What is missing from this famous quotation? “A _____ and his _____ are soon _____.” You have three minutes. Ready, set, go!

–Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney, Bored of the Rings

Longtime reader and frequent correspondent George writes in (but always at the wrong email address–dude, it’s right here!) to bemoan the ever-larger number of variant covers cluttering up the racks of the Direct Market lately. Retailer extraordinaire Brian Hibbs spends the second half of his latest column doing much the same thing. Me, I just wonder how this industry got to the point where there’s apparently a massive amount of money to be made in catering to stupid people.

I mean, seriously, who buys these things? Is it the same people who buy Jet records when there’s at least one copy of Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak available in every record store in America? Folks, the bottom dropped out of the comics-collectability market a long, long time ago. These things now exist to have their prices artificially inflated through ridiculous publishing and production maneuvers in order to fleece fanboys who were sufficiently un-stupid to avoid buying them when they came out (or maybe they just walked to the store too slow–let’s not give them too much credit) but so fucking stupid as to want to track the damn things down and pay about forty times what they’re actually worth to own them.

And the variant covers are almost never nice to look at, by the way. I’m not sure how deep into the gimmickry we’ve gotten during this cycle, but holograms and foil embossing and blah, blah, blah–hideous, one and all. Or, it’s an ugly picture drawn by one of those artists who did five issues of an insanely popular comic, then dropped out to play video games. Or, it’s just another uninteresting pin-up looking image in a long string of uninteresting pin-up looking images, only now you get to buy the whole goddamn book over again for the privelege of owning it. People, they are not worth owning.

About the only impulse behind buying variant covers that I can understand on the consumer side of things is completism. This has resonance with me, as I’m currently waiting ever-so-patiently for the day when I have enough money that I can buy all the recently remastered Rolling Stones and Brian Eno and King Crimson and David Bowie CDs that I already own in less remastered versions. When you really like an artist, you want all the tip-top versions of that artists’ work that are available. But 9 times out of 10, there’s no qualitative difference between the original version and the one with the variant cover–they’re not digitally remastering Astonishing X-Men #1, you know? Occasionally publishers will throw in some DVD-esque supplemental material, like sketchbook pages, scripts, original pitches, and so forth, but quite frankly it infuriates me that all this stuff was lying around and being planned to be used to sucker people into buying a comic book over again after, having no idea such things were planned, they bought the first version. The big movie studios pull this type of nonsense all the time with DVDs, and that’s enough to piss people off too, even though in those cases you’re often getting three hours worth of bonus material for your additional expenditure, rather than, what, eight pages of costume designs?

And then we get into the larger issues, the ones Hibbs talks about in his column–how variants clog up market share and choke midlist and indie titles out of the stores, how they’re indicative of companies fixated on the bottom line instead of telling quality stories (which, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, is exactly how the superhero got turned around when New Marvel first came along–in other words, good storytelling makes good business sense), how they can potentially sink retailers by forcing their inventory into unnatural contortions, how the stupid fucking things can do nothing but turn new customers off of comics and often do the same to longtime readers who simply get fed up, and on and on and on.

Long story short, don’t buy variant covers. Don’t, don’t, don’t. They’re dumb. The end.

A little less than a year ago I wrote a big post on manga–how it truly is the future of comics, and that American comics publishers could and should be learning valuable lessons from it. Nothing that I’ve seen or heard or learned in the intervening months has changed my mind, that much is for sure. (The simple fact that at my bookstore (which I presume to be representative of most chain bookstores), size/format alone is what gets a comic book shelved with the hot-selling manga titles as opposed to the slow-as-molasses-selling non-manga titles, should be reason enough for publishers to be paying a lot closer attention.) Essentially, what manga has done is remove unnecessary obstalces to readership; in my opinion, American publishers haven’t done nearly enough work in this regard. Anyway, I recently came across the piece in the archives, and I think it holds up rather well. Check it out and see if you think it holds up, too.

Most of these come courtesy of Kevin Melrose and/or Graeme McMillan. I mean, don’t they usually?

ICv2 reports that manga continues to multipy and devour, just like those stench-ridden machines from the sea in Junji Ito’s Gyo. (Did you like what I did there?)

‘Kettle Black’: Pot

J.W. Hastings continues a multi-blog dissection of the politics of Warren Ellis, focusing on Ellis’s semi-secret embrace of benevolent dictatorship. J.W., I don’t know if this will affect your analysis, but hasn’t Ellis come out and said that the Authority were, in fact, the villains of their own comic book?

After all the recent superhero movies and cartoons, at a time when Robin and Beast Boy and Spider-Man have their faces all over buses, comics sales have not improved significantly at all – it’s never going to happen unless we change the pricing, the format, the content and many other things about traditional U.S. superhero books.

Quoth Grant Morrison, in a wide-ranging discussion over at ComiX-Fan that covers his X-Men run and its effect on his personal life, his many upcoming Vertigo projects, his oddly inaccessible backlist, his multimedia ventures, and his occult theories. No one in the industry gives better interview than this man. As a matter of fact, it’s difficult to think of anyone in any industry who does.

Towards a definition of comics journalism, from Jeff Chatlos. Great stuff. (In fairness to the Comics Journal, though, JEff, they have done a cover feature on Grant Morrison, and I believe one on Ed Brubaker is in the works.) I think the big obstacle to serious, comprehensive, industry- and artform-wide comics journalism is the fact that there’s next to no money to be made in it, because there’s next to no audience for it. But it’s worth hashing out what would constitute such a thing.

Meanwhile, NeilAlien doesn’t buy the notion that Dirk Deppey’s Comics Journal will be a step in the right direction as far as a “middle ground” between fanboy fawning and elitist pisstaking is concerned; neither does Dave Fiore. But are Neil and Dave demanding that the Journal not just cover mainstream/superhero comics, but cover them the exact same way Neil and Dave would? In my many calls for the Journal to engage the so-called mainstream, I’ve never demanded that they like the mainstream. I simply want them to approach it with an open mind, engage the text on its own merits rather than as a symptom or a “see what I mean?”, and do so regularly enough to keep a current record of that segment of the medium rather than falling back on decade-old conventional wisdom about what constitutes superhero/mainstream storytelling. I’m sorry Tom Spurgeon isn’t reverential enough toward Stan Lee for Neil’s liking, and I’m sorry Dave doesn’t find discussions of a creator’s career and influences particularly interesting, but the fact is that Spurgeon is (hands down, I think) the finest writer on comics there is, and that nobody tackles creator interviews with the smarts and comprehensiveness of the Journal. If this kind of engagement with the mainstream is wrong, I don’t want the Journal to be right. Now, if they cover this stuff in a shallow fashion, just to prove to themselves that all their pre(mis)conceptions are true, I’ll be going after them with as much gusto as anyone. (Case in point being Tim O’Neil’s review of Grant Morrison’s The Filth, which, as the commenters on this Gutterninja discussion thread accurately point out, seemed more like an excuse to take a whack at the big X-shaped pinata than to actually, y’know, talk about The Filth (or New X-Men, for that matter.) But honest engagement is all we can ask for, and I think one has to put one’s biases ahead of one’s judgement to believe that people like Dirk and Tom will offer anything less.

Finally, go dig Johnny Bacardi’s new digs!

“They should just make Krypto be the Spectre.”

–my co-worker Greg

Heidi MacDonald responds to the furor over her anti-blog comment in Comic Buyer’s Guide by offering a sort-of apology, which is fine since it was only a sort-of anti-blog comment to begin with. But the hilarious thing about her post is that it helped me discover that Alex Beam’s infamously and genuinely anti-blog article, in which he talked about what an unreliable fly-by-night enterprise this whole writing-for-the-Internet thing is as opposed to people like him who write for Real Publications, is a victim of linkrot.

That is fucking classic.

(For more on Alex Beam, click here.)

Steven Berg on The Dark Knight Strikes Again. I’d say “’nuff said,” but it really isn’t, because I’ve got to mention his wondrous description of the role played by the cataclysmic Superman-Wonder Woman sex scene. It beggars belief that people can read a book with something like that in it and think that said book was some sort of play-it-safe corporate sellout. I mean, it has a cataclysmic Superman-Wonder Woman sex scene.

NeilAlien helps talk up the need for an intelligent middle ground between Wizard and The Comics Journal, and points out, accurately, that this is what the comics blogosphere has become. But with all the comics bloggers who’ve written for the Journal in recent months, is it possible that we’ll see the Journal itself become that middle ground, at least in part? I think so, in the sense that all we’re really hoping for is a magazine of criticism that’s smart without being snobby and well-read without being elitist or obscurantist, and, well, that’s Dirk, generally speaking, isn’t it?

Franklin Harris cites an ICv2 report that publisher CPM will be launching an all-yaoi (that’s guy-on-guy romance) line. People, that is hot. It’s certainly possible that I’ve just watched Velvet Goldmine one too many times, but I do think we’re slowly easing our way into a society where two hot guys making out has the same appeal to women as two hot girls making out has for men. (If you have to, chalk this up to the male cast of The Lord of the Rings–I’ve yet to meet a female fan of the films who doesn’t have a favorite mental image of some pair or other getting freak nasty). And in my opinion, you really can’t go wrong with two hot people of any gender making out. So why not show it in comics? I’m sure it’ll be more interesting than that Britney/Madonna bullshit.

I just want to point out a couple of posts by Dave Intermittent–one about comics (specifically the difference in temperament between Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison) and one not–and say that Dave has been writing very, very well recently.

Speaking of writing very well, how about Scott at relatively new blog Polite Dissent? His ten-point defense of blogs is probably the best explanation of why the medium is so strong that I’ve yet come across. But are blogs really “superior” to more traditional methods of newsgathering, both print- and web-based, as Scott suggests? I don’t necessarily think so. They have strengths and weaknesses just like any other publishing mechanism. But to the extent that they fill a previously unfilled niche, enable ideological democracy across a broad spectrum of fields, allow for specialized dialogue without the competitive-cum-belligerent interaction of messboards, and serve as a Greek chorus for those aforementioned “more traditional methods,” they’re certainly worth embracing.

Scott also has a great little collection of tips for eBaying your comics. This is quite helpful to me because I’m tentatively planning to, well, eBay my comics.

And MORE great writing! This time from Jason Kimble, to whom I clearly have been paying not nearly enough attention. Jason has produced a masterful three part analysis of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volumes 1&2, focusing on the conflict between the “extraoridnary” (which Jason reads primarily as sexuality and violence, or carnality if you prefer) and the “gentlemen” (civilized repression, or at least compartmentalization, of same). And before you start saying “Hey, he’s just taking it for granted that there’s something extraoridnary about carnality, when that really is kinda ordinary, isn’t it???” (Eve Tushnet, I’m looking in your direction), let’s keep in mind that since LoEG takes place in Victorian England, that’s a perfectly fair base assumption. Ooh, it’s all so good–the kind of writing I don’t get to do nearly often enough. (The big horror-blogging marathon was probably the last time I waxed close-reading.) And BTW, it was found via Marc Singer’s fascinating post on the same subject. You’re pretty much gonna have to read that one too.

Finally, I was reading Junji Ito’s Uzumaki today, and you know what? I’m really glad I read comics. Aren’t you glad you do too?

Did you know that former Comics Journal editor and FOG (Friend of Gojira’s) Milo George has his own blog? Well, you do now! Try to imagine a venue where he could put his hilarious message board persona on display without having to do battle with various Danny Hellman or John Ronan sock puppets and you’ll have some idea of just how entertaining this is. Go ye and read, and tell him Sean sent ya! No, seriously. I want you to email him and tell him I sent you. HE NEEDS TO KNOW.

Looks like the beloved Heidi MacDonald is auditioning for the coveted title of the comics blogosphere’s Alex Beam. (Courtesy of Franklin Harris.) Hey, Heidi, didn’t Rich Johnston sing that number on last week’s show?

Come back, Seth–all is forgiven!

It’s difficult to describe how gorgeous Fantagraphics’ The Complete Peanuts Volume One is. I don’t own a copy–my plans to subscribe to their subscription plan (hey, did they ever end up doing that) went away with my old job–but I flipped through it at Midtown Comics the other day, and Holy Mary Mother of God, it’s just spectacular. I’m still not nuts about Seth’s cover design, but seeing it in the actual size and shape of the book (not to mention wrapped around the book’s contents) does make it work pretty well (in spite of the design, if not because of it). And inside! The paper is lovely, the reprint quality is completely astounding, and the material itself is both adorable and laugh-out-loud hilarious. And speaking anecodtally, the bookstore I work at has already sold out of them. Congratulations to everyone involved, because if this doesn’t end up being the book of the year, I’d almost be frightened to see what is.

(And on an unrelated note that I couldn’t leave unplayed, thanks to a gift certificate and store credit, I bought $120 worth of comics at Midtown for a grand total of three bucks and change. Damn, that’s hot!)

“It’s like rap music, first dismissed as a trend. It’s gone well beyond a passing fad.”

Comics store owner Bill Liebowitz on manga, as quoted in USA Today. (Link courtesy of–who else?–Franklin Harris.)

Actually, that quote reminds me that I’ve got to get back to work on my startling expose, “2004 – A Good Year to Get Out of the Hip-Hop Business?”

Eve Tushnet has been blogging titles. That is, she’s been collecting lists of people’s favorite titles, as opposed to the works themselves. (The first such post is linked above; click on it and scroll up and you’ll see a bunch more. Hey Eve–when you do stuff like this, you gotta include links to all related posts in the most recent post!) I once started a thread like this on the Comics Journal messboard, and of course I love making lists, so naturally I couldn’t resist…

COMICS

Our Cancer Year

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

Perfect Example

From Hell

Watchmen

The Dark Knight Returns

Elektra Lives Again

That Yellow Bastard

The Big Fat Kill

“Tear It Up, Terry Downe”

Human Diastrophism

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Safe Area Gorazde

ALBUMS

A Wizard, a True Star

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Presence

…I care because you do

The Idiot

Liquid Swords

This Is Hardcore

Station to Station

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

You Goddamned Son of a Bitch

Beaucoup Fish

Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols

Tonight’s the Night

All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones

Standing on the Verge of Getting It On

The Dandy Warhols Come Down

White Light/White Heat

Let It Be

Let It Bleed

Kind of Blue

In a Silent Way

Here Come the Warm Jets

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

Starless and Bible Black

Disintegration

Pink Flag

Fear of a Black Planet

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Electric Warrior

The Menace

Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks

Everything, Everything

LITERATURE

Something Wicked This Way Comes

“She Was Spittin’ and Yowlin’ Just Like a Cat”

“Survivor Type”

The Crying of Lot 49

Choke

Books of Blood

“In the Hills, the Cities”

“Pig Blood Blues”

I Know This Much Is True

1984

Homage to Catalonia

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Lord of the Flies

The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids

The Stand

“In the Mountains of Madness”

“Behind the Wall of Sleep”

FILMS

Night of the Living Dead

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3

Kill Bill

Scorpio Rising

Eyes Wide Shut

Dawn of the Dead

Rebel Without a Cause

The Wicker Man

The Killing

If my brain didn’t feel like those awful Adult ADHD commercials right now, I’m sure I could come up with more, or better. But those are the ones that are tickling my fancy right now.

It’s been a big week for funnybook thrills here at ADDTF. I’ve spoken with two living-legend artists by phone for a freelance assignment, I bought $120 worth of comics for a grand total of three bucks and change in actual cash thanks to a birthday gift certificate and store credit, and to top it all off, I unknowingly played a big part in the creation of the latest issue of Nick Bertozzi’s Rubber Necker, which I finally picked up.

Nick, as I hope you’re already aware, is an extraordinarily gifted cartoonist who, thematically and stylistically, seems to stand alone amongst his peer group. From his madcap league-of-extraoridnary-modernists serial The Salon to his none-more-black collection The Masochists to his modern-day Eightball anthology series Rubber Necker, he’s shown a mastery of a variety of styles, genres, and tones, all engaged with the help of fluid linework and one of the most singular color palettes in all of alternative comics.

So naturally, when I’d hire him to do illustration work back when I was an editor of the A&F Quarterly, I’d order him to draw pictures of naked people. Seriously! Nick was the illustrator for our regular video-game review column, and in illo after illo he outdid himself in the witty smut arena. (Check it out!)And lo and behold, he’s reprinted all of his “Naughty Preppies” pieces in Rubber Necker #4, and thanked me in print to boot! I couldn’t be more flattered and honored. Nick’s one of the great ones, and I’m proud to say that the world is now graced with more Bertozzi drawings of erect nipples and man-ass than it otherwise would be had I not intervened.

Go visit Nick’s website, and pick up his comics, too. They’re wonderful.

Hey Marc Singer–email me, willya? The link’s to your left.

You know, I like Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan’s Demo quite a bit. It’s easily some of the most compelling work being made in its genre today. But I’m not sure you can tell that from my review of the series. Basically, I had a few concerns about the creators’ approach to teen angst and the politics thereof, but I couldn’t figure out a way to express them without coming across as unnecessarily snide and condemnatory. So I was happy to get an email from Brian Wood in which he addressed some of those concerns, and even happier that he agreed to let me post the message here, as a corrective to my earlier take on the series. Take a look:

Thanks for the Demo writeup! It’s really gratifying that so many people respond to the book.

A couple nitpicky comments, though, if you would indulge me. 🙂

“I’m not really convinced that Wood & Cloonan’s outlook on American life is any more complex: Both tend to end each issue with a list of all the awesome punkrawk music they’ve been listening to, and Wood’s politics, as expressed in his Channel Zero books, are somewhat infamously nuance-free.

(I’m certainly dreading his examination of a soldier’s life in Demo #7.)”

You of course know that my Channel Zero was written 7 years ago, when I was pretty young and not really very nuance-free in ANY aspect of my work. Besides, if you concede that the line of dialogue you quote from Demo #3 makes sense coming from the narrator of the story, why not the same from Channel Zero’s characters? It’s not an autobiographical book, and no more expresses my worldview than anything else. And I would even go so far as to say it’s not MEANT to be a nuanced work, since it deals with a rookie political thinker struggling in a very black-and-white, right or wrong world.

I don

Planet of the Capes

w: Larry Young; a: Brandon McKinney

ISBN: 1-932051-20-1

$12.95, 80 pages, B&W/Color

There are a million and one reasons why Larry Young & Brandon McKinney’s Planet of the Capes shouldn’t work. The plot is a shambles, for one thing. We see things happen and we have no idea why they’re worth seeing–there’s no through line, there’s no narrative drive, there’s no weight that pulls us from one scene to the next. The characters, and we’re using that term loosely, are ciphers, just the latest in a ever-lengthening line of Batman/Captain America/Superman/Wonder Woman/Hulk/Green Lantern/what-have-you manques. The art is almost confrontationally ugly, the kind of style you see in dollar-bin back-issues of bad 80s Marvel & DC books, complete with lousy paper stock and the glorious color of the black-and-white glut. And the whole thing, of course, is merely the latest pisstake on the superhero genre by a smartass indie guy, which, although not quite as unnecessary as another straight superhero book, is still pretty goddamn unnecessary. (What the world needs now is not another Brat Pack.) No, it shouldn’t work at all.

But it does.

A creepy, uncomfortable graphic novel, Planet of the Capes follows the–see, I was tempted to say “adventures” there, but it’s really just a bunch of crap that happens for no real reason–of four supertypes: A Batman-cum-Captain America knockoff named Justice Hall, who is the latest raven-themed vigilante in a line of such individuals dating back to Ben Franklin (the raven is the national bird in this, the Federated States of America, and I certainly got a kick out of finding out why); quasi-bad-girl Kastra, an alien princess type with the usual amorphous telekinetic/energy-based powers that women superheroes always get saddled with; the Schaff, a rampaging Hulk stand-in who is himself the result of an accident in which two other superheroes (the Green Lantern-ish Red Fez and Kastra’s father, an intergalactic warrior leader) were physically melded together; and the Grand, a Superman figure about whom we learn next to nothing, beyond the fact that he’s a bona-fide asshole. After we’re introduced to all four characters (via an autograph-seeking kid who couldn’t be more transparently a mere plot device), we see them get blown into an alternate dimension, where planet Earth is superhero-free. In very short order, all four “heroes” end up dead. (No, I’m not spoiling anything–it says so in giant block letters right there on the back of the book.) How this happens is where they story hooks you.

On Young’s website he says that each of the four superheroes represent not just a super-archetype, but a faction of the comics industry. I’m not going to sit around guessing who’s what (beyond the obvious conjecture that the Grand represents modern-day superpublishers)–I’m far too taken aback by how perfectly Planet demonstrates how the excess baggage of the superhero genre, unless it’s being handled by extremely gifted men and women, makes great art so very difficult create. In the heroes’ world, their behavior is readily understood and tolerated, if not fully accepted, but with a flick of the switch no one they meet can make heads or tails of what the hell they’re doing or why the hell they’re doing it. It’s a reaction I’m sure you’re familiar with–you probably felt it last time you read a lousy superhero comic, one where the characters did things simply because, well, that’s the way things have been done for the past sixty years. The result of such by-the-numbers obesiance to convention and cliche, Planet shows us, is soulless, ugly, and ultimately destructive. (So too, naturally, is at least one of the heroes in the story. Getting there is half the fun.)

But none of these ideas would stick if there wasn’t something to the work itself, and there is. The book features a terrific four-color flashback to the event that created the Schaff, with a compelling wordless sequence that (in a rare move for the book) gives the scene some real heft. The final act takes place atop a dam, with wide-open spaces of sky, sun, and water giving the impression that these characters really have been freed from their constraints, and could go do something either very bad or very good at any moment. And the final confrontation between the two sudden nemeses is surprisingly forceful, all squinty eyes and lantern jaws and unexpected, horrendous violence. Again, Young was smart enough to leave this key sequence silent, and again McKinney imbued it with a sense of dread that enables it to work without simply relying on audience memories of similar confrontations.

Planet of the Capes is likely to be one of those books that either works for you, or doesn’t. (A quick look around the comics blogosphere should tell you that.) With its slapdash plot and largely empty characters, I’m sure some people would feel cheated by the $12.95 pricetag (that’s three bucks more than your average manga volume, for a whole lot less story). But Planet is a solid, squalid little book, and if you’re in the right mood, it’ll tell you a lot of things you’ve wanted to hear about far too many supercomics. “We’ve been had” is the message, and this nasty, brutish, and short supercomic is the messenger.

This is fun. I was inspired to do this by reading Bill Sherman‘s blog today, but since I originally saw it at Rick Geerling‘s the other day and was all ready to do it but didn’t get the chance, I’m going to do both. First up is the other day’s, then today’s. The former will be easy enough to identify for some people; as for the latter–well, if you can get it right, I think I might have to send you money or something.

1. Grab the nearest CD.