When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept. And thus he said: “My son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee!”

This is the saddest song I’ve ever heard. The first time I listened to it, I sat down and cried for about ten minutes afterward. There’s a moment deep into the song that you will see coming from far away and that will devastate you nonetheless; it just made me cry sitting here at my desk. Utterly, exquisitely painful and beautiful.

* I’d love to hear more about the specifics if only to determine how best to fight back, but this report of a man named Christopher Handley being prosecuted for the possession of obscene manga is as chilling as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s involvement on his behalf is welcome. Extra disturbing: Handley was literally followed home from the post office by law enforcement after picking up the books in question, which allegedly depict sexual activity involving minors. I have a pretty brightline approach to this particular area–if it’s not an actual photograph it shouldn’t be illegal to possess–and I hope this outlook is upheld.

* Bruce Baugh’s Shift-T is a new blog dedicated to chronicling Bruce’s experiences playing World of Warcraft. I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about why he’s worth reading on this subject even if (like me) you don’t play WoW–why he’s worth reading if the only things you have in common with him is indulging in a hobby, any hobby, and having some desire to think about what you get out of that hobby. But if you’re not sold on those high-falutin’ grounds, he does post on why it’s fun to go into battle with an angry gorilla by your side.

*The minicomics clearinghouse known as Global Hobo has relaunced under new management with a new blog and some of the great USS Catastrophe site’s backstock. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Heroes loses AICN’s Hercules. This is like when Cronkite declared Vietnam unwinnable.

* My pal Rickey Purdin’s Octoberfest of horror sketches is getting more and more fun:

Altcomix fans, can you identify the unfortunate soul in that last illo?

* An exclusive, limited-edition Marc Bell book? Drawn & Quarterly people, you’ve got my mailing address, right?

* I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but the decidedly post-apocalyptic treatment given to Venom in the new video game Spider-Man: League of Shadows looks like imaginative fun if this trailer is any indication. It also occurs to me now that superhero-comic-based video games have been a pretty conservative lot in terms of their plotlines, as best I can tell, but the medium lends itself just as readily to more expansive, quasi-Elseworlds narratives like this one.

* ZOMG LIBRARY PR0N (via everyone):

* If you’d like to feel your own sanity slip a bit, read the repeated pleas of a U.S. military officer on behalf of a captive American citizen and “illegal enemy combatant” who literally was being driven insane by his treatment in a Navy brig in Charleston. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Finally, I repeat, Chinese Fucking Democracy.

Or Else #5

Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, October 2008

40 pages

$4.95

Buy it from D&Q if they get it in stock

Or Else #5 is one of Kevin Huizenga’s least showy comics in recent memory, as well as one of his most openly autobiographical; all of that is true despite it mostly being about living in a war-ravaged post-apocalyptic dystopia. The centerpiece story, “Rumbling,” is based on a prose work by writer Giorgio Manganelli, and sees Huizengan everyman Glenn Ganges inserted into a Handmaid’s Tale-esque scenario of warring religious factions as an ambassador from a country “where wars of religion are not waged.” (Amusingly, Ganges later reveals that his homeland fights scientifically rigorous wars of atheism instead. Bill Maher Is Watching You!) I think you can see a little bit of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs (Huizenga’s a fan) sneaking in here, with the strips emphasis on the lavishly constructed uniforms of the various factions’ soldiery and its relatively straightforward pacing and use of genre. The autobio elements slip in through a pair of strips about animal intrusions into the Huizenga/Ganges household–first a turtle in a strip that (I think) openly stars Huizenga rather than his stand-in, then a longer strip about various spiders and wasps that have infested and done battle in Ganges’s house, where the long, lighter-colored hair Ganges is sporting makes him look more like the cartoonist himself than ever. The back-cover photograph of one of the bug battles depicted in the comic adds another real-world/fiction crossover element. The package is rounded out by several strips that focus on picayune details–sentence diagramming, “How Are We Spending Our Tuesday?”, the structure of a conversation between two people represented solely in gibberish, and so on–to such a degree that their meaning is all but lost, like a word repeated into incomprehensibility. Need I mention the effortless cartooning–a loosening line used to connote flashbacks, the military precision with which Huizenga uses grays? It’s not the knockout blow that some previous Or Else issues have been, but as an exercise in Huizenga’s trademark juxtaposition of the quotidian with the universal (and frequently the philosophically troubling), it’s solid; as a unit, though, I’m not sure why it begins and ends where it does and contains what it does.

One obstacle all first-person horror movies must overcome is the need to justify why somebody on the run from horrible life-threatening monsters would continue to keep the goddamn camera running. Usually the (real-world) filmmakers try to do it with two different stock responses: 1) The camera, some angry other character informs us, makes the cameraperson feel safe, removed, like this isn’t real; 2) People, the cameraperson informs us, just “need to know” what happened. In both cases this usually comes across like sophomore-year media-studies bullshit (nowhere more so than George A. Romero’s depressingly awful Diary of the Dead). While a particularly strong film can add emotional resonance that makes these excuses work by setting up the continued use of the camera a sort of life-preserver for characters on the verge of completely losing it (The Blair Witch Project, for example), you usually just need to think about the camera’s presence the same way you think about hearing explosions in space–you suspend your disbelief in favor of the way it enhances the drama.

[REC] is different, and clever as the dickens. Our in-movie filmmakers aren’t pretentious film students with Marshall McLuhan on the brain or vapid exemplars of the YouTube generation. They’re journalists–puff-piece specialists, yeah, but journalists all the same. Reporter Angela and her cameraman Pablo head out on a ride-along with a couple of firemen for their Insomniac-style human-interest show, so at first their filming is justified by their jobs. Next, they end up locked in a quarantined apartment building by the authorities, despite the presence of several ill and injured people who badly need medical attention; now the filming is a matter of evidence-gathering, a public service on behalf of the frightened and ailing people in the building and a rebuke to the security and health officials who deprive them of both freedom and information. As the horrors mount and filming becomes increasingly impractical in real-world terms, the camera is used as a light source. When the light is broken, the characters navigate via its night vision. At every turn, there’s a reason the camera needs to stay on.

I bring all this up because, as my wife pointed out when I described it to her, that’s a lot more thought and effort on behalf of making the subgenre’s central conceit work than most films of its ilk display. So good for directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza and their co-writer Luis Berdejo! But I also mention it because this subterranean current of logic throughout the film is key to the success of its final act, when it hits you with a tidal wave of weird for which you are almost entirely unprepared. All of a sudden, a movie that had been a pretty straightforward, well-acted, effective mash-up of Blair Witch and 28 Days Later or Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead takes a sharp left-turn into Creepyland, somewhere between the farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the collected works of Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. It blindsides you and discomfits you mightily, picking up on elements from throughout the entire film in terms of astutely utilizing the first-person camerawork and shoddy lighting to suggest as much as it shows, but blasting those elements right into overdrive. I’ve seen scarier neo-zombie movies, but in terms of sheer narrative smarts, this one’s right up there.

Travel

Yuichi Yokoyama, writer/artist

PictureBox, October 2008

202 pages

$19.95

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

I love traveling by train, which is good because I’ve done a lot of it over the years: commuting to work from Long Island to Manhattan, traveling up to college in New Haven or down to visit my then-girlfriend in Delaware. Perhaps it’s just these positive associations that feed my affinity for the rails, but thinking about it, I get something out of the journey beyond the destination. A train is an interstitial space, where you can sit for hours in one spot but you’re not actually anyplace, where you move but stand still, where you see parts of the landscape normally as hidden as what you see when you turn your head around on a Disney World attraction to watch the animatronics reset and redeploy for others. Trains are magical.

So is Travel, PictureBox’s second release from Yuichi Yokoyama. I actually like this one better than New Engineering, much better, even. Not because New Engineering wasn’t quite good, because it was–maybe just because what I saw in New Engineering was alien, while Travel, for all its hyperstylization and hilariously deadpan spectacle, is something I can point to and say, “I know this.”

The idea of the book couldn’t be simpler: Three guys get on a train, ride it for a while, then get off. And yes, you read that page count correctly–you’re basically looking at around 180 pages of guys riding on a train. But as with Kevin Huizenga’s Fight or Run, that pared-down parameter gives Yokoyama free reign to indulge in some of the most dynamically staged and inventively drawn comics you’re gonna see all year. The 45 pages or so (!) the guys spend walking through the train to find a seat actually had me laughing out loud after a while, as each fellow passenger they pass looks more and more hysterically taciturn despite their outlandishly detailed clothing and hairstyles, and each attempt to squeeze through a crowded aisle or purchase something in the concession car is depicted from an angle that makes it look like something out of the Wachowski Bros.’ Speed Racer. (That’s a compliment.) When they finally do take their seats, we’re then treated to a tour de force recreation of nearly every possible thing you can see through your window on a train–cities and fields, sun glare and rivulets of rain, parallel trains and passing traffic, our reflection in the window and our reflection in the windows of buildings outside–or inside the train car itself–other passengers walking by, clouds of smoke from cigarettes, another traveler pulling a book out of his jacket to read in a manner so dramatically presented you expect him to whip out a gun and start shooting Colin Ferguson-style.

That something so plotless can remain so gripping for so long is a testament to Yokoyama’s ability to pick unexpected ways to show us everyday things, from the subtle effects of perspective and distortion he can ring out of his simple line to astute use of repetition and slight variation to convey passage through space and time. It’s early yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this near the top of my eventual Best Comics of the Year list. I certainly look forward to rereading it on the train.

* My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity presents an extravagantly detailed recap of the half-hour of Watchmen footage recently screened for members of the press who aren’t me.

* Speaking of Watchmen, actor Matthew “Ozymandias” Goode continues his streak of being amusingly forthright about his role, adding “possible closeted homosexual” to “child of Nazis” among his personal additions to the character. I’m trying to think if there’s any other effete-villain clichés he can throw in there…any thoughts?

* David Cronenberg may be doing another thriller–a Robert Ludlum adaptation starring Denzel Washington. I am totally in support of this. (Via AICN.)

* Jon Hastings takes a look at the Luna Brothers’ Ultra and the perils of superhero niche marketing.

* In a “short post” that is longer than virtually every comics review I’ve ever written for this site, Jog casts a slightly skeptical eye on Rafael Grampá’s action-horror fantasia Mesmo Delivery.

* As part of a month-long horror-movie sketchathon, my buddy Rickey Purdin has got to be fucking kidding me:

Look Out!! Monsters #1

Geoff Grogan, writer/artist

self-published, September 2008

32 pages

$9.95

Buy it from Geoff Grogan

Where did this thing come from? I was handed a copy of Look Out!! Monsters by creator Geoff Grogan’s wife at SPX, and they seemed like friendly, unassuming folks–certainly not the hipstery enfants terribles you might expect to be behind a comic like this. Meanwhile, Google tells me that Geoff Grogan is a cartoonist behind a Rat Pack pastiche called Nice Work, a Xeric Grant recipient for this very comic, and a writer-about-comics who penned this interesting essay challenging the artcomics approach of Kramers Ergot. As it turns out, his work in Look Out!! Monsters would fit nicely next to the Kramers volumes on your bookshelf. Like the best stuff in that anthology series, its art–painted over collaged pieces of The New York Times–calls attention to its own construction but is nevertheless harnessed to an emotionally rich narrative. It’s really impressive.

The nuts and bolts of the book feature Frankenstein’s monster appearing in the smoking crater left behind by an airstrike during what looks like World War I. The Monster assaults a trench full of soldiers in a thrillingly staged fight that evokes both Jack Kirby and David Mazzuchelli, before a cleverly constructed transition suddenly finds both us and the Monster whisked away to a Gothic cathedral. There things take a turn for the creepy, with the Monster mimicking a gargoyle’s disgorgement of water, before the comic gets all non-narrative on us, with huge splash pages and spreads of Frankensteinian lab equipment, Lee/Kirby unstable-molecule pseudo-scientific dot-printed epiphanies, images of unspecified violence and romance, the return of the Monster to assault a hapless victim, and finally the collapse of the Twin Towers. Beneath it all–literally, since the canvas consists of newspaper snippets–are hints of the chaos unleashed by that catastrophic attack, as terrifying and unpredictable as the creation of Frankenstein and the Fantastic Four, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. It’s beautiful to look at and very hard to shake; concept and execution are both very successful on a variety of levels. Do look out for it.

* M. Night Shyamalan is all gung ho about doing an Unbreakable sequel, which was the original plan before audience reaction proved lukewarm compared to The Sixth Sense. Of course we’ve now seen that some lukewarm audience reactions to post-Sixth Sense Shyamalan films are more lukewarm than others, so Unbreakable 2 is suddenly a lot more feasible, especially given the ever-increasing mania for superheroes and what you have to imagine will be an increased willingness on the part of post-Hancock Hollywood to try superheroes without comic-book bonafides.

* Remember yesterday when I said there’s maybe going to be a sequel to 28 Days/Weeks Later that was maybe gonna be called 28 Months Later and maybe directed by Paul Andrew Wiliams? Well now that last part has maybe been debunked, but we can add “it’s maybe set in Russia” to the maybe-facts we know about the movie, maybe. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* The concluding volume of Brian Ralph’s first-person zombie thriller Daybreak came out at SPX: you can see the final installment online here and read the “script” for the last 20 pages here.

* Here’s that SPX 2008 report I did again.

* Dave Kiersh rules.

* So does Paul Pope.

My SPX 2008 con report is up at Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter. I hope you enjoy it!

* SPX was this weekend! It was fun. Jog, Chris Mautner, and Rickey Purdin have all blogged at length about it, and I mention them specifically because they mentioned me specifically in their reports, which is really all it takes. In terms of individual selling points for those reports, Rickey includes a list of everything he got which should give you a sense of how much appealing stuff was on sale, Chris includes photos which show you what the experience was like, and Jog goes in-depth on the panels he participated in as well as offering a summary of the comics internet and how it’s changed by way of digression.

* My own SPX report will go up at Tom Spurgeon’s site sometime soon. And yes, There Will Be Bowie Sketches here soon as well.

* There’s definitely a new George A. Romero Dead movie on the way, and it’s probably not a direct sequel to the truly terrible Diary of the Dead thank god, and it’s maybe called Island of the Dead. I think that covers it.

* There’s also maybe a third 28/Later movie on the way, and it’s maybe called 28 Months Later, and it’s maybe directed by Paul Andrew Williams. I think that covers it.

* For some reason, Roger Ebert talks to the Wachowski Brothers about Gordon Willis’s cinematography as seen in the new remastered edition of The Godfather. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* I’m sure the Siegels are indeed genuinely grateful for the money writer Brad Meltzer raised to save Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel’s childhood home, the birthplace of Superman. I’m sure Meltzer is totally sincere in doing this, on-sale book about Siegel or no. It’s a nice thing to have done, a mitzvah for a family who could use one these days. But it leaves a funny taste in my mouth given that at this very moment, the publisher at which Meltzer is a huge deal is engaged in a legal battle against the Siegel family over Siegel’s creations. Maybe it’s just seeing these stories appear on the same on the same day that’s making me scratch my head, but surely there are more meaningful, dare I say vitally important, ways to honor the creation of Superman by Jerry Siegel in terms of systemic reform for which high-profile writers and artists could publicly agitate than by refurbishing a house. Tom Spurgeon is right (see item #16): at a certain point it comes down not to high-falutin’ ethics, but to our common self-respect.

* UPDATE: Kiel Phegley offers an interesting counterpoint.

Abe Sapien: The Drowning

Mike Mignola, writer

Jason Shawn Alexander, artist

Dark Horse, 2008

144 pages

$17.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

Maybe the most interesting thing about Mike Mignola’s Hellboy/B.P.R.D. franchise is how at this point in its history, when Mignola and his collaborators are producing enough miniseries set in this world to give the impression that it’s actually one big ongoing monthly (if not two!), the material is actually at its bleakest. What was once a rollicking Jack Kirby vs. H.P. Lovecraft mash-up—albeit one that wedded the former artist’s bombast and visual joie de vivre with the at times oppressive horror of the latter—is now almost a tone poem about three-time loserdom. Pretty much every Hellboy-related miniseries over the past extremely productive year or so has left me feeling really sad about the characters, who regularly confront evidence that they’re just not up to snuff, and that there are things in the world so horrible that even a demon, a fishman, a ghost, a firestarter, a resurrected black-ops officer, and a small army of experts and soldiers look like pikers compared to it.

That’s certainly the theme of Abe Sapien: The Drowning, the first solo series dedicated to Hellboy’s gilled second banana. Set during one of Hellboy’s earlier hiatuses from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, it shares with the current series of Mignola/John Arcudi/Guy Davis minis a sense that without the Big Red One around, without his guiding force, his colleagues and friends can barely keep their head above water. Some people are different and special because of it, the message seems to be, but some people are just different, and that makes life a long, difficult struggle indeed.

In this case, Abe is sent on what’s supposed to be an easy mission in order to break him in as a solo operative: Swim around off the coast of a former leper colony to retrieve a magic dagger once used to kill a warlock, now resting on the ocean floor somewhere. It doesn’t go so well. One thing that struck me is just how much Mignola uses certain tropes that obviously scare him on some level in nearly all of his books: little unassuming guys transforming into big giant horrible monsters; groups of creepy servant people; mouths opening and extruding something huge and terrible. Nearly all of this is reflected in the plot, which starts out small and seemingly clear and soon balloons into a morass of shifting and expanding alliances and motives. Poor Abe is out of his depth in more ways than one.

Besides being one of Mignola’s more emotionally affecting stories of late, it’s also one of his most effective as horror. That’s largely down to the art of Jason Shawn Alexander, who owes less to Mignola’s high-contrast cartooning or Guy Davis’s neurotic line and more to the ’80s and ’90s horror and dark fantasy of artists like the Hampton Brothers, Pratt, and John Van Fleet (all of whom are amusingly name-checked as B.P.R.D. agents). There are a great many striking panels (the burning ghost priest, the statue of Saint Sebastian, the moray eel) and a few genuinely frightening, tough-to-look-at ones (the old woman in the window, the face of the warlock, the converted church). I know there’s a knee-jerk reaction to a writer-artist farming out part of his workload to other creators, but Mignola’s choices in that regard, from Arcudi and Davis to Richard Corben to Alexander) have been consistently terrific. The same is true of their comics.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s fundraiser walk is this Sunday. My wife will be walking and she’s close to her new goal of raising $1000. Please consider donating even just a few dollars to this very worthwhile cause.

Wizard COO Fred Pierce has been fired.

Burma Chronicles

Guy Delisle, writer/artist

Drawn & Quarterly, 2008

272 pages, hardcover

$19.95

Buy it from D&Q

Buy it from Amazon.com

Early on, I thought that this was going to be my least favorite of Delisle’s three tyranny travelogues. This time out, instead of Delisle being sent to China or North Korea due to his job as an animator, it’s his wife, a member of Doctors Without Borders, whose career has brought Delisle to Burma (technically Myanmar, but that’s essentially the “slave name” assigned it by the ruling military junta, so many countries don’t use it). This means that the daily grind of work that formed the spine of Delisle’s activities in Pyongyang and Shenzhen gets replaced with laps around a pool, cute business with his baby Louis, and a generally more tourist/holiday vibe. The more it starts to feel like a James Kochalka sketchbook diary the more you feel the absence of that structure. (The inclusion, for the first time, of slapsticky wordless vignettes doesn’t help either.)

But in a way, this is fitting, because Burma as a nation seems to be missing the usual structure as well. As seen through the glimpses Delisle is afforded, China is a country that’s genuinely interested in the economic products of the modern professional, though not the cultural and political ones, and is milking them for all they’re worth. North Korea is too far gone to make a go of that, but to flatter itself and properly impress its subjects, the regime makes a show of being modern; it can’t afford not to lie about it. Now, perhaps it’s just Delisle’s lack of gainful employment that masks bustling business elsewhere in the city of Rangoon, but Burma as a government seems perfectly content with letting the people with whom Westerners come in contact live in relative, non-Westernized simplicity, while away from Western eyes–in entire zones of the country where foreigners are not permitted–the real economic and military depredations take place. Indeed, shielding their doings from outsiders appears to be their number-one concern.

This picture begins to emerge about a quarter of the way through the book and slowly picks up steam because, for the first time, one of Delisle’s travel memoirs has a sort of real-life “plot”: The death by a thousand cuts to which the junta is subjecting Western charities and NGOs, preventing them from reaching the people who need them the most (persecuted minorities) and slowly forcing them to shut themselves down lest they end up complicit in the government’s discrimination. Slowly the junta’s efforts at reality control become harder to miss–culminating most absurdly in the wholesale relocation of the capital from Rangoon to a prefab city in the middle of nowhere whose name can’t even be released to the public for security reasons.

Once again Delisle is a jolly, slightly frantic fish out of water, but this time the juxtaposition between him and his host nation is more poignant than ever. Two stories stick out: A meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery, the simplicity of which seems to almost haunt Delisle after the information overload of all his other journeys throughout the country; and a heartbreaking incident in which Delisle beamingly presents a French newspaper article about his sojourn in Burma to the amateur animators he’s been teaching as a hobby, only to discover that because of its critical tone toward the junta, one of his students is soon “disappeared.” In both of these very different cases Delisle is left wondering how life could be lived that way, and so are we.

* Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen—there’s a veritable bumper crop of new Kevin Huizenga comics, including the new Or Else and the debut of Fight or Run, available for purchase at this weekend’s SPX, where I and my wallet will be in attendance. Good stuff from PictureBox, too, including Powr Mastrs Vol. 2.

* Looks like Zack Snyder did one of those Fellowship of the Rings deals where a goodly chunk of Watchmen footage was screened for critics, to seemingly uniformly positive reactions. The movie’s gonna be 2 hours and 43 minutes long or so, while the length of Dr. Manhattan’s visible cock was unverified at presstime. AICN’s Moriarty has a lengthy review.

* Speaking of Snyder, at the Watchmen sneak peek he revealed he is in fact planning a 300 sequel based on an as-yet-unfinished, and most likely un-started, new Frank Miller graphic novel about a subsequent battle between the Greeks and Persians. I’m looking forward to both.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch seems less high on Batman #680 than I was–I really quite liked it; the sinister ambiance of that comic was really something–but you should read his review anyway.

* Finally, Happy 40th Birthday, Night of the Living Dead!

I will be attending the Small Press Expo in Bethesday, Maryland this Saturday. I will be wearing a bright red Partyka T-shirt and (most likely) carrying a San Diego Comic-Con tote bag, and, of course, you will know me by the trail of Bowie sketches. Please say hello to me!

Recent events in the lives of people very close to us have prompted The Missus to join the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Out of the Darkness community walk in Old Westbury, Long Island this weekend. The walk is a fundraiser for the AFSP, and she’s set up a donor page for people who would like to sponsor her walk. Her target amount is $500. Would you please donate whatever you can to help?

Today the penultimate issue of Grant Morrison & Tony Daniel’s “Batman: R.I.P.” storyline comes out, and with it, one would assume, the reveal of one or both of the storyline’s big mysteries: the identity of criminal mastermind the Black Glove and the fate of Batman himself. I actually have no clue what happens and my friends who do have kept mum, and I haven’t stumbled across any spoilers online, either. It’s been a loooooong time since I looked forward to reading an issue of a comic with the same anticipation that I looked forward to watching an episode of Lost or late Sopranos. I actually gushed about it to the Missus this morning, something I’m not sure I’ve ever done about a monthly comic: “Something really big’s gonna happen to Batman but no one knows what it is!” Maybe this is what reading comics feels like for people who don’t work at Wizard and find out everything in advance.

Not counting the dancing girls who I guess came with the show, is there a single moment in this performance that is not completely disarming, open, and emotionally direct? Tracey Thorn’s unassuming outfit and tentative dancing, even the slight false notes here and there in her otherwise silken voice, give the impression that she’s just some girl who after months and months of sitting in her apartment thinking these thoughts finally found the courage to sing them. “Tonight I feel above the law–I’m comin’ in to land”…if you can find a better encapsulation of that blissfully, knowingly foolhardy confidence you get when you’re finally gonna make your move on the person you want, I want you to please let me know. This is a perfect little song.