Bruce Baugh drew my attention to this delightful Watchmen remix by Chip Zdarsky in which the end of the book is refashioned into a parody of the Spider-Man comic “One More Day” and the reaction to it. This inspired two thoughts:

1) Watchmen is a really good comic.

2) I’m really curious as to what the critical reception of the movie version will be. On the one hand it’s got the right politics and is sort of the apotheosis of the current pop-culture trend in favor of comics (“the Godfather of comic book movies” will be a hard pullquote to resist delivering; I predict Peter Travers will be the one to pull the trigger), but on the other there’s the Ron Rosenbaum-y “graphic novel” backlash and the fact that thanks to 300, critics feel obligated to hate Zack Snyder HARD. For example, in terms of the story’s politics, I’m guessing that contra 300 they will be correctly attributed to the source material’s creators and temporal context rather than incorrectly attributed to the movie’s, because to do otherwise would be a point in the movie’s favor, and we can’t have that. We shall see.

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks which horror-movie character we’d most want to be like, and which ones we think we’re actually the closest to.

In light of the release of the first trailer for George A. Romero’s contribution to the docu-horror genre, Diary of the Dead…

…Matt Maxwell’s post on his childhood experience of the proto-docuhorror flick The Legend of Boggy Creek will provide you with useful context.

(Trailer via Dread Central.)

Incredible Change-Bots

Top Shelf Productions, August 2007

Jeffrey Brown, writer/artist

144 pages

$15

Buy it from Top Shelf

Buy it from Amazon.com

The best gags in Jeffrey Brown’s loving, lushly colored Transformers parody feel like they didn’t necessarily have to be part of Jeffrey Brown’s loving, lushly colored Transformers parody. A Change-Bot describing, mid-fight and in overly verbose detail, the rigors he went through so as to enjoy pounding the shit out of his enemy…a leopard batting around an origami Change-Bot, then “trot trot trot”ting away with the crumpled bird-bot in its mouth…the evil leader blowing away his underling for the crime of having “perfect aim” that’s “not perfect enough”…all of these jokes play off the same sources of humor–inflated self-worth either rampaging unabated or getting pathetically deflated, imaginations shaped by exposure to genre fiction–present in many of Brown’s gag panels and short, funny stand-alone strips.

The story that links them all together is definitely best appreciated by Transformers fans, and I’d imagine Brown didn’t hope for anything more. That two factions of giant robots waging vindictive war against one another for eons might unwittingly cause massive destruction to themselves and their allies in the process is an idea that even kids could dimly make out beneath the surface of the concept, and Brown brings it to the fore entertainingly, maybe all the more so for its gentleness (Dan Clowes’s “On Sports” this isn’t). He also makes some hay out of the narrative loose ends endemic to these kinds of stories: robots yelling “I can explain!” and never doing so, doomsday buttons that may or may not have been pressed. If anything, I wish he’d laid into some of the Transformer mythos’ weirder elements–those five-headed floating robot tribunal guys, the giant planet-sized robot, the death and rebirth of the two leaders, and so on–but I suppose that would draw it away from the central “two equally stupid and destructive forces are arbitrarily slapped with ‘good’ and ‘evil’ tags and the audience is expected not to notice” thesis.

Ultimately Change-Bots is dumb fun, with the emphasis on both words: Practically every character is an idiot, which limits the book’s depth. But when combined with Brown’s solid character design, blockily effective action choreography, and vivid magic-marker palette, it’s certainly a pip to breeze through, even if I don’t see myself returning to it as often as I do to Brown’s autobiographies, or even most of his other, less franchise-specific humor and parody comics.

Here’s a fascinating little post from Siskoid on two of my favorite current superhero comics, Green Lantern and Immortal Iron Fist, and how their writers have created independent “bubble worlds” of their own within the larger shared universes they inhabit. This is certainly part of what has made them so appealing over the past year or so, and one of the reasons why I tend to mention them in the same breath. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

And here’s a post I don’t like at all from Reverse Shot on two of my favorite movies of the past year, 300 and 28 Weeks Later, tagging them as among the year’s worst films in an almost willfully ad hominem- and inaccuracy-laden fashion. Bonus points for the now de rigeur slogging of 300 director Zack Snyder’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, which they sneeringly attack for its proficiency with action in much the same way that previous gatekeepers of good taste sneeringly attacked horror films like the original Dawn for their proficiency with being scary and gross.

* Holy Motime–Dave Fiore, scholarly scourge of the primordial comics blogosphere, is back! Here he is arguing that “the liberation of the secret self” which I spy in the costumes and superpowers of superhero comics isn’t always so liberating. References to the bildungsroman abound, as they are wont to do when Dave’s on the scene.

* Speaking of triumphant returns to the fold, Johnny Bacardi is totally back too.

* Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder pays loving tribute to her VHS horror-movie collection. Normally I’m averse to these kinds of nostalgic attachments to outmoded media, but the thing that’s so endearing about a VHS fetish is that it’s impossible to make the usual pretentious arguments that they sound or look better than that cold newfangled digital stuff–they look and sound awful! It’s pure attachment to the objects and the experiences that surrounded them, which is adorable.

* Rich Juzwiak of FourFour hated The Orphanage. Paging Jason Adams!

* Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot has written a very good review of There Will Be Blood that begins with a description of the film’s final shot so you should by no means read it unless you’ve seen the movie, but if you’ve seen the movie you should read it.

* Famed horror artist Steve Bissette is a big-time Peaks Freak, and in this epic post he outlines the entire release history of Twin Peaks on home video/DVD/laserdisc, explaining just why the Definitive Gold Box Edition is the bee’s knees. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Finally, Glenn Kenny asks: Antonioni or Thunderbirds?

Multiple Warheads #1

Oni Press, July 2007

Brandon Graham, writer/artist

48 pages

$5.99

Buy it from Oni

(I hope you’ll pardon me for getting meta for a moment. Normally I think talking about trends when discussing a comic like this is just a substitute for actually discussing the comic, but in this case the meta takes us in a direction my mind’s been wandering in a lot lately anyway.)

I don’t know if it’s fair to credit Scott Pilgrim as throwing wide the doors for projects like these, or if it’s simply the highest-profile such project to pass through said doors regardless of who might have opened them. But at any rate, Multiple Warheads is one of those books like SP that makes you say “hey, this is an exciting time to read comics.” Like a growing number of projects–many from Oni–it’s the product of a North American artist who’s interested in action-based genre storytelling yet has no particular debt to superhero comics, a creature that until recently didn’t exist. In this case the artist is Brandon Graham, and he’s bringing to bear obvious interests in manga, European sci-fi comics, barbarian stories, and porn to create a fast, loose story of a waaaaay post-apocalyptic future where a va-va-voom young lady named Sexica smuggles super-powered organs around a walled-off city inhabited by aliens and werewolves and normal people too. It’s a pretty slight thing. Maybe that’s because the most obvious points of comparison–Scott Pilgrim, East Coast Rising, The Pirates of Coney Island–are all telling book-length stories while Graham’s going done-in-one (and at kind of a hefty price point). Or maybe it’s because the thin line, skewed proportions (everything seems both a bit narrow and a bit bowed), and acres of blank space in the word balloons give the art a tossed-off barely-there feel. Or maybe it’s because the story isn’t really a story per se, it’s more of a “day in the life” kind of thing that simply begins when it begins and ends where it ends, arc schmarc. But the end result of all that slightness is not unpleasant in the, well, slightest. It’s a breezy vibe for a breezy character. Indeed, breeziness is very serious for Sexica, almost a raison d’etre. She wants to go someplace nice, untouched by war, and she’s tried to get there, it seems, through means both intimate (sewing a smuggled wolf dick onto her boyfriend for some extra spark in the sack) and direct (taking advantage of a spaceship crash to get the hell out of Dodge). It’s a laid-back book, almost a stoned book, which makes sense given that Vaughn Bode is evident in Sexica’s every lovingly delineated curve. I enjoyed it, and I’m hoping that future issues will provide some muscular mind-expansion–something along the lines of the beautiful panel that communicates Sexica’s post-coital bliss at being surrounded by the comforts of home with a bed’s-eye-view of the bulbous light fixture on the ceiling above her–to deepen and enrich the pleasures of this installment’s lovely but fleeting buzz.

I watched There Will Be Blood last night, and it was excellent. That final scene really blasts it into the ionosphere, like Raging Bull. Which is appropriate, because between this and Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Daniel Day-Lewis has somehow become the living incarnation of Robert DeNiro’s squandered talent. I think No Country for Old Men is a better film all things considered, but that’s really neither here nor there. (If I had to guess the subconscious trigger for critics picking this one over the Coens’ effort, it would be Jonny Greenwood’s landmark score, which to use the cliché is like the film’s fifth main character.) If Paul Thomas Anderson ever gives this kind of treatment to a character who’s less sympathetic, he may have the scariest movie ever made in him someplace, and I’m not just saying that because the most memorable shot in this movie is highly reminiscent of the most memorable shot in The Exorcist.

Anyway, the title of this post is a tribute to Jason Adams’ amazing insight into a certain scene in the film. Click here and scroll to the bottom to be flabbergasted.

* I’ve been a busy little bee lately: On Friday I reviewed C.F.’s Powr Mastrs Vol. 1 and yesterday I reviewed Josh Simmons’s Batman and in between I talked about Scott Smith’s The Ruins with Jim Treacher. I also spoke with Tom Spurgeon about the year in superhero comics. Finally, at this week’s Horror Roundtable, I reveal the horror projects I’m most excited about in 2008. (That list got longer with every single other response!)

* Dirk Deppey has created a colossal (seriously, it’s big, like the size of one of those Pitchfork Top 100 things) tribute to the 52 best comics of 2007. It’s heavy on manga, particularly scanlations.

* It’s official: The New York Times reports that violent movies reduce violent crime rates by keeping potentially violent people off the street and in the movie theater. (Via Jackie Danicki.)

* The article also contains a great plug for Kids in Mind, the excellent, non-judgmental website that catalogs violence, profanity, sexuality, and bathroom humor in films (ostensibly for parents to know what not to show their kids, though the Missus and I use it for its reliable indications of whether or not a given movie has vomiting in it).

* My kind of civil disobedience: South African teenagers make out in public in defiance of their country’s new “no PDA” law.

* I’ve really been digging the bite-size “Screening Log” movie write-ups at Not Coming to a Theater Near You lately. Here’s David Carter on the analog world-building of Flash Gordon, Rumsey Taylor on a payoff in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Carter on the lack of Coen-isms in No Country for Old Men, Taylor on humorlessness in For Your Consideration, and two one-sentence reactions from Taylor to Eraserhead and RoboCop 3.

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRWM reviews Dan Simmons’s arctic horror novel The Terror, about which I know roughly as much as I did about The Ruins prior to reading that because I didn’t read the review. (Okay, I know a little more–the setting and time period.) I’m getting a similar vibe, though, so it seems like this will be the next book I take out of the library.

* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants wishes Jeremy Renner, a fine, fine actor and star of two of my favorite horror films ever, Dahmer and 28 Weeks Later, a happy 37th birthday.

* Jason’s also got his own massive, wide-ranging Best Of 2007 movie post, including invididual awards, his top 5 horror films, and his top 20 movies overall. He sees a lot of movies.

* Spinning off a New York Times piece, Clive Thompson examines the government’s crusade to be able to confiscate and examine your laptop at border crossings (I’ve also heard about this going down at airports) and potential technological workarounds for the intrusion.

* My friend and sometimes collaborator Matt Wiegle is holding in his hands his comic-book rendition of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for Barnes & Noble’s No Fear Shakespeare graphic novel line.

* Artist Robert Burden has posted pictures of a new pair of epic paintings of action figures, including my beloved Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line. (For scale, note the four framed Krang figures attached to the painting.)

* It took Southern classmates in college to turn me on to the genius of “y’all” as the English language’s second-person plural. Could “yo” be an equivalent innovation for the gender-neutral third-person singluar? (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* The Blot artist Tom Neely has released the soundtrack to his gallery show Self-Indulgent Werewolf. It looks pretty badass:

* Speaking of looking badass, dig this lovely series of mostly horror-based Che-style paintings by Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder.

* David Lynch has no love for watching movies on cellphones. There will always be something funny about watching Agent Gordon Cole curse. (Via Rue Morgue.)

The fact that it’s hilarious aside, this video actually raises similar issues to the recent snobby reactions against Amazon’s Kindle and other electronic book readers. But whereas those reactions are transparently dopey–print is print, and having a fancy-looking book is nice but it’s also its own separate experience from enjoying the writing, as anyone who’s read a beat-up dog-eared coverless copy of a much-loved book can tell you–Lynch’s makes sense because most films are meant to be seen on a much bigger screen.

* Ladies and gentlemen, “doppelganger by cake.” (Via Bryan Alexander.)

* Finally, I know that putting the characters of a great drama’s final season in a Last Supper pose has been done before, and I don’t care. This shot of the Battlestar Galactica cast from Entertainment Weekly is awesome. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

If you are interested in hearing my thoughts about how 2007 treated the Big Two superhero companies, as well as getting some general info about what makes me tick as a comics reader, Tom Spurgeon has posted a lengthy interview with me at the Comics Reporter that’ll fill you in.

Batman

self-published

Josh Simmons, writer/artist

16 pages

Read it for free at joshuahallsimmons.com

This haunting, completely unauthorized take on Batman begins with what may be the best first panel of a comic I’ve seen in the past year: A crazed jumble of a cityscape whose non-Euclidean geometry resembles something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari threatens to overwhelm the panel borders and spill out all over the reader, while a caption box identifies it, simply and confrontationally, as “Gotham City.” That sets the tone for what follows–a disturbing, uncomfortable response to the Batman concept. What really knocks me out is just how many different levels it works on. It could be a horror comic in about a human monster in the Henry/Buffalo Bill/Leatherface vein. It could be a blackly humorous, satirical pisstake on the Caped Crusader. It could be a vicious assault against the reactionary politics of the superhero. It could be an angry riposte to the ever-grittier direction superhero comics are headed in. It could be an exercise in drawing action and environments. Most amazingly, it could be a great Batman comic, period–Batman’s rooftop and skyscraper milieu is depicted with genuine awe, the physical particulars of his methods are choreographed impeccably (as good as any comic this side of Paul Pope’s Batman Year 100), and the story is totally convincing as an examination of what might happen if Batman, worn down by the weight of years of horror and toil–“I’ve been Batman for a long time,” he repeats–finally snapped. As in his horror graphic novel House, Simmons’ art excels in conveying the way the sheer size of environments both natural and manmade can be frightening, and as his inks shift back and forth from woodcut chunkiness to manic clarity, the effect is practically palpable. The pacing is ruminative but never plodding, lingering just a bit too long, making you feel like something is off but never tipping its hand till the story demands it. Clever bits of business involving Catwoman’s acrobatics and the passing of a nearby plane add pizzaz to an extremely dark affair. Even Simmons’ figures, never his strong suit, have the mitigating factor of masks and costumes working in their favor. And on a meta level, it’s just exciting to watch an artist steal a major corporate icon because he’s got something to say and needs him to say it. This is a hard comic to shake, so thank goodness I have no intentions of trying to do so.

At the unsolicited but welcome suggestion of my old pal Jim Treacher, I recently read The Ruins, the latest novel by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan. Literally all that I knew when opened the book and started the first page was that a) it was some kind of thriller; b) it was very, very good. Since I believe this is the ideal way to read any book, I recommend that those of you who haven’t read The Ruins go into it the exact same way–you’ll have a blast–and warn you that SPOILERS FOLLOW. However, we don’t give away the ending, so if you’re okay with knowing what the high concept is and getting some of the important details blown for you, I suppose you’re free to ignore my warning, although (as the events of the book demonstrate) that’s frequently a bad idea. I mostly recommend that if you’re at all interested in the kinds of things this blog frequently discusses, you skip this post and go and read this book at once.

Anyway, here is the email exchange between me and Jim.

There are 266 titles on the list so far.

—Dick Hyacinth on the database he’s compiling of comics people have put on their Best Of 2007 lists. That’s almost 300 different comics, and while surely some of them are bad and were listed by people with not-so-good taste, I think that’s indicative of both the scope of the industry and the number of high-quality releases out there right now.

* Tom Spurgeon’s Comics Reporter site is back, thank God. I really enjoyed his interviews with two of my favorite people in alternative comics, Fantagraphics editor/publicist Eric Reynolds (worth reading for the beans he spills about Fanta’s upcoming releases–Rory Hayes!) and AdHouse publisher Chris Pitzer (worth reading for Pitzer’s overview of his company’s mission as a publisher).

* Bloody Disgusting reports that Doomsday, the post-apocalyptic thriller from The Descent director Neil Marshall, is now slated for a March 14th release.

* Lost star Matthew Fox lets slip some mild spoilers in a lengthy interview with Entertainment Weekly’s Dan Snierson (what, was Jeff Jensen busy?). So be warned, he does state some facts (both structural and specific) about the the show’s previous and upcoming seasons that are not readily apparent from what we’ve seen so far. But if you can stomach that, he also has some fairly candid and interesting things to say about what has worked and not worked on the show.

* Dick Hyacinth’s lengthy, catholic Best Comics of 2007 list is one of my favorites of its kind so far.

* Echoing Ted Rall’s complaint about the perceived New York Times/Best American Angsty Artcomix Axis, NeilAlien argues that such institutions lean so heavily enough to a certain flavor of comics to create the impression that “all artcomix are precious white suburban objets d’angst,” likening the phenomenon to the deleterious impact of the superherocentricity of the Direct Market. I’ve seen many a “new mainstream” adherent draw this parallel, which is bogus because a) a couple of editors at a couple of outlets don’t have nearly the level of control over access to comics that the spandex-fixated majority of DM retailers do, and b) the real complaint about the domination of one particular genre is not simply that the genre is dominant, but that many examples of that genre are lousy and and don’t deserve the dominance. Unless you’re an inveterate contrarian, this is not something you’d say about the work of creators like Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, and Jaime Hernandez (whose Maggie strip from the NYT doesn’t even fit into the lamely stereotyped mold the anti-angst crew is trying to push on it anyway).

* Finally, from the Ozymandias files, via Bryan Alexander: A joint US/Norwegian research team has stumbled across a bust of Lenin abandoned by Soviet scientists at the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility, the most remote point on the frozen continent, some 50 years ago. Look on my works, ye capitalists, and despair.

Speak of the devil: Ann Thompson of Variety pens an interesting article on the new wave of first-person docu-horror, focusing on Cloverfield and the indie haunted-house film Paranormal Activity and emphasizing both the format and the “less is more” approach to the scares. The Blair Witch Project looms over it all. (Via Dread Central, which calls the films “voyeur horror,” an intriguing label. The next “torture porn”?)

Powr Mastrs Vol. 1

PictureBox Inc., November 2007

C.F., writer/artist

120 pages

$18

Buy it from PictureBox Inc.

Buy it from Amazon.com

It might be the jellyfish-on-human double-penetration tentacle-sex scene that makes you realize that this is an adult fantasy comic, but that label, “adult,” is really present throughout this first in a projected series of chronicles of the land of New China. For all that characters like Subra Ptareo may be on a quest and Mosfet Warlock may be a mad scientist, their interlocking stories (so far) don’t read like the genre narratives of my youth beyond their fantastic trappings at all. Instead, they’re stories about buying things and selling things, about twentysomethings (or at least twentysomething analogues) meeting new people and flirting with them, about getting stoned, about fucking and deceiving the people you fuck, about being moved to tears by the realization that you’re actually good at what you’ve chosen to do with your life. Where the fantasy really comes in, for me at least, is in the art. C.F.’s simple, childlike line is reminiscent in affect and effect of Frank Santoro’s in their mutual publisher’s Cold Heat, but while the latter relies on open spaces and canny color choices to evoke the both the supernatural and the mental states akin to it, the former gets it done with detail. The result is always shocking, whether a sudden splash page overripe with flowers and foliage or a doggystyle-eye-view close-up of a tentacle-filled vulva. The word I’m really looking for here is psychedelic, not the cheesily amorphous lowest-common-denominator version but the intense wall-of-sound riot of art-information present in a Moscoso font or the crescendo in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” The combination results in as fecund a playground for the imagination as a far more traditional fantasy story, but arrived at from a totally different direction. It’s inspiring.

* It blows my mind that Della’morte, Dell’amore/Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi hasn’t directed a horror film since then, and has actually only directed one other movie of any kind in that time (he’s been doing TV work). But Fangoria reports he’s got a project in the works called Catacombs Club, which sounds like it’s got the same intoxicating mixture of romance and morbidity that the earlier film boasted. Click for details, including the news that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen co-writer Charles McKeown is writing the screenplay, and the factoid that Soavi shot second unit on that Terry Gilliam film. (Via Dread Central.)

* BC at Horror Movie a Day pans Blair Witch Project director Daniel Myrick’s supernatural teen thriller Solstice.

* State of the beast update: Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo reprints eyewitness reports from the San Francisco Chronicle that the two surviving victims of the fatal (to both human and animal) tiger attack at the San Francisco View on Christmas had been actively harassing the zoo’s lions shortly before the attack.

* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants takes reviewers of The Orphanage, and Roger Ebert generally, to task for overusing Alfred Hitchcock’s famous “surprise vs. suspense” anecdote. He does this in large part because he thinks The Orphange doesn’t earn the Master’s posthumous approval; I’ve gotta see it before I pass judgment and god only knows when that will happen. As an aside, Jason also mentions how scary he found The Others, a movie I think works exactly one time and then is pretty much useless, so badly does its ending skew everything that comes before it.

* Marvel Editor-in-Chief/Amazing Spider-Man artist Joe Quesada and long-time ASM writer J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski continue to very politely but very publicly blame one another for the shortcomings of the poorly received (by this blog and basically every single other one) “One More Day” Spider-Man storyline, in which Peter Parker and his wife Mary Jane make a deal with the devilish Mephisto to remove all traces of their marriage (past, present, and future) from existence in order to save the life of Peter’s wounded Aunt May. The funny thing is that both men focus on the story’s wonky continuity implications and slapdash use of magic as the narrative equivalent of universal solvent, but neither seem to realize that the emotional, psychological, and moral character-based underpinnings of the entire thing are just as shoddy.

* Finally, allow me to recommend the latest iteration of Dick Wolf’s venerable police and D.A. procedural series Law & Order. The Missus and I watched the back-to-back-episodes double season premiere on our TiVo today, and it’s the best the show has been in a long long time. It’s not just that new cast additions Jeremy Sisto and (particularly) Linus Roache hand in strong performances as lived-in, pointedly un-glossy characters–the whole show seems to have been tightened up, with scenes given more time to breathe, actors given more time to react, even better framing and lighting. It’s almost reminiscent of the show’s earliest Chris Noth/Michael Moriarty years, where half the fun of the show came from watching a George Dzundza or Steven Hill reaction shot. The cop material in particular showed a gravitas it hadn’t had since the departure of Jerry Orbach. Good stuff, worth putting off watching Project Runway and catching one of its countless re-airings instead for.

Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews David Cronenberg’s seminal body horror/media satire/James Woods vehicle Videodrome.

And BC at Horror Movie a Day presents a Best Of/Worst Of roundup of his first year on the job, the job being watching at least one horror movie every day. Read the roundup for either the hidden gems he discovered or the hilariously bad budget-pack junk he watched to make the quota, or simply to reward him for living the dream/nightmare.

* The Daily Galaxy reports that some scientists are worrying that ages-old organic matter unearthed–or un-iced–as global warming melts the polar ice caps will accelerate climate change. Infocult’s Bryan Alexander notes the potential eldritch implications, obvious to fans of H.P. Lovecraft and John Carpenter everywhere.

* New Year’s gift number one: Blogger Ken Lowery, formerly of Ringwood, now has his own fancy new web site, Ken-Lowery.com To think I knew him when he still had the word “Ragefuck” in his blog name!

* New Year’s gift number two: I tend to enjoy The Best of Bootie, year-end mash-up collections compiled by mash-up DJs A Plus D.

* Adam Balz’s brief rumination on the Ed Tom Bell character in No Country for Old Men over at Not Coming to a Theater Near You strikes me as unfair to Ed Tom’s deputy. Balz labels him as “artless [and] simple-minded” whose “far from revelatory” thoughts “dance around the crime.” In fact, if I recall correctly, the deputy’s pretty much dead on in everything he says; the main difference between him and Ed Tom is that he verbalizes most of his thoughts while Ed Tom doesn’t.

* Finally:

They called him Iron Man, a hulking teenage football player with a baby face and winsome smile who lived with his parents in a small ranch house in the Buttonwoods section of town.

Then, one summer night in 1987, Craig Price crept across his neighbor’s yard, broke into a little brown house on Inez Avenue and stabbed Rebecca Spencer 58 times.

She was a 27-year-old mother of two.

He was 13.

Two years passed before Price struck again.

Joan Heaton, 39, was butchered with the kitchen knives she had bought earlier that day.

The bodies of her daughters, Jennifer 10, and Melissa 8, were found in pools of blood, pieces of knives broken off in their bones; Jennifer had been stabbed 62 times.

—“Hulking boy killer changes justice system,” AP, CNN.com

Kid Eternity

DC/Vertigo, February 2006

Grant Morrison, writer

Duncan Fegredo, artist

144 pages

$14.99

Buy it from Amazon.com

So this must be one of those “minor works” I always hear so much about. Collecting the three-issue 1991 Vertigo “reimagining” of some old DC character, Kid Eternity reads like many a current comic really intended as a movie pitch rather than a reading experience: A hapless everyman is inducted by a glib, ubercompetent, superpowered cool dude into the secret truth behind the world as we know it. The pleasures to be had here are in the idiosyncratic details Morrison weaves into this shopworn plot: casting said everyman as an observational stand-up comic (his name, Jerry Sullivan, evokes a Seinfeld with an Irish-Catholic’s hang-ups instead of a Long Island Jew’s); making said secret truth a weird (if familiar) splatterpunk take on Dante’s Inferno; harnessing artist Duncan Fegredo, who currently mimics Mike Mignola in the pages of Hellboy, to the yoke of the world’s lengthiest Dave McKean impression. But the curveballs failed to keep me as too many of the surrounding pitches were predictable and almost half-hearted. Serial killer? Check! Deranged Christian missionary? Check! Crazy lettering? Check! Tarot cards? Big check! Fegredo’s visuals feel similarly lackluster: For every memorably wild vista (his infernal architecture is particularly ambitious) there’s a murky, difficult-to-follow action sequence (I’m still not quite sure what happened in that initial bloodbath), hard-to-distinguish supporting character (I didn’t notice that there were two separate murderous antagonists for Jerry and the Kid until they started attacking one another), or just generally uninspired choice (a would-be mindblower tour of hell is metonymized by a few static stand-alone panels and one image seemingly picked at random to anchor the spread in the background). Morrison’s at his best when his comics either really read like comics (Arkham Asylum, All Star Superman) or look like comics (We3, I dunno, Seven Soldiers), and this comes across as a creature of its era that thinks it’s too cool for school to do either, which it isn’t.