Teratoid Heights

Highwater Books, Summer 2003

Mat Brinkman, writer/artist

176 pages

$12.95

Buy it from Bodega Distribution

Originally written on March 8, 2004 for publication by The Comics Journal; a longer alternate version appeared on this blog

Cartoonist Mat Brinkman is the most compelling member of the Fort Thunder art collective, combining the whimsy and chops of a Brian Ralph with the weirdness and choppiness of a Brian Chippendale or a Jim Drain. And in this little book, he’s created a minor sequential-art masterpiece. This nearly wordless, black-and-white collection of short adventure stories, in which a variety of monstrous, faceless creatures explore their respective environments with alternately hilarious and frightening results, recalls Jim Woodring’s Frank stories, in its deft use of scary-funny black humor and unexpected surprises. But it eschews Woodring’s familiar funny-animal tropes for something new, eerie, and original. The art, which simultaneously possesses the starkness of woodcuts and the manic detail of the ’60s undergrounds, quite simply looks like a transmission from Another Place.

Each of Teratoid‘s subsections has its strengths: The wild wanderings of “Oaf” are notable for their emotional range and their visceral description of this fantasy world’s geography; The simply-drawn creatures of “The Micro-Minis” are like cartoon automatons, their actions flowing naturally from their own design as a function of the very mechanics of drawing them; The wordplay of “Cridges,” the book’s only non-silent section, show Brinkman to be as able and witty a manipulator of language for its own sake as he is of art. The book’s real tour-de-force, though, comes in the section called “Flapstack,” which concerns the subterranean realm of little creatures that look a lot like pulled teeth. That section’s story “Sunk” is, I think, the single best comics sequence I read all year. Three of the teeth creatures, each bound to the other by a length of rope, fall into a winding labyrinth. As they try to navigate this complex maze, Brinkman intercuts between them as though multiple cameras are involved. The three creatures are indistinguishable but for the corresponding numeral that appears each time they come back “on screen.” Before long we have a sense of exactly where in the maze each creature is, and it’s the intense concentration required to keep up with Brinkman’s byzantine constructions that attaches us to the creatures as surely as their frustratingly short lengths of rope attach them to each other. As they attempt to overcome the obstacles they encounter, the tension is, almost stunningly, an edge-of-your-seat affair. The powerful end to this thriller–which, again, stars three silent and indistinguishable walking teeth–is testament to the power of the medium when artists deploy it in new and sophisticated ways, and to Brinkman for having the vision to do.

* Lost link number one: An enlightening Jeff Jensen interview with show honchos Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse at Entertainment Weekly that clarifies some unintentionally ambiguous points from last week’s episode regarding the chronological order of flashbacks, a certain notable bracelet, and lots more. Quote of the day:

The only true canon is the show itself.

Then explain the goddamn numbers in the goddamn show instead of the stupid ARG! Okay, venting over.

* Lost link number two: The Tail Section clears up some erroneous reporting regarding Lost‘s scheduling–they are airing the eight pre-strike episodes all in a row, and the second batch will all be airing at 10pm.

* The Ruins link number one: new trailer!

* The Ruins link number two: New posters!

Trailer and one-sheets via Bloody Disgusting.

* Comics Bulletin’s Robert Murray talks to writer Simon Oliver and editor Jonathan Vankin of the canceled-before-its-time Vertigo series The Exterminators. To me this series, rough edges and all, is the most interesting thing going on at Vertigo today, and the fact that it has to call it a day 20 issues earlier than its planned 50-issue run is a real downer. I guess they can’t all be Y: The Last Man or Lost. However, it does at least give you a better financial impetus to invest in the trade paperbacks. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* The mostly not-so-good Gawker Media “sci-fi” blog io9 has a coup of an interview with Cloverfield monster designer Neville Page. The three-decades-old legacy of H.R. Giger’s Alien design lingers on. (Via Whitney Matheson.

* Stacie Ponder calls out the genre-nerd internet for its weirdly negative sight-unseen reaction to Neil Marshall’s retro-apocalyptic thriller Doomsday. To me this kneejerk reaction is just part and parcel of other dopey horror-fanboy shibboleths: gore is good, PG-13 and M. Night Shyamalan and any trend that doesn’t involve constant on-screen dismemberment are bad, we must support Our Genre, etc.

* The new Meathaus anthology, featuring Jim Rugg, Ross Campbell, Dave Kiersh, Brandom Graham, Farel Dalrymple, James Jean, the Hanuka Bros., Dash Shaw, and Ralph Bakshi (!), looks pretty pretty. I will however admit some reticence, because in the post-Kramers Ergot and Mome world, the content bar has really been raised–there’s more to anthologies than pretty drawings. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

David “Fight Club” Fincher is directing the film adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole, the best horror comic of all time. And the project has migrated from MTV Films to its parent company, Paramount itself. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

The Would-Be Bridegrooms

Shawn Cheng, writer/artist

Partyka, 2007

36 pages

$4

Buy it from Partyka

The most recent minicomic by my friend Shawn Cheng sees him continuing to mine his interest (obsession?) with bestial forms, particularly the almost manic detail found in art representing the mythical monsters of Native and South American cultures. As opposed to the bleakness of his Ignatz-nominated collaboration with Sara Edward-Corbett The Monkey and the Crab, this one is much more playful in nature, despite sharing with that earlier work a plot involving a game of one-upsmanship gone horribly awry. As his coyote and jackrabbit protagonists play their game of dueling transformations to impress the grandma of their prospective bride, the fun is in watching Cheng’s character designs evolve from knowingly lo-fi (dig the coyote’s first-grader triangle for a nose) to hilariously baroque. Quickly running out of ideas, the two would-be bridegrooms start repeating themselves, producing high-level video-game variants on earlier creatures they’ve transformed into (“DEMONIC Ice Giant!” “MUTANT White Bear!”); once they max out their imaginations with their absurdly complex World Serpent and Thunderbird creations, they pause, give up and simply start beating each other up. All this is smartly offset by the constant observing presence of the adorable little round-headed grandma. (Her startled squeal of “Oh!” upon seeing the first transformation tickled me pink.) It’s she who gets to deliver the story’s punchline/moral, which is that showoffs inevitably lessen themselves compared to the woman they intend to impress. It’s an appropriate ending for a neato little mini that uses an understated, perhaps even slight, narrative to, yes, impress.

* NBC is abandoning the traditional September-May TV season next year in favor of the 52-week rollout that’s been the de facto model for the past few years anyway. In terms of the few shows I care about I think this is good, as arbitrary scheduling decisions should have less of an impact on storytelling decisions, although I guess none of it really matters until Nielsen rejiggers sweeps.

* Stacie “Final Girl” Ponder rather hilariously interviews American Psycho screenwriter Guinevere Turner. Definitely check out the photo captions.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror rightfully praises Robert Carlyle’s jaw-droppingly powerful performance in 28 Weeks Later as Oscar-worthy in an alternate universe where such performances get noticed by anyone who doesn’t also happen to have a zombie escape plan committed to memory.

* Man, someone give this guy a self-published comic about women and fashion! (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Ken Lowery tries to explain why he doesn’t like “torture porn,” but in lumping together and subsequently dismissing a whole slew of movies including the Saw series, the two Hostel movies, Turistas, The Devil’s Rejects, Chaos, and so on, he disregards separating the wheat from the chaff in any meaningful way, and moreover discusses only one of those films in any kind of detail, so even if his argument is that there is no wheat, that’s not at all clear. I think one day we’ll be as unlikely to hear these kinds of arguments from genre buffs as we currently are to hear them say “slasher movies are no good” as though there’s no difference between Halloween and Jason Takes Manhattan.

* Finally, nightmare fuel: A deep-sea video camera captures images of dozens of giant sea spiders.

As if I didn’t like the cerebral English dance act Hot Chip already, the video for their new single is laden with references to Tim Burton’s Batman, the superhero movie that makes all subsequent superhero movies look like the humorless, gutless, visually inert experiments in tedium they are. I count Axis Chemicals, the little giftwrapped box that the Joker sends Vicki Vale a gasmask in, throwing paint at the statues, “you’re my number one guy,” Prince’s half-Joker “Gemini” character and Vicki Vale’s black dress from the “Batdance” video…I am in LOVE.

* Appy polly lodgies for the blog outage for the last few days. Fortunately my MT software soldiered on in secrecy, which is why you can now find reviews of Ed Brubaker & Steve Epting’s Captain America and Eleanor Davis’s The Beast Mother below.

* The government of China, which hey by the way is responsible for approximately 2/3 of the world’s state executions, has banned all horror, alien, occult, and supernatural-related media.

* When comics critics collide: Tom Spurgeon interviews Doug Wolk. It’s full of great stuff, including investigations of Wolk’s reactions to various creators and comics, the value of “conversation-starting” and shared universes, and tons more. If you’re interested in comics criticism you should certainly read the whole thing.

* A small part of the interview touches on something I said, which I think bears clarification. In referring to my disapproval of his own excitement about Dave Sim’s upcoming project Glamourpuss, Doug says…

If I had to limit myself to art by people whose world-views matched mine, I wouldn’t have a lot left, and if I couldn’t enjoy art by people whose world-views I find repugnant, I’d lose some things that mean a lot to me.

I’ve said the exact same thing from time to time and still believe it; however, to the extent that an artists repugnant world-views are the subject of their art, as is the case with any Dave Sim comic purporting to be about women, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to find the art just as repugnant as the worldview, no matter how pretty or inventively laid out it might be. (And let’s just say I beg to differ on that score as well. I mean, Jesus.)

* This week’s Horror Roundtable asks us to name a scene in a horror movie that brought us close to tears. After watching the episode of Twin Peaks last night, I’ve got another one to add to the list.

* Another day, another pan of Diary of the Dead, this one from Ken Lowery. Meanwhile it didn’t make a whole lot of money during its opening weekend even on limited-release terms. I’m less excited about schlepping into the city to see this thing with each passing moment.

* The upcoming Hellraiser remake is now going to be written by the screenwriters of Saw IV. Joy. Hey, maybe it’s a wonderful film.

* Am I the only person who thinks that Cloverfield monster toy is inaccurate? I seem to remember its forepaws (or whatever you’d call them) facing backwards, with the wrist or ankle joint pointing the feet back, not forward. I remember that being a very disconcerting detail in fact. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Thanks to the opening of Victoria Large’s review of The Signal, I’m now officially intrigued by the movie, even though I sort of think it would be nice if reviews of horror films could save the pop sociology until at least the second graf.

* Check out this far-out cover to Sammy Harkham’s Crickets #2! Via K. Parille.

* New Portishead!

* Finally, via Whitney Matheson, an excerpt from the novelization of Road House.

The Beast Mother

Eleanor Davis, writer/artist

Little House Comics, 2006

19 pages

$5.00

Vainly hope to buy it from Little House

Like The Wicker Man (the original, not the nightmarish Nic Cage version, and God am I tired of having to say that), this beautiful minicomic by the prodigiously talented artist Eleanor Davis smartly plays upon and then reverses the ingrained sympathies of the modern genre reader. What appears to be a simple, perhaps even simplistic fable about a maternal monster, a man with a gun, and how we kill what we don’t understand turns out, in a fairly grim (perhaps even Grimm) fashion, to carry almost precisely the opposite message, albeit with enough ambiguity to keep you uncomfortable long after you’ve finished.

Davis is a thrillingly precise artist. In a slightly different world her art might have drifted into the overly slick style of the Flight school of animation refugees; instead it stops short of their cold cartoonishness thanks to unexpected touches of vulnerability in the character design and figure work (she’s Young Comics’ preeminent poet of breasts and body hair), yet without sacrificing a sense that every line is going exactly where she wants it to. Her use of black is powerful, guiding the eye around her immaculately composed layouts and as strongly delineated as the mini’s ridiculously attractive die-cut cover. Best of all she ends the thing with no fuss or fanfare–nasty, brutish, short, and highly recommended.

Captain America #33 & #34

Ed Brubaker, writer

Steve Epting, artist

Marvel Comics, December 2007 & January 2008

24 pages, $2.99 each

What can you say about a series that in one issue sees a disembodied cybernetic arm spring to life and effect a prison break like the Addams Family’s Thing on steroids, and in the next sees protests over mortgage foreclosures and high gas prices lead to a brainwashed squad of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents opening fire on unarmed civilians outside the White House? Taken together these two scenes illustrate the best thing about Ed Brubaker’s run on Captain America, which itself may well be the best thing ever to be done with the character: It blends all the disparate Captain America flavors—two-fisted World War II hero, star-spangled costumed superhero, Steranko superspy, gritty black-ops badass, American icon, Marvel Universe elder statesman, post-9/11 symbol of Where We Are As A Nation—into a smoothie of pure action-adventure satisfaction.

Of course, since his “death” (sorry, can’t help but put it in quotes) in the series a few months back, Cap himself is nowhere to be found in the book that bears his name, and everyone and their grandmother will tell you it’s a testament to the handle Brubaker has on the cast of supporting quasi-super characters–Sharon Carter/Agent 13, Bucky/The Winter Soldier, the Falcon, Black Widow, Iron Man, Nick Fury, Union Jack, Spitfire, the Red Skull, Doctor Faustus, Arnim Zola–that the book remains eminently readable. Everyone and their grandmother is actually wrong, but only because the way they’re framing the issue is so silly: I understand the expectations inherent in the concept of “title character,” but Brubaker is a skilled craftsman and so are his main artists on this title, Steve Epting and Mike Perkins, so the notion that the death of Steve Rogers–in terms of superhero secret-identity complexity, we’re not talking Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne here–would scotch the whole affair reminds me of that Seinfeld routine where he says that people who get passionate about their local sports teams are essentially rooting for laundry. No, what’s impressive about the continued quality of this series is Brubaker’s grip on the tone–how the absence of Cap has seemed only to intensify Brubaker’s abilities to draw from the strengths of all the aforementioned aspects of the character by extending them to his entire milieu. This sleight of hand is so deft that you’re so caught up with the cloak-and-dagger stuff involving various superpowered people infiltrating AIM and RAID and Kronas and so on that when the entirely organic-feeling results of those organizations’ schemes–the destabilization of the American economy via problems we in the real world are currently facing in slightly less intense forms–come to light, you’re just staggered by how appropriate it feels, even in a book where a major supporting character has the mutant ability to talk to birds. Heck, the guy even gets something interesting out of Mark Millar’s astonishingly stupid Civil War plot by playing the victorious Iron Man as a conqueror with a conscience.

The big hook in issue #34 is that Cap’s old sidekick and current ex-Manchurian Candidate, Bucky, has now assumed the Captain America mantle. I don’t really understand why his new suit is shiny, other than it gives designer Alex Ross an excuse to bathe his paintings of it in even more sourceless white glow than usual, but who cares? He makes an interesting candidate for the position because unlike Rogers, who could only grieve over the horrors of the world, Bucky, like America itself, has actually committed a few. Now he’s trying to make up for it, and hey, we can relate, I think.

The festivities in these issues are underpinned by Epting’s muscular, much-imitated noirish stylings. His action choreography is impeccably intelligible, his punches feel like physical things, and he clearly has a great time with the costumes, uniforms, and tech that give the book its superheroic sheen even as he dirties it up with unidealized faces and blacks galore. His Red Skull is intimidating as heck, too; thanks to the plotline, it’s once again a mask rather than a guy with a skull for a face, and those normal eyes peeking out from behind all that latex or whatever it is are reminiscent of those shots in Texas Chain Saw where you can see Leatherface’s peepers rolling around beneath the mask. He’s creepy, in other words, and makes a great enemy for one of the three or four best superhero titles on the market today.

* Kristin Dos Santos has the final word on post-strike Lost: After airing the seventh of the eight pre-strike episodes on March 13, the show will break for six weeks, then return at 9pm on April 24 with the eighth. It will then be rolling out at 10pm (after Grey’s Anatomy) for the following five weeks’ worth of post-strike episodes. And show honcho Carlton Cuse tells Michael Ausiello that the spare three hours of show out of the originally planned 16 that they now won’t end up using this season will be employed at some undetermined point in future seasons. Man, that was frickin’ exhausting.

* I’m not going to read the whole thing until I see the movie—and god knows when that will be, given its super-limited release and a bevy of lukewarm responses that make me reluctant to go out of my way to track it down—but I really liked the opening lines of Robbie Freeling’s review of George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead:

There’s a tendency in some high and low circles to instantly enshrine any new work from classic horror-meister George A. Romero, good-natured, jocular guy that he is, as a way of validating not only his formidable zombie oeuvre but also the seventies horror movie canon itself. Always the most overt of that bunch in his penchant for toothy sociopolitical commentary, Romero has often traded in rather glib social satire since the revelation of his 1978 Dawn of the Dead; whereas Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter’s genre work has mostly been greeted with retrospective praise and analysis, Romero’s never made any bones about his intent. His easy-to-bottle concepts have always had a clever ring—the pop-allegorical purity of brain-devouring zombies shambling through a shopping mall was a great idea waiting to happen.

* Romero himself talks about some dream projects at SciFi Wire, including an outright slapstick zombie horror-comedy and letter-faithful adaptations of Burroughs’s Tarzan and Stoker’s Dracula. He also expresses bemusement at the outrage from some fannish quarters that Diary might in some ways be Blair Witch Project-esque, because, you know, god forbid.

* I really enjoyed this David Bordwell post on inventive blocking within static shots in There Will Be Blood; it’s written to illustrate how most staging of actors in films these days is either stand-and-deliver or walk-and-talk because filmmakers rely on camera movement and editing to keep things interesting instead.

* The great Bruce Baugh posts his thoughts on Scott Smith’s excellent horror novel The Ruins. My favorite part runs thusly:

The main characters are on vacation in Mexico after having graduated college, and before heading off to work or grad school. From my 40-something perspective it’s all too easy to look at such people and think rude thoughts like “slacker”, but in fact they’re not slackers. They have no great sins and not many significant lesser ones. They’re not doing anything that would normally ever be wrong, until they go off on what should be a lark and isn’t. Calamity ensues. They’re naive, yes, but then part of the point of a civilization is that people don’t get thrown into the state of nature all the time so a little naivete won’t kill you.

In conversation with Bruce he pointed out that the attitude of the book toward the characters is much less judgmental than that of similar stories by Clive Barker and even Stephen King, which I think is about right.

* The latest from the “science is awesome” files: Two gigantic new carnivorous dinosaur species have been discovered in Niger.

* Finally, the 20 Most Awesome but Tremendously Geeky T-shirts.

Goddess Head

Dash Shaw, writer/artist

Teenage Dinosaur Press, 2006

100 pages

$11.99

Buy it from the Poopsheet Shop

In theory I should love this book. A collection of various shorts from 2002-2004, it more or less epitomizes the abstract short-form comics that so excite me–an emphasis on repetition and rhythm, a disconnect (syncopation?) between text and image, figures and patterns bearing equal emotional and narrative weight, a pointed lack of “this means this, that means that” allegory or straightforward storytelling, emotionally rather than intellectually intelligible content. And yet it leaves me cold, both on its own terms and when compared to the Kevin Huizenga, Anders Nilsen, and John Hankiewicz comics of this sort that I find myself constantly returning to. Shaw’s line seems uncertain, frequently unattractive but for no discernible purpose, done this way out of lack of craft rather than intentionality. His stream of consciousness flows too frequently into the shallow waters of shock-value sexuality and easy self-reflexivity, neither of which seem to serve much purpose other than announcing themselves. The end result is scattershot, like it’s trying to do too much at once. The best work here is the lyrically minimalist day-in-the-life comic that concludes the volume, “Cheese”–the line shapes up, the visual language is clever (a one-panel shower scene riffs on the familiar breast self exam diagrams found in college dorm bathrooms everywhere) and, in the concluding sequence that uses the arching and flattening of a single line to signify the onset of sleep, quite poetic and beautiful. It displays the focus the rest of the book lacks. I think there’s enormous potential here–that he chose to do this kind of comics at all would indicate that–and obviously he’s got several more years worth of work under his belt at this point. But for now it’s not quite there.

* In case you missed ’em, I recently reviewed The Complete Persepolis and (repackaged from The Comics Journal‘s Best of 2003 issue) Mother, Come Home. New reviews go up first thing every Monday/Wednesday/Friday.

* The main news I was waiting for now that the strike is over: Lost honcho Carlton Cuse announces that Season Four will now have 13 episodes instead of 16, while those three extra episodes will be added to Season Five, now 19 episodes long.

* Turnabout is fair play: Warner Bros. is being sued by Fox over the film rights to Watchmen. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Here’s the correct link for that Joe Lynch interview I mentioned the other day. UPDATE: Goddammit, got it wrong again! Fixed now.

* Check out the badass zombie-centric cover art for the 25th anniversary rerelease of Michael Jackson’s amazing album Thriller. (Via Uncrate.)

And here’s my argument for why the title track’s video belongs in the horror pantheon, btw.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s publisher and charitable trust are suing New Line Cinema for non-payment of film revenues. Coming on the heels of similar lawsuits from Peter Jackson & company and the films’ actors, this can’t reflect well on the mini-studio as its parent company Time Warner decides what to do with it.

* The WGA strike is all over but the shouting. E!’s Kristin Dos Santos talks to people who work on Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and a bunch of shows I don’t care about regarding how many episodes they expect to shoot and get on the air during what’s left of this season.

* Roy Scheider died. A long time ago one of Steven Wintle’s Horror Roundtables was about Oscar-worthy performances in horror movies, and I totally whiffed. Like Jason Miller in The Exorcist, Scheider in Jaws was just an astonishingly likeable, no-frills, lived-in character. I love him in that movie and I’m sad he’s gone.

* Steve Gerber died. I remember him best as the creator of Thundarr the Barbarian and his companion Ookla the Mok.

* Time Warner is going to be knocking New Line Cinema down a few pegs. Kristin Thompson has the scoop on how this move pertains to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

* Although this Maul of America post is way too credulous when it comes to the emotional power of the human drama in Cloverfield, it’s certainly a welcome addition to the all-too-small canon of anti-The Host criticism as it calls bullshit on the egregious slapstick-grieving scene and the pat political subtext. (Via Matt Zoller Seitz.) Also, big ups to the post for picking out this admittedly very cool, Charlie White-esque still from The Host by way of illustration.

* Monster Brains gives a shout out to Shawn Cheng, Zak Smith, and Nicholas Di Genova’s monster-combat jam webcomic On the Road of Knives.

* Finally, here is how I first discovered the Wu-Tang Clan: The astonishingly intense video for the astonishingly charismatic Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s astonishing all-one-verse song “Brooklyn Zoo,” my favorite hip-hop track of all time.

The Complete Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, writer/artist

Pantheon, October 2007

352 pages

$24.95

Buy it from Amazon.com

The first two-fifths or so of The Complete Persepolis is a pleasurable, even gripping read, coming across like a ground-level view of a real-world 1984 played as farce instead of tragedy. The euphoria of revolution giving way to factionalism and repression, the first ominous signs that something really bad is on the way, the lack of a coherent “and then this leader did this and this city did this” historical through-line (the Ayatollah Khomeini is never mentioned or even alluded to), the story told instead through only the glimpses of the avalanche of history available to a little girl—all this is reminiscent of Winston Smith’s memories of the dawn of Ingsoc and Big Brother in Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece. In this way Persepolis does those of us on the outside of Oceania Iran a great service as it reveals that this regime’s thought police is a miserable failure: Beneath the veils and behind closed doors, people live the most normal, hopeful, free lives they possibly can. The breezy cartooning and young Marjane’s precociousness leaven the proceedings with the kind of humor you’ve got to figure is anathema to the benighted thugs who’ve forced otherwise regular people into an ongoing nightmare of political prisons, bloody fanaticism, and hypocritical sexual repression.

But when the second chunk of the story rolls around, the seams start to show. Teen Marjane’s misadventures in Europe are a lot less compelling as narrative than li’l Marjane’s Revolutionary childhood–they’re not a whole lot more exciting than any kid you ever knew who smoked weed a lot in high school, in fact. And it’s at that point that you start to really notice the weakness of Satrapi’s cartooning. Her line seems chunky but without purpose, like it’s simply out of shape, while she either has the most limited ability to draw clothes and figures I’ve ever seen or she actually does know more people who dress head to toe in black all the time than you’d find in the audiences shown in Depeche Mode 101. Juxtapose both aspects of her art with the frames of the animated feature based on the book that populate this edition’s cover and the comparison is not flattering to the source material: The cartoon’s line is cleaner, the character designs tighter, and the graytones give the backgrounds (frequently nonexistent in the book itself) a lush life of their own. Satrapi also proves to be an unreliable editor for her own biography, as a lot of the juiciest material (losing her virginity, dealing drugs, the “hours of hallucinations” she suffered after a suicide attempt) are almost completely elided, in favor of countless stories about how tedious she finds her friends. (Hey, I’m with her there!) The book rambles on structurelessly, but not in a way that evokes the randomness of life–it’s all just there, and then it all just stops. The bummer of it is that when it does, you can still remember a time earlier on when you would have wished it didn’t.

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE MOVIE VERSION OF THE MIST

Today it occurred to me that there’s an obvious political read of the film version of The Mist‘s rejiggered ending, and I don’t recall seeing it anywhere:

Couldn’t one say that insofar as the mist is a horrible but ultimately very fleeting catastrophe, and David’s homicidal/suicidal reaction is basically much ado about nothing, there’s a parallel to America’s response to the horrendous but ultimately isolated (so far/thank god) attacks of 9/11?

I’m not saying this was the filmmakers’ intention; I’m not commenting on the validity or the interestingness of the interpretation; I’m just saying it seems like you could look at it that way and I’m surprised no one did, as far as I know.

Two quick links this morning:

* First, Matador pictures has posted tiny images of the teaser poster and a couple of stills from their upcoming adaptation of Clive Barker’s Book of Blood. (Via Dread Central.) So far so good, I think…

* Meanwhile, do you remember my story about how when I worked at Troma, one of my coworkers handed me a bootleg VHS copy of The Blair Witch Project that the directors had given him at Cannes, and that was how I watched it the first time? Well, you know who that guy was? Joe Lynch, director of Wrong Turn 2, as I just realized from reading Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on A poster and a fun fact