a website redesign that essentially turned their blogs into a collection of disembodied headlines, and in some cases folded them into another stream of content entirely. It’s funny how similar the features they’re complaining about are to what bugs everyone so much about the new Comics Journal website, and how easy a fix would be in both cases. When people go to a blog, they want to see the posts, not the headlines and first few sentences of the posts.

* One of the great MCs, Guru from Gang Starr, is in a coma after a heart attack. Here’s wishing him a full and speedy recovery.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Everyone’s wondering who Jacob wanted Hurley and Jack to summon with the lighthouse. Who’s #108? The name, according to Lostpedia, is Wallace–a name we’ve never seen before. Lots of people are guessing Desmond, but my guess is Walt. Mostly I just think that would be awesome. It’s also one of very few ways left for them to justify how important Walt was in the first two seasons. And on a purely logistical level, Walt’s been raised by four different people, so it should be easy enough for him to have a surname we haven’t heard yet.

But most importantly, it would also be the ultimate callback to that momentous, the-key-to-everything backgammon conversation Locke had with Walt in Season One: “Two players. Two sides. One is light. One is dark.” A final confrontation between Fake Locke and heretofore inexplicably psychically enhanced Walt would bring everything full circle.

Naoki Urasawa’s Monster Vols. 1-3

Naoki Urasawa, writer/artist

Viz, 2006

208-224 pages each

$9.99 each

Buy it from Amazon.com

[First, a programming note. Because I read so many comics and write so many reviews, I end up reading and reviewing mostly self-contained works rather than long runs. The problem is I’ve been at this for long enough that a majority of the books on my “unread” shelves (plural) are part of big ol’ multi-volume series. Which is exciting! I love plunging into a world for as long as it’ll have me, that’s one of the great pleasures art can provide. But it presents a conundrum for a critic who posts three reviews a week, because on the one hand I’m accustomed to reviewing a complete work, so a big part of me would prefer to complete a series before reviewing it. Moreover, I don’t wanna bury the site in piecemeal reviews of a couple-three volumes at a time, just so no one, me or you, gets bored. On the other hand, I really like holding myself to this schedule, it’s fun and it’s been good for me as a writer and just as a reader too. And there’s probably something to be said for posting more than one review for a given series, tackling earlier and later material from it separately, seeing how both the material and my take on it change over the duration of its run. So for now that’s the direction I’m headed with this particular series, though in the future I may go ahead and stop posting reviews until I get a whole run read. Who knows? Life is a mystery. And so is…]

Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, the series that as best I can tell broke him in America, is a strange beast. You’ve got four distinct, and perhaps competitive, forces at play in these early volumes. Number one is the elevator-pitch concept: Brilliant doctor risks his career to save the life of an orphan, only for the orphan to grow up into a serial killer. Number two is the way that high concept broadens and complicates into a globetrotting (well, Germany-trotting, so far) political-thriller pageturner/potboiler. Number three is the frothy pulpy soapy melodrama of it all, with characters yelling about the sanctity of human life and children in peril and a villain who is repeatedly labeled “pure evil” Michael Meyers-style and geniuses in their fields who throw it all away for the sake of the job and on and on. Number four, maybe the most interesting force at work, is this undercurrent of meaty and specific social issues that weave in and out of the genre business: German reunification and its discontents, being an Asian immigrant in Europe, medical ethics and hospital politics, child abuse (depicted in a shockingly frank fashion at times).

And as I’ve pointed out in the past, Urasawa’s art plays it all totally straight. It’s just pure craft, existing for the sole purpose of getting the story across and over. The people look cartoony, yes–they remind me of Disney house-style people, not in terms of their specific look but in the way they function as vehicles for immediately intelligible ideas and emotions. The clarity they comprise is so…overpowering, I guess is the word, so able to lodge in your brain, that this morning as I was thinking over Footnotes in Gaza again, the people of Rafah appeared to me in Urasawa style, not Joe Sacco style. My point, though, is that apart from their cartooniness and penchant for yelling, which could point toward the pulp melodrama as the dominant thread for the series, the character designs and the art in general really don’t tip their hand as to what you “should” be making of all this. Is it “just” addictive thriller storytelling? Are we meant to take the various waxings philosophical seriously, is the thriller stuff and the in-your-face villainy and the way we’ve met four or five people so good at their jobs that it’s broken up their marriages intended as a palatable container for it? Or is it vice versa? This is what American serialized genre-entertainment fans might call the Lost question (a comparison I’ve made with Urasawa’s stuff before). Frankly, I think that in Monster‘s case the pulpy stuff wins the day hands down–the issue-y stuff is reeeeeeeally broad. But I suppose the point here, in the end, is that if you can read the first volume and not want to read the next 17, you are made of sterner stuff than I.

* Happy 10th Blogiversary to NeilAlien, Skyfather of the Comics Blogosphere. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) Spurge’s list of 21 cool things about Doctor Strange is a pretty great birthday present.

* Today at Robot 6 I talked a bit about Geoff Johns’ post-promotion charm offensive.

* Plenty of fun Lost links today (and don’t worry, I’m gonna be keeping the Carnival spoiler-free unless otherwise noted). First up, Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly follow-up post, which includes more interesting discussion of Jack–who’s one of my favorite characters on the show, let me just come right out and say it–and in which VanDerWerff shares my enthusiasm regarding a potential identity for a potential someone.

* Next, Noel Murray’s review/recap for the Onion AV Club struck me as particularly sharp and observant this week, regarding everything from a weakness of some of the dialogue in this episode to the throwback elements it included to a way in which the final seasons will increase our investment in the first to parallels between this episode and the corresponding installment of Season One to making fun of Doc Jensen.

* Keep comin’ back to the comment thread on my Lost post for the week if you please–insights and compelling debates abound.

* Finally, good golly, look at this “visual timeline” Olivier Lacan is building for Lost! Right now it’s very much a work in progress–there are more gaps than there is timeline at this point. And it’s not very well written. But it’s a great idea, executed with gorgeous screencaps, and it’s as good a reminder of the show’s sweep, scope, and mystery as anything I’ve seen. Soak it in. (Via Whitney Matheson.

* Super Mario Galaxy 2!!!!!

As I watched that trailer I literally became frightened of how much time I will be spending playing this game. As Rob Bricken at Topless Robot points out, it’s very very similar to the first game, but man, if it ain’t broke.

* Gene Simmons is one of the worst people in the entire history of recorded music, without exaggeration. Just a loathsome creep in almost every conceivable way. Turns out the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as his son Nick Simmons flagrantly plagiarized Tite Kubo’s Bleach for his comic Incarnate–a plan that would seem to require no one reading his comic for it to succeed–and then issued denials that manage to be simultaneously insulting to manga, threatening to his detractors, and transparently bullshit to all. My favorite report on all this today is Rob Bricken’s at Topless Robot, which does not hold back.

* Want. Tom Neely, ladies and germs.

* More Destructor art from the LAW! King Suckerman, Rickey Purdin, and this killer piece by Zach Oat.

* Oh hey, Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts is back.

Batman & Robin #9

Grant Morrison, writer

Cameron Stewart, artist

DC, February 2010

24 story pages

$2.99

I’ve been a bit of a broken record on this score lately, but here is another comic I want to physically force the writers and artists of other action-dependent superhero comics to read, eyeballs propped open A Clockwork Orange-style. Consider if you will the care and attention paid to the page on which Batman and Batwoman pound the stuffing out of Zombie Batman. (Okay, first consider that this comic contains a page on which Batman and Batwoman pound the stuffing out of Zombie Batman. Then move on.) Look at the way the fight choreography flows from one panel to the next. It’s not just a series of random cutaways: The pivot you see Batwoman executing in the background as Batman punches Zombie Batman in the jaw of one panel leads into the kick you see her deliver in the foreground as Batman cocks his other fist in the next panel, which leads into the left hook you see him land in the panel after that. Or return to earlier in the issue, where a still-wounded Robin and out-of-his-league Alfred battle the Zombie Batman using the objects (a wireless computer mouse, a wheelchair) and environments (an elevator) available to them, each beat portrayed with crystal-clear visual logic and visceral impact. I could seriously reread that sequence where Zombie Batman gets choked with his own cape as Alfred snags it into the elevator and hits the Up button, until Zombie Batman cuts himself loose with a batarang, over and over again. God how it cleanses the palate of the umpteenth two-page melee spread.

What’s still more delightful about this issue is that Stewart brings these same chops to pretty much everything he draws. Look at the knowing Mona Lisa smile on Batwoman’s face as she tells the romantically interested Dick Grayson not to get his hopes up, sharing an inside joke with those of us beyond the fourth wall. Look at how Batwoman’s father looks like he wandered in from another comic as he pops up in street clothes among a gaggle of costumed crimefighters, emphasizing what a gonzo concept it is to have your dad be your sidekick more clearly than anything I’ve seen in Batwoman’s solo adventures to date. Look at Zombie Batman himself, as much a gift to the toy folks as the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh was and the Batmen of the Timestream are about to be. And I could definitely stand to see the double-punch panel become as much of a trademark element of Batman and friends as using “Bat” as a prefix.

Oh yeah Grant Morrison’s involved too. What I liked best about his work here is usually what I like least about Batman comics: His army of increasingly interchangeable crimefighting tagalongs. The real Batman isn’t even in the comic anymore, of course, so this book features no fewer than nine such characters, if you count Zombie Batman; four of them are direct riffs on Batman himself. But from Papa Batwoman’s military jargon (via a pretty effortless and kind of funny Greg Rucka impression on Morrison’s part) to Knight and Squire’s jocular “keep calm and carry on” comportment to Dick and Batwoman’s born-of-necessity ability to think and act on their feet and in tandem, each one seems not just like a different person, but a whole person, not just a one-dimensional reflection of some aspect of the real Batman that the writer wants to have walk around on its own for a while as these things frequently are.

I hate when people set themselves up against some largely imagined consensus, but I am going to go ahead and say that I do miss the sense of mounting mystery and menace of the Morrison material that culminated R.I.P, which I’m guessing is a minority position among the sorts of folks whose blogs you’re likely to read if you read this one. But Batman & Robin, and this issue perhaps more than all the others so far save #3, is a fine, fun superhero comic, set in the milieu of the only superhero I really love in and of himself. Who couldn’t use one of these now and then?

* Amy Sedaris and George Takei are among the voice actors in the amazing pilot for Neon Knome, Paper Rad/Cold Heat impresario Ben Jones’s Adult Swim series-in-waiting. But it will never end up on the air for you to abuse Ambien to unless you vote for it in this contest. Team Comics already pissed away a decade’s worth of increased clout by failing to get Michael Kupperman’s Snake ‘n’ Bacon over; let’s not let this happen again.

* More Destructor fan art over at We Are The LAW, this time from the great Chris Ward. Look for a tease of a future Destructor storyline in the comments!

* Looks like Zak Smith/Sabbath’s Playing D&D with Porn Stars is going to be regular reading for me: Dig this entry on a creation of his called the Vomiter, which is basically a postapocalypitcally infected human who pukes a creature selected from the monster section of the guidebook with a roll of the dice out of an internal dimensional vortex. Damn.

* Todd VanDerWerff may well be the only Lost critic worth reading. It’s delightful watching him think about Jack, even as someone who (unlike VanDerWerff and about 90% of the show’s audience) has never not liked the character.

* Speaking of Lost, things are cooking with gas in the comment thread for this week’s post on the show, so be sure to chime in if you’re interested.

* Speaking of lotsa interesting comment-thread fodder, many smart people have chimed in about George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones books, in such a way as to intrigue me, even if I can immediately grok Tom Spurgeon’s reservations about them.

* ADDTF fave Ross Campbell is doing a new superhero book from SLG called Shadoweyes, but because it’s a Ross Campbell comic, it starts with two gothy girls lying around on a bed and eating vegan food, so that’s good news. My chums at Robot 6 have an interview about it and a preview of it.

* Gary Groth’s grudging admission that TCJ.com is the pits rapidly became as irritating as his initial “We’re now gracing your shitty comics Internet with our presence–you’re welcome, America” post, so it’s nice to see Chris Allen smacking the new post around a bit. I’ve said it before and it looks like I’ll be saying it again and again: You can’t win just by showing up anymore.

* This one goes out to Blaise Larmee.

* Alright, another very good episode, intriguing in both timelines, lots of juicy mythology, fun performances, action, hieroglyphics, dead people, the whole nine. So far the only false note for me this season has been the Great Kate Escape episode. Three out of four ain’t bad.

* During one of the initial segments of Jack’s flashsideways, he seemed as taken aback by his appendectomy scar as he seemed to be on the plane by the cut on his neck and just the general way he looked in the mirror. They made a nice big deal of this this time, complete with a call to Mom asking when he had the operation, so methinks there’s something fishy going on with this whole alternate timeline, that it’s not as simple as “what would have happened if the Island had been nuked in the ’70s.”

* And I’m glad of that, because it’s only now occurring to me why some part of me never quite believed that was where they were headed in the first place: I never consciously made this connection, but the idea that we’re seeing what life would be like if something bad had never happened to them and they lived happy lives instead is straight-up The Last Temptation of Christ and/or “For the Man Who Has Everything.” Obviously the Lost writers aren’t above riffing on or referencing other big genre works–The Dark Tower, The Stand, Watchmen, we can all rattle off another half-dozen major touchstones easy. But never do they simply lift storylines wholesale. This ain’t Heroes, and Jeph Loeb hasn’t worked on the show since Season One. So while I had speculated that maybe this would all lead to Jack or Sawyer or whoever seeing how much better their life would be without the Island but somehow sacrificing it all for the greater good, I don’t think that’s where we’re headed anymore, at least not in the “Christ still chooses to die on the cross/Superman decides to rip off the psychic plant and kick Mongul’s ass” way I was kicking around.

* So, in each flashsideways, our protagonist character will bump into an Other? Kate and Claire met Ethan, Locke met Ben, and Jack met Dogen. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. Or to use Ian Fleming’s formulation, three times is enemy action. Dun dun DUNNNNNN! Anyway, I like this because it means we’ll probably see big Tom again. Speaking of which, did you notice the last name “Friendly” on Jacob’s lighthouse wheel? He really was “Mr. Friendly”! Oh, Lindelof & Cuse, you kidders.

* We’ve learned, if it wasn’t clear already, that the Man in Black is an out-and-out liar. Obviously he was pretending to be Jack’s dad. Obviously as such he only pretended to be speaking on behalf of Jacob. Claire tells us “her dad” told her that the Others stole her baby, which isn’t true. Thus one can assume he was seriously fudging the truth for Sawyer too. My brother Ryan pointed out that a cave hollowed out of a sheer cliff wall over the ocean seemed like an odd place for Jacob to hang out, making him skeptical that that was ever Jacob’s place to begin with. The moment I saw those 360 names written out in an orderly fashion next to each degree on the wheel, I thought, “Well, I guess there was probably no need for Jacob to have scrawled them all over the roof of a cave someplace else on the Island.” Particularly if the wheel is a magic portal into all their lives, right?

* Who’s the momma? Juliet?

* I loved all the callbacks to Season One. Shannon’s asthma inhaler, the caves, going on a jungle quest, Jack recalling his vision of his dad…Thinking back, it really did seem like that was just a vision, for a long long time after that episode aired. Maybe an Island-inspired vision, but a vision nonetheless. I wonder how long it took for the writers to decide “You know what? That really was his dad!” Then again, the body was missing from the coffin all along, so who knows.

* I would say that Hurley’s speculation that the skeletons in the cave are two of their own, as a result of time travel, shoots down the possibility that that’s actually the case. But remember back in the day when they got “Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller to play on the radio and Hurley said it could be coming from anywhere “or any time?” He added a quick “just kidding,” and at the time I thought that was the creators’ signal to us that we didn’t need to bother with spacetime continuum theorizing. Whoops!

* Jacob’s a manipulator too. Important to remember. What I really want to know is whether the Others’ rather barbaric conduct over the seasons are a result of a more-or-less faithful interpretation of his orders, or if things are way off base due to either a communication breakdown or deliberate malfeasance by Ben or Richard or Widmore or Dogen or whoever the relevant person is.

* With Jacob looking on approvingly, newly minted leadership-position Hurley opts to be cryptic and not answer Dogen’s question. So THAT’S how they learn it!

* The animal-corpse baby in Claire’s basinet was the most disturbing thing the show has served up in a long time. Like, it made me really uncomfortable for the brief few seconds we saw it. That is Texas Chain Saw Massacre shit right there. I’ve said this before, but as we’ve learned more about the Others, the Dharma Initiative, the Monster, and so on, a lot of the sense of fear and horror that these things presented in the earlier seasons, when the show was often one of the scariest on television, gradually dissipated. It’s nice to see them try to inject it back in.

* And hey, an axe murder! Alright.

* I don’t know if this was something they thought of, but of all the characters they could have left to the tender mercies of crazy Claire and evil Locke, Jin was an excellent choice because he spent years trying to stay one step ahead of the wishes of a vicious gangster. I believe that he’s someone capable of thinking on his feet and staying alive around the homicidally violent, longer probably than any other character except maybe inveterate conmen like Sawyer or Ben.

* Here’s the thing, though: Fake Locke knows that Jin knows that they’re both lying about who has Claire’s baby. Sawyer, who’s with Fake Locke, will know it too. How’s all that gonna work?

* Back to the Lighthouse for a second: I thought this was a fine scene, because it delivered something we haven’t seen…mmmmmmaybe since Locke refused to press the button at the end of Season Two? Which was someone getting so fed up with the way the Island’s phenomena have used and abused him that he snaps. There was an interesting new dynamic in play here as well: In the Hatch, Locke really had no evidence about whether what he was doing was extraordinary or bull, he just didn’t buy it anymore. Jack, on the other hand, just got a glimpse of his childhood house, and someplace in Japan, and maybe Oxford or something, in the mirrors of a magic lighthouse to which he’d been led by someone who got his directions from a dead man only he could see or talk to. Jack knows damn well that something really astonishing is happening on the Island, in reference to him specifically–and it’s precisely that knowledge that’s driving him crazy, not the lack of knowledge that so tormented Locke. Jack smashing the mirror (did he hear or fear or…?) was six seasons of not knowing what the hell is going on exploding into action. Good stuff. (I sort of wish the smashing hadn’t been spoiled by the stupid network’s next episode teaser last week, but oh well. It was at least nice of them to try to avoid making that mistake again this week.)

* I loved seeing all the hieroglyphics on the temple hallway wall, just ‘cuz you know they threw that in there so that the Lostpedia folks would translate it. And translate the Japanese dialogue, and freezeframe every glimpse of the wheel, and so on and so forth.

* Who’s coming to the Island? I’m pulling for Walt. I can barely fathom how satisfying that would be.

* Want to reignite interest in your bloated, overlong, shit-the-bed-in-the-third-movie Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy in two easy steps? Cast Ian McShane as Blackbeard and break open the fuckin’ canned peaches.

* Though she is a supporter of motion-capture performances like that of Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Kristin Thompson writes a compelling essay about why they nevertheless shouldn’t qualify for the traditional acting Oscar categories. This is a mitzvah, as the argument really should be hashed out by people with an appreciation both for the technology and the reasons why it’s different than traditional acting, and not as some Internet-style “LUDDITES VS. THE FUTURE” flamewar. One thing though: Zoe Saldana was getting Oscar buzz for her performances as Love Interest in Avatar? I thought that character and everything she brought to it was just as rote as everything else in the movie.

* I haven’t read George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, though it’s very very high up on my list of “next big prose series I’m reading.” (Right now in my head I’m going through a long digression about how there’s only so much time in the day and how much my Comics Time reading and reviewing prevents me from reading long serialized works of both comics and prose, and moreover how I’ve had the first two discs of Mad Men Season One in my backpack for like four months, and how I’m only up to World 5 of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and god only knows how long it’s gonna take me to get through all of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster now that I have all 18 volumes finally, and hey what about the long-promised revision of my anti-Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets thing that would require me to read all those digests, and for Chrissakes I’m not even up to First Bull Run in the John Keegan American Civil War book, and on and on and on. But you can take it as read.) But it seems to me that an HBO grown-up fantasy series could be to die for, and casting Sean Bean in the lead seems like a great way to start. The whole rest of the cast can be seen at that link, too. Maybe readers can chime in as to who’s good and who sucks in the comments.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch sings the praises of Soldier X. My great hope is that all this Internet attention will spur someone at Marvel into saying, “Ah, what the hell, let’s collect the damn thing.” Help us, David Gabriel–you’re our only hope! Anyway, here’s a nice bit from Marc-Oliver’s review:

This is the point where Soldier X reveals its kinship with Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’ Omega the Unknown, but also with Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Like those works, Soldier X treats superheroes as a metaphor for the literal limitlessness of the human imagination–easily the single most compelling aspect of the genre, as well as, unfortunately, the single most overlooked one.

* A shadowy cabal of my chums from one of my ex-employers has started up a sketch blog called We Are The LAW, where we’re taking turns drawing characters we like. We’ve actually kicked things off with two characters of our own devising: Justin Aclin’s Geist from Hero House, and mine own Destructor from my comics with Matt Wiegle. I want to emphasize that only a handful of us can actually, you know, draw, but hey, what the hell. Below is Geist by me, Destructor by Ben Morse, and Destructor and friends by T.J. Dietsch. Click the links for the full-sized versions.

* Elsewhere, Rickey Purdin draws the Black Flame from B.P.R.D. The sequence where he walks into the Zinco boardroom in full Nazi supervillain regalia with his head on fire and announces “You’re all fired” is one of the all-time great comic book moments I’ve ever read. Full stop.

PS: I wonder if Zinco and Cinco have any connection?

* A good way to prep for tonight’s Lost is to read what Kiel Phegley’s mom Lynn thought of last week’s episode. Imagine a recap column written by Lapidus and you’re pretty much there.

I wrote a comic called “The Side Effects of the Cocaine” about David Bowie’s very strange sojourn in Los Angeles between the release of Young Americans and Station to Station. Isaac Moylan was kind enough to draw it. You can read it at Isaac’s site. I hope you enjoy it!

* Is Siege a bomb? I have no idea but maybe you’ve got an opinion.

* Also on Robot 6 today: The LA Times’ Graphic Novel Book Prize finalists are a strong group, and this is the first and probably last time I’ll ever think of Gareb Shamus and Robert Altman at the same time. This weekend I also revealed what I’ve been reading. Click that last link for an interesting take on Blackest Night and Siege from Tim O’Neil, too.

* Tom Spurgeon is to the new DC executive team what the Daily Kos is to the Obama Administration: Rhetoric is nice, but he demands action on a progressive agenda.

* Speaking of Spurge, just try to resist buying Dan Nadel’s Art in Time after reading this review.

* To Ceri B. and all RPG-interested readers: Zak Smith is a very very good artist and one of my fellow “Fifth Beatles” vis a vis the Partyka group. He’s also a fellow Son of Eli. He’s also writing a fascinating blog about being a D&D Dungeon Master, featuring posts like this killer piece on four different kinds of vampires and how to play with their varying rule sets. He’s also a porn star who’s playing D&D with Mandy Morbid, Satine Phoenix, Kimberly Kane, Sasha Grey, Justine Joli and so forth. Definitely check out his blog Playing D&D with Porn Stars. I’m looking forward to their upcoming video series I Hit It With My Axe, which will basically be them playing a campaign you can follow like a TV show. That’s a rad idea, porn stars or no.

Doomwar #1

Jonathan Maberry, writer

Scot Eaton, artist

Marvel, February 2010

34 story pages

$3.99

This isn’t a review so much as a couple paragraphs about how rad I think Doctor Doom is:

Doctor Doom should be King Shit of Marvel’s Turd Mountain. Seriously, he should be the one bad guy that makes even all the other bad guys go, “Whoa.” He rules his own country, he rivals Doctor Strange on sorcery and Mister Fantastic on science (and ranks with both of ’em on the awesome-name score), he’s up there with Iron Man on the super-armor scale, he’s got a great look, and he’s like crazy arrogant and angry all the time. He’s the ur-villain. What I’ve liked about his recent cameos in books like Captain America: Reborn and Siege: The Cabal is that the other big-deal villains like the Red Skull and Norman Osborn seem to realize all this but still attempt to use Doom for their own ends, because his skills make him too useful and their own megalomania blinds them to the downside of crossing him. That’s about right.

However, it always feels to me like he’s overused in terms of his interactions with heroes. I don’t mind him constantly in sotto voce contact with the other big schemers, that seems like something Marvel’s megalomaniacal mastermind-type villains would always be doing. But when he jumps ugly with the good guys, that to me is the kind of thing you save for an every-few-years jolt, not a constant string of tussles. He’s just too formidable a threat to frequently use without devaluing the brand. Every appearance should be for the ages, and his every interaction with a hero or team should alter their status quo for the long term. (I actually think that’s true of every A-list villain, but I understand the difficulties involved; Doom seems like the kind of character you ought to try really hard to do right regardless.)

Is Doomwar the kind of Doom-based throwdown I’m looking for? It’s too soon to say. Doom himself is just a puppetmaster in this early installment, though his master plan as it’s been described to us by Black Panther siblings T’Challa and Shuri, whom he has dethroned, is suitably pseudoscientifically apocalyptic. Seizing 10,000 tons of Vibranium from Wakanda and using it to unlock god knows what mystical mumbo-jumbo is the kind of thing you’d figure Doom would spend his afternoons planning. Being an ice-cold murderer in support of it, shooting a civilian every few minutes until Storm, the current Queen of Wakanda, acquiesces to his demands–yeah, that’s also something Doom would do in my book. What does he care? He’s a tyrant, let him be tyrannical. I understand that that’s the sort of thing lots of people will just read as “icky,” but villains have been killing people in genre material young people have read for decade upon decade. Saruman’s goons wased a bunch of hobbits for pete’s sake. I’ll live.

What’s interesting about Doomwar is that I didn’t expect it to be so…Brubakerian, I guess is the word for it. It’s “superheroes as black ops” in the Mighty Marvel Manner. Scot Eaton is drawing in that scratchy Marvel house style of the past several years; it’s much more of a piece with Steve Epting and Mike Perkins and Butch Guice than with the jazzy John Romita Jr. covers the book sports, although he shares with JRJR a real knack for drawing bruisers. Colossus, T’Challa, and Doom all look like dudes you wouldn’t want to mess with at all. Meanwhile, the concept could have come straight from one of Ed Brubaker’s Captain America storylines, too, and insofar as it’s about a sinister group that uses an appeal to patriotism to wrest control of a democracy over to a sinister outside force–the plot of Brubaker’s “The Man Who Bought America” arc, with Wakanda instead of America and Doom instead of the Red Skull–that’s basically what it did. It even shares with Brubaker Cap a knack for resonating with current events without referencing them outright: I can’t be the only person who thought of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality legislation when reading the coup leader’s diatribe against mutants and witchcraft and suchlike. In turn, the Black Panthers are presented less as superheroes than as exiled leaders plotting the violent overthrow of the regime that violently overthrew them first. Cyclops and Emma Frost quietly funneling various X-Men to them in hopes of freeing Storm reads like a mutantified version of Charlie Wilson’s War.

I suppose this could all come across as rather dreary and by-the-numbers. And it might be, if not for a few factors. One is the presence of Doom, so far latent rather than actualized, and my lingering hope that he’ll do something totally awesome. Two is Eaton’s literally muscular art–I find I just like looking at it a lot. Three, and most promisingly, is an out-of-left-field ending that short-circuited my every expectation of what the primary business of this series was going to be for the rest of its issues. The way it goes down actually gives me more faith in the future fortunes of the aforementioned Factors One and Two, in fact. Fingers crossed.

* I thought Tom Spurgeon’s ten thoughts on the DC management announcement were pretty solid.

* Recently on Robot 6: Cameron Stewart makes a Batman & Robin-related funny and John Porcellino makes a Batman & Robin-related drawing.

* Ben Morse has a round-up of recent Winter Games What The–?! silliness at Marvel.com. I really do love his profile of Team Transylvania.

* Renee fucking French, man.

* Frank Santoro is my favorite webcartoonist.

* If you’ve ever looked up at a big building and are a superhero fan you’ve probably thought about what a battle atop it would really look like to onlookers, which is why this Robt Seda-Schreiber cover version of John Romita Sr.’s cover for Amazing Spider-Man knocked my socks off. Making the action smaller makes the action bigger, you know? Click the link for the full-size piece.

* Real-Life Horror: John Yoo, who still has his law license and teaches at Berkeley, gave the legal thumbs-up to literally massacring civilians.

* Good question.