Maybe try a little harder next time.

On the other hand, the results in the short story category bode well for the Simpsons Ergot issue. There’s always next year, gang!

* Marvel has acquired the rights to Marvelman (aka Miracleman) from creator Mick Anglo. This British Captain Marvel (aka Shazam) knockoff became a pioneering revisionist-superhero series at the hands of Alan Moore, Mark Buckingham, Neil Gaiman et al, then got lost in legal limbo for decades now, preventing the well-regarded revisionist stuff from ever being reprinted. The individual issues walked away from the Wizard library years ago, so I’ve never been able to read this, and it was just on the list of five things I’d like to be reprinted I sent to the Comics Reporter for this week’s Five for Friday feature. This is a treat. Marvel EIC Joe Quesada talks to my Comic Book Resources overlord Jonah Weiland about the announcement on CBR’s motherfucking boat.

* Now here’s a heckuva con debut: Drawn & Quarterly is premiering Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions #12 at the show. Looks like it’s getting even darker.

* My favorite announcement in this Geoff Johns Spotlight panel report isn’t Blackest Night: Flash with Scott Kolins, but the fact that Krypto the Super-Dog will be fighting Dek-Starr the Red Landern Cat. RRRRREOW! Johns has a CBR Boat Show interview of his own.

* And speaking of Johns and Blackest Night (this isn’t strictly an SDCC link, but just good timing on Curt Purcell’s part), Curt Purcell of the Groovy Age of Horror continues his series of posts on the horror-tinged DC event. Here he is on Green Lantern Corps #38 and Green Lantern #43; here he is on Tales of the Corps #1 & 2; and here he is on Blackest Night #1 and Green Lantern #44. Curt is not a regular reader of DC comics, so I think his posts are instructive for several reasons.

First, he rightly points out that the quality of the art in this crossover, specifically that of Doug Mahnke and Ivan Reis, is quite strong (though Reis has looked better in the past, IMHO). To the credit of both DC and Marvel, the current cycle of event comics that kicked off with Infinite Crisis and continued with Civil War, World War Hulk, The Sinestro Corps War, Final Crisis, Secret Invasion, and Blackest Night have all featured talented stylists at the helm, although this leaves them frequently plagued by fill-ins, lateness, or both. (I actually think Blackest Night could end up going without either problem; we’ll see.)

Second, he articulates a problem with serialized superhero comics that not even Jim Shooter-style “new-reader friendliness” can overcome, namely that even if a superhero comic uses exposition to provide you with all the information you need to make sense it, it still “presuppose[s] a history of emotional attachment to these characters” to connect with it. And frankly there’s no more of a way around that than there would be to make latecomers to The Sopranos instantly connect with the plight of Christopher Moltisanti. It’s just the nature of long-form serialized storytelling. The key is to avoid plot points that are simply “Hey look, it’s That Guy!” in favor of “Hey, look what that guy is doing!”

Third, I think it’s interesting that he started his read of the event with an issue of Green Lantern Corps because it had the tagline “Prelude to Blackest Night” on the cover. The thing is, every issue of Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps has had that tagline on the cover for months–at least two full storyarcs, in Green Lantern‘s case. As a hardcore superhero comics reader, I knew that this was intended a) to goose sales, and b) to establish a tenuous connection to the upcoming event, and not c) to mean that this was actually a prelude to Blackest Night in the literal sense. But of course an outsider would have no way of knowing that. This was something that never would have occurred to me.

* Back to SDCC news proper, here’s something else that never would have occurred to me: the formation of an enormous line to get into the plain-vanilla X-Men comics panel. My first San Diego Comic-Con was 2001, and iirc you could pretty much waltz right into any of the “here’s what’s coming up in this particular superhero franchise” panel. As Tom Spurgeon notes:

I saw at least a half-dozen lines to a few random panels that ten years ago would have had a hard time putting together 40 people that were dauntingly long this time out. One story that three people told me was that one mainstream comic book writer had a signing so stuffed that security was involved in processing the line.

It seems that San Diego is a big con for everything, including comics.

* I don’t think any news or new ground is broken in Graeme McMillan’s interview with Marvel EIC Joe Quesada for io9, but it’s a pretty good encapsulation of how Quesada comes across in every interview I’ve done with him, and what he values/prioritizes about his job. I find it difficult not to respect him on those grounds. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Golly, Rafael Grampa can draw.

* Tom Neely has a con-exclusive minicomic called Self-Indulgence at the show for which he will hand-draw each and every cover. Is “others-indulgent” a word? Because that’s what that is.

* Scott Pilgrim videogame coming!

* I was rather smitten with Gerard Way’s Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, so I’m looking forward to plowing through the second volume of the series, Dallas, in time to pick up the freshly-announced third volume, Hotel Oblivion.

* World War Z author Max Brooks is writing a G.I. Joe miniseries for IDW. That’s IDW’s second good get of the con. I’ll check it out.

* The most interesting thing about this O.G. music-blogger roundtable featuring guys like Matthew Perpetua, Sean Michaels, David Gutowski, and Andrew Noz is how few of them read other music blogs. I think if you conducted a similar discussion with comicsblogging godfathers like NeilAlien, Bill Sherman, Dirk Deppey et al, you’d get a very different result.

I tried to divert my mind to a new track and got thinking about how I had wanted to paint Brent Norton yesterday. No, nothing as important as a painting, but…just sit him on a log with my beer in his hand and sketch his sweaty, tired face and the two wings of his carefully processed hair sticking up untidily in the back. It could have been a good picture. It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think–I did–that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

It turned out I wasn’t as good as he was. I kept trying to be for longer than I should have, maybe. I had a show in New York and it did poorly–the art critics beat me over the head with my father. A year later I was supporting myself and Steff with the commercial stuff. She was pregnant and I sat down and talked to myself about it. The result of that conversation was a belief that serious art was always going to be a hobby for me, no more.

I did Golden Girl Shampoo ads–the one where the Girl is standing astride her bike, the one where she’s playing Frisbee on the beach, the one where she’s standing on the balcony of her apartment with a drink in her hand. I’ve done short-story illustrations for most of the big slicks, but I broke into that field doing fast illustrations for the stories in the sleazier men’s magazines. I’ve done some movie posters. The money comes in. We keep our heads nicely above water.

I had one final show in Bridgton, just last summer. I showed nine canvases that I had painted in five years, and I sold six of them. The one I absolutely would not sell showed the Federal market, by some queer coincidence. The perspective was from the far end of the parking lot. In my picture, the parking lot was empty except for a line of Campbell’s Beans and Franks cans, each one larger than the last as they marched toward the viewer’s eye. The last one appeared to be about eight feet tall. The picture was titled Beans and Perspective. A man from California who was a top exec in some company that makes tennis balls and rackets and who knows what other sports equipment seemed to want that picture very badly, and would not take no for an answer in spite of the NFS card tucked into the bottom left-hand corner of the spare wooden frame. He began at six hundred dollars and worked his way up to four thousand. He said he wanted it for his study. I would not let him have it, and he went away sorely puzzled. Even so, he didn’t quite give up; he left his card in case I changed my mind.

I could have used the money–that was the year we put the addition on the house and bought the four-wheel-drive–but I just couldn’t sell it. I couldn’t sell it because I felt it was the best painting I had ever done and I wanted it to look at after someone would ask me, with totally unconscious cruelty, when I was going to do something serious.

Then I happened to show it to Ollie Weeks one day last fall. He asked me if he could photograph it and run it as an ad one week, and that was the end of my own false perspective. Ollie had recognized my painting for what it was, and by doing so, he forced me to recognize it, too. A perfectly good piece of slick commercial art. No more. And, thank God, no less.

I let him do it, and then I called the exec at his home in San Luis Obispo and told him he could have the painting for twenty-five hundred if he still wanted it. He did, and I shipped it UPS to the coast. And since then that voice of disappointed expectation–that cheated child’s voice that can never be satisfied with such a mild superlative as good–has fallen pretty much silent. And except for a few rumbles–like the sounds of those unseen creatures somewhere out in the foggy night–it has been pretty much silent ever since. Maybe you can tell me–why should the silencing of that childish, demanding voice seem so much like dying?

–Stephen King, “The Mist”

Immortal Weapons #1

Jason Aaron, Duane Swierczynski, writers

Mico Suayan, Stefano Gaudiano, Roberto De La Torre, Khari Evans, Victor Olazaba, Michael Lark, Arturo Lozzi, Travel Foreman, artists

Marvel, July 2009

40 pages

$3.99

You don’t have to look around the comics blogosphere too hard to find praise for how Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction retooled the mythos of the heretofore largely ignored kung-fu superhero Iron Fist into one of the sturdiest and most expansive in the entire Marvel Universe. Like Geoff Johns did with Green Lantern by introducing a rainbow of multicolored Lantern Corps, Brubaker and Fraction took a key component of Iron Fist’s existing backstory–he’s the warrior champion of a mystical city–and simply multiplied it in a couple of different directions–Danny Rand is just the latest in a long line of such champions, and his mystical city is just one of seven such cities, all with long lines of champions of their own. Suddenly, writers had access to a whole new array of allies and antagonists, mentors and successors, settings and story possibilities. It was veritably the birth of the Iron Fist Universe.

Since Frubaker’s departure for greener, better-selling pastures, the book has continued under the direction of pulp writer Duane Swierczynski in much the same rewarding vein. In addition to keeping up the Frubaker traditions of stand-alone issues spotlighting past (and future) Iron Fists and supporting roles played by the Fist’s former Heroes for Hire chums, he’s continued rolling out natural-seeming expansions of the original Iron Fist mythos: For as long as the Iron Fists have existed, so too has a being whose sole purpose is to kill and devour Iron Fists; the Seven Cities have kept an Eighth City as their secret gulag, ruled by the fallen First Iron Fist. The shock of the new may have subsided, but the ideas and execution mesh rather seamlessly with the relaunch.

The one weak spot has been the art. Frubaker’s run was anchored by the great David Aja, perhaps the best exemplar of the naturalistic New Marvel House Style pioneered by Alex Maleev during Brian Michael Bendis’s wonderful Daredevil run back in the day, and sported any number of strong (and schedule-saving) guest artists. Sweirczynski’s counterpart has been Travel Foreman, a bold and distinctive stylist, but one whose angular, inky figures, frequently adrift amid wide empty backgrounds, run counter to the cinematic-pulp feel of the previous run, and can make the action, an all-important component of a kung-fu superhero comic, difficult to parse. It’s not bad art by any means, particularly considering how easy it would have been to saddle the title with something bland and unremarkable, but without the first-round-knockout quality that Aja brought to the book (I vividly remember how impressed Wizard’s weekly review roundtable was with that first issue), I’d imagine it’s been tough to stop Frubaker fans from jumping ship.

Which is why, it seems, The Immortal Iron Fist has been at least temporarily canceled, replaced with Immortal Weapons. This miniseries focuses on each of the Iron Fist’s mystical-champion counterparts, a terrifically named bunch including the Bride of Nine Spiders, Dog Brother No. 1, the Prince of Orphans, Tiger’s Beautiful Daughter, and this issue’s star, Fat Cobra. He’s been the breakout member of the bunch, a sumo-lookin’ dude with a ceaselessly cheery demeanor and insatiable appetite for wine, women, and food. (Not sure about song, though I wouldn’t be surprised.) Guest writer Jason Aaron plays this to the hilt, initially surrounding him with a posse of beautiful masseuses and filling in his backstory with comical imagery: A tubby baby born in a pigsty, the Cobra became an opera singer, then embarked on a decades-long ass-kicking tour of the world and beyond, complete with besting Hercules and Volstagg in a competitive eating contest in Olympus. In one sequence that riffs on a Frubaker trademark and had me laughing out loud as I read it on the train, Cobra and a female sparring partner suddenly switch from exchanging exotically named blows (Elbow of a Thousand Agonies, Giant Squid Spine Squeeze, Hell’s Dentist) to exotically named sexual maneuvers (Tongue of a Thousand Passions, the Peddling Tortoise, the Wheelbarrow of the Gods). But a twist that plays off the Cobra’s womanizing ways, initially for comic effect, suddenly turns deadly serious, complicating our understanding (and that of the amnesiac Cobra himself) of who the Cobra is and what he’s capable of. Aaron is joined on this journey by an array of talented artists, each responsible for a different era in the Cobra’s life: Mico Suyan’s framing sequence gives the Cobra a rounded, lifelike feel, while Daredevil regulars Stefano Gaudiano and Michael Lark each evoke the book’s past artistic glories. There’s even some gorgeous coloring (love those purples!) by the always welcome Matthew Hollingsworth. Compelling one-and-done stories are not easy, but you wouldn’t know it from reading this one.

The book is rounded out by a story from the regular team of Swierczynski and Foreman and starring the Iron Fist himself; this will be continued throughout the miniseries. With ace inker Gaudiano backing him up, Foreman suddenly comes into his own: His art gains in detail and in evocative power, with a memorably bug-eyed, strung-out junkie, an adorable kung-fu urchin, and Danny Rand’s girlfriend and partner Misty Knight looking as real and as beautiful as ever. The action is easy to parse, and the costume choices (from kids in kung-fu training togs to the aforementioned junkie in his tighty whiteys) are memorable. It’s quite an effort, and with any luck, the Immortal Weapons will last, if not forever than for a few more arcs of work of this caliber.

* The problem with being on the East Coast during Comic Con is that very few newsworthy things actually happen during your day. Maybe that will change tomorrow and Saturday. But other than the ongoing Twilight war (and I must say I’ve been impressed by how the comics commentariat has largely maintained a policy of shrugged shoulders at the very least and chanted “gabba gabba we accept you” at best rather than screaming “I CAST YOU OUT! THE POWER OF STAN COMPELS YOU!” at them) Thursday has been dullsville.

* That said, there were a few developments of note. For starters, Buenaventura Press is debuting Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club #3. That alone is cause for celebration.

* Speaking of which, holy crap would you get a look at all of Fantagraphics’ many many con debuts?!?

* Daniel Clowes is moving to Drawn & Quarterly for his next book, Wilson. That strikes me as big news.

* So does Bob Schreck’s move to IDW.

* Agents of Atlas lives!

* Curt Purcell ponders Blackest Night‘s “new reader friendliness” and/or lack thereof and some fannish reactions to same. And by “ponders” I mean “shakes his head in disbelief at.”

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Cullen Gallagher reviews my favorite film of 2008, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo–perhaps the strangest action movie I’ve ever seen.

* At The House Next Door, Dan Callahan pays tribute to Madeline Kahn. She will always be the Empress Nympho to me. “Say, Bob–do I have any openings that this man might fit?”

* I believe it was Louis Seize who said Apres Preview Night, le deluge. N’est-ce pas?

* The Onion AV Club speaks to Grant Morrison about this and that. He does some more public proclaiming of his desire to work on Wonder Woman, for one thing. But this was the money quote for me:

///I don’t know much about what’s going on in the global comics scene these days, I’m sorry to say. I have to confess I’m not a huge comics fan in the wider sense of comics as an art form. Apart from the absurdist comics like Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed To Thrizzle and Steve Aylett’s The Caterer, I just like superhero stuff. I’ve never paid a great deal of attention to the undergrounds or the indie scene.

Isn’t that depressing? What alternative comics or manga or webcomics or anygoddamnthing that isn’t Marvel or DC would you suggest Grant Morrison read? Tell me in the comments. Let’s find Grant his gateway comic! I’ll start: Acme Novelty Library #19! (Link via Whitney Matheson.)

* Speaking of Morrison, here’s some of his very very early work as a writer-artist. Bee ay en ay en ay ess. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Gosh, there’s a sneak preview of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds at Comic Con?

* Here are Tom Spurgeon’s Top 50 Comic Con Panel Picks. I sort of felt like there weren’t a ton of things I was dying to see this year, but ymmv.

* Chris Mautner reviews Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker novel The Hunter from the perspective of a Cooke skeptic, particularly regarding his slickness and tendency toward nostalgia, a perspective I share–thus making me look forward to reading the book myself.

* Vice’s comics issue features interviews with Anders Nilsen, Chip Kidd, Chris Onstad, Gerard Way, Gary Panter, and more. (Via Whitney Matheson again.)

* Anyone else think it’s weird that MGM’s upcoming 3-film Hannibal Lecter Anthology blu-ray doesn’t feature the three movies in which Anthony Hopkins plays Lecter, instead including the Hopkins-less Manhunter rather than its Brett Ratner-directed Hopkinsy remake Red Dragon? I didn’t say “bad,” mind you, just “weird” from a major studio.

* This is interesting: Friend o’ the blog Sean B. notes in the comments that the solicit for James Robinson’s Justice League: Cry for Justice #4 makes it sound like the issue, unlike the series’ debut, will tackle the morality of torture by “the good guys” head-on. Seriously, it makes it sound like this is in fact the whole point of the series. Um, wow? Of course, now the problem is one of potentially overdoing the sociopolitical stuff in the fashion of countless genre works pandering for relevance with critics who use such sociopolitical content as their sole barometer of genre-art quality, but whatevs.

* Last night I had a very detailed and convincing nightmare about working for Wizard magazine. My friend Chris Ward, on the other hand, has actually lived several very detailed and convincing nightmares while working for Wizard magazine. Today he recounts one of them, and it involves interviewing Margot Kidder.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Gerard Way, writer

Gabriel Ba, artist

Dark Horse, 2008

184 pages

$17.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

When you think of how many indie superhero titles are abject failures of imagination and innovation, The Umbrella Academy becomes all the more impressive. I’d imagine that as with most creator-owned superbooks it’s the product of a life-long love of Marvel and DC (and by now, ’90s Image). But most creators who are thusly smitten wind up barfing out some dishwater-dull origin story involving types rather than characters and fixated on producing iconic moments for copies of copies of copies of icons. Writer Gerard Way, who as the lead singer of My Chemical Romance can’t even claim that doing comics is all he’s ever wanted to do creatively, is beating such people at their own game. He’s produced a weird, sad comic about superheroes, with sophisticated pacing that trusts in the intelligence of the reader rather than insisting on serving them nothing but what they’ve already seen. Essentially, the seven members of the Umbrella Academy are to their adoptive father Hargreeves what Michael, Janet et al were to Joe Jackson, with similarly dispiriting results in terms of the disconnect between talent, even talent used optimally, and happiness. There’s no happy ending for them, either. It’s superheroing with sharp edges.

He’s done this with the help of Gabriel Ba, whose work here reads like a cross between Mike Mignola (perhaps enhanced by the presence of Mignola’s longtime go-to colorist Dave Stewart) and The Incredibles. He’s produced solid character designs (based on concept sketches by SVA grad Way) that transition well between superhero and soap opera, he frequently draws his panels utilizing zesty, infrequently used angles, and his action is coherent and dynamic. For his part, Stewart is brilliant as always, throwing huge splashes of eye-melting colors (oranges, pinks) into the mix in a way that’s both exciting and slightly alienating–much like the comic itself.

Now, to be sure, the characters themselves are more sketched than fully rendered at this point. And I’ve heard criticism that the thing reads like a Grant Morrison Doom Patrol tribute album, though not having read much early Morrison I can’t comment on that. But from where I’m standing this thoughtful, engaging work all around.

* Yesterday I put out a call for review requests. If there’s a comic you’d like me to review, let me know in the comments and if I have it I’ll try to review it. (Try not to suggest a million things, though, and please don’t request stuff you worked on. Also, please be patient–I’ve got a backlog!) Thanks to everyone who’s made suggestions so far!

* While I’m talking about my stuff, I want to remind everyone of my various Web 8.0 ventures:

Bowie Loves Beyonce: A blog dedicated to pictures of David Bowie and Beyonce Knowles.

Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts: A blog dedicated to pictures of t-shirts I like.

@theseantcollins: A Twitter account dedicated to whatever it is Twitter accounts are dedicated to.

* Kevin Huizenga previews Ganges #3! Elsewhere, Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson updates us on the rest of the Ignatz line. (Via Chris Mautner.)

* The new George A. Romero zombie movie will be called Survival of the Dead. Honestly, I’ll be stunned if it’s even watchable…but I like being stunned.

* The Onion AV Club interviews Michael Kupperman! There’s a big shoutout to my pal Alejandro Arbona and the whole altcomix-supporting ex-Wizard crew, and Kupperman’s amazing Twitter account is discussed in detail.

* This is fascinating: Borders is launching Borders Ink, a teens department centering on YA staples like fantasy, Twilight, and graphic novels. Given that Borders seemed just as likely fold as launch a major new initiative this year, and given the chunk of the comics market that relies on a healthy Borders, I’ll be watching this with great interest. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Continuing Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s series on action movies, Leo Goldsmith reviews John McTiernan’s Die Hard. I think he makes a little too much of the notion that Bruce Willis’s physique was shockingly relatable–maybe compared to Stallone or Schwarzenegger, okay, but they didn’t throw in the glass-in-the-feet business because Willis wasn’t enough of a physical specimen for people to relate to. Still, good stuff, especially about how likable the bad guys were (not even in a “love to hate ’em” way–they were genuinely likable!).

* In a pair of posts inspired by my own post on the topic, Gene Phillips talks torture and superheroes. In addition to correcting my memory of the “criminal through the window” scene in The Dark Knight Returns (the guy throws himself through the window to get away from Batman). I’m not as sure as Phillips that it’s advisable, or even possible, to divorce the physical torture of criminals by superheroes for information from thinking about what that would mean in real-world terms, but he’s certainly right to argue that this was, in the words of The Wire, “all in the game” for many decades, unexamined by creators and audience alike. I wonder if that’s good or bad.

* Look, Hans Rickheit has a new blog for his upcoming graphic novel The Squirrel Machine! (Via Mike Baehr.)

I will not have much to do over the next week or so but read and review comics. Which comics would you, the readers of STC’s ADDTF, like me to read and review? Post your requests in the comments (they’re slow as shit, so be patient). If I have it I will try to read and review it. (NOTE: Please do not request a comic you yourself made or edited or published mmkay?)

* I’ve been waiting for this for a long time: Entertainment Weekly’s Lost correspondent Jeff “Doc” Jensen runs down the 15 mysteries the show must solve, as nominated by the fans. Interestingly, he says only the top three were suggested by more than 5% of the fans, which I guess means there are a shitload of mysteries overall. But I think it’s a very strong list, and though my brain’s a bit fried I didn’t notice any glaring absences. Obviously the creative team pays attention to Jensen in particular and the hardcore fanbase in particular, so it seems safe to assume that they’ll use this as a guide to, at the very least, include at least a throwaway line or two of explanation for each mystery. (In-show explanation of the Numbers’ significance FTW!)

* San Diego Comic Con participants, beware the area’s infestation of carnivorous giant squid. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken is a great nerd-culture blogger, but his admitted weak spot is American comics. Watching him try to blog about the latest superhero sensation is always a bit like listening to your six-year-old cousin try to explain the plot of The Lord of the Rings or what have you. Still, his remove from the teapot-tempests that we hardcore readers get involved in gives him fresh eyes and a valuable perspective, which is why I enjoyed his review of Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis’s Blackest Night #1–he’s able to see the zombification of various superheroes for its in-story ramifications regarding superheroes’ frequently realized hopes of resurrection. Interesting.

* Speaking of Blackest Night, my friend Rickey Purdin made DC’s special sub-site for the event.

* Tom Spurgeon wonders if the Double Deuce that is the comics industry has finally reached a critical mass of Daltons. I thought they’d be bigger.

* Eve Tushnet liked Shaun of the Dead. A lot.

* I’ve long had a soft spot for Rick Trembles’ Motion Picture Purgatory movie-review comic strip, to the point of wondering aloud whether or when it would be collected. But I think someone pointed out to me that this had already happened, and lo and behold, they’re up to Volume 2–and that cover is a doozy.

* Curt Purcell reviews Pixu by Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, Fabio Moon, and Gabriel Ba. I haven’t read the second half of the book so I can’t say if I agree or disagree with Curt’s take, but I really liked his logic here:

Ultimately, though, this doesn’t work for me, because of a problem that I think plagues a lot of “creepy” horror–the creepiness is evoked by piling details on each other in a way that ends up feeling ad hoc, and that never quite coheres into any really substantive sense of menace. One guy seems to have been reduced into obsessive-compulsion and paranoia. Creepy! One girl cuts off her boyfriend’s hair while he sleeps–then eats it. Creepy! [etc.]…Creepy horror works, to my mind, when the details function as a system of symptoms, and the punch comes when we get the big reveal of the underlying illness, so to speak.

I totally get what he’s saying here. I think maybe the best example of this is The Ring 2–lots of lovely creepy imagery in there, but as opposed to the first film, this imagery failed to cohere.

* Did you know that Stephen King was the first writer to print the words “fuckery” and “fucknuts”? In his two best books, The Stand and It, no less. Now I love them even more.

* My pal (and occasional editor) Justin Aclin was on the Fanboy Radio podcast promoting his upcoming superheroes-in-college graphic novel Hero House. He was also interviewed by Robot 6’s JK Parkin for the same purpose.

* Jordan Crane made this gorgeous print of one of Jaime Hernandez’s Love & Rockets #24 cover, and holy smokes, look at the damn thing. Actually, look at all of Jordan’s prints.

Never Learn Anything from History

Kate Beaton, writer/artist

self-published, June 2009

68 pages

$18

Read some strips at Kate Beaton’s site

Buy the book from TopatoCo

Like Ditko Hands or Kirby Krackle, Kate Beaton Eyes are a signature achievement in cartooning. They widen, they narrow, they leer, they roll, and (god bless Tyra Banks for introducing this concept to the world) they even smile. If it’s possible to make eye contact with a comic, Beaton’s comics are prime candidates–you lock eyes with them and you’re instantly drawn in. If eyes are the window to the soul, then Beaton’s comics, like James Brown, have soul to burn.

Once you’re finished saying jeepers creepers over those peepers, the rest of her cartooning’s elegant gestalt has a chance to make an impression on you. Beaton’s line is loose, even rough at times, yet sinuous and whole–it’s like cursive handwriting. It feels both sketchy and deliberately fancy, really a perfect complement to her subject matter, which more often than not plays history’s great men and women (and the women and men in their lives) for laughs by feeding them through a precocious 14-year-old’s priorities, sense of humor, and keen observation of adult absurdities–the kinds of gags you might find passed back and forth in notes between smart kids during third period history. Fans of Shakesperean actor (and brother of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin) Edwin Booth shriek and moan during Hamlet’s soliloquy like Twilight fans over Robert Pattinson taking his shirt off. Lord Byron is a slut. President James Monroe drops the Constitution, then bends over to pick it up, in order to show off his ass to an appreciative young lady. Rebels, revolutionaries, and rabblerousers from Robespierre to Louis Riel to Tadeusz Kosciuszko to Patrick Pearse to George Washington come across like the kind of bumbling heroes or simpering villains you’d find in a kid’s action-comedy superhero cartoon. She has a real knack for their body language, too, as they proclaim and lounge and get shot in the face by arrows and come onto each other and so forth–their movements and poses are nearly as distinctive as their eyes. (Her self-caricature is a real peach, too.) Meanwhile there’s something about Beaton’s dialogue delivery that really suits the Internet–the strips sort of slowly wind their way up to the joke, at which point lots of punchlines seem banged out in all caps with no punctuation by hysterical messageboard people who are all too aware of their own hysteria, if you follow me.

Not every joke is a winner, and even many of the best gags don’t really make you laugh out loud–I was already familiar with some of these strips from Beaton’s website, so I think that during this read-through, the only bit that made me LOL was this hilarious drawing of a drunken Santa Claus. And I have to assume that the Pythonesque history-major humor is an acquired taste. (I remember when I was a kid and first discovered Monty Python that I assumed all adults knew the ins and outs of the history of philosophy and made jokes about Kant all the time–this was the humor I pictured existing somewhere out of reach.) Some of the slowly accruing jokes never quite seem to accrue. But the gestalt is so good-natured that you don’t even mind the bits that are just semi-funny, and the cartooning is an absolute pleasure. Soak in it.

The Lagoon

Lilli Carre, writer/artist

Fantagraphics, 2008

pages

$14.99

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I’m grateful for books like The Lagoon, where things happen without neat resonances with other things that happened, where you can’t always locate the part within the whole. The Lagoon is a horror story, if a low-key one; like much of the best horror it makes the connection between horror and the absurd. Whether you’re talking about a giant gorilla climbing the Empire State Building or a puzzle box that unleashes S&M demons, horror’s iconic images frequently boast a lack of inherent logic that rivals that of video games. Carre gently (and I do mean gently–don’t expect the surrealist nightmares of Tom Neely or Josh Simmons here) applies this throughout her story. The characters don’t appear to know where the creature who lurks in the titular waters came from or why it does the weird thing it does, and neither do we. Nor are we presented enough information to determine the true nature of the creature’s relationship with one member of the family at the center of the story. The context provided points to something illicit, but perhaps that’s just the lingering effect of the story’s eroticized, somnambulist qualities–so much takes place at night, in bedrooms, in still waters, against thick and sticky blacks…and heck, one character is an actual somnambulist. And finally, the story’s coda (more like its final third) doesn’t appear to directly address the preceding events in the way we’d expect. Carre’s sinuous, snaking treatment of sound provides a through-line; there are windows that get opened and shut and lied about; the characters are of course the same; but it still feels disconnected in ways that few writers today are gutsy enough to attempt. The overall effect is like Clive Barker fed through a twee filter. This’ll stick to you.

* Thank you to everyone for your well-wishes. It means a lot to us.

* Jeez, I have a lot of catching up to do!

* World War Z author Max Brooks tells Fangoria that the screenplay for the WWZ adaptation is now being written by Matthew Carnahan, best known for chin-scratching political thrillers (okay, “thrillers”) like The Kingdom, State of Play, and Lions for Lambs. Amazing Spider-Man writer/NorGwen StaceBorn shipper J. Michael Straczynski previously took a shot at the script. It’s worth nothing, however, that in Hollywood these days JMS is better known as the writer of Angelina Jolie’s Oscar-baiting Changeling than as a nerd guy, and obviously Carnahan plays to a tonier crowd as well. That’s great news as far as I’m concerned. The beauty of World War Z was that you could envision it being made into a Ken Burns documentary, and I’d really love to see a zombie movie with all of Hollywood’s resources behind it take a High Drama approach to the genre.

* Robin Hardy’s semi-sequel to The Wicker Man is a go again! Previously called Cowboys for Christ and shuttered for lack of funding, it’s now called The Wicker Tree and is currently filming in Edinburgh, Scotland.

* Because I was too busy having a heart attack when I linked to CBR’s coverage of the great Grant Morrison/Clive Barker mind-meld, I neglected to point out that Morrison apparently said he intends to write a Wonder Woman project, with the intent of ironing out some of the characters problematic aspects in terms of gender and sexuality. However, Dan DiDio doesn’t seem to be aware of those intentions–or if he is, he’s not talking.

* Happy Fifth Blogiversaries to two of my favorite cats on the comics internet, Joe “Jog” McCulloch and Matt Maxwell.

* John Harrison’s film adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood will have a one-time-only theatrical screening during Comic Con on Friday night. Last year I think I blew off a similar screening of Midnight Meat Train to watch Jane Wiedlin make a Snakes on a Plane joke at the Eisners.

* Speaking of Harrison, he’ll be adapting Stephen King’s Cell as a TV miniseries, meaning that Eli Roth’s film version is dunzo, I guess.

* Here’s a terrific interview with Paper Rad’s Ben Jones that all the kids are talking about. Money quote:

Paper Rad isn’t a sexy story either. I’d like to be able to talk about it like a young New Yorker might talk about dance parties or graphitti or doing drugs, but when you ask me about Paper Rad I am going to have to tell you about how it was and is just a desperate vital exercise in finding meaning in life. The day to day was about trying not going crazy, about not giving up, it was about being happy. I am sure thats not what people want to hear. They want me to talk about neon jamz, cardboard robots, inflatable bears covering Boston songs, wearing 2 pairs of sunglasses, Volvo’s full of trolls, nintendo mind-melts, or the Doo-Man Group, but again, as someone who was creating the content that fueled the expression and celebration that surrounded Paper Rad, for me the experience isn’t summed up in a 3rd generation Dan Deconesque youtube video, or any superficial reduction or interpretation, the experience was an attempt at an honest and clear artistic expression. But I guess we package that expression in a candy coated outershell so its fair to react to the shell. But I insist that there is a deeper meaning beyond the clutter and noise and color on the outside. And that deeper meaning was “don’t worry, be happy”. Also don’t forget about the 20 foot Bart Simpson mural at Pace Wildenstien. I don’t know, I guess I am sad this week cause I lost my cat.

I feel you, BJ. (Via Dan Nadel.)

* Go see RiffTrax live! (Via Topless Robot.)

* Jason Adams posts three teaser posters for Let Me In, Matt Reeves’s dopily titled Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In. Trajan font, ho! (The nice thing about the Internet is that a blog like this can produce a Swedish-speaking commenter to debunk the studio’s suggestion that this is a more accurate translation of the title.) Jason also writes about the movies and the novel for The Film Experience. Still pretty conflicted about this.

* Jason also reminds us that Children of Men was a gorgeous film and puts together the screencap gallery to prove it.

* Tim O’Neil explains why decompressed superhero team books don’t work.

* I love Stephen King’s short story “The Raft.” When I was a kid my grandparents had a cabin near a lake, and there was a raft anchored out in the lake a ways just like there is in the story. It was a ton of fun to swim out there and jump off and such, but it was also a bit on the creepy side–fish would swim underneath and nibble at you, seaweed grew up the anchor lines, and of course if you jumped or dove in too deep you’d end up in the morass of vegetation on the lake floor, which was indescribably gross. So the setting for this story was instantly recognizable to me, and the horror of it instantly understandable. The story also features one of my favorite of King’s trademark “we’re probably going to be eaten by monsters soon, so why don’t we have some illicit sex to blow off some steam” scenes–quite a climax, too! Anyway, I bring all this up because there’s a miles-long blob of apparently organic mystery Arctic goo floating down the Alaskan shoreline, and at least one report of a seagull stripped to the bone by it. Maybe this is why Sarah Palin resigned? (Via Ryan Penagos.)

* Finally, boys and girls, action, na-na-na-na-eeeee…

I will not be going to San Diego Comic Con after all because my cat is very, very sick.

Without going into details, this has been a bad year.

Wednesday Comics #1

Brian Azzarello, Eduardo Risso, Dave Gibbons, Ryan Sook, John Arcudi, Lee Bermejo, Dave Bullock, Vinton Heuck, Kurt Busiek, Joe Quinones, Neil Gaiman, Mike Allred, Eddie Berganza, Sean Galloway, Paul Pope, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, Dan DiDio, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Kevin Nowlan, Ben Caldwell, Adam Kubert, Joe Kubert, Karl Kerschl, Brendan Fletcher, Walt Simonson, Brian Stelfreeze, Kyle Baker, writers/artists

DC, July 2009

16 pages

$3.99

No sense beating around the bush: I don’t like newsprint. It’s flimsy and icky and doesn’t look nice. It doesn’t hold color well. You get a big fold-out broadsheet made of newsprint like this thing and fold and unfold it a couple of times and it becomes more messed-up and harder to do anything with each time. I don’t like it when newspapers use it, I don’t like it when PictureBox uses it, I don’t like it when Paper Rodeo uses it, I didn’t like it when that Comic Shop News thing they’d stick in the bag with your weekly pull list used it (they still around?). To paraphrase James Murphy, I don’t get the borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’30s. I don’t like paying $3.99 for a comic that self-consciously evokes its own disposability with the stuff it’s printed on, either. (Hell, I don’t like paying for a single issue of anything.) Basically this project is designed, aesthetically, to press a lot of buttons I don’t have.

That said, Wednesday Comics #1 works perfectly well as a sort of My First Kramers, an astutely curated experiment in what happens when you tell a bunch of auteurs to do they thing on a gigantic canvas. As with Kramers Ergot 7, you get a few different approaches to how to use all that space. Some of the creative teams, most notably the father-son team of Joe and Adam Kubert, just blow up a regular grid, resulting in an eye-arresting sequence of Nazis playing the captured Sgt. Rock a chin-music symphony and giving you that “Lily Tomlin holding a giant book” sense of the object’s sheer size. Others cram the page with extra information: Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman strip, a far less nostalgia-inclined affair than most in the book, is riddled with tiny panels and minute twists and turns, while Karl Kerschl and Ben Fletcher’s Flash effort takes a cue from the likes of Dan Clowes and tells its story through a pair of self-contained but interconnected funnies-style strips. Other creators tip their hats to the newspaper strips of yore as well: Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook’s Kamandi story is done Prince Valiant-style, while Paul Pope’s Adam Strange effort is a less direct but still recognizable homage to classic adventure strips and sci-fi pulps. Even the modern era earns some tips of the hat: Kurt Busiek and Joe Quinones’s Green Lantern strip references Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier in era, tone, look, and even a mention of its title, while the awe-inspiring naturalist Kyle Baker Hawkman art that took the internet by storm is employed in the service of a disappointingly direct and unfunny 300 parody. (He’s riffing on that long opening sequence from the comic version–“We march.”–that Zack Snyder didn’t use in the movie, so maybe people will miss it. I’m kind of jealous of those people.)

When you print comics this big you have a lot of space to fill, which draws your attention to coloring even more than normal, and in this case that can be a blessing and a curse. Trish Mulvihill escapes the dreaded Vertigo Brown with some lovely golden hues in the Brian Azzarello/Eduardo Risso Batman piece that opens the issue, Ryan Sook provides some interesting purple-orange sunset scenes for his Kamandi strip, Joe Kubert’s palette on the Sgt. Rock piece is refreshingly and effectively subdued, and Jose Villarubia’s gray skintone for Adam Strange meshes with his purple jumpsuit and bright blue enemies for an effect that looks appropriately aged and weathered. But I think in most other cases, the paper stock betrays the color work. You can practically feel Amanda Conner’s Supergirl wanting to be a bright red, blue, and blonde, Laura Allred’s normally radiant work looks in her husband Mike’s Metamorpho strip like you’re looking at it through sunglasses, Sean Galloway’s Teen Titans art is dialed way down (those graytone or nonexistent backgrounds don’t help)…even the great Dave Stewart is undone with colors for Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck’s Deadman strip that just don’t quite click.

As for the stories themselves, who can judge at this early stage? I suspect that for the most part, how you react to these meager one-page morsels at this stage in the game depends on your preexisting feelings about the characters and the contributors. (Spoiler alert–I’m excited about the Paul Pope strip!) I think Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman strip, which is so different both visually and narratively from what you’re used to seeing from DC with regards to this character–and from everything else in the comic–is the one that’s most likely to surprise in the long run, though for good or ill I don’t know. Also, clever of John Arcudi to open his Superman strip with Supes flying backwards at the audience, no? I do think it’s rather delightful that DC, or at least series editor Mark Chiarello, turned to a bunch of talented creators and told them to write about their respective characters in whichever way they chose rather than hewing to on-model continuity or overall vibe. (Hey, remember when Marvel did that more or less line-wide in 2000-2001 or so?) Of course, the thing about these kinds of non-continuity short-story “tone poems” in honor of this or that superhero character is that it’s hard to get them to stick, and harder still to get a sense of what you’ll get out of them in the end, other than “Hey, Metamorpho’s neat” or whatever.

That, I suppose, is the problem. Four bucks for 15 one-page slivers of story, 12 weeks in a row, is an awful big investment for an uncertain return. (And I’m already let down something awful by the Baker Hawkman thing.) This is why I think it’s fair to spend so much time kvetching about the paper stock, because Wednesday Comics isn’t a series, not really–it’s an object. The size, the format, and most especially the newsprint were selected to stand out, to impress the physicality of the object upon you. Seeing the burst of publicity for the book last week made it clear that this was a smart choice in some ways: Tying a high-profile comic book launch in this day and age to a way of doing comics that’s almost completely outmoded, with bonus points for resonating with the overall death of newspapers, was bound to attract the attention. Meanwhile, within the world of comics, this is the sort of project, and the sort of talent line-up, that’s bound to win plaudits from bloggers and award committees–if this thing doesn’t clean up at next year’s Eisner’s I’ll eat my hat. The point of Wednesday Comics is for you to note how different, how unique, how special it is. Which is well and good, but it’s all undercut if you just don’t like newsprint, you know?

OH MY GOD

This year’s San Diego Comic Con will be inundated with Twilight fans, mostly young girls, and the accepted fannish reaction to this demographic, almost entirely untapped by the North American comics industry, will be unremitting hostility.

Doom Force #1

Grant Morrison, writer

Keith Giffen, Mike Mignola, Steve Pugh, Ian Montgomery, Brad Vancata, Richard Case, Walt Simonson, Paris Cullins, Ray Kryssing, Duke Mighten, Mark McKenna, Ken Steacy, artists

DC Comics, 1992

64 pages

$2.95

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Obviously, this is an in-the-moment parody of the ever-more-extreme (with a capital “E,” at one point) superhero-team comics of Rob Liefeld and his peers and imitators. The gags are all a lot stronger than you’d think they might be, actually, which is surprising even given the talent of the writer. The Crying Boy’s nebulously defined bad-luck powers and emo demeanor, Flux’s girl-superpower of amorphousness and her sperm-covered form-fitting unitard, The Scratch’s corporate branding and badassness that passes fully into the realm of douchebaggery, etc etc etc.–I chuckled at each, and that’s even before you get to Shasta The Living Mountain or the list of trademarked names for characters who may appear in future volumes, which is really one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in a comic (Gridlock! Campfire! Timesheet!). But I think the most rewarding gags are the ones that tug things in either goofier or weirder directions than necessary. In the former category, there’s Shasta’s transformation into said Living Mountain–complete with not just a ski slope and chairlift, but actual skiers. In the latter category, there’s the way the comic pretty much stops short a couple of times so that the brother/sister villain team can get into uncomfortable shouting matches about proper feminine attire: “Every strong woman must feel free…to express her femininity by wearing exotic lingerie…” (You’ve got two guesses at to which sibling says that and the first guess doesn’t count.) As for the Liefeld-manque art, I never actually read (or even just bought) his comics so I can’t tell you how effective a lampoon it is. I do however remember Mark Millar’s much-repeated insistence that Kids Love Rob Liefeld, and it’s true that the cast of thousands assembled to knock Rob off here do a great job of conveying Liefeldian EXCITEMENT and VOLUME and BARELY CONCEALED NIPPLES AND LABIA at the expense of any vestige of storytelling coherence. Overall it’s a hoot that holds up well. I like it better than Batman: Gothic. PS: Mickey Eye cameo!

Click to embiggen and click here to maybe buy it as a T-shirt if you live in the UK or something, I don’t know, but it’s AWESOME

* Plug time: I don’t think there’s a single freelance assignment I do from which I get more enjoyment than writing for Twisted ToyFare Theater, so I’m super-psyched that Twisted ToyFare Theater Vol. 10 is now available. If you have a nerd-culture funnybone somewhere in your body, I really do think you’ll find it a hoot.

* San Diego Comic Con is coming up in less than two weeks, and while an almost comical amount of personal and professional stress has kept me from getting too excited about the fact that I’m now going to it, I’m starting to feel a few tinges. Anyway, the schedules for Thursday and Friday are up, though I haven’t looked at them yet, and apparently you can still get a room in a good hotel if you want. (Heh, I just clicked the schedule links to copy the URLs and seeing phrases like “Friday is Star Wars Day” gave me butterflies. Yep, starting to get excited.) As for me, I will be the Andy Samberg to Jonah Weiland’s T-Pain: I’m staying on the motherfucking boat!

* Speaking of cons I love, MoCCA’s Karl Erickson speaks with Robot 6’s Tim O’Shea about the festival’s problems and plans to solve them. I’m excited to see this being addressed so directly–to the point of moving the festival to the spring in an attempt to avoid heat problems entirely, no less. I also suspect that Erickson reveals the source of many of this year’s problems when he notes that there was virtually a 100% staff turnover prior to the show, forcing them to start from scratch in many ways. I wish them all the luck in the world getting things back on track for 2010 because MoCCA is my favorite show. (Good get for the Robot 6 gang, too!)

* Surprising no one, Warner Bros. is indeed preparing the real Director’s Cut of Watchmen for a holiday DVD release. Hilariously, this appears to hitting the news now only because a promotional flyer for the actual Director’s Cut that WB is including in the phony “Director’s Cut” coming out at the end of the month got leaked.

* I feel like a dope constantly posting updates about Clive Barker adaptations when I still haven’t seen The Midnight Meat Train, but here’s some new info and pics from Dread and here’s a red-band trailer for Book of Blood, which will be screening at Comic Con on Friday night.

* It’s always fun when a friend comes in cold to a comic series I really enjoy, and such is the case with my pal Ceri B.’s review of Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s Runaways.

* Another pair of worthwhile reviews: Jog takes a look at Wednesday Comics #1, while the AV Club’s Scott Tobias reviews one of my very favorite films of all time, Lost Highway, for his New Cult Canon series.

* Back when I worked at Wizard I helped create a hoax story about a direct-to-comics Goonies sequel written by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner. Click the link to let Ben Morse explain it all to you.

* Why do cartoon characters vomit up fish skeletons? Tim Hodler turns to Al Jaffee for answers.

* Jeffrey Brown draws the Hulk. Click already.

* Being Paul Pope is nice work if you can get it.

* Finally, do me a favor and give your pets a snuggle today, will ya?