So the Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica debuts this Friday night. Sort of: They did that weird SciFi/Syfy double-dip where they released the “uncut” pilot on DVD first and show it on TV months later. That’s what they did for the stand-alone BSG movie Razor (I think; it’s possible they premiered around the same time), and that’s what they did for the show’s movie-length epilogue, The Plan. But I guess my TiVo didn’t recognize it as part of my Battlestar season pass, because I have no idea when it actually aired. It was only hearing that Caprica was finally ready to blow that made me watch my DVD copy in the first place.

Given my level of Battlestar Galactica fandom generally and my enthusiasm for its extremely divisive ending particularly, that’s kind of weird, right? But maybe it’s not. I was deeply satisfied by the BSG finale–like, almost spiritually satisfied by it. It was a take on apocalypse and cultural extinction I’d never seen before–a people sacrificing their nominal legacy in hopes that a true legacy of peace, free from the sins of the past, might someday be inherited by their unknowable descendants. Also, Starbuck was an angel. You can check io9 or Tor.com for the vitriolic C.W. on these developments; I loved them, was powerfully moved and shaken by them. The idea of watching a new episode of Battlestar after that, no matter how many “answers” it promised to provide, was just…anticlimactic.

To their credit, writer Jane Espenson and director (and supporting player) Edward James Olmos seem to realize that. The Plan isn’t the fill-in-the-blanks everything-you-know-is-wrong blockbuster I had vaguely in mind. You might even see it as a bill of goods. Turns out the only “plan” the whole “and they have a plan” bit was referring to was just “they would like to kill all the humans.” Um, surprise?

What you do find out that you didn’t know before is that the Brother Cavil who lived in the fleet, the one to whom the Chief came when he thought he might be a Cylon way back when, was orchestrating the fleet-based Cylons’ various attempts at murder and mayhem. So you see how Boomer got her instructions when she was a sleeper agent–it wasn’t internal programming, it was orders she received from Cavil, who then put her back under to fulfill her missions. You find out how Leoben became obsessed with Starbuck. You find out where that phony Defense Department Six came from when she tried to frame Baltar for the crime he actually committed, and where she went afterwards. (I think she was airlocked.) You find out why the Five who suicide-bombed himself did it. You get some back-up for the way multiple copies of the same Cylon roamed around the fleet without getting caught, and why. You find out who Caprica Six was meeting on Caprica before the attack, and you find out that yes, it was Baltar who passed Adama the note about the 12 Cylon models.

In addition, there are some comic-book-tie-in-style new storylines introduced. There’s a Four in the fleet, and he has a human family he doesn’t want to destroy; there’s a Four in Anders’s little group of survivors back on Caprica, too, and by contrast he wants that group’s Cavil to pull his thumb out and get to murdering. And the two Cavils come to very different conclusions about the Cylons’ attempted extermination of man, which is sort of the philosophical crux of the episode. (It’s hard not to call it that.) These are welcome developments in that Dean Stockwell becomes the star of the show, while Rick Worthy, always the most underused of the Cylon actors, finally gets a chance to do something with his sinister warmth. But again, none of it gives you the “a-HA, so THAT’S what was going on!” feeling you might have expected.

And so. We can question the wisdom of prefacing every episode of your show by referring to a Plan but never, in fact, having one, and then not even bothering to make it up in time for the finale, so that you have to create an almost anthology-style appendix to the show and air it months after the fact. Moreover, you can question the weirdness of the execution of that enterprise. In the opening credits there’s a line about how the film is “based on the series Battlestar Galactica created by Ronald D. Moore” or something like that, as if it’s not even technically a piece of the series. Moore isn’t the only MIA figure, either–try half the cast. Apollo, Starbuck, and Baltar appear only in repackaged footage from the original episodes. Despite the movie being about the Cylons, Lucy Lawless’s D’Anna has approximately three seconds of flashback screentime. Most bizarrely, Mary McDonnell’s President Roslin doesn’t appear on-screen at all; in an unintentionally hilarious bit at the very end, you see the legs, and only the legs, of a character I assume is supposed to be Roslin descending a ladder. Roslin’s absence also makes it next to impossible for there to be much Tory material in the movie–her involvement amounts to crashing her car when the bombs hit, getting rescued, and then walking down that ladder. Finally, because this was a straight-to-DVD release, there’s a bunch of entirely gratuitous nudity. (And no, not from anyone you’d already decided you wanted to see naked.) It’s a weird project, in other words, and the seams of its production show.

But here as always, for me, Battlestar Galactica is all about the delivery. Not the mythology or the mysteries, which were all kind of a convoluted, contradictory mess when all was said and done (this ain’t an Alan Moore comic, it’s not even Lost), but exploration and observation, through writing and acting, of how individuals and societies deal with catastrophe. And on that score, The Plan came through. It’s essentially a big ol’ tone poem about murder and suicide. Character after character comes to the point where they must kill, and then they do or they don’t, and we see what that does to them. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, and to say it’s down my alley is to understate the case considerably. I mean, find me a Blue Velvet fan who doesn’t want to watch a movie in which Dean Stockwell orchestrates a series of cold-blooded murders, culminating in a particularly ugly and taboo one he commits himself.

Aside from some clunky theological dialogues between Anders and Cavil, Espenson mostly stays out of the way of these parameters. Given that her last episode was nearly series–ruining in its awfulness, her redemption arc is perhaps The Plan‘s standout. Meanwhile, Olmos, who established himself as one of the series’ finest directors with the episode in which Baltar was tortured, acquits himself equally admirably here. He lets silence and image do the talking a lot of the time–following nuclear payloads to their destination, following mushroom clouds into the sky, following battlestars as they drift and burn, following airlocked bodies as they freeze and float, following bodies as they fall.

It’s in this way that The Plan dodges the knockout punch thrown by the series finale proper. (Actually, I think you could comfortably stick it within the finale–pop the DVD out after the climactic shootout and the final jump; watch The Plan; put the finale back in and finish it up.) If “Daybreak” was about human and Cylon abandoning their horrific legacy, The Plan IS that horrific legacy. A gutsy choice, leaving that as the final taste in our mouth…and yet it tastes delicious.

Detective Comics #854-860

Greg Rucka, writer

J.H. Williams III, artist

DC, 2009-2010

24 story pages each

$3.99 each

I’ll admit it, I was too hard on Detective Comics. I always understood, and agreed with, every word of praise offered for J.H. Williams III’s almost comically proficient art, mind you. You don’t need me to go over that, Jog handled it nicely. It’s just that beyond the art…well, I didn’t think there was anything beyond the art.

Maybe it’s that Question back-up that threw me, with the erstwhile Renee Montoya adopting the exact same crimefighting set-up as the lead feature’s star, i.e. beautiful lesbian with military and/or law-enforcement training adopts the mantle of a male superhero while her old-man sidekick sits at a computer back at HQ. And it’s not exactly as if either of them are the only strong-women-also-cry tough gals Rucka’s ever written. Meanwhile, some past Rucka plot points I never really got into come along for the ride, most prominently the convoluted Religion of Crime and its Batwoman-obsessed prophecies. I liked that idea when it was tied directly into Darkseid–the more other stuff that it hooked up with, from Vandal Savage to some old Rucka characters to the actual Bible, the less compelling I found it.

On a more fundamental level I think I’m just a lot less interested in superhero comics as fed through the filter of writers who’ve read, watched, and written a lot of spy and crime fiction over the past decade. What was once a thrilling deviation–seriously, The Ultimates, Sleeper, Gotham Central and the Daredevil/Alias/Powers trifecta blew my mind once upon a time–is now the default. Over at Marvel you’re seeing, or you will be seeing, I think, that noir/black-ops framework give way to a bold new era defined by loosey-goosier writers like Matt Fraction and Jonathan Hickman; Ed Brubaker’s given a pass because that really is the perfect place for a postmillennial Captain America to be. At DC, that kind of stuff doesn’t interest the main moneymakers and ship-steerers, Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison, in the slightest. And though I’m far less militant (heh) about this point than other readers I know, there’s always the suspicion that shoehorning superheroes and their fantastical fiction into exciting but reality-based counterpart activities like law enforcement and espionage and organized crime is a way to strip them of the weirdness and wonder even the worst of them usually contain–to polish them up even while darkening them up, to smooth out the angles and make them action-franchise-friendly. So for all those reasons there’s a degree to which I’ve had my fill of books in which characters nonchalantly drop military argot in conversation and suchlike, and thus I’m a tough nut for Rucka’s writing in ‘Tec to crack.

But after taking the opportunity to read all seven issues of the “Batwoman in Detective Comics” run, I’ve realized just how far short I was selling it. Is the story a game-changer, a brain-melter? No. But it’s a good deal wilder and weirder and, yes, more wondrous than your average spandex-turned-kevlar effort. And shame on me for not seeing how Williams’s art, far from an Avatar-style silk hat on a pig, draws on and enhances Rucka’s strongest stuff while muting the weaker elements. Simply put, how did I miss how very Hot Topic the whole “pale redheaded lesbian dresses up like an S&M vampire and does battle with her pale loligoth Satan-worshipping evil twin sister who dresses like Alice in Wonderland” thing is? It’s a very glam, very goth, very fetishy, very fun set-up, hammered home with Williams’s dark psychedelia, polymorphous mimickry (that extended Mazzucchelli impersonation is really breathtaking) and (you don’t hear much about this, but for real) dazzling good-girl art.

What’s more, this is actually some of my favorite Rucka writing I’ve come across. You know how most superheroes have a two-stage origin? Batman’s parents are killed, and the bat flies through his window; Spider-Man gets bitten by the spider, and his Uncle gets killed; Superman’s home planet blows up, and he’s raised in all-American fashion by his kindly adoptive parents? Batwoman’s mother and sister are killed, and then she gets Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’d out of the military. She’s not just gay–homophobia is a foundational trauma for her. I love it. I also really like the air of doomed glamour, to use a favorite phrase of mine of late, with which Rucka imbues the whole affair. Batwoman’s bright-red trimmings seem like war paint she puts on to power past the sense that this was all a terrible, terrible idea. Rucka knows the power of pointed silences and fade-outs, all of which are painstakingly choreographed by Williams, using disembodied panel boxes to pinpoint moments in the comics equivalent of slow motion. When we suddenly see Alice’s tear-streaked mascara emphasized during her fight with Batwoman’s father, when Alice falls across the top and down the right hand side of a climactic spread with a great gulf of ocean mutely occupying the rest of the pages–it means something. I can already hear the Moore-derived derision that none of this has any echo in any one’s real life, but even if that’s true, who cares? It’s violent, it’s sexy, it’s spectacular–just what I want from my superhero comics.

* It’s been brought to my attention that some people may doubt my sincerity when I sing the praises of Tom Brevoort’s blog and/or Twitter feed–from which I mined the content in this Robot 6 piece on the Marvel/DC rivalry. Let me assure you that I’m serious as a heart attack. It’s not that I agree with everything he says, or that I don’t realize that it’s at least in part showmanship–it’s that I wish every other bigwig in the biz came out and said what they were thinking. We’d be healthier.

* Speaking of said rivalry, here’s Kiel Phegley on Marvel’s provocative Siege/Blackest Night comic-swap offer.

* Here’s Jog on last week’s comics. It starts with the sentence “This is a VERY GOOD Image comic about orcs and stealing and penises and conquest” and gets better from there.

* Here’s David Welsh on Natsume Ono, author of the very promising-looking not simple.

* Here’s Jim Henley on how Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are, and aren’t, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby or Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Actually, it’s also about how Lee/Kirby and McCartney/Lennon themselves aren’t like Lee/Kirby and McCartney/Lennon.

* Here’s Jeet Heer on the paradox of James Cameron’s Avatar. Speaking of, I know it was very nice-looking, but I’m trying to figure out why the hell it won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and in fact why it was even nominated versus, say, District 9 or Paranormal Activity, and the only answer I can come up with is that Hollywood wants to canonize absurdly expensive filmmaking that makes an even more absurd shitload of money in turn. If this thing had flopped as hard as people thought it would–as hard as I thought it would–heads would have rolled in the dozens. (Well, in theory; accountability is so not hot right now.) It was structurally important to the American film industry for this movie to be hugely popular with audiences and critics.

* They hired a guy who makes Saw movies to do the Paranormal Activity sequel. You can’t make that up.

* Jeepers, that’s a gawjuss Dough Mahnke cover for Green Lantern #53. Click the link for the full-sized image.

* I can’t even imagine spiking a finished comic. I’m too precious about my own work and too un-prolific to spare one.

* I thought this Onion News Network piece on Lost fandom could have gotten a lot more vicious than it did, but it’s the appearance of Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse toward the end that tipped the scales in its favor. They kid because they love!

* In this interview at Robot 6, Sean Murphy, artist of the upcoming Grant Morrison series Joe the Barbarian, has just inducted himself into the Tom Brevoort Candor Hall of Fame.

* Chris Butcher rains on Orson Scott Card and Alan Moore, albeit to different degrees and for very different reasons.

* Real Life Horror: We straight-up murdered three guys in Guantanamo Bay.

* This is fucked up.

* Today on Robot 6: Tons and tons and tons of cool comics by Winsor McKay (via), Johnny Ryan, Conor Stechschulte, and Benjamin Marra.

Over at Matt Rota’s site you can read “We Had No Idea,” our latest comic together. I hope you enjoy it!

Forming

Jesse Moynihan, writer/artist

ongoing webcomic, January 2009-January 2010 (and counting)

Read it at JesseMoynihan.com

I was pretty happy with the high concept I came up with for Afrodisiac, so let’s try it again: What if the stars of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions were the Big Answers? Like Nilsen’s funny-animal epic, Forming tells the tale of characters struggling with the stuff of existence–life, death, fate, their place in a universe that appears fundamentally capricious. Unlike Nilsen’s birds, though, Moynihan’s characters are archangels, cosmically powered alien beings, demigods and titans of legend, founding members of humanity who commune (and copulate) with higher beings on a daily basis. The metaphor scales our human plight up, not down, in other words. The art follows suit. Moynihan’s line is soft, its weight gently fluctuating, shored up by quietly irregular coloring, suggesting the same vulnerabilities as Nilsen’s stippling and figurework. But the design is maximalist: Crazy Kirbyesque costumes, Fletcher Hanks psychedelic action, long sequences of physical combat, extradimensional travel, mental fantasias. The stakes are similarly higher–the central action includes Lucifer’s battle with Michael and the birth of human civilization as conferred upon us by ancient astronauts. The gag, of course, is that these highfalutin’ types are just as messed up as we are, complaining about their jobs and their family and their sex lives and so on.

So yeah, you’ve seen it before. But what makes its use in Forming so appealing is the strip’s rolling, loping, laconic pace. New subplots–a literal clash of the titans, Lucifer & Michael, Adam & Eve, corporate intrigue on the alien homeworld–are slowly folded into the strip, and our lens on the action swings back and forth between them like a pendulum. Moreover, most of the strip’s two-page installments are stacked on top of each other, our eyes slowly cascading downward as the action unfolds over a long vertical plane. The cumulative effect does even more than the specifics of the dialogue in terms of humanizing the cosmic characters and wringing bleak gallows humor from their dilemmas. If this thing ever gets collected in print, I’d love to see it in a super-tall, super-narrow format just for that reason. It’s a very pleasurable reading experience, and it’s easy to see how rewarding a weekly visit could be.

* Today at Robot 6: Tom Brevoort, the Lord Emperor of Twitter, talks about the Siege/Blackest Night trade-in offer and Neil Gaiman’s Marvelman plans.

* Brendan McCarthy’s Spider-Man: Fever arrives this April. GLO-FI AS FUCK

* I only skimmed it since I haven’t seen the movie yet, but CRwM’s piece on Park Chan-wook’s vampire film Thirst takes some provocative shots at the horror blogosphere. Sample quote:

This is why the general mediocrity of the Great Zombie Revival is actually the key to its success: A subgenre that reinvents itself in mind-blowing ways every two or three films is going to exhaust the mental bandwidth of its audience as well as sow some discord among people who latch on some particular configuration of the genre elements and decide to become purists. But a certain pandering familiarity, spiced with only slight hints of novelty, neither taxes your audience nor risks alienating them.

I skipped Thirst because I thought it was directed by the guy who did The Host, which was a piece of shit, so that’s my bad.

* Matthias Wivel, Tucker Stone, and Noah Berlatsky explain their choices for the Best Online Comics Criticism of 2009. I recommend Matthias’s and Tucker’s posts, but not Noah’s, since he thinks Ganges is boring.

What Had Happened Was…

Domitille Collardey, writer/artist

Weeping Willow, 2009

20 pages

$6

Buy it from Domatille Collardey

You could rough this one up pretty bad if you wanted–like Jog says, it’s an alternative comic of the “here’s some stuff that happened” school that people who dislike alternative comics think all alternative comics attend. Collardey’s stories–actually, that’s too strong a word–reminiscences about her move to Brooklyn, her visit to San Francisco, her interview with Francoise Mouly, her conversation with her Holocaust-survivor grandfather, even her very life story aren’t revelatory, or (with one obvious aforementioned exception) even memorable on their own terms. What they are is a showcase for her art, and she’s got some serious chops. I’m really drawn to her wavy line, the way a series of gentle S-curves both cohere into little people and convey the timidity and uncertainty with which Collardey apparently approaches the world. Against that backdrop her depiction of Mouly really pops: Bigger eyes rimmed with make-up, darker hair, taller body, confidence and competence standing out amid Collardey’s gee-shucks artistic personality. Equally impressive are color sequences that employ brown and gray watercolors to convey warmth rather than desolation or “realism,” most notably in a self-portait that strikes me as both clear-eyed and flattering–which is then surrounded by a colorful panoply of cartoon heads. The paper stock really holds Collardey’s brushwork and colors well, by the way. As a sampler of an artist with a lot of potential, it’s worth a glimpse. Let’s see where she goes from here.

* Dannie Flesher, cofounder of Wax Trax! Records, has died at age 58. I really would not be the same without him. When I was a teenager, the industrial aesthetic pioneered by Flesher, his partner Jim Nash, and Wax Trax! acts like Ministry, KMFDM, and their myriad side projects defined “cool” for me in a way that still holds true for me today. Trent Reznor and Al Jourgensen joining forces to cover Black Sabbath with 1000 Homo DJs’ “Supernaut” is pretty much the most amazing thing a 16-year-old Sean could imagine. Any day I’m dressed all in black, which is usually three or four days a week, you pretty much have them to thank. Today I’m still impressed by just how committed Wax Trax! bands were to their sound and style. There’s a totality to their encapsulation of deviance and decay that’s still chilling, and extremely edgy and ballsy even now. Plus, a vintage Ministry side project is a joy forever–I listened to the Revolting Cocks Beers Steers & Queers just this morning, not knowing what had happened, and it’s still a death-disco hoot. Thank you, Dannie. I hope wherever you are now, Jim’s there with you.

* Today on Robot 6: Buy Prison Pit pages and check out the Best of 2009 comics meta-list, plus a quick thought from me on same.

* Hey, new Paul Hornschemeier Forlorn Funnies? How about that!

* Jesse Reese of Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? tackles Mike Mignola and Richard Corben’s Hellboy: Bride of Hell. The Hellboy books proper spent some time in the wilderness, but I think with The Wild Hunt and Bride of Hell, they’ve been duly and deftly brought in line with what makes B.P.R.D. so compelling: Their heroism ultimately futile, our heroes fail.

* Viz has some cool-looking comics coming out soon.

* Here’s a list of the bestselling graphic novels at my LCS, the great Jim Hanley’s Universe, in 2009. Superhero-heavy, but which superhero titles we’re talking about is kind of surprising.

* Benjamin A. Shobert of Asia Times waxes philosophical about the Red Dawn remake, in which Red China is apparently the heavy. (Via CRwM.)

* Clive Barker is making some fucked-up Halloween costumes.

* Thanks to Tom Spurgeon for directing me to Michael Wm. Kaluta’s J.R.R. Tolkien calendar and a terrifically choreographed Buz Sawyer chase sequence. Next time you just wanna take your superheroes and have ’em fly around shooting shit at each other, please take a look at this and think again!

* Hey, it’s a new comic I wrote! Well, it’s actually not new, but it may be new to you and it’s certainly new to the Top Shelf 2.0 site. It’s “Pornography,” a non-pornographic comic written by me and drawn by the great Matt Wiegle. I hope you enjoy it.

* The League of Tana Tea Drinkers horror-blog collective is tackling horror comics. Click the link for further linkage.

* Poe-etic creepiness from Mr. Noel Freibert.

* Solid observation by Tom Spurgeon regarding the December 2009 Direct Market sales charts:

I personally think it worrisome that there’s a drift downwards in books that sell over 50,000 copies, which would seem to support a theory — or late-night, drunken blurting-out, as you will — that a lot of effort is necessary to push certain comics into respectable sales territory and that maybe nothing is being done or can be done for the bulk of them. The comic book middle class is rotting away, in other words. One might suggest that the more poignant outcome of “event fatigue” isn’t that people are going to get tired of events eventually (even though they likely will), but that people are only excited by events now and fatigued by everything else as a result.

* Curt Purcell kicks off a series on Final Crisis by labeling its use of Modernist techniques self-defeating–an anti-story movement welded to a celebration of stories and storytelling. There’s a lot to disagree with here, from the characterization of Morrison to the characterization of Modernism, but I wanna see where we’re headed first.

* The latest What The–?! video is a parody of Dark Reign. The stuff I didn’t write made me laugh.

Afrodisiac

Jim Rugg & Brian Maruca, writers

Jim Rugg, artist

AdHouse, January 2010

96 pages, hardcover

$14.95

Buy it from AdHouse

Buy it from Amazon.com

What If Pim & Francie Got Bitten by a Radioactive Luke Cage? Afrodisiac, like Al Columbia’s fractured masterpiece, is a comic, an art book, an objet d’art, an assemblage of stories and story fragments and illustrations and pastiches and sketches and ephemera and so on. Yet I’m guess everyone interested in an Afrodisiac book would have been perfectly happy with an anthology of straightforward blaxploitation riffs, showcasing the heavy-lidded, angular action characters, juicy design choices (this thing is like sound-effect lettering porn), and deadpan over-the-topness we saw from the Rugg & Maruca team in Street Angel, maybe with a few ben-day-dot nods in the direction of faux vintage. So why go further? Well, for one thing, if you have the design talent that Rugg and Chris Pitzer do, why not.

But what these moves communicate is the slipperiness of what Afrodisiac really is. The titular hero receives a different origin with each story–he’s a cyborg, an inner-city Billy Batson, a ghetto Captain America or Thor or Spider-Man. He’s marched through a variety of comic-genre parodies–Archie, romance, funny-animal, Bronze Age Marvel magazines, Bronze Age Marvel comics. Sometimes his adventures are made to look like they could have sprung straight from the ’70s, but other times the coloring or the printing or the language (this ain’t Comic Code approved!) tip the project’s hand. And that’s to say nothing of Rugg’s art, which is sly and slick in a fashion that befits a guy who gets into the annual Society of Illustrators show every year rather than a member of the Gerry Conway-era bullpen. And have we ever lived in a world where a character like the Afrodisiac would get a toy line or a Saturday morning cartoon?

It could have simply coasted on the asskicking concept of a superhero pimp called the Afrodisiac, but every choice Rugg, Maruca, and Pitzer make here makes it harder to put your finger on what’s going on. Which, I think, is the point: Afrodisiac is an attempt by modern white nerds to capture and critique the art made by the white nerds of yesteryear’s attempts to capture the art made for that era’s black audiences in response to what that era’s white entertainment industry thought of that era’s black audiences, specifically what they wanted to see from the relationship between black criminals and white women. (Phew.) It is, in other words, about the nature of truth, about different marginal or marginalized subculture’s attempts to understand and interact with one another, how those attempts magnify and distort one another, and in the end produce art as fascinating and fractured and entertaining and incomplete as the cut-up “final issue” that ends the collection. Powerful stuff? You’re damn right.

* Chew on some good online comics criticism courtesy of a blue-ribbon panel hosted by Ng Suat Tong, and swing by panelist Frank Santoro’s place for further options.

* The latest stop in The Cool Kids Table’s journey through the decade in comics is 2006, aka The Year of 52.

* Buffygate has been pretty entertaining. I like to imagine Whedon wading in, tossing Bill Willingham’s ruined body onto the floor, and saying “What we have here is failure to communicate.”

* What if Clowes was one of us? He was young like one of us?

* Thank goodness for all those giant Stone Age bats, or else how the heck would Bruce Wayne maintain his signature look?

* Tom Spurgeon ends his holiday interview series with a bang: Bill Kartalopolous on Kramers Ergot 4. I find the way he situates the book in terms of previous publishing efforts by Jordan Crane and Tom Devlin really welcome, since that’s the environment in which I was approaching the book at the time. It’s also worth comparing his experience with Kramers and Blankets at MoCCA 2003 to mine.

* And with that, the holiday interview series draws to a close. Thanks, Tom, I know I’m biased since I was involved, but I enjoyed it as much as any online comics writing I’ve come across in a long time. Here’s a wrap-up/round-up/highlight reel.

* Today on Robot 6: Lots and lots of little announcements regarding Brightest Day, DC’s post-Blackest Night event/series/brand. The most interesting to me is the biweekly series of the same name by Geoff Johns and Peter J. Tomasi.

* Related: a very nerdy Geoff Johns Q&A. (Is there any other kind?)

* Also related: Curt Purcell on stories vs. events.

* Back on Robot 6: read Dan Hipp’s cool-looking series Gyakushu! online for free, and John Malkovich is the Vulture. (Except that, uh, the whole thing has been scrapped–good, maybe we can get a good Spider-Man movie now.)

* I fully support 3D re-releases of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies. But is it really true that “Experts now predict that 3-D will become the new multiplex standard within five years” in “as dramatic a shift as when the ‘talkies’ killed off silent movies in the early 20th century”? Also, do you really need to grant anonymity to a source when all they’re saying is that George Lucas is excited to tinker with his old movies using new technology? Oh well.

* Matt Maxwell continues mulling over horror, science fiction, and issues of story scale. He’s also posted all of his “Conversation Fear” columns from the late, lamented Dark But Shining horror blog.

Sleeper Car

Theo Ellsworth, writer/artist

Secret Acres, 2009

32 pages

$6

Buy it from Secret Acres

Theo Ellsworth’s Capacity, a monumental work of ferocious interiority combined with irresistible openness, was one of the decade’s best comic debuts. It was a knockout. Sleeper Car is more like a playful tweak of the nose or pat on the buttcheek. Stepping away from the artistic-autobiography subgenre that made Capacity so singular, Ellsworth uses this 32-page pamphlet as an opportunity to deploy the same tools he used there–the endlessly inventive character designs, the googly eyes and rubber lips, the enveloping crosshatched backgrounds, the seemingly infinite fur and feathers and scales and joints and so on–in the service of what I think could best be called flights of fancy. The stories and strips here are funny, though they’re not out and out gag comics; they’re fantastical, though they’re too loose and unconcerned with narrative worldbuilding to qualify as fantasy. What’s interesting to me is seeing the different approaches he takes with each one.

For example, the longest, central story, about two verbosely formal robots who make a bet about the existence of gnomes, uses a staid six-panel grid to heighten its deadpan humor. But the source of that humor shifts throughout–first it revolves around the wordplay of the droids’ creaky way of speaking, then gets goofy showing the second robot passing the time as the first embarks on his search for proof, then there’s a series of very funny “photos” of the victorious robot’s shenanigans with the loser’s forfeited arm, and then there’s a punchline splash page (!) that injects a whole new comical menace into the proceedings. Throughout, it’s all about knowing just what image will nail the required effect. You see this in many of the strips here: A traveler’s wanderlust depicted by showing him distraught and on skis at the top of his staircase, say, or a sleeping behemoth scratching his head in wonderment as an explorer rockets out of his gullet, or a kid’s eyes peering from the distended neckhole of his pajama shirt as he wraps up his knees, feet, and arms in it to form a “pajama tent,” or a drawing of empty bus stop letting us down easy after a strip in which a traveler’s face transformed wildly from panel to panel. None of it’s gonna bowl you over, but none of it’s meant to. It’s expert, effective cartooning–little sketches of where a cartoonist with this visual vocabulary and this set of ideas can go. I’ll follow him there, that’s for sure.

* Matt Maxwell asks, in essence, does that which is horror in micro become science fiction in macro? Really good question, Matt. Brainwave: Thinking about it with this in mind, I think what sticks with me about Cloverfield is that it goes macro but yet it still feels “horror” to me. Perhaps this is a specific feature of Lovecraftian horror?

* My wife showed me a clip from Human Centipede on YouTube and I was beyond disturbed. I can’t remember the last time I had that visceral a reaction to something that wasn’t one of my usual triggers, like growths or animal cruelty. Anyway, IFC will be distributing Human Centipede in the US.

* Jesus, look at this Jim Blanchard drawing of Ian Curtis. The larger version, available at the link, is now my desktop wallpaper. (Via Flog.)

* Today at Robot 6: New Iron Man armor and a shopper’s guide to the Fantagraphics New Year’s Hangover Sale.

* A short but sweet chat between Tom Spurgeon and Dan Nadel about Joan Reidy & Ron Rege Jr.’s flawless Boys.

* Marvel vs. the Kirbys, Phase Two.

Monsters

Ken Dahl, writer/artist

Secret Acres, 2009

208 pages

$18

Buy it from Secret Acres

Buy it from Amazon.com

Gross-out sex-life autobiography has a storied history in alternative comics, but it’s sort of a St. Olaf story. (Crumb is repeated first as tragedy, than as farce.) Folks with sufficient cartooning chops are afforded ample opportunity to Tex Avery themselves out, which I do appreciate. And of course there’s the thrill we get from coming across someone with no internal censor–to paraphrase Hesh Rabkin, between their brain and their pen, they have no interlocutor. But it’s very, very, very well-trod territory, and you can count me among the people who came across Joe Matt’s Spent and thought “Well, that’s enough of that.”

So it took some persuading for me to give Ken Dahl’s Monsters the story of his life with herpes, a shot. Another comic about some creepy artist type’s loathsome behavior around and toward women? Drawn with confrontationally ugly underground-style depictions of everyone involved and hyperactive exclamation-point-ridden lettering? Coupled with enough grand-guignol lesion close-ups to trigger my skin-growth phobia like wo?

Wrong wrong wrong! I enjoyed the heck out of this book. For starters, I was giving Dahl’s art short shrift. Jeepers this guy is accomplished. I don’t point this out nearly often enough, but as a non-artist, I really get a thrill out of good cartooning because it’s so beyond my ken. To develop a visual vocabulary and deploy it consistently page after page…I mean, man. Anyway, on the most basic level, Dahl’s bobble-headed, adenoidal characters are crafted with an assured, flowing line that trails off into feathering wisps for a hint of vulnerability beneath the slickness. Moreover, they are an instant visual signature, serving both to deflate the angst and self-absorption of his story and satirically skewer the various alt lifestyles of which he is a tangential part. (For what it’s worth, I think the mockery–of everyone from Christians to vegans–is one of the less considered parts of the book, but still, no one comes out of this looking like an angel.) But more importantly for the book, they’re a template from which he can deviate for extravagant, almost Tom Neely-esque sequences, in which Dahl’s emotions and/or his infection literally explode from within and take over in monstrous fashion.

But for me, the most interesting thing about Monsters is Dahl himself. Turns out he’s not a creep at all! He has no idea how he got herpes, had no idea he had it when he gave it to his girlfriend, and commits a grand total of one genuinely douchebaggish actions in the entire course of the book. Instead, he obsesses on his condition to a psychologically debilitating degree, sealing himself off from having a healthy social life or any kind of romantic relationship for years. In fact, while the “educational filmstrip” facts’n’figures sequence about herpes simplex is the book’s ostensible centerpiece, for me the real tour de force was the ending, which in a quick one-two punch upends what I’d thought was going on with both the story’s plot and its moral. Dahl turns out to be far more victim than victimizer, and the deft way in which he teases that reversal out of our expectations for a book of this sort is its best trick.

* By far my favorite set of responses to Heidi MacDonald’s end-of-year/decade survey comes from Sparkplug’s Shannon O’Leary, and not just because she’s a rare voice of sanity regarding Battlestar Galactica‘s breathtaking finale. O’Leary digs in and unpacks the fallout from Diamond’s decision to raise its order minimums in such a way as to essentially extinguish the presence of the small press in the Direct Market. I’m grateful, because it was only after reading Heidi’s survey that I realized I’d all but forgotten that this even happened–that’s how quickly and totally I internalized the notion that unless you’re a really lucky person in a big city or college town, you can’t get those comics in comic shops anymore, it’s just a given. That’s your story of the year, I’d say, much more so than the big moves at Disney/Marvel and Warner/DC, where very little has happened yet and I imagine the main effect will be to cut out some ingrained nonsense.

* What’s more, Diamond’s move has made Internet retail presences, webcomic set-ups, small-press shows, and small-press-friendly websites all the more important to an entire mode of expression. Case in point–I’m not sure you’d be seeing so many excellent altcomix, like this little number from Frank Santoro, online these days if the DM were still open to it at all. The move has made Internet retail presences, webcomic set-ups, small-press shows, and small-press-friendly websites all the more important to an entire mode of expression.

* What I’m most concerned about in 2010 is how Diamond, the economy, and the short-term-profit-maximizing policies of the big companies will jointly shape the fates of the ’00’s new breed of publishers. Bodega’s already taking the year off; whither Buenaventura, PictureBox, Sparkplug, Secret Acres, AdHouse?

* Today on Robot 6: Michael Kupperman’s rejected New Yorker comics and Matt Groening’s music festival.

* I have no brief with Ti West’s The House of the Devil, but releasing a VHS version as a promo item is a great idea, and its mimicry of vintage ’80s VHS packaging is impeccable, as any Portable Grindhouse owner could tell you. It’s the back cover that really gets it over.

* The Sinestro Corps War really was very well done. And it pulled Curt Purcell back from the brink!

* Ben Schwartz and Tom Spurgeon talk B.P.R.D., the best ongoing superhero comic of the decade. It’s a rambly thing that talks as much about Otto Binder and Alan Moore as it does about Hellboy, but you won’t mind much. What’s fascinating to me is that Schwartz got into the series as recently as the Black Goddess arc, which was the most recent one (until today’s release of King of Fear #1). I played catch-up with Hellboy in, oh, 2002? 2003? and then started following all the Hellboy-verse books from there, so it’s interesting to see the impact they can have on someone who reads a big chunk in a short time frame. After all, it’s been telling one large story since Davis and Arcudi came aboard, so it’s probably like plowing through an HBO show on DVD. Two things I wish they’d gotten to are 1) the degree to which both BPRD and Hellboy have become about the characters’ failure to do what they’re trying to do, and 2) that wonderful scene in The Black Flame where the evil CEO enters his boardroom in full flaming-skull supervillain regalia and calmly tells the board of directors “You’re all fired”–one of my all-time favorite comics sequences, up there with the end of the World’s Fair issue of ACME, the beach scene in Diary of a Teenage Girl, the locust sequence in Skyscrapers of the Midwest, the lizard-tail sex scene in Black Hole… Also, Tom, I don’t suppose Ben convinced you to count B.P.R.D. and Hellboy (and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) as superhero comics for your best-of-the-decade shortlists, did he?

* A Masters of the Universe art show? Oh, indeed. The world of He-Man is deathlessly weird, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink amalgam of stuff that’s cool to eight year olds. It’s the closest this country’s come to the bizarre childhood entertainment franchises of Japan, I would say. (Via FarePlay.)

* Three things that are cool-looking enough that I’m not even going to show you a sample image, you’ll just have to click for yourselves: Kevin Huizenga’s “Famous Ghost,” Josh Cotter’s Xmas commission, and Tom Neely’s “I just figured it all out…”

* Matt Maxwell’s latest decade-in-review installment tackles the history of his reading and writing about comics. I’m second only perhaps to Heidi MacDonald in getting a kick out of trips down comics-blogosphere memory lane.

* Poor Curt Purcell. Curt, if I’d known you’d gone into your project of reading each and every event-comic tie-in title actually expecting to be entertained more often than not, I could have warned you, like the wizened old local at the end of the first reel of a horror movie.

* Rob Bricken’s review of Avatar makes me feel like maybe he and I linked up the neurons in our respective headtails. Now we’re bonded for life.

* Only problem is that I’m clearly already ponytail-to-ponytail with Tucker Stone, if his Best Comics of 2009 list is any indication. Sample quote: “There’s scary, and then there’s horrifying. After reading Cockbone, I’m starting to wonder if there’s a third thing that’s even worse.”

* Con War comes to Texas.

Giraffes in My Hair: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Life

Bruce Paley, writer

Carol Swain, artist

Fantagraphics, 2009

136 pages, hardcover

$19.99

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

Pencil is not an easy medium to publish in for a cartoonist–just ask the superhero artists whose work looks like the proverbial cake left out in the rain when “digitally inked” or colored right off the original pencils. But Carol Swain makes it look easy, and I think it’s because she’s figured out a way to spot blacks with a pencil. Those sooty shadows and clouds and night skies and manes of wild hair suffuse her work in Giraffes in My Hair with a sort of negative-image glow, popping her foregrounded figures off the page with a barely-there white aura. Couple it with her ever-shifting angles and it’s a damned effective way to create a sense of space and depth, reminiscent of similarly adroit strategies by Jeffrey Brown and Ben Katchor. If Swain’s jarring close-ups make her panels less immersive than theirs, her porous gray shadings make up for it with atmosphere–an inviting softness, tinged with just enough smokiness to remind us that what’s going on here isn’t entirely pleasant. The overall effect works so well that I really had to stop myself and peer at her pages to figure out what made them tick. I was too busy being propelled along by the effortlessness of the art.

So Giraffes, a collection of anecdotes from Bruce Paley’s teens and twenties on America’s countercultural fringe, is a breezy read. But it’s one rooted in an almost unchanging nine-panel grid with sparse, nearly monotone narration. At times this allows the comics to tip over into bluntness, particularly with the ending to some of the stories: The tale of how Paley avoided Vietnam ends with a shot of the Wall; a story of New York City’s ’70s heroin scene ends with Death itself offering us a bag of smack. But in general, the art and the writing are a perfect fit. Swain’s art rarely calls attention to or gets in the way of itself, and in that it meshes seamlessly with Paley’s deadpan “here’s what happened” narrative style, his reluctance to overstate or oversell the import of the anecdote reminiscent of Harvey Pekar’s. (Of course, Pekar’s work rises and falls on the strength of his collaborators–Paley’s got Swain, so there’s not much falling to do here.)

Yet at the same time the presence of that subtitle indicates a unifying theme, which makes Paley’s storytelling choices all the more interesting. The first story shows an 18-year-old Paley ditching college and leaving home to hitchhike cross-country with his girlfriend, but the home life that led him to drop everything and drop out is relegated to a quick line of dialogue and about half a page upon his return from the journey. As hippies give way to punks we suddenly discover that Paley’s a habitual heroin user, but we never see his introduction to the drug. A story about an ill-fated attempt to import drugs from overseas sees Paley casually mention time spent in Tangiers, but up until that point his adventures had been strictly domestic. In some graphic memoirs these lacunae would be maddening; here’s they’re sort of the point.

Paley’s not claiming anything spectacular about the life he lived or the stories he plucked from it. The way he tells it and Swain draws it, living on the edge feels like an interchangeable commodity with Pekar’s life as a civil servant. An interesting conversation with the janitor may be replaced by doing speedballs with Johnny Thunders, but the game’s the same: get by, find a little happiness when you can, and cling to the stories that comprise your life, the recounting of which has a value all its own.

* Wow, this is really something: Like half the cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live is doing a fundraiser for the off-Broadway adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Money well spent for a variety of reasons.

* Powr Masters 3 and If ‘n Oof: on the way in May!

* Over at Robot 6 I rounded up some notable posts in the great “Did comics stink in 2009 or is it just me?” debate.

* Tom Spurgeon interviews Jog on Death Note, one of the great entertainments of the comics decade.