* This David Lynch short film shot with a cinematographe camera is horrifying.

(Via Stacie Ponder.)

* Timothy Olyphant is going to star in the remake of George A. Romero’s The Crazies. That’s nice, but mainly what struck me about the Dread Central article where I found this out is the picture of Olyphant as Seth Bullock. Good God was Deadwood a great television program.

* Renee French is talented.

* If you watch Heroes live every week as it initially airs, creator Tim Kring thinks you are “saps and dipshits.” Thank goodness superhero fandom doesn’t get riled up that easily, or else he could catch some flack for this!

I Live Here

Mia Kirshner, J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge, Michael Simons, primary writers/artists

Ann-Marie MacDonald, Lynn Coady, Joe Sacco, Kamel Khélif, Chris Abani, Karen Connelly, Tara Hach, Lauren Kirshner, Valerie Thai, Niall McClelland, Seamrippers Craft Collective, Tina Medina, Julia Feyrer, Tiffany Monk, Charlotte Hewson, Sean Campbell, Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Morstad, Karen Comins, Lackson Manyawa, Felix Yakobe, Edward Kasinje, contributing writers/artists

Pantheon, October 2008

320 pages

$29.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

Visit the website

Donate to the I Live Here Foundation

Because it’s easier than talking about the content, I’m going to start my review of I Live Here, actress Mia Kirshner’s labor-of-love examination of human rights abuses suffered by women and children around the world, by discussing the presentation. Simply put, it’s stunning, certainly among the loveliest, most lavishly and thoughtfully designed books I’ve seen this year. The “book” consists of four slim, separate softcover volumes, each one reminiscent of a small notebook or journal, encased in a surprisingly sturdy, unfolding slipcase, the texture of which evokes the white paint/plaster/whiteout/whatever that is comprises the cover’s visuals. Each volume focuses on a different region where suffering is endemic: Ingushetia, a Russian republic that serves as home for thousands of Chechen refugees; the refugee camps (more like internment camps) along the Burma-Thailand border where members of the Karen ethnic group have been herded by Burma’s military dictatorship, as well as the Thai cities where Burmese refugees often end up as sex workers or domestic servants; Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican border city that serves as a narco capital and the site of literally hundreds of murders and disappearances of women and girls, many of them unsolved; and Malawi, an impoverished African nation where the rate of HIV infection hovers around 20%. Kirshner and some of her collaborators (Sacco, Simons, Gloeckner, and MacKinnon) traveled to each place, and the information and material they collected formed the basis for a variety of reportage, memoir, fiction, poetry, illustration, painting, photography, collage, comics, and assorted other visual and textual accounts of what’s going on in these places.

It’s all beautifully done, and virtually never maudlin, self-indulgent, or over-designed, which is something of a miracle given the subject matter and the sheer number of contributors. Kirshner’s eye for detail is impressive for a first-time author, but I don’t think she ever gives in to the temptation to oversell the import of a shared moment or specific insight (even regarding her family’s experience with the Holocaust or her own rape as a teenager, both of which inform her intent to create this book); the focus is still squarely on the full contours of the human catastrophes to which she bears witness. Moreover, while I Live Here can only be called a graphic novel in the very loosest sense–sequential art driven by panel transitions accounts for exactly two subsections of the whole project–Kirshner and her main collaborators bring a comics sensibility to the entire affair, concentrating on a juxtaposition of text and image that conveys more information than simple illustration. Sometimes this can be fairly complex and unexpected, as in the needlepoint and craft works that accompany an account of a murdered young woman in Juárez. Other times it’s as simple as just explaining what we’re seeing: In the Burma/Thailand volume, there’s a powerful one-page sequence of 12 increasingly out-of-focus snapshots captioned, in white-out, “Self-portraits—She took one picture every hour while working her shift in the brothel. She had six clients in 12 hours.” Some contributions rely on the way the text is presented: What looks like four pages of word-find puzzles in the Juárez volume turns out to be names of dead and disappeared girls written out end to end; a series of short first-person accounts of life in juvenile prison in Malawi is illustrated by Malawian signmaker Edward Kasinje, whose visual representations of their words end up reminiscent of the type-based work of Ray Fenwick.

The actual graphic novelists involved in the project hand do memorable work here, unsurprisingly. Joe Sacco’s strip “Chechen War, Chechen Women” contains some of the best art I’ve ever seen from him, his figures containing a searing, prophet-like power. This is also where we get our first good look at Phoebe Gloeckner’s experiments with digitally manipulated photography and doll-making, in a monumentally upsetting series of diorama-like depictions of the rape and murder of women and girls in Juárez. Her overripe, disturbingly childlike imagery is juxtaposed with flatly literal translations of reports on the crimes from the Mexican media and police documents (“Said, ‘she leave her children to me because I am now without work. She should know how tempted, and no right has to anger with me when she is not there.'”).

As is probably apparent by now, this is devastatingly, soul-crushingly sad material. It clearly got to Kirshner, who admits as much throughout the book, after seeing a series of photos of carnage taken by a Chechen refugee, after visiting Juárez. As her journeys go on, the books feel less comprehensive–I think each subsequent volume is a quicker read than the one before–as if Kirshner eventually lacked the heart to throw it all at us again and again, preferring impressions to examinations. There’s stuff in here you’re going to wish you could un-read, un-see. You’ll cry. (It was a short fiction piece about a Karen child who had to leave her dog behind while fleeing her village and wondered if the dog was sad because he couldn’t understand where his masters went that got me.) You’ll start making comparisons in your head: Is Juárez, with its recognizably North American pop-culture and commerce, more or less upsetting than the familiar Eurasian rubble of Chechnya? Is the perfect storm of man’s brutality to man in Burma and Thailand more or less unjust than the avalanche of disease in Malawi? Is hopelessness quantifiable? If the world is the sick, unfunny joke these stories of these places suggests it to be, there’s something heroic about those willing to go out of their way to hear that joke be told, is there not?

* Did you know that Phoebe Gloeckner is blogging again? She is. Did you expect it to be sad? It is.

* CBR’s Alex Dueben speaks with Ross Campbell, creator of the weird, wonderful Wet Moon and Water Baby. Campbell is a really unique artist in comics right now and hearing about his mental process is pretty fascinating. There’s a great bit where he reveals his Minx effort, Water Baby, was originally planned to have a raunchier story but less sexy visuals:

Actually, looking back on the artwork just now, I still really like it, but I think I went a little overboard on Brody’s breasts. Even though Louisa’s are even bigger, Brody’s particularly seem overly prominent, not specifically because of their size since obviously tons of girls have these proportions and they’re fine and normal, but just the manner in which I drew them. Maybe it’s just Brody’s nipples, which always seem to be pushing into her shirts (I guess I was trying to show that Brody never wears a bra, too), I don’t know. Maybe if I could go back and fix up all the nipple protrusion it would be perfect. [laughs]

He also reveals that Tokyopop is resolutely fucking him out of being able to do anything further with his excellent goth-zombie graphic novel The Abandoned, which is a crime. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Chris Mautner speaks with Ivan Brunetti about his two-volume Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories. Once again, we see that anthologies of this sort eschew good superhero comics not out of choice, but out of necessity, courtesy of those comics’ publishers:

Then there were things that were prohibitively expensive and just impossible to track down the rights on. It’s really hard to get a hold of Marvel Comics. I would have loved to have stuff by Jack Kirby in there. You can’t even find who to contact to get those rights, plus they would have been so expensive. The recent Best American Comics —

Q: — wanted to get in Paul Pope —

A: Yeah and DC wouldn’t even want it reprinted. There were those kinds of issues to consider.

Another crime.

* Fangoria speaks with World War Z author Max Brooks about the coming film adaptation, directed by Quantum of Solace‘s Marc Forster and written by Spider-Man: The Other‘s J. Michael Straczynski.

Brooks is also pleased with the latest WORLD WAR Z script draft by J. Michael Straczynski, whom some predict will win an Oscar nomination for his screenplay to the Clint Eastwood film CHANGELING. The scripter managed to distill Brooks’ wide-ranging collection of journal entries, interviews and anecdotes detailing the ultimate battle between man and zombie into a cohesive screenplay. “I’m thrilled that the man who created BABYLON 5 is working on this movie,” Brooks said. “I can’t give it away, but Straczynski found a way to tie it all together. The last draft I read was amazing.”

Another crime?

* David Bordwell sings the praises of that golden age of edgy Hollywood filmmaking…the ’80s?

* Look! I’m a highlight!

That’s from an SPX retrospective strip by Dustin Harbin, who sure can draw. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Frequently you hear comics people talk about DC’s iconic heroes. If I made a list in my head of who those are, it would map exactly to this drawing:

From a DC Comics color guide, drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. (Via JK Parkin.)

* A Ghostface Killah Greatest Hits featuring a song called “Ghostface Christmas”? Oh, indeed.

* Quote of the day:

‘Tis the season to be crazy!

–Some crazy lady on the train to work this morning. Unfortunately, being actually crazy, she didn’t know to quit while she was ahead, and used the line (by which I mean shouted it to no one in particular) twice. So now it’s unable hang in the collective memory of her fellow passengers as a singular, spontaneous flash of shamanic-savant brilliance the way I’m sure we’d all prefer it to.

* Finally (via Whitney Matheson, Chinese Fucking Democracy.

* First-time director Mark Poirier will be remaking The Host. Fans are worried he’ll deviate too much from the original by making the remake a good movie. (Via Dread Central.)

* Looks like Damon Lindelof and Leinil Francis Yu’s Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk will finally finish! Good–it was a good comic so far. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Strange Ink’s Sean B. makes the case for Rorschach’s seemingly Snyder-elided monotone, comparing the vigilante to such memorable flat-affect villains as Anton Chigurh and HAL 9000. I think Chigurh is an apt comparison given that I think Moore and Gibbons meant Rorschach to come across like a Leatherface/Michael/Jason-style masked slasher to his victims. That said, I think it’s a mug’s game to argue whether or not movie-Rorschach will maintain the original’s embodiment/critique of Ditko-Rand A-is-A black-and-white morality based on his accent in a trailer or two.

* Your quote of the day comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It’s a funny thing to be a black kid into fantasy. Most of this stuff is ripped from Tolkien, and as much as I love LOTR, there is, indeed, something disquieting about the total whiteness of the movies. I don’t blame that on Jackson or Tolkien. If someone was doing a fantasy epic based on Xhosa creation myths, I wouldn’t expect to see any white people.

Meanwhile, this comment regarding how “race” and attractiveness have affected the evolution of World of Warcraft was pretty fascinating to me. Actually, the whole comment thread is pretty terrif and if you’re a politically sensitive follower of fantastic fiction it’s well worth your time.

* Rest in peace, Guy Peellaert.

(Via Dirk Deppey.)

Powr Mastrs Vol. 2

C.F., writer/artist

PictureBox, November 2008

104 pages

$18

Buy it from PictureBox

Buy it from Amazon.com

My goodness, this is a filthy book! Powr Mastrs Vol. 2 is a “fantasy” in both the generic and sexual senses. A throughline of eroticized mayhem only briefly glimpsed in Vol. 1 (Aphasia the Witch’s boob-bearing corset, and of course the Jellyfish Emperor/Lady Minirex hentai sequence) emerges as the dominant mode of C.F.’s odd indie epic of magic, mad science, and violence. Maybe that’s what makes the violence here so memorable and disturbing–a certain sexualized vulnerability for the victims and animalism for the perpetrators.

The bit everyone’s going to remember from this volume is Ajax Lacewing’s Midnight Express/28 Days Later style dispatch of a giant. The eye-gouging and decapitation are gory enough on their own, but when accompanied by genuinely upsetting smack-talk (“I know you can’t see now, but you can hear me: You’re trash. Giants are trash.”) and Ajax’s erect penis in full money-shot mode, they’re a true violation. The savagery here and throughout (Buell Kazee introduces us to Viskoser Tod, Tetradyne Cola battles Darman Orry) is palpable, as is the sexuality (the Bosch-like construction of Cool George Herc’s nude body, Minirex’s masturbation, the languid psychedelic sensuality of Aphasia and Windlass Wendy Wheetah the Witches, the Sub-Men’s underwater dalliances). And it all makes sense in a way, given that we learn that the plot’s prime mover is the exploitation, and subsequent rebellion, of the sentient creations of the aloof Mosfet Warlock. It’s a strange and sinister mythos, based on the use and abuse of people’s bodies by other people; I can’t help but feel that outside of the world of artcomics there are hardcore SFF readers who would take to this like ducks to water. I’m not entirely convinced that it justifies a $18 price point for what is essentially one-sixth of a larger story, but this is impressive work.

By the time this song came out Danzig had already had his big crossover hit with “Mother.” I’m pretty sure America was in the throes of “Closer”-era Nine Inch Nails mania at this point, though, and the comparatively non-metal electronic vibe of this song is an indicator of that, as is the part-NIN part-Tool video. This is pretty far out of Danzig’s traditional horror-punk and Frazetta-metal comfort zone, and, I’ve always thought, rewardingly so. The primary trick here is repetition. Danzig repeats a series of negative statements on pretty much the same handful of notes without a hint of his Viking Elvis voice to be heard, and the musical backing is exactly the same throughout; the closest it gets to a chorus is just repeating the previous verse while running the vocals and guitars through distortion effects. The tone is relentless and claustrophobic, yet also seductive thanks to that industrial groove–which fits, because the song is about the growing appeal of both isolation and self-destruction, both of which are often attractive to the genuinely depressed. “Gonna live with all my soul inside,” he repeats; elsewhere, “Keep thinking of suicide.” There’s no escape and I find that rather haunting.

* Jog takes a look at one of my favorite comics of the year, Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel.

* Leigh Walton makes the case for Rorschach’s tough-guy voice, The Watchmen, and other fan-lamented aspects of what we’ve seen from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen thus far. Bonus points for making the retrospectively obvious “Have a Cigar” connection.

* I’ve tended to think of Brian Michael Bendis’s New Avengers as follows: A strong, exciting opening arc full of solid action beats (Hydro-Man floods the basement, the Sentry tears Carnage in half) provides an interesting mix of A-listers and potentially interesting also-rans with a solid raison d’etre and mission statement, i.e. fate threw them together just like the original Avengers; now they must track down all the criminals broken out of a super-prison while finding out who’s responsible for the breakout and the subsequent massacre of slaves in the Savage Land. The book then gets sidetracked almost instantly by storyarcs devoted to explaining who the (it turns out) not terribly interesting after all also-rans are (the Sentry, Spider-Woman), messing with continuity in a pretty unsatisfactory way (House of M, the Xorn/Collective stuff, Illuminati), and the demands of outside titles and external crossovers (dropping Daredevil from the team before he could even join, splitting up the team for Civil War), all despite occasionally impressive character work (particularly with Luke Cage, who really has become a leading player in the Marvel Universe thanks to Bendis’s great work with him). Jon Hastings’s critique is a simpler yet somewhat more fundamental one: Bendis never learned how to write action scenes for large numbers of characters. True enough, whenever I think of a big Bendis team-book/event-comic action sequence, it’s a two page spread of people punching and stabbing and shooting in every direction, accompanied or followed by cutaway panels highlighting indistinct individual bits of action–just like Jon says. (Meanwhile in the comments Jon takes a swing at the basic reason for the team to exist, but I’m not ready to go that far.)

* Over at my favorite new TV show of the season, Bruce Baugh continues to explore what’s up with World of Warcraft. One thing that strikes me anew with each new post is just how many major factions are involved. My fantasy background is almost solely Tolkien, where for all intents and purposes it was a strictly bipolar world; intra-faction strife (Dwarves vs. Elves back in the Elder Days, Saruman vs. Sauron in the “present”) tended to be of limited scope and duration. I don’t recall other fantasy series I enjoyed (Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander) deviating from that model overmuch. (Ursula K. LeGuin kinda eschewed bad guys iirc.) By contrast, WoW is lousy with rivals on every side, and it seems like part of the fun of the game is that you really never know where the next big story-driving assault will come from, or whether the alignment of powers when the next big thing is resolved will in any way resemble the current alignment.

Here’s an admirably po-faced fan-made video for a song I really enjoy. Even as a little kid, when you might expect me to connect most solidly with the fantasy-tinged heroism depicted in this song, I grokked it for the quietly brutal anti-war song it is. The contrast between the gentle grandeur of the music, with its troubadour acoustic guitar and celestial vocal harmonies, and the fact that they’re ultimately talking about this “lucky man” getting shot to death on the battlefield struck me as bracingly honest about how glorious these sorts of endeavors really are. Obviously that’s a lesson Tolkien prepared me for in this context, but still.

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories Vol. 2

Ivan Brunetti, editor

Jessica Abel, Anonymous, Lynda Barry, Mark Beyer, Ariel Bordeaux, Chester Brown, Jeffrey Brown, Charles Burns, Martin Cendreda, C.F., Brian Chippendale, Daniel Clowes, David Collier, Robert Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Kim Deitch, Debbie Dreschler, Charles Forbell, Renée French, Drew Friedman, Phoebe Gloeckner, Leif Goldberg, Carrie Golus, Adam Gopnik, Bill Griffith, Milt Gross, John Hankiewicz, Fletcher Hanks, Sammy Harkham, David Heatley, Tim Hensley, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Bill Holman, Kevin Huizenga, Jess, Cole Johnson, J. Bradley Johnson, Ben Katchor, Kaz, Megan Kelso, Dave Kiersh, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Michael Kupperman, Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Matt, David Mazzuchelli, Winsor McKay, Richard McGuire, James McShane, Jerry Moriarty, Anders Nilsen, Diane Noomin, Elinore Norflus, Onsmith, Gary Panter, Paper Rad, Laura Park, Harvey Pekar, John Porcellino, Jayr Pulga, Archer Prewitt, Ron Regé Jr., Joe Sacco, Richard Sala, Souther Salazar, Frank Santoro, Kevin Scalzo, Seth, R. Sikoryak, Art Spiegfelman, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, Eugene Teal, Matthew Thurber, Adrian Tomine, H.J. Tuthill, Carol Tyler, Maurice Vellekoop, Chris Ware, Patrick W. Welch, Mack White, Karl Wirsum, Basil Wolverton, Jim Woodring, Dan Zettwoch, writers/artists

Yale University Press, November 2008

400 pages

$28

Buy it from Yale University Press

Buy it from Amazon.com

While not quite the world-beating effort that was its predecessor, this second Ivan Brunetti-edited anthology from Yale University Press still makes it difficult to imagine a more welcome addition to the bookshelf of a comics fan looking to expand her repertoire, or a non-comics fan looking to dive in head-first. If anything this installment casts an even wider net for contributions, roping in a greater number of cartoonists and even including such one-off, quasi- or literally anonymous outsiders as Elinore Norflus, Eugene Teal, and the author of Utility Sketchbook–the former pair being just two of a solid number of artists this particular comics buff had never even heard of. (At one point, after reading a sample strip from Charles Forbell’s old-time comic Naughty Pete for the first time ever, the obvious inspiration it afforded Chris Ware made me laugh out loud when I saw it was from Ware’s own collection.) In a way that offsets at least one complaint I’ve heard about the first volume, that its contents were too easy to duplicate in your own collection. But I think it also say something about the book’s mission–despite its impeccable “starter kit” credentials, it’s not necessarily intended to serve as a linear roadmap for your further comics purchasing and reading, because in comics there are plenty of dead ends worth exploring regardless.

If there’s a major problem with this volume, it’s not so much with the selections as with their arrangement. Volume 1 was ordered mostly by length, which led to an engrossing sense of flow yet also allowed Brunetti some leeway in terms of which strips he placed with which. Here, Brunetti reveals in his introduction, he’s just freestyling, which paradoxically gives a more rigid feel to some of the sections. My beef is primarily with the “slice of life” section, which begins on page 154 with James McShane’s “draw what you’re doing every ten minutes throughout the day” strip from Kramers Ergot 6 and continues for almost 100 pages before ending with Phoebe Gloeckner’s stone-classic “Minnie’s 3rd Love.” Those two strips alone indicate the range of artistic and narrative ambition and interest in this autobio-anthology-within-an-anthology, and much of the time the juxtaposition is not flattering to the navel-gazers. Perhaps it’s trite, but I can’t help but feel that the true-storytellers dealing with genuine trauma and tragedy here–Gloeckner, Anders Nilsen, Debbie Dreschler, Joe Sacco–have a major leg up on the “here’s how my day went one day” folks, a passion that somehow gets reflected in superior visuals, be they the impeccable draftsmanship of Gloeckner and Sacco, the four-color expressionism of Dreschler, or the things-fall-apart experiments of Nilsen. (Not all the people dealing with really rough stuff come out winners, however: Maybe I’m just fed up with anti-science from Left, Right, and Unclassifiable, but Chester Brown’s anti-psychiatry tract “My Mother Was a Schizophrenic” always strikes me as a sad indulgence along the lines of Neal Adams’s hollow-earth theory, Dave Sim’s Marxist/Feminist/Homosexualist axis, and Steve Ditko’s A=A screeds.) This is not to say that all of the more quotidian strips in this section fail. I think Dave Kiersh’s paean to suburban Long Island, Jeffrey Brown’s account of losing his virginity, and John Porcellino’s tribute to his late dog are all sweet, memorably drawn, and actually moving, for example, while the vicious lampooning of her own mother in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s strip almost must be seen to be believed. It’s just that…well, the Joe Matt material sucked the life out of me, I suppose, and a lot of the stuff that surrounded it didn’t help.

But most of the sections are quite strong. A series of newspaper strips into Harvey Kurtzman strips into Art Spiegelman’s tribute to Kurtzman into Spiegelman’s pastiches of old newspaper strips into Jess’s example of same two decades earlier ends up being fairly revelatory for each of its constituent parts. There’s a beautiful, art-driven sequence of blocky, washy markmakers including David Mazzuchelli, Jerry Moriarty, Ben Katchor, and Frank Santoro’s Storeyville. A sequence of R. Crumb/Harvey Pekar strips about blues and jazz records and record collecting ends up feeling like a complex and at times uncomfortable suite about race, sex, class, art, and modernity. And the sequence of strips that ends the book–Seth, Adrian Tomine, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, David Heatley–ends the book on a high note. And a funny one. I wonder if the recent kerfuffle over Heatley’s comics too completely overlooked the fact that his neurotic cataloguing of awkward events is almost always geared toward very funny punchlines? And I suppose it had been a while since I read Ice Haven, but man, that is some hot shit. In just the “Mr. & Mrs. Ames: Detectives for Hire” strip alone, the savage misanthropy (“It’s just another shithole, filled with worthless pigs”) had me losing my balance on my chair from laughing so hard, only to be completely and devastatingly upended by the desperate and true expression of love (“I said, ‘This world would be absolutely unbearable without you.'”) I closed the book feeling thrilled to have read it. Somebody told me that Brunetti doesn’t plan on doing any more volumes in this series. I’ll confess to being pretty upset about that. I almost want to break into his house and hang out in front of his bookshelves until he walks me through a third.

(via)

Robert Burden in action.

* My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity is but one of a horde of nerdy critics whose positive reviews for the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace I’ve spotted today. This is noteworthy because buzz for the film up until a couple of days ago had been pretty lukewarm. Now I’m excited for it all over again.

* Related: I’ve Netflixed all the Bourne movies, to which Quantum is said to be rather deeply indebted, and may get to watch some or even all of them before I finally hit the theaters for 007. I’ll keep you posted. (Aren’t you excited?)

* Also related: Quantum director Marc Forster has signed on to direct the adaptation of Max Brooks’s excellent zombie mock-oral-history World War Z, with a screenplay by not-excellent comics and Changeling writer J. Michael Straczynski. (I dunno, Supreme Power was good, so fingers crossed I guess. ) So now I’m invested in the success of Quantum even more deeply. (Via AICN.)

* Look, a new, short trailer for The Spirit! Looks fine. (Via Rick Marshall.)

* Haha, the star of Twilight calls the books out for their egregious Mary Sueishness. This to me is a far more acceptable framework for taking potshots at the series and its imminent film incarnation than the horror-site bog-standard “eww girls.”

* One thing I did not expect to find today was an in-depth examination of the Hellraiser series by comics blogger Tim O’Neil. Part one is an encomium to the Hellraiser concept, part two contains reviews of every theatrically released installment, and part three deals with the “apocrypha”–aka straight-to-video sequels. Sample quote:

Considering that this film was made for a reported $1 million dollars, it’s easily one of the best-looking “low budget” horror films ever made. Considering the Faustian bargain that Barker reportedly made in order to have the film made his way – signing over future franchise rights to New Line and agreeing to a paltry budget in exchange for the chance to direct his own book – the fact that it looks as good as it does is something of a minor miracle. Especially if you consider the fact that Barker was himself a novice filmmaker, with just two experimental shorts under his belt as a director. It’s a shame, in a way, that he’s not temperamentally suited to working in the film industry, because if he had chosen to focus his energies he probably could have been a director for the ages. As it is, he’s probably a better writer, but still, the prose world’s gain is film’s loss. (And the first person to mention Lord of Illusions in the comments gets bopped on the head.)

It’s true. There are images and sequences in Hellraiser that are stunning given the inexperience of its director, and frankly I think Nightbreed, despite the evident studio interference, is a pretty remarkable film at times too.

* Kramers Ergot 7 tourdates! One of the drawbacks of the emergence of Brooklyn as a hipster mecca is that now many comics events I might go to were they held in Manhattan end up in the borough of Kings, a paradoxically closer yet less accessible location relative to where I’m usually at.

* I realized while reading Bruce Baugh’s latest, picture-filled look at what’s going on in World of Warcraft right now that these posts are filling the role of “the new TV series I’m following this season” for me. Best of all? No commercials! WARNING: ADORABLE WALRUS GUY AHEAD

* When I step back and take a look at my tastes–in comics, in music, in film, and in literature–the former two appear to be much broader than the latter two. Provided a first-glance look at the art doesn’t make me want to close the book and not look again, I’ll read virtually any comic, I’m rather voracious about it, I enjoy the experience of reading a lot by a lot of people, etc. With music I’m almost obnoxiously eclectic, and while I’m not necessarily a first-adopter when it comes to new artists (particularly compared with dedicated music bloggers) I do indeed enjoy an enormously wide range. In neither case is this an “eat your vegetables” deal–I truly like a lot of different stuff.

But when you look at my film-viewing habits over the past year or two or perhaps even longer, I’m basically only ever watching and talking about genre films from major studios. That’s due in part to the parameters of this blog during its all-horror incarnation, and to the fact that I really do love horror and a lot of other genre entertainments, and to the fact that tracking down genuine independent and art-house fair involves an expenditure of time and money, but I don’t feel the movie-review sidebar of my blog is actually representative of what I’m interested in overall. I’m a little more expansive in what I’ve been reading prose-wise, but only a little. Again, this is striking me as odd. There’s probably no reason why my movie-watching and book-reading habits shouldn’t be as wide-ranging and reliant on independent outlets as are my music-listening and comics-reading habits.

* In a few weeks I will have spent a year reviewing three comics a week every week without fail. I’m proud of this achievement and I’ve gotten a lot out of it. I still have a bunch of Comics Journal backlog to post and a pile of review copies I really want to get to, so it may stretch into the New Year as well. But one thing that’s really fallen by the wayside, particularly as the year has gone on, is my prose reading. (Actually that’s probably a good reason why the books I’ve read haven’t been all over the map–I haven’t read enough one way or the other.) I think it would be a lot of fun to be reading prose at the rate I’ve been reading comics lately, or at least close to it. I sometimes sit around and think of how much fun it’ll be to finally read The Master and Margarita, or the two or three Chuck Palahniuk books I haven’t gotten to yet, or Moby-Dick, or maybe taking a crack at those George R.R. Martin fantasy novels HBO is going to adapt, or diving into Robert E. Howard because I feel like my pulp pump has been duly primed, or Nixonland, or the Stephen King short story collections that aren’t Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, or Four Past Midnight, or or or or or. Nearly all of my dedicated reading time is taken up by comics, though. Maybe I’ll change that in the New Year, despite how much I’ve dug my thrice weekly Comics Time.

* Oddly, I don’t feel like my writing time has been impacted nearly as much, even though I’ve spent more time on the blog than ever before. I think that’s because my writing habits have always been weird and dependent on long periods of simmering and stewing and mulling culminating in several-hour bursts of creativity, rinse, repeat. That’s an easy schedule to fit into existing frameworks. Meanwhile, having Murder come out scratched a big part of that itch to Be A Comics Writer, obviously. And I have two separate “graphic novels” (in this case meaning “book-length collections of interrelated short stories) largely in the hands of their artists right now, plus a separate short story or two, so I don’t feel like I’ve been slacking.

* One thing you will not see me do, no matter how much I blog enthusiastically about it, is start playing World of Warcraft or any other video game, because that would so clearly be a disaster for me it’s almost comical. There goes the little time I’m not spending at my day job, doing freelance work, doing personal writing and reading, or doing blog writing and reading–poof, gone. No can do!

Hellboy: Darkness Calls

Mike Mignola, writer

Duncan Fegredo, Mike Mignola, artists

Dark Horse, 2008

200 pages

$19.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

I think B.P.R.D. is better than Hellboy at this point, whether or not Mike Mignola himself is drawing either one. With John Arcudi as co-writer and Guy Davis on art, B.P.R.D. has that mix of action, horror, sly black humor, and quietly but genuinely unnerving fatalism that has long characterized Hellboy at its best, with art that is totally different than Mignola’s yet in many ways equally accomplished and evocative. But now it’s more grounded in things you can grasp and understand than Mignola’s increasingly unfettered “main” series–there are still recognizable human concerns, likable characters, and dramatic stakes at play, rather than Hellboy punching his way through esoteric world mythologies inhabited by an increasingly prodigious cast of hard-to-discern faerie-demon-god-witch-ghost things. I also think that of all Mignola’s recent artistic collaborators, Duncan Fegredo is doing my least favorite work; that’s a pretty faint damnation since it’s still pretty good, but there’s something about the way he apes Mignola but throws in more lines and details that just doesn’t satisfy the way the work of Mignola himself or the not-at-all-imitative work of Guy Davis does.

All that being said, you know what? I reread this graphic novel the other night and had a grand time with it. In large part, I think that’s because reading it all between the same set of covers in one sitting enabled me to finally figure out what the hell is going on! Basically, Hellboy’s living in the estate of a very old friend of his mentor’s. He goes out for a stroll and happens across a trio of weirdos who turn out to be the anthropomorphized familiars of medieval witches slain by a witchfinder-general type. They resurrect their old mistresses, but the witchfinder guy still haunts the area and attacks. The familiars split. Witchfinder-zombie kills two of the witch-zombies, but the third snags Hellboy and brings him to a big meeting of all of England’s witches. They’re seeking a new ruler, since the witch-queen Hecate was previously vanquished by Hellboy and was since unsuccessfully resurrected by a half-man half-devil named Igor Bromhead who tried and failed to take her powers for his own. They ask Hellboy to be their king, and he says no. A servant of HB’s old enemy, the Russian mythological baddie Baba Yaga, offers to take HB off their hands by way of vengeance for his spurning their offer, so that Baba Yaga–another HB vanquishee–can get her own revenge on him. They say yeah sure, so HB finds himself in the dreamworld-Russia of Baba Yaga, who sics an army of skeletons and an immortal warrior named Koschei the Deathless on him. She promises to let Koschei die if he kills Hellboy–she has possession of his soul–but I guess it turns out that Hellboy can’t be killed in this dimension either. (Or maybe not at all?) While Baba Yaga does manage to kill Perun, the pagan Russian god of the earth, her and Koschei keep coming up empty against Hellboy himself. With the help of a spirit of the forest, a little house-elf type guy, and a creepy little girl who once used a gift from Baba Yaga to kill her abusive step-family, Hellboy keeps schooling Koschei, who keeps getting revived by Baba Yaga, but each time she does so she throws more and more of her own power into him. Finally she runs out of juice (even tossing old Rasputin’s soul into the mix), but in one last-ditch effort she gets Koschei to lob a knife into Hellboy’s back. This still doesn’t work, but it makes HB drop a magic piece of paper the creepy girl gave him, which turns into an ocean and allows him to swim back to the real world. There he dispatches that witchfinder-zombie from earlier on. That guy’s sword is inscribed with the name of Igor Bromhead, the half-man reptile dude who we saw swing and miss in his attempt to take Hecate’s powers as his own. Turns out he’s been slithering around Italy eating sheep and things ever since. Hellboy kills him but not before he can get out a prophecy about HB leading Hell’s army, which after all is HB’s whole reason for being around. This ties into something one of Baba Yaga’s undead Russian comrades told her earlier–that Hellboy wasn’t “ready” to give her an eye in exchange for the one he poked out of her years ago, but the implication being he might one day. Meanwhile, as all this is going on with Hellboy, a little pig-guy named Gruagach has pitched the witches on resurrecting a mysterious “HER” to use as their new queen now that Hecate is out of commission and Hellboy is a non-starter. He and some minions find this big giant who’s in charge of keeping this mystery lady’s pieces in a box in a deep dungeon and explain that the witches want the box. The giant gives it to him but then crawls into the dungeon himself since he wants no part of the bad stuff that will go down once whatsername gets loose. On their way back to the witches Gruagach and his pals come across Dagda, who I think is king of the faeries or something and who doesn’t want them to open the box. One of the minions kills him and then feels terrible about it and kills himself. Gruagach proclaims to assembled faeriedom that whoever’s inside the box will now be their queen as well. Then there’s a pair of epilogues: In the first, the BPRD gets their first letter from Hellboy in six years, just a quick note telling them where he’s hanging out now. They realize that the old friend he’s been staying with has been dead for 24 years or so. Uh oh! In the second epilogue, an old witch-hunter-type guy we’ve seen mentioned here and there named Edward Grey does a seance with Hecate to ask her life story, and she explains that she once upon a time helped ruin the proto-kingdom of Hyperborea by delivering unto them promethean knowledge of the workings of the universe that she stole from the fallen angels its ruler had penned up. (It’s kind of a Sauron/Numenor deal.) She makes it sound like it’s going to be Grey’s mission to stop Hellboy from unleashing the apocalypse (her included), which she says Hellboy will not survive regardless. The end!

Okay, I got a few things out of writing down that summary. First, now I think I finally understand what happened. Second, it becomes obvious that this story is waaaaay too convoluted, even for Hellboy. There’s upward of a dozen factions at work, each trying to do something that’s a little ambiguous and mysterious to begin with. Put it all together and it’s borderline incomprehensible–you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and unless you sit and bang one out like I just did, none is forthcoming. Third, the art really doesn’t help. Fegredo’s spin on Mignola is already a little too manic and cluttered–he admits in the sketchbook section reprinted in the back that he’s not really adept at spotting blacks, certainly not on the level Mignola is–and a lot of it hits your eyes and brain as a wall of noise. Meanwhile, a lot of the different characters are pretty hard to tell apart–I thought the pig guy was part of the cat/frog/bird crew, i thought piggy’s minions were Baba Yaga’s minions, I thought the faeries were the witches, and on and on and on. Add these problems to the already murky plot, and whoo doggie.

But I mentioned the fatalism of the Hellboy books earlier, and I think that’s what comes through the strongest here for me. The Hellboy-proper comics have flirted with incomprehensibility for quite some time, so that’s really no surprise; what is sort of surprising to me, given how ongoing genre titles usually work, is that Hellboy and the BPRD seem to be headed for an unhappy ending. When you think about it, ever since Hellboy left the BPRD and struck out on his own, the status quo for both halves of the equation has actually gotten worse with the close of each new adventure. This story all but says that Hellboy, our cute sardonic two-fisted hero, will indeed become the Beast of the Apocalypse he was born to be. That’s what I take away from Darkness Calls–that underneath the sea of crazy that flows from humanity’s collective unconscious, underneath the haze of mythology and Lovecraft that Mignola is increasingly untethered in, something terrible is happening. That’s a fine, black beating heart for powering a mythos.

(courtesy of Gardner Linn)

Hi-def version here.

Eh, a lot of slow motion and superhero/trailer cliches, and they call the “team” “The Watchmen” which is like if someone sat around thinking up the best example of a dumb thing Hollywood would do. As the trailer began to load I suddenly realized I’m pretty bored with this movie already. My friends Rickey and Sam point out, however, that this could be a pretty exciting trailer for people who haven’t read the book, haven’t seen the first trailer (although thanks to The Dark Knight that doesn’t describe too many people), haven’t seen the San Diego footage, haven’t seen the Scream Awards teaser, haven’t seen the promo posters, and on and on and on…

* My pal Rachel Molino takes a look at Rafael Grampa’s Mesmo Delivery for Wizard.

* Dig AdHouse honcho Chris Pitzer’s eBay auctions, man. Lotsa good, often OOP stuff for cheap.

* Kevin Eastman says that David Fincher, Zack Snyder, and Gore Verbinski will be directing segments in the new Heavy Metal movie, and I totally believe every word he’s saying, don’t you? (Via Splash Page.)

* Bruce Baugh explains why he thinks World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King events are working so well: It’s optional, it’s containable, it’s graspable, and it makes it worth your while.

* Speaking of which, I know I’m spending an awful lot of blog time on something I don’t participate in in any way, but I could not help but dig the hell out of the cinematic intro to the Lich King expansion pack:

One thing Bruce has discussed in his “WoW for N00BS” posts is that the game has a zesty sense of scale, embiggening stuff to make it more awesome. Good! One of the advantages of doing something as unrepentantly nerdy as designing World of Warcraft is that you don’t need to be ad hoc apologists for your material, making sure it’s as realistic as a historical epic or as rooted in readily graspable allegory as possible. If you want to show a giant Sauron guy in skull armor and furry boots break free of a throne encased in a glacier and unleash a gigantic zombie dragon thing in order to psyche up your undead army over music that launches every salvo in the generic-fantasy-score arsenal and narration that’s one vowel away from namechecking the Forest of Lornadoon like it’s straight outta Bored of the Rings, you can knock yourself completely out with it. You can commit.

* In the comment thread downblog, Bruce, Tom Spurgeon, and Strange Ink’s Sean B. offer their opinions on the pros and cons of the soon-to-be-seen-on-not-TV-but-HBO fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Bruce and Sean are mostly pro, Tom mostly con.

* ReFlogging part one: Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit!

* ReFlogging part two: deeply delightful Hulk sequence!

To the extent that things like World War Hulk work, it’s because that angry, savage Hulk can be seen as a reaction against the world failing to work like it does for him in stories like this. The Hulk is both the world as it is and the world as it should be. Batman is the same way, I think, only in his angry version he’s trying to beat the world back into making a sense it fails to make in his non-angry version rather than lashing out against the world when its pre-fallen splendor is interrupted for him. In other words, Batman’s innocence aspect is without hope, while the Hulk’s experience aspect is without hope, if that makes sense.

* Why would you mess with Manuel? (Via Whitney Matheson.)

Let’s watch as all-time A-#1 Sean T. Collins style icon Gary Numan shows us how it’s done:

Jesus jumped-up Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar, that is essentially the coolest thing that ever happened in human history. Daft Punk and Beck need to be sending regular royalty checks.

That footage is from 1979, I believe. A couple of years later, having decided that his set’s Metropolis light towers were insufficiently gigantic and extravagant and his own personal mien was insufficiently supervillainous, Gary decided to revamp his performance of this song as follows:

The sort of complete commitment, totality of vision, and lack of fear or self-deprecating irony required to perform a song about androids whilst seated in a mobile throne you’re piloting around the stage is impressive beyond words to me. Great tune, too.

This is our bedroom. I’m told it’s rather Twin Peaks-y, and I can see it in this picture, sure.