Cold Heat #2 & 4

BJ and Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc., 2006/2007

24 pages each

$5 each

Read it for free at ColdHeatComics.com

Buy it from PictureBox

Originally written I don’t remember when for WizardUniverse.com’s Thursday Morning Quarterback feature

COLD HEAT #2

The deliberately crude art style of this indier-than-indie miniseries will no doubt turn many readers of Big Two comics off. That’s a damn shame, because BJ and Santoro have created a unique and addictive hybrid of thrilling sci-fi murder mystery and drugged-up punk-rock coming-of-age tale. Continuing the story of a high school girl named Castle who’s reeling from the death of the lead singer of her favorite band and from getting dumped and fired simultaneously by the CEO of the company she was interning at, this issue introduces the man who’ll doubtlessly be the series’ big bad: Senator Wastmor. In his crazed search for the ‘killer’ of his dirtbag son—i.e. whoever provided him the drugs he O.D.’d on, at a party where Castle was the last person to see him alive—he’s the perfect portrait of the power-crazed politician: He mouths platitudes about how ‘the war on illegal drugs and underage drinking is now at its own D-Day’ on TV, while spewing obscenities and violent threats against the kids of Castle’s hometown when the camera’s off. Meanwhile, the pink-and-blue art nails the feeling of being really, really messed up as Castle takes way too many pills and gets embroiled ever deeper in the strange events befalling her town. If you can put aside your preconceptions and track down this comic, you’re in for a treat.

COLD HEAT #4

Like a 6-year-old trying to describe the awesomeness of Space Mountain at Disney World, this indie tale of sex, drugs, rock, conspiracies and alien abductions draws its strength from the contrast between the epic nature of its subject matter and the childlike way it’s presented. With its simple pink and blue color scheme and deliberately lo-fi linework, this issue’s revelation of presumed-dead rock singer Joel Cannon’s ‘2001’-style contact with extraterrestrial beings has a purity that makes up for its lack of detail, making its mystical vistas as powerful as those of any mainstream artist.

* There isn’t much in this rather sycophantic Wired.com interview with Grant Morrison you haven’t heard the writer say before, but good gravy, take a look at the cover for the collected edition of Final Crisis by J.G. Jones.

* Actually, he does say one thing that strikes me as being some serious horror blogosphere-bait:

Wired.com: Like continuity, is crisis itself becoming obsolete? Disaster scenarios seem to just get heavier and more mind-blowing, but they also are becoming more ubiquitous. Are we too inured to apocalypse and crisis these days to be scared of it anymore?

Morrison: I don’t know if we’re so much inured to apocalypse as almost sexually obsessed by it. We could only love apocalypse more if it had 4 liters of silicone in each tit. Think of all those videogames where the Earth’s overrun by insect-aliens or there’s been an atomic war and we’re stumbling in the ruins with a gun we stole from a zombie. We should be grateful that we live in a culture so insulated from true horror it can afford to play with fear as entertainment.

That’s a rather egregious misreading of the role and provenance of horror art and entertainment, no?

* Meanwhile, the pullquote from Morrison’s interview at Comic Book Resources isn’t from Morrison himself, but from the “tune in next time” text at the bottom:

Check back with CBR News on Friday for a new interview with Grant Morrison, where he discusses “Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye,” and some other projects he’s currently writing for DC Comics including one book about the Multiverse and a second in the vein of “Watchmen” featuring the heroes of Earth-Four, who are all former Charlton Comics characters.

Emphasis mine. The war of No-Beard against All-Beard continues!

* Speaking of Alan Moore, read this conversation between Carl Wilson and Peli Grietzer about Gossip Girl. (Seriously, it has something to do with Alan Moore, I promise. The thesis they tease out is that much of the “trash culture” you see enthusiastically consumed by, oh I don’t know, ex-Ivy League pop-culture bloggers–from Gossip Girl to Britney Spears’ recent albums–is actually produced with precisely that audience in mind, often by creators who come from that demographic themselves. Given my ambivalent feelings toward “poptimism,” this quote from Grietzer stuck me:

i guess my general thought here is that so much of what’s taken to be literati\hipsters\whatever breaking beyond taste-barriers [some but not all of what ‘poptism’ delineates] is more about a certain generation taking over the production of popular culture and catering to its own tastes rather than a generation shifting its tastes towards ‘the people’.

…as did this from Wilson:

There’s research on the reasons for the “omnivorism” shift among elite consumers, some of which credit it to globalization and multiculturalism – that in the post-industrial economic order, it’s more important to demonstrate your code-switching skills, and not to seem married to a single set of cultural markers.

I resemble that remark! This is part of why I was so taken aback by Alan Moore’s dismissive comments about Hollywood filmmaking, superhero comics, and the like–the bulk of my cultural consumption and conversation takes place in a space where the more voracious a polyglot you are, and the lower your barriers to low culture, the better. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)

* And speaking of Gossip Girl, I have my problems with Terry Richardson, but this is not one of them.

* Tim O’Neil continues slouching toward a Kingdom Come review, this time by pinpointing the rise of Alex Ross as the moment where DC in particular began drinking the “heroes as icons” Kool-Aid. I think you continue to see that play out everywhere from Kurt Busiek’s approach to the Batman/Superman/Wonder Woman trifecta in Trinity to the company-wise fixation on “legacy heroes.”

* This new Vertigo series Sweet Tooth from Jeff Lemire seems interesting. It doesn’t like like An HBO Original Series at all.

* Hey, here’s what Marc Bell looks like these days: A psychotic drifter! And Chris Oliveros looks like Gary Groth’s cousin as always.

* What is wrong with people? Something is very wrong with people.

* Charles Manson, 2009.

* Finally,

SPOILER ALERT – SORRY I FORGOT TO ADD IT LAST WEEK BUT I IMAGINE YOU ALL KNOW THE DRILL AT THIS POINT

* Another delightful episode. It literally filled me with delight. I can’t remember exactly when–I think it was when Sawyer told Jack, Kate, and Hurley “It’s 1977”–but at one point I just leaned back and laughed, I was having such a swell time.

* With that in mind, I wish the episode were twice as long as it was. As it stood, it was an unusual episode in that there were no big revelations or dramatic reversals or other big moments. It was more a series of necessary conversations and events to bring various characters up to speed and establish a new status quo among the various groups. What happens to Jack/Kate/Hurley? What happened to Sayid? How did the Ajira plane land? Where did Frank and Sun go? How did Ben get injured? How do Sawyer and Juliet react to the return of their previous love interests? How does Jin find out about Sun’s return, and what does he do about it? How does Miles handle it? Now we know the answers to all those questions and we can move on from there.

* The episode also threw in a bonus answer or semi-answer here and there for questions we weren’t expecting the answers to just yet. For example, we learn that Horace and Amy’s baby is everyone’s favorite doctor-slash-killing-machine, Ethan. This led to maybe one of the greatest moments in the history of the show, where Juliet finds this out and her “aww wook at the widdle baby” facial expression curdles as though she just realized she’s holding the world’s most adorable giant maggot.

* We also get some more hints as to the origin of the uber-important Pearl station, as the long-rumored Radzinsky (who made the blacklight map on the blast door in the Pearl hatch) appears and is revealed as a bit of a paranoid who is apparently responsible for designing the Pearl in the first place.

* And we also discover that Young Ben Linus is in fact roaming around Dharma Village during Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel’s back-in-time sojourn there–though that then raises the question of how the time-displaced characters have been handling that bit of awkwardness.

* And oh yeah, where’s Daniel at?

* This episode also deftly managed multiple tonal shifts. You had the light ’70s-spoof comedy that happens any time we go back to the Dharma days. You had the interpersonal drama of Our Heroes and Heroines meeting up once again. You had the Season Two/Three capture-and-interrogation throwback storyline with Sayid and Jin. You had the Season One throwback storyline with the new castaways in the present day (one assumes). You had Frank’s pulse-pounding and heroic Sully Sullenberger moment. You had some really creepy moments in abandoned New Otherton with Jack’s ghostly dad. You had Scheming Sun, which gave me another favorite moment–Sun braining Ben with a paddle in a long-overdue act of comeuppance. (I always love it when Ben gets caught with his pants down.) This show can do a lot of things well.

* As far as false notes go, the only one that stuck out to me was Sawyer’s sudden upbraiding of Jack during their brief conversation at the Sawyer/Juliet residence that night. I know Jack is overbearing (to say the least!), and I know his comment about reading a book was out of line, and I know that the two have a history of pissing contests, but a) we’ve just established that Sawyer is a much more mature and content guy, and seeing him revert to form so quickly felt wrong; b) poor Jack just went from pill-popping, banned-from-the-hospital mess to desperate rescue-mission organizer to time-traveling Dharma janitor in the space of a few days–cut him some slack, James!

* As far as I’m concerned, the Castaways straight-up murdered that co-pilot. They all got on the plane knowing what could happen, and his blood is on their hands. I hope the show directly addresses how many people have died so that these clowns could have their little adventures, and does so in a way where there are actual emotional consequences for that, rather than a lecture from a bad-guy character that can be quickly shaken off and forgotten.

* I hope we don’t see a whole lot of “John Connor sending his own father back in time to conceive him”-style time travel paradoxes, but after reading Todd VanDerWerff’s excellent-as-always review/recap, I wonder if Ben and the Others were building that runway in Season Three specifically so Frank could land on it in the future.

Cold Heat #1

BJ and Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc., 2006

24 pages

$5

Read it for free at ColdHeatComics.com

Buy it from PictureBox

Originally written on November 22, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

Cold Heat is a terrific comic for people who don’t think of their adolescence as having been particularly adolescent. That is to say, the prevailing approach toward reminiscing about one’s teenage years seems to be one of cringing embarrassment–no, actually, more one of condescension: “Ugh, what a little idiot I was then, I can’t believe I listened to Stone Temple Pilots,” etc. Writer-artists BJ (aka Ben Jones, he of those dog comics) and Frank Santoro say “fuck that noise” and instead choose to emphasize the rapturous beauty that adolescence’s grandiose melodrama and edge-of-disaster emotion constantly infuses into everyday life, particularly where music and romance are concerned. In doing so they craft a comic that is impossible not to compare to both arenas. Cold Heat‘s wispy, barely-there linework, the visual leitmotif of swirling and the rock-centric storyline–the events of the first issue revolve around our heroine Castle’s reaction to the fatal overdose of Joel Cannon, beloved lead singer of the noise band Chocolate Gun–don’t so much suggest as demand references to the blindingly happysad guitar maelstroms of Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and M83. Moreover, readers of a certain age will no doubt remember the whirlwind of emotion they were caught up in upon the death of Kurt Cobain, the likely inspiration here. I still remember storming away from the dinner table when my dad dared to agree with Andy Rooney’s “good riddance” assessment of Kurt’s passing; Cold Heat is a little like remembering that incident in comic book form. But the romance angle is important too. The book starts out with an almost anti-romantic vignette–Castle is callously informed by the CEO of the company at which she is an intern that the outfit has gone belly-up after just having had sex with him. “I forgot my CD player there,” she realizes after she leaves–one more regret. But soon the wide-eyed, upturned-face beauty of Jones and Santoro’s portraiture of Castle takes hold, suggesting a lo-fi–or more accurately, doodled-during-math-class–approximation of romance-era John Romita Sr. The simplistic pink, white and blue color scheme adds to the “just hadda get it down on paper before study hall ended” feel so effectively that you might not notice the subtlety with which a sort of crayon shading is used to evoke smoke-filled, drug-addled parties and the lonely, scary darkness of suburban nightfall. And the hints of craziness–a murder mystery, a potential World War III, a minotaur carrying a severed head–somehow combine to evoke teenagedom much more accurately than a strict slice-of-life comic would. Add in the slick cover stock, a letters page (called “Heat Waves!”), a letter from editor Dan Nadel that reads like liner notes from that old Temple of the Dog CD you’ve been meaning to rip to your iTunes and a short prose story by Timothy Hodler about falling in love with the office superhero fan, and you’ve got a comic that feels like a cable from a world where the only thing that exists is a dimly lit bedroom in which you’re wearing ripped jeans and you just keep listening to and rewinding “Teen Age Riot” over and over again. Outstanding.

* Boody Rogers’ Boody., Ivan Brunetti’s Ho!, the Greg Sadowski-edited Supermen!–that’s an impressive, and oddly punctuation-heavy, assortment of books now out from Fantagraphics.

* Real-world water monster update: Meet Predator X, a 50-foot prehistoric sea monster with four times the biting power of Tyrannosaurus rex–the most powerful jaws of any animal in the history of the planet.

* Curt Purcell ponders cultists vs. critics, liking something vs. “getting” something, and other issues of fandom and buffdom and whatnot. I think this is the key paragraph:

The basis for this difference of experience comes down to different patterns of directing attention. Attention–both what it’s focused on and what is filtered out of it–makes all the difference. Where I, a fan, see a werewolf in a Paul Naschy movie, non-fans see a bad actor in bad makeup. Well, he is a bad actor in bad makeup, and I’m not surprised that’s where most people’s attention comes to focus. If I see him as a werewolf in these movies, it’s not because I think he’s a great actor in amazing makeup. And I haven’t adopted some weird critical standard whereby I pay the same attention as non-fans to his bad acting and cheap makeup, and declare it awesome anyway. What I do is focus my attention much more intensely than most on the werewolf he’s trying to depict, and filter out or disregard as much as I can of anything that would compromise or spoil that experience.

To what extent do you offer a work you like the benefit of the doubt? To what extent does offering it the benefit of the doubt determine whether or not you like it to begin with? That seems to be the chicken-and-egg question with which Curt and his interlocutor here, CRwM, appear to be grappling.

* This brief review of Watchmen by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Eva Holland, a total Watchmen virgin, is for some reason my favorite entry in that particular Watchmen review subgenre, for its brevity and its lack of concern with finding the “correct” opinion w/r/t the book or the movie.

* Troubling image of the day #1: A still from a film adaptation of Paul Hornschemeier’s Return of the Elephant, god help us.

* Troubling image of the day #2: Renee French, ladies and gentlemen.

* Delightful image of the day #1: Olga Kurylenko in Neil Marshall’s upcoming Picts. vs. Romans epic Centurion. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Delightful image of the day #2: Kate Winslet, ladies and gentlemen.

SPOILER WARNING–DON’T LET ME RUIN THE SHOW’S ELABORATE MYTHOLOGY FOR YOU

* Weaksauce. That episode felt like a contest to see which storyline could be the most boring.

* First of all, you return from this ungodly long hiatus, and your first episode back is the school play episode? Besides feeling ridiculous in that every character is required to perform in the school play, I just sort of liked it better when they did Hair on Head of the Class.

* Age of Innocence, yes, we get it.

* I don’t care if the pretentious artsy-fartsy director character was intended as the show’s self-parody of the pretentious artsy-fartsy visual artist from earlier in the season, he was still intolerable. During that conversation at lunch I actually had a Dr. Cox from Scrubs moment where I burst out yelling “OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE MOST BORING SCENE IN THE HISTORY OF RECORDED MEDIA.” The Missus turned to me and said, “Oh, I haven’t even been paying attention. Too long; didn’t read.”

* Also, you could see the stupid drama critic misinterpreting the crash-and-burning of the show, and the annoying director guy claiming it was deliberate, a MILE away.

* I did kind of like the nervous lesbian stage manager, though.

* When it finally cut over to Chuck I said “Meanwhile, on a better show…” but I’d forgotten that he was in the middle of a student production of his own, Eyes Wide Shut Jr., which ended as randomly and pointlessly and unimaginatively as it began.

* Was it me or did they keep on implying Dorota was leaking to Gossip Girl? Was that just a red herring? They seemed to resolve all that stuff by pinning it on Rachel. (I still think Dorota IS Gossip Girl.)

* Speaking of Rachel, the one bright spot in the show was the hotness of the Hot for Teacher storyline. Something about the girl they cast in that role is really realistically adorable, which makes it even hotter. I totally called “they’re gonna do it in the costume closet,” btw. Of course they then had to go and write her out of the show, when they easily could have begun a Blair/Rachel romance, goddamn them.

* Seeing the teaser for next week’s episode, I’m starting to wonder whether the show’s rapid cycling and recycling through all the possible main-cast pairings is actually the major structural problem we’ve all kind of joked that it might be. The more you mix and match Dan, Serena, Chuck, Blair, Nate, and Vanessa, and sometimes Jenny, the less rewarding it gets. (Unless you did something nutso like Chuck/Serena or Dan/Blair, which I would support fully and which I assume we’ll get to eventually.) Meanwhile, the show’s attempts to bring aboard outside love interests have been three-eps-and-done affairs from the get-go, whether lame (that horrible artist guy) or kinda awesome (Madchen Amick, Hot for Teacher). The outsiders can’t bring the weight that the main cast does, but the main cast can’t sustain the novelty that the outsiders bring, and around and around we go.

* Your first must-read of the day: Tom Spurgeon presents the best comics of 2008. It’s interesting to see how much emphasis Tom places on the importance of weighing works qualitatively against one another as a goal of criticism–I suppose that goes without saying when it comes to a year-end ranking, but even in that case, I tend not to place so much importance on qualitative distinctions myself. And again, it makes me wish I’d read as much about Acme Novelty Library #19 as I have about Final Crisis (which I liked!). Tom also takes his fellow critics to task for their lack of engagement with books like What It Is and Kramers Ergot 7, a bit unfairly if I recall correctly, but hey, it takes different strokes to move the world.

* Your second must-read of the day: At MCAD’s “MOMEntum” exhibition, the great Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics holds forth on the evolution of alternative comics from comic book to graphic novel, and what that means for young cartoonists like those in the audience. (As a side note, it always does my heart good to see Jordan Crane’s NON given credit alongside Sammy Harkham’s Kramers Ergot. Had more people been able to see it, I don’t doubt NON #5 could have had the impact of Kramers Ergot 4–it certainly did on me.) (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Speaking of Kramers, Dick Hyacinth reviews Kramers Ergot 7 practically story-by-story. I think my favorite thing about the review is the way his photos of the scanner-busting pages make everything look big enough to be hung on gallery walls. Elsewhere, Dick does the world the public service of creating an actual working Kramers Ergot 7 table of contents.

* Sopranos creator David Chase’s next project will be called A Ribbon of Dreams. It’s an HBO miniseries with a sweeping story about the rise and presumably fall of two producers from the dawn of Hollywood to the present day. Sold.

* Todd VanDerWerff all but takes a mulligan on critically evaluating the penultimate episode of Battlestar Galactica until he sees its concluding episode this week. Which, wow, that’s going to take some getting used to. Anyway, he tentatively likes what he saw this week, as did I. He also takes the time to unpack why Baltar’s cult/conversion storyline has been so frustrating, perhaps my biggest pet peeve of the show’s final two half-seasons.

* In the latest installment of his continuing, awesome series of posts on ’90s superhero comics, What Ifs?, and other extraordinarily geeky topics, Tim O’Neil explains the difference between the “alternate worlds” of What If? and the “analogue worlds” of Elseworlds. Some of you just shrugged your shoulders, and some of you aren’t even reading this sentence because you’ve already clicked over. He also continues to promise a review of Kingdom Come, which I’m looking forward to because I like that book.

* My pals at the Cool Kids Table throw decorum to the four winds and run down the Watchmen spinoffs, sequels, and prequels of their respective dreams.

* Speaking of Watchmen, will the film’s relative failure adversely affect the prospects for more full-frontal male nudity in Hollywood films? Given the really egregious and unnecessary Penis Panic that gripped critics both mainstream and geek-centric, to say nothing of modern geek culture’s bizarre, bullying hypermasculinity, my guess is that the answer is yes. What a country. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

* “Tom Neely sure can draw” update: Tom Neely sure can draw.

* The last gasp of torture porn? Jason Adams gives pretty high marks to the remake of The Last House on the Left.

* Speaking of torture porn: Take some time, if you’re not some phony 24 tough guy and you don’t mind having your soul kicked repeatedly in its kidneys for a while, to read the International Committee for the Red Cross’s report on torture at America’s network of terror-war prison sites. It’s the involvement of doctors whose job it was to ensure that everyone was tortured just enough to not die (they weren’t always successful) that will be haunting me to my grave. And of course, the repulsive likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah–real-life horror stories themselves–never deserved the emotional martyrdom that their treatment now forces us to grant them.

* Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald wonders if the Obama Administration isn’t the new boss, same as the old boss in several important respects. Faith in good intentions, as we’ve learned (as I’ve certainly learned), is just not enough.

The Last Lonely Saturday

Jordan Crane, writer/artist

Red Ink, 2000

80 pages

$8, softcover or hardcover (!)

Buy it from Fantagraphics

Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Savage Critic(s).

Great day in the mornin’!

As promised last week, here’s a very different “best of Nine Inch Nails” mix. The inspiration here was a comment I remember Trent Reznor making regarding the song “Only,” which is a great big bass-slappin’ monster of a dance song–he said something to the effect that he had to work really hard to overcome being embarrassed about releasing a disco song. I instantly thought, “But you’ve recorded TONS of them! And they’re GOOD!” So here’s a collection of Trent at his toe-tapping, head-nodding, floor-filling, ass-shaking best. (Titular parentheses courtesy of Matthew Perpetua.)

Let’s Go Dancing (On the Backs of the Bruised): Nine Inch Nails Dance Music

The Hand That Feeds (DFA Remix) / Head Like a Hole / Only / The Perfect Drug / Heresy / The Hand That Feeds / Sin / Closer / Ruiner / Discipline / Complication / Down In It / God Given / Head Like a Hole (Opal) / Ringfinger / Let’s Hear It for Nine Inch Nails

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Originally I’d planned on including either more or perhaps different examples of his groove-oriented work–I was thinking of slower almost-funk songs like “Into the Void,” “Where Is Everybody?”, “The Only Time,” “The Big Comedown,” “Capital G” and so on–but I couldn’t figure how to make it all work together, so I dropped that stuff with the exception of “Closer” (because, c’mon, it’s “Closer”). Also, I could have included a lot of remixes, but I decided to stick with internally produced work, so the only non-Trent-produced song on here is the DFA remix of “The Hand That Feeds” (because, c’mon, it’s the DFA).

I hope you like this side of Nine Inch Nails as much as these folks did!

I FORGOT TO ADD THE SPOILER WARNING LAST WEEK, BUT I REMEMBERED THIS WEEK

I thought that was a strong episode, a very strong episode in fact. I didn’t see the flashbacks coming at all, and it was a very smart idea, tying these characters back to all they’d lost. Not that they were all note-perfect, mind you–again, we’ve gone to the bottomless grief reservoir quite a few times so seeing Roslin fall apart in a public fountain lacked the impact it might have otherwise; Anders’s ode to physics seemed a bit on the nose, even if it is the kind of thing I can picture a smart jock saying in an interview with a female reporter while reclining naked in a tub. But seeing Roslin with family, and seeing Zack Adama again, and especially seeing Baltar with his father and all the levels of discomfort and embarrassment that that meeting exposed in Gaius and Julius and Six…wonderful stuff.

Speaking of Gaius, his long, weirdly underdeveloped religious-cult storyline finally felt like it had a point, which was that Gaius was spending that time falling bass-ackwards into power once again. He kept it up because it got him laid, it got him attention, he’s good at it, it was some kind of emotional outlet, and Head Six wanted him to, but in the end it was all leading to this pivotal juncture where he ends up basically the most powerful person in the fleet as everyone else goes off on the rescue mission. Callis, who over the years became one of the show’s great pleasures, played the entire episode with a look of “what the fuck, man?” in his eyes. I’m a little concerned that without an antagonist still in the fleet his storyline might feel flat, but we’ll see.

Which leads us to what will apparently be the series finale’s big leap of faith, which is that the Admiral and President and stand-in President of the fleet would allow however many hundreds of key military and political personnel to take however many military assets they need and fly off on a suicide mission into Cylon Central in the middle of an asteroid field right next to a black hole. On a narrative level, this is Gandalf’s gambit at the end of The Lord of the Rings, where he, and all the surviving members of the Fellowship who could give the game away if captured and tortured, and the King of Gondor and the King of Rohan and most of the leadership class, strolled up to the Black Gates to be slaughtered because they believed that something very important and transcendent required them to do so. The thing is, that’s a lot easier for the characters and the audience alike to swallow in a fantasy narrative than it is in a science fiction allegory where people drive cars and smoke cigarettes and pretty much behave like normal people except for a few fantastic elements. What the story is asking us to do is believe that at this point, the fantastic elements in these characters’ lives are, perhaps, all they have left to cling to, that all these hundreds of people are going to risk it all because to not do so will just mean floating around aimlessly in space for a few more decades until they die out. If Hera means something, they mean something, so they’re going for broke. It’s a gamble on the show’s part, and if I were coming to it cold I don’t know if I’d buy it, but the show has earned a lot of goodwill from me by being one of the highlights of my life for a few years now, so gods-speed, gang.

* Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely are doing a new series called Batman and Robin, have you heard? “It’s like David Lynch doing the Batman TV show,” says Morrison, which phrase is, I think, to the Internet what “ZUR-EN-ARRH” was to Bruce Wayne.

* Look, normally I wouldn’t mind if They remade Stephen King’s It, because Tim Curry’s performance and make-up as Pennywise was literally the only thing the 1990 TV miniseries version got right. But then you hear that the new movie version is going to consolidate the 1958-to-1985 flashback/flashforward structure and all the ensuing and awesome period detail into the present day, and it’s like, fuck, why not just remake Killer Klowns from Outer Space instead? One day someone’s gonna take one of Stephen King’s really good books and make an HBO maxiseries out of it, complete with subterranean tween gangbang, and we can all be happy. Until then I’m going to want to throw my computer through the window on a regular basis.

* Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johansson as some Russian villain and the Black Widow in Iron Man 2? Well done, Marvel Studios. Everyone try not to stare at ScarJo’s Russian accent.

* Jog reviews Cold Heat #5/6.

* Jason’s Low Moon looks fantastic.

* John Hankiewicz can draw the bloody bejesus out of a sewing machine case.

* Spurge:

But yeah, if you liked Watchmen, you might want to try some of the books that are like whatever the heck you liked about Watchmen, and DC has certainly published some of those books.

LOL

* In light of the Battlestar Galactica series finale, part one of which airs tonight, this has got to be the quote of the day:

On March 17, there will be a “Battlestar” retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as “human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith,” according to Sci Fi.

Actually, no, wait: This is the quote of the day:

The panel will be moderated by “Battlestar” fan Whoopi Goldberg.

(Via the utterly gobsmacked Topless Robot.)

Cold Heat #5/6

BJ & Frank Santoro, writers/artists

PictureBox, Inc.

48 pages

$20 (limited edition of 100 copies)

Buy it from PictureBox

Cold Heat was truly tailor-made for my enjoyment. Combining genre storytelling with avant garde art and layout, minimalist linework with maximalist psychedelia, shoegazey atmosphere with cotton-candy colors with Kurt Cobain and Ziggy Stardust references with teen-angsty sex, drugs, and violence…basically, even if Cold Heat didn’t exist, it would be necessary for me to invent it. I never thought I’d get the chance to hold a new single issue of Cold Heat in my hands again, so on that level alone, the existence of this comic book (a double-issue, technically, but who’s counting) is cause for rejoicing, regardless of the execution.

Fortunately, the execution is killer. I think the standout story element in this installment is just how far Jones and Santoro are willing to take the Senator Wastmor character in terms of making him an embodiment of elite-political culture at its most loathsome, a sort of fever dream of naked cruelty, avarice, rapaciousness, and hypocrisy, complete with Uzis, orgies, and shitting on prisoners. It’s reminiscent of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs in terms of imagining Power and those who master it as corrupt, violent, and disgusting.

Visually, the changes here are subtle but important. The introduction of purples to the pink/blue color scheme to flesh out and darken the world a bit. The replacement of the swirling motif with one of diamond-like patterns imposes a new level and form of visual power on the world of the comic. “There’s no turning back” reads a Castle thought-caption at the bottom of a page where this geometric device is at its most prominent, and such is its impact that we absolutely believe her.

This is not to say that it’s all gruesome abuse and overwhelming visuals. Wastmor and his schemes and depredations are an over-the-top goof, at varying times referencing classic abuse-of-authority touchstones from Salo to Illuminatus! to Twin Peaks to Eyes Wide Shut to Revenge of the Nerds; he conducts his final Uzi-toting rampage clad only in thong underwear. Meanwhile there’s a laugh-out-loud dialogue exchange between Castle and her martial-arts instructor, in which they fill each other in on their respective adventures, that revels in the story’s deadplan implausibility in a fashion reminiscent of a similar recent scene in Lost. Like Scott Pilgrim on haphazardly mixed cold meds and anti-depressants, Cold Heat is a true trip, a visionary experience in a medium that should be providing them by the bucketload. Please read it.

Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret

Michael Kupperman, writer/artist

Harper Entertainment, 2000

128 pages

$14

Buy it from Amazon.com

Hmm, what’s my “in” here? I could start by saying that Kupperman is a kindred spirit to Terry Gilliam: Gilliam’s animation work for Monty Python repurposed the imagery of Victorian and Edwardian England for surrealist humor and sexual satire, while Kupperman similarly works with visuals from the pulp and adventure publications of pre- and post-War America for surrealist humor (again) and riffs on the absurdity and violence of that culture. I could also say that he draws everything much, much better than he needs to–it’s like if Charles Burns did a book full of super-dense gag strips. I could point out that unlike most of the funnies, these comics truly work as comics, with visuals and text constantly trading off in terms of what’s doing the heavy lifting in getting the jokes across. I could elaborate by saying he’ll go both elaborate and direct with both components–for example, the visual gag at the heart of “Dead End Alley” is unanticipatable and complex, while the punchline panel of “The Cowboy in the Dinner Roll” is exactly what you think it’s gonna be and hammers the laff home with the subtlety of Mjolnir; meanwhile, you get text-heavy pieces like “Murder Makes My Head Hurt” and “From ‘Lives of the Cartoonists'” that take a full page to unspool and reach their pinnacle, but you also get instant-crackup juxtapositions like “Swamp Blanket Bingo,” “Sex Blimps,” “Sherlockules,” and “I Am a Gamera.” I could say that the work he’s doing in Tales Designed to Thrizzle, despite simply being a continuation of everything you’re seeing here, is better overall, but somehow that only makes this book more fun as it becomes rewarding to see how he refines his approach and execution in the later books. But I think I’ll call Michael Kupperman a comic (and comics) genius and leave it at that.

* I’m sick of Photobucket’s bullshit. Can anyone recommend a better image-hosting site that won’t yank Jim Rugg drawings of Doctor Manhattan because you can see his genitals? (Doc’s, not Rugg’s.) I don’t want to use my Flickr account as a random image depository.

* A few residual Watchmen review links first:

* Jim Emerson compares and contrasts the film with The Dark Knight, which in restrospect is the “visually realistic take on superheroes” film that a Watchmen adaptation had the potential to be in other hands but ended up emphatically not being; Emerson argues that that’s to Watchmen‘s betterment.

* Adrian de la Touche at The House Next Door praises the movie for aspects other critics have used to lambaste it–the on-the-nose music choices, that sex scene–and refers to Zack Snyder as “a talented—fuck it, I’ll bite—visionary filmmaker.” I kind of think so too! The Paul Verhoeven of the ’00s?

* And now some MMORPG geekiness:

* Man, is this ever right up my alley: Here’s a firsthand account of how the game Tabula Rasa used its real-world cancellation as grounds for an in-game apocalypse.

* On a similar note, Ta-Nehisi Coates wonders how player vs. player combat could be employed to affect the World of Warcraft storyline.

* Cold Heat #5/6 is out! I have a copy and hope to review it shortly.

* “Tom Neely sure can draw” update: Tom Neely sure can draw.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s review of last week’s lackluster Battlestar Galactica focuses on how difficult it is to properly evaluate individual episodes of a plot-heavy series, particularly toward the end of its run, without the context provided by the plot’s yet-to-be-aired resolution.

* The remake of Let the Right One In is in fact going to be called Let the Right One In, thank god.

The new U2 album, No Line on the Horizon, is pretty good I guess. It’s okay. My first-listen reaction is that it’s better than How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and much better than career-worst All That You Can’t Leave Behind. The lyrics get pretty dire, as you’d expect these days–Bono needs to ban the word “beautiful” from his repertoire for a while, just like there was a period where the band agreed they weren’t allowed to use “streets”–and the Edge’s rockin’-out riffs are kind of forced and gutless. Regardless, “Get On Your Boots” is stuck in my head pretty frequently.

Anyway I write this because I have a bad feeling that some people are going to refer to certain tracks on the record as “experimental,” particularly in light of the comparatively straightforward songs on the past two albums. Let’s not forget that we know what actually experimental U2 actually sounds like, from back when the lead singer of the biggest band in the world dressed in platform heels, gold lamé suits, devil horns, and kabuki make-up and called himself “MacPhisto.”

“Lemon” is my favorite U2 song. Interestingly, I really loved it and the rest of Zooropa from the moment it came out, way before I listened to electronic or dance music generally. I think that even then I was excited to see the band try something so very different, and even then I was excited to see them do it well. I also contextualized Zooropa as the Magical Mystery Tour to Achtung Baby‘s Sgt. Pepper–a denser, deeper, weirder, braver exploration of the territory they’d just opened up an album ago.

As a song, with its techno shimmer (when I first started hearing electronic dance music I called all of it “techno” and it’s tough to shake) and falsetto vocals that most rock fans instantly associate with disco, “Lemon” is superficially quite confrontational versus the rest of the band’s catalog–the aural equivalent of what the names Pop and “Discoteque” and the Village People costumes they wore in the video were a few years later. But like all the best of their ’90s material, “Lemon”‘s addresses the same kind of spiritual, capital-R Romantic yearning that the band’s big rock hits did, only fed through filters of uncertainty and self-consciousness. So, the lemon itself, the symbol that represents the magical mystery woman du jour, is big and bright and juicy and natural as one might expect, but it’s also sour and maybe a little blinding and associated with the sterile advert artifice of “lemon fresh” sloganeering.

The song describes man’s attempts to create art as guilelessly self-obsessed, his attempts at transcendence ultimately self-reflexive and driven by the usual preoccupations:

A man makes a picture

A moving picture

Through the light projected

He can see himself up close

A man captures colour

A man likes to stare

He turns his money into light to look for her

The motif is repeated:

A man builds a city

With banks and cathedrals

A man melts the sand so he can

See the world outside

A man makes a car

And builds roads to run them on

A man dreams of leaving

But he always stays behind

In both cases, the question seems to be whether the creative act is even necessary, whether we’re introducing unnecessary intermediaries into an observational process that’s really as simple as opening our eyes.

Meanwhile, despair (“I feel like I’m drifting, drifting, drifting from the shore”; “these are the days when our world has come asunder”) yields to hope of respite (“I feel like I’m swimming out to her”; “these are the days when we look for something other”); indeed, the latter is not possible without the former. This is perhaps best expressed by the epigrammatic “chorus” of the song: “Midnight is where the day begins.” The music itself ebbs and flows in a similar fashion, with the uplift of the chorus’s piano-plunking drifting back down into melancholy cello. But our final glimpse of the enigmatic “she” reveals that “she is the dreamer, she’s imagination/She had heaven, she wore lemon,” so maybe we’re right to try; maybe everything doesn’t collapse in upon itself, and there is something great out there waiting to be captured.

* I thought it might be nice to round up some of the Watchmen reviews I’ve gotten something out of, both positive and negative ones. This gives me an excuse to pointedly ignore the critics who used the film as an occasion to flaunt their ignorance of and antipathy toward “graphic novels.” (To quote Trent Reznor, you know who you fucking are.)

* For starters, here’s my review, if you missed it or avoided it before seeing the movie yourself.

* Of all the major critics, Roger Ebert is the most unabashedly bullish about the film. He’s followed up his initial review with a second, lengthier one based on a second, IMAX-derived screening. The latter is less a review than a rumination on Dr. Manhattan and a life lived by way of quantum physics. The pure geekiness of that, the “half-stoned and chugging Diet Coke at 3 in the morning debating the ending of Lost Highway with your college roommates”ness of it, is really delightful, and precisely the kind of response I was hoping a Watchmen movie would be capable of provoking. In terms of Watchmen‘s eventual status in the pantheon, which I care a whole lot less about, Ebert’s imprimatur is interesting in that he’s become sort of a patron saint of film fans who come at the medium from either a geek or buff perspective, rather than a cineaste/scholar perspective, if you will.

* Even more effusive than Ebert is the young-ish liberal national-security blogger Spencer Ackerman. “Watchmen is a great film,” he says, which is not a statement I’m seeing made that straightforwardly even in receptive quarters (like this blog, for example). However, he serves up three quibbles involving three characters that I for one agree with: Ozymandias is too obviously sinister and his twisted altruism is too insufficiently developed; Laurie’s backstory is truncated and de-complicated, right down to the disappearance of her real, ethnic last name; Rorschach’s rightist, or perhaps fascist, politics are downplayed, except as the tics of a sociopath. I think Ackerman’s perspective is worth taking a gander at in that he represents a pretty common breed of geek: A guy who’s extremely smart, savvy, well-read, and cutting-edge in a variety of areas (politics, punk rock) but is pretty strictly superhero-based when it comes to comics.

* I haven’t been tracking the conservative political blogs for their responses, nor have I kept an eye out for which critic, Right or Left, comes up with the most hamfisted allegorical read regarding the film (“Obama and Ozymandias–they’re both effete liberals whose names start with an O, and they’re both destroying the world in order to rebuild it in their egomaniacal image,” that sort of thing. I’m sure Dana Stevens managed to compare the Comedian to Dick Cheney or something equally revelatory). But Andrew Sullivan says he thoroughly enjoyed the movie and I for one hope he posts about why. I guarantee you the letters he gets in response will be just as entertaining, no matter what he says.

* My longtime companion Jason Adams says something I’ve been thinking to myself while reading several negative reviews of the movie, which is that the massive planned Director’s Cut will likely fill out a lot of lacunae that people who didn’t like the film have been calling out; for Jason, this means giving fleshing out the vox populi in the persons of the newsstand owner and his comics-reading hanger-on. I also like Jason’s review because he says Rorschach’s last stand tugged a tear out of him even where the book itself didn’t–it did, for me, during my last read–and because he makes fun of the critics who didn’t grok that the airship sex scene was cheesy on purpose.

* Tim O’Neil basically calls it a bad movie he enjoyed. He echoes the pretty oft-voiced problem with the development of Ozymandias, says that the film’s Laurie Jupiter “looks like she’s made out of the same plastic as her costume” (killer line), and beefs with the super-ness of the non-super characters’ action scenes.

* Contra critics like Tim, who reference the film’s extraordinary fealty to Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ original comics (whether for good or ill), Joe “Jog” McCulloch, who did not care for the film at all, argues that the movie is in fact nothing like the comic, particularly in how it translates Gibbons’s visuals, character design, and grid-based pacing. I think he makes some rock-solid points in his treatment of such diverse “lost in translation” moments as the bloodstain on the Comedian’s smiley-face button, the damage incurred by the Comedian during his murder, and (most especially) the way the film reverse’s the book’s juxtaposition of largely bloodless run-up to extraordinarily splatteriffic climax; I don’t think that I’d even noticed the lack of bodies in the streets at the end until reading Jog’s review. (Elsewhere, he imagines Watchmen: A Film by Peter Greenaway.)

* Tom Spurgeon, the Perry Cox to my John Dorian, disliked the movie too. I really enjoy the way he calls out the lack of cohesion among the performances; how the increased violence in the “Dan & Laurie vs. knot-top muggers” kneecaps our ability to see Rorschach as uniquely dangerous and crazy; and the glossed-over fact that the climax’s megadeaths were caused by an American weapon. On the flipside, he also tips his hat insightfully, if that can be done, to the acting choices of Billy Crudup and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

* In his pan, Leigh Walton, my editor at Top Shelf, has a great line: “Snyder et al adapted Watchmen more or less exactly as they would have adapted Kraven’s Last Hunt or Emerald Twilight or Secret Wars II. ‘Here’s a great comic book story, and we’ll bring it to life on the big screen.'” The thing is, I really like Kraven’s Last Hunt.

* Over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, one of my favorite (if in this case inaccurately named) film blogs, Victoria Large calls Watchmen an “intoxicating, messy, tough-to-shake movie. It’s a film to think about, worry about, fight about, and I’m grateful for that. So love it. Or hate it. Or do a little bit of both. But please don’t dismiss it.” I’m not quite on board with the last few bits, but I have to say that otherwise this tracks pretty closely to my own level of appreciation for the flick. In a waym this doesn’t surprise me. My favorite film of 2008 was Rambo. Granted, I didn’t see any of the Oscar-bait efforts that year, and very few of the more legit critical darlings (Let the Right One In is probably the big exception). And granted, Rambo is in some ways a deeply stupid movie, and in others a deeply problematic, even troubling one. But it surprised, entertained, thrilled, horrified, and haunted me. I think Watchmen is Rambo with costumes.

Dick Hyacinth and I continue our discussion of Charles Burns’s masterpiece Black Hole over at The Savage Critic(s). Check it out!

The Exterminators Vol. 1: Bug Brothers

Simon Oliver, writer

Tony Moore, artist

DC/Vertigo, 2006

128 pages

$9.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

Originally written on November 2, 2006 for publication in The Comics Journal

Conspiracy theory has long been the hallmark of a certain strain of DC-subimprint storytelling. From Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles to Warren Ellis’s Planetary, the edgier edges of Time Warner’s sequential art empire are rife with tales of beautiful badasses whose proficiency in matters of philosophy, style and killing people enable them to thwart the world’s secret chiefs and revel in knowledge withheld from the blissfully ignorant masses. The Exterminators is almost a willful antithesis to such books: Here, the people who unearth the true world order are an assortment of creepy working stiffs who kill bugs for a living.

If anything, first-time comics writer Simon Oliver actually goes overboard in serving up steaming piles of anti-glamour in this opening chapter of what augurs to be an apocalyptic conflict between humanity and an army of nature-run-amok creature-feature “smart roaches.” If Oliver had one Direct Market retailer order for every time one of his characters says “motherfucker,” he’d be well clear of the cancellation threshold. Meanwhile, the (self-conscious) sexiness of the Illuminatus!-inspired work delivered by his UK-based counterparts is transmogrified here into a sordid vibe that borders on misogyny whenever sexuality is broached. The archvillain of the piece is a lesbian corporate overlord who inducts new recruits (like lead character and ex-con Henry James’s restless girlfriend Laura) into her sinister enterprise by fucking them; future installments of the series introduce a new prostitute love interest for Henry who dresses up like famous literary figures for her johns, and an obese researcher who obliviously bangs a shady scientist who all but wears an “I’m a Fugitive Khmer Rouge War Criminal” T-shirt. Aside from the single angelic Hispanic mother whose horrific roach infestation serves as the central plot of this volume (and it’s not like that cliched character does much to ameliorate the other ones), women in The Exterminators haven’t yet proven to be a whole lot more than whores.

But based on this volume, I’m willing to give Oliver time to fix that problem. There’s something enormously refreshing about Henry, a character who genuinely enjoys the break he’s making from his criminal past and the hard but rewarding work he’s doing at the Bug-Bee-Gone company, run by his step-father Nils. Even as he’s slowly drawn into the mysteries of Egyptian bug gods, super-roaches and sci-fi biological weapons (developed by the corporation at which Laura is exploring her lipstick-lesbian side), he never cops a “look how cool I am” attitude nor a working class anti-hero pose–Oliver’s delightful scripting shows him attacking each problem like it’s a particularly frightening and yet potentially surmountable obstacle in a 9-to-5 job. He’s aided tremendously in this by the effortlessly pleasant cartooning of Tony Moore. His oblong faces and expressive eyes give each of his characters the kind of air that, were they real people, would make you come home from a day at work and say to your significant other, “You know such-and-such? Man, there’s just something about that guy I really like.” Moore broke out by helping to launch Robert Kirkman’s hit zombie epic The Walking Dead, and he’s just as proficient with horror-genre tropes here as he was there, from bug-ridden corpses to armies of the bugs themselves.

Overall Bug Brothers is skeevy fun, which is probably exactly what it set out to be, and the bargain price DC slapped it with will hopefully go a long way toward encouraging readers to pick up one of Vertigo’s most unique offerings. It’s not a series I want to see go legs-up anytime soon.

(Via Pterodactyls)