I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how good the new Dawn of the Dead was, particularly in light of how mediocre Hellboy was, and in anticipation-slash-worry about how Kill Bill Volume 2 will be. (I’m afraid I won’t be satisfied unless, pace Tenacious D, it rocks my fucking socks off.) So I was tickled to read the following from Chris Puzak, from his positive review of the new Dawn:

This movie’s garnered a lot of positive reviews, although I think if I read another one which talks about what a biting critique of consumerism, the original movie was, I’m going to scream. Yes, George Romero made some jokes about shopping malls in the original, but the movie was basically about zombies eating people. The way people are going on about it, you’d think Michael Moore directed the movie from a script by Howard Zinn. I wish critics would just admit they like watching gory movies instead of pretending they watch them for the alleged social commentary.

My sentiments exactly!

Meanwhile, in the interest of equal time, Chris (and Franklin Harris) liked the Hellboy movie, and Dave Intermittent didn’t like Kill Bill Vol. 1. (Which I guess I can understand, but man, if Quentin Tarantino really is embarrassed about liking female ninjas, making two epic potentially career-killing movies about them sure is a funny way of showing it!) Meanwhile, John Jakala didn’t like the Hellboy movie, and commenter Mason accurately pointed out that this was that rarest of occasion where the grafted-in Hollywood-standard romantic subplot was the best part of the film.

Also on the great minds think alike front, my criticism of Elvis Mitchell from that Dawn of the Dead review I linked to above generated a surprising amount of “hear, hear”s. One of my favorites was from cartoonist Matt Wiegle:

…I also keyed in on Elvis Mitchell’s review as lazy [and] annoying. I may be reading too much into it, but it seemed as if he had some weird class issues going on with the remake, by both slamming it as an “expensive Troma Production” and by saying it was “clearly made in Toronto;” I feel critics often beat a film with the Toronto Hammer when they want to make it seem cheap or lazy. It was as if he was saying “This movie would like to think it’s high-class, but it’s not! See? Toronto!”

Amen. And it’s even dopier than usual to say that sort of thing about a remake you’re unfavorably comparing to an original that was shot in Pittsburgh.

Another quick thought on the recent battles in Iraq: It could well be that the news establishment’s relentless focus on reporting only negative developments out of that country since the invasion began is actually mitigating the potentially devastating impact the current Tet Offensive-esque hostilities might otherwise have on public opinion and support for the war. People who are following events in Iraq only casually have subsisted on a steady diet of “another deadly day in Iraq” and “angry Iraqis took to the streets today” served up by our nation’s anchorpersons for over a year now. What’s another few days of this to them, one way or the other?

My goodness, if I ever write something successful, and forty years afterwards people were to go around insisting that writers of that time must treat that successful something with “respect”, I’d just die. Please, artists of the future, disrespect the bejesus out of me!

The work and comments of Darwyn Cooke have raised an interesting question: Must art be respectful to what has gone before, or should the words “respect” and “art” even be used anywhere near each other? Contra Chris Butcher, I’ve got to agree with Dave Fiore and say heck no, at least not when the “respect” in question entails a slavish devotion to the perceived “aims of the original creations” or to the “artistic intentions” of the original creators.

Whenever any artist is fired up or inspired enough by someone else’s work to do something that comments upon it in any way–that’s real respect. It’s the only kind of respect that matters, and certainly the only kind of respect that will engender more good art. Pure conservative homage-paying is about as far from the art impulse as you can get.

And good golly, “ethics” don’t enter into it! This isn’t a company refusing to hand over an artist’s property, or dicking him out of royalties–this is an artist putting a new spin on an old idea. Nobody has the ethical or moral right to have their creations remain unchallenged or unsullied forever and ever, world without end amen. I’d submit to you that most artists wouldn’t want that right even if it were available to them. A revamp or reexamination alters the original work not one iota. It certainly doesn’t violate the rights of the creator of that original work. Go ahead and paint that moustache on the Mona Lisa–so long as you’re not doing it on the original painting and/or destroying all copies of the original in circulation, you haven’t done a damn thing wrong.

This is not to say that all would-be iconoclasts are geniuses, or that all reverential nostalgia-mongers stink on ice–give me Astro City over Rawhide Kid any day. Pisstakes and cheap cash-in revamps can only get you so far (even aside from the “let’s make them all thugs and perverts!” school of kill-your-idols reactionism, I think we’ve all seen enough slick and soulless Hollywood remakes to know that sometimes the original creator’s intent is, in fact, vastly superior to that of his would-be reinterpreters), while sometimes an original work is rich enough to merit all kinds of fairly straightforward re-exploration. But if we decide that the only appropriate way to build upon or comment on the work of artists past is to mimic what we think were their goals and beliefs, how will we ever get anywhere?

PS: Why is it superhero writers who always get called out for this sort of thing? I haven’t heard anyone condemn, say, the Air Pirates for disrespecting the artistic intentions of Walt Disney (aside from Disney’s legal team, that is). For that matter, I’ve yet to see any bloggers wax outraged about how Alan Moore unethically abused poor Bram Stoker by having old opium-addicted Allan Quartermain slip the high hard one to Mina Harker, or how he disregarded the artistic intentions of Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells by having Mr. Hyde anally rape the Invisible Man.

PPS: On tangentially related notes, Marc Singer summarizes the denouement of Grant Morrison’s emotionally expansive and intellectually brilliant New X-Men run (you know, that dopey corporate spandex book he slummed on to make a quick buck without saying anything worthwhile), Dave Intermittent has some questions for fans of the non-fantastic, and John Jakala writes, like, the best JLA/Avengers review ever.

AiT/PlanetLar publisher Larry Young has pointed me in the direction of this MillarWorld thread, where he talks up some of his favorite comics blogs. Happy as I was to see yours truly’s on the list, I was happier to see that, as Larry tells it, I played a big part in getting him to take a closer look at the comics blogosphere in the first place. And I think the interaction’s been beneficial to both sides: I got a good interview, lots of bloggers have gotten free AiT/PL comics, and AiT/PL has gotten a lot of free publicity. It’s nice when the internet coughs up a win-win like that, isn’t it?

New Frontier auteur Darwyn Cooke appears to have taken up the mantle of unabashed pseudoicon-worshipping nostalgia of the sort occasionally visible in the work of Alex Ross and Mark Waid with a zeal unrivalled this side of John Byrne. The latest target of Cooke’s ire is Mark Millar, who has violated Cooke’s delicate sensiblities by making the Hulk into, essentially, a giant cannibalistic prison rapist. (Link courtesy of Franklin Harris, who’s got a bunch of cool links up there.)

Your mileage may vary when it comes to Millar’s brand of vulgar deconstructionism–like Jim Henley, I can’t quite decide if Millar’s making some sort of point about how we glibly condone bastardry when it’s done by “our bastards,” or if he simply likes blowing shit up; at any rate I like his Captain America–but it’s clear at this point that Cooke has bought into the big corporate superhero companies’ attempts to transform their cheaply churned-out pulp heroes into worship-worthy Olympians. I detected this back when Cooke was going after Frank Miller for mistreating fictional characters in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and with this new revelation I’m increasingly glad I jumped off the New Frontier-buying bandwagon. I don’t need to spend all that money on some long hagiography of Green Arrow and the Blue Beetle.

(Which is not to say I’ll never jump back on–I like his art and his storytelling style so much on their own merits that I’ll be sorely tempted by the eventual collection. Moreover, Cooke comes across as far less fundamentalist about these issues in his exchange with Millar than he did during his assault on Miller. But if the future of superhero writing is to be with either Cooke on one side or Miller and Millar on the other, I’m pretty comfortable with the side I’m on.)

At the place where I now work, someone stole our only copy of Palomar.

This sucks, because that’s less money for Fanta and Beto, but hey, at least someone’s reading it, presumably.

I’m vacationing in Colorado till next Tuesday. Blogging will probably be on the light side. Please try to contain your disappointment.

(Light blogging, schmight blogging.)

My military education is limited to one semester of Society and War back in college, so I’m not prepared to make a big announcement about the ongoing battles in Iraq. Well, actually, I am, and it’s that here at home the pro- and anti-war arguments appear to have become completely unfalsifiable. The usual suspects on either side have taken the events of the last couple of days to signal that we’ve now completely blown it, the Inevitable Revolution has begun, and we might as well pack our overweening nanny-state imperialist bags and go home; or that our desperate and savage enemies are acting like complete idiots and we have a golden opportunity to mop the floor with them and pave the way for Iraqi democracy in one fell swoop. “Failed war” and “we’re winning”–it appears that whatever happens, adherents to one or the other of these narratives will find that said happening fits neatly into their storyline.

Me, I’m not so sure. The closest comparison to the current goings on seems to be the Tet Offensive (about which I did learn in that Society and War class, thanks). Of course it’s not exactly the same–Tet was more or less coordinated throughout NVA and VC ranks, whereas it’s unclear how much collusion there is between disparate groups like Sadr’s militia, the Fallujah insurgents, Syrian infiltrators and so forth; much of the current hostilities seems to have stemmed from an extremely unlucky confluence of circumstances, such as the Fallujahn lynching and the shuttering of Sadr’s newspaper. But it’s similar in that it’s difficult to see an outcome to the battles that, in military terms, isn’t a complete disaster for the insurgent groups. Fallujah and Sadr City could have remained relatively untrammelled hotbeds of rebellion and murder for months, but now the insurgents in both places have handed the Coalition an excuse to squash them, an eventuality that the poorly disciplined and outmatched insurgent groups will not long prevent. Like Tet, the outbreak of fighting is surprising, but in the end it will likely be a nightmare for the enemy.

However, like Tet, what matters is not the reality on the ground but the perception both here at home and abroad. Do these battles represent some sort of massive intelligence failure? Can they be seen to represent popular sentiment about the Coalition, even though the people doing the fighting command little general support? Will they produce more casualties than the public can bear, either on our side (doubtful–Americans seem to have learned the lesson of Mogadishu) or among civilians (possible, despite the care being exercised by our forces; these groups are renowned for their use of human shields, residences, and mosques as both safe havens and propaganda generators for the credulous media)?

Which leads us back to our two rival, unfalsifiable narratives. In a situation where the outcome is more or less a given, the spin is everything. Will Fallujah, Ramadi, Sadr City et al mark the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning? It may come down to which of those narratives is shouted the loudest.

Man, what a mess they made of Hellboy.

I went to see this movie despite my better instincts. The commercials I’d seen weren’t the least bit appealing. The same, alas, can be said for the movie itself. The grandeur, charm, and eeriness of the comic were nowhere to be found. In its place were a bunch of action sequences that weren’t particularly thrilling, a bunch of slimy monsters that weren’t particularly scary, a bunch of events that weren’t particularly connected, and a bunch of characters that weren’t particularly interesting.

Hellboy himself was played with all the aplomb you’d expect from Ron Perlman, but he was written painfully generically–just the umpteenth brash, wisecracking anti-hero down the pike, with none of the quiet deadpan resignation that makes him such an interesting character in the funnybooks. They took Abe Sapien down a new road, endowing him with extensive psychic powers I don’t remember him having in the comics and giving him the effete accent and demeanor of David Hyde Pierce, but the poor guy disappears halfway through the film and plays no role in the climax (which is probably just as well, seeing as how he was pretty much useless the rest of the time except as a convenient way to insert flashbacks into the flick). There’s a fundamentally pointless everyman character, who besides being boring throws off the balance of the film, which should have been centered solely on Hellboy. There’s Professor Broom (Bruttenholm, though you only see that name in the end credits), who’s dying, but the film completely negates the significance of that revelation by–well, let’s just say cancer’s the least of his worries. Liz Sherman was probably my favorite character; as played by Selma Blair she was believably aching. But even she is weighed down by the needlessly tortuous plot in which characters do this or that thing (start off in semi-retirement, say, then come back due to an event that probably killed hundreds of people but which fact goes unremarked upon; or start off in trouble, then continue to do the thing that got them in trouble, but not get in any more trouble) with no rhyme, reason, meaning, or consequence.

That’s the real problem with the film: Nothing has any weight. Why do we start with Hellboy on the outs with his “father,” Professor Broom, but never show a real reconciliation between them, nor comment on their failure to reach one? Why do we start with Liz Sherman institutionalized when she seems to be just fine, then suddenly bring her back into the fold when she’s a disaster waiting to happen? Why do the bad guys unleash the slimy Samael monsters? Why make destroying them such a central part of the plot if they do nothing to further the story, and if we’re just going to have a character toss in a throwaway line explaining that, after all the main characters have had their asses kicked by them, “we’ve destroyed thousands of their eggs” anyway? And if that’s true, how the hell do so many of them wind up in Moscow? And are slimy tentacled monsters really the *only* monsters worth showing? Seriously, variety is the spice of life, people, especially when you’ve got the entire Mike Mignola bestiary from which to select the damn things! And how is it that getting shot full of holes doesn’t kill the zombie Nazi guy at one point, but getting stabbed full of holes does? And what’s the point of the immortal she-Nazi, anyway? Does she do *anything*? And what’s up with Rasputin? He can apparently materialize anywhere at will and just as easily disappear, so why does he bring himself into contact with his enemies so often in order to use them to further his plans, when he could clearly accomplish quite a bit on his own? And why use Hellboy at all when you contain an apocalypse-causing god within your own body?

Folks, I could sit here writing more of these unanswered questions about dopey plot points all afternoon. That’s what a mess this movie is. And it’s not fun enough or good-looking enough to make up for it, nor are the characters compelling enough or the ideas unique enough. It’s a big, big let-down, even more so when you consider what a genuine marvel the comics themselves are. Do yourself a favor: Take your money and spend them on those comics instead.

April Fools is over. Phew. Now do yourself a favor and go here and breathe in the sweet, sweet perfume of really good comics.

(Link courtesy of Tim O’Neil, as part of a truly epic post including an ungodly long round-up of Secret Wars II and a worthwhile corrective to my Old New Marvel lament. Marvel was always just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. The problem is that now, they’re throwing it at an entirely different wall. (My guess is it’s the one with all the X-Men wanted posters that Wolverine and Kitty Pride are standing in front of on the cover of “Days of Future Past” Part One. That seems to be a wall they’re fond of revisiting.))

Jamie Rich‘s anger at the comics “mainstream” burns with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns, and you know what? It should.

It occurred to me today what a travesty, what an enormously fucking huge leap backwards it is to replace Grant Morrison’s New X-Men with the braindead retroatrocities Marvel has planned. The corporate-mandated return to spandex…the Cyclops “body condom”…the return to the anti-golden age of 90s-style X-scripting (paging Doctors Lobdell & Tieri)…two monthly books in which Chris Claremont is free explore his bizarre metafictional parentosexual relationship with Kitty Pryde…allowing Chuck Austen to continue to use the franchise as his writ-large therapist’s couch (or electroshock bench, take your pick)…”enabling” Rob Liefeld…revivifying concepts that have failed time and time again in the eyes of all but the hardest of the hardcore fanboy in the guise of giving the people what they want…do you think any of it will engender thoughts like this, or this? Hell, look at this massive Barbelith thread–do you think that any of the follow-ups to Morrison’s run (even Whedon’s) will lead to discussion with this breadth and depth, all supported by a text that spells nothing out yet adds so much in, said text having been written by someone smart enough and talented enough and big-hearted enough to think his work through on so very many levels? Fat. Fucking. Chance.

I don’t blame Jamie for being pissed at all. Over the past four years the comics “mainstream” has had maybe its greatest chance since the early ’60s to do something. Comics is a real Wild West medium–it’s out in the hinterlands of pop culture, where anything goes, where the tools and the energy of the bona fide mainstream zeitgeist can be used and abused in any number of glorious ways, where art-world and Hollywood bullshit can be righteously and thoroughly pissed on and ignored. And a few years back a bunch of mavericks took over Marvel, and for a while it looked like they’d drag the whole superhero industry into the wild frontier.

And what happened? For every Sgt. Pepper (read: New X-Men) and Kick Out the Jams (read: The Dark Knight Strikes Again), we got about four dozen Nickelback records: joyless, pointless retreads of the Candlebox albums currently preserving the memory of the ’90s shit-glut in discount bins nationwide.

Listen, Marvel did a lot of good over the past four years, and they’re still doing a lot of good now. I think Marvel bashers really miss how the company turned things around for all the other superhero publishers–getting writers rather than artists acknowledged as the backbone of the industry warrants Quesada & Jemas’s inclusion in the proverbial comics hall of fame all by itself. But take a look at Marvel’s current publishing plans–those good books are something Marvel’s moving away from now, not something they’re headed toward. Do you think you’ll see something like Jones’s Hulk or Milligan’s X-Force come out of the Reload initiative? Do you think anyone but Bendis will get a chance to write something as moody and risky as Bendis’s Daredevil or Alias? For that matter, do you think Millar will be able to do with The Ultimates what Millar did with The Ultimates? Even the Bendis-centered Avengers-titles revamps, helmed as they are by solid indie pros, are being touted as back to basics. I’m not saying the experiments of the last few years have always worked, but good Christ, has no one told this company that its basics have sucked for three decades?

And oh yeah, did I mention that this latest bold new direction will continue the time-honored tradition of simultaneously ignoring and suffocating both the true mainstream (manga, other types of genre storytelling) and the vital underground? Because that’s what’s made American comics the picture of health that it is today!

I’ll admit to being in a bad mood this evening. I had a terrible day at work, I hurt my feet, someone stole the front license plate off my pick-up, and it goes on. But the book that brought me back to comics is over, and I’m surveying the landscape, and there’s just nothing out there, man. It’s heartbreaking, is what it is. And I say this not because I hate superheroes and comics and superhero comics, but because I love them.

(Original link courtesy of NeilAlien. Look what you done, Neil!)

Is this the best thing Warren Ellis has ever said?

If I’m the Marvel EIC, then my first responsibility is to make money for the company. I’m an employee. That’s what I do. I don’t do all these extraneous books with characters known only to the hardcore fans….I want a GHOST RIDER book, because everyone knows Nic Cage wants to do GHOST RIDER, and it’s going to be about a guy on a bike with his head on fire who runs people over. And then lights them on fire. And then goes into a bar and drinks it and does Lisa Marie Presley over the pool table and then lights the place on fire and goes out and gets back on his bike and looks for more people to run over. This is what they want. Damn straight.

Answer: Yes, this is the best thing Warren Ellis has ever said. (From MillarWorld, courtesy of Popp’d.)

I just want to say that I think I have yet to view a major Sopranos murder without having had said murder spoiled for me beforehand. Seriously. Not one.

Goddammit.

A couple of days ago I questioned Franklin Harris’s assertion that the preponderance of superhero comics in the Direct Market does not force non-superhero comics out of that market. Today Franklin responds:

Sean assumes that if only comic-book shops stocked more non-superhero titles, those titles would sell. But the direct market hasn’t given me any indication that there is a sizeable, unmet demand for non-superhero comics.

Yes, but this is because the Direct Market is a classic example of the self-fulfilled prophecy. The DM was created by superhero companies (mainly Marvel), staffed by superhero fans, and geared almost exclusively toward superhero fans. OF COURSE superhero comics sell very well in the DM while other comics don’t–superhero fans have had several decades to learn that this is where they must go for there superhero comics, while fans of other types of comics have had several decades to learn that in any given state in the Union the stores that can fully service their needs number in the low single digits. That the indie and alternative companies have been able to find a niche in the DM at all is almost more luck than anything else.

The reason it appears as though non-superhero comics won’t sell is because, given the current set-up of the DM, they can’t. Decades of deliberately targeted anti-competitive publishing, advertising, and retailership have created a situation where, if on this very day every comics shop in America started ordering as many copies of Optic Nerve as they do of Batman, the things would just languish on the racks. Except, of course, at those mythical “good” comics shops, where things like Optic Nerve sell like hotcakes, because people know they can find them there. The point is, not only have superhero comics (or at least their blinders-wearing hardcore devotees) forced out non-superhero comics from the DM, they’ve pretty much destroyed any chance for non-superhero comics to ever come back. This is why publishers who specialize in other genres are so energetically exploring other venues.

Usually debates like these devolve into some pro/anti-art comics argument: “You’re just upset because some lame autobio comic isn’t selling as much as JSA” or whatever. So for the sake of avoiding this argument, let’s ignore Blankets, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, Maus, Ghost World and any number of other acclaimed and successful alternative comics that nine comics shops out of ten don’t even carry. How about manga, for crying out loud? Japanese comics are a sales phenomenon in the bookstore market, as anyone can tell you–and the DM is ignoring it! Indeed, a vocal contingent of both retailers and consumers is actively advocating against pursuing it! If you can give me a reason why this easy-access source of buckets of revenue is being eschewed that isn’t “the DM, through the predilections of its retailers and consumers and through the machinations of the big American publishers and their monopolistic distributor, is willfully incapable of selling anything but superhero comics,” I’ll shake your hand.

And hell, since manga is almost as divisive a topic as altcomix at this point, how about comic-strip collections, perennial best-sellersr in the real world? When was the last time you saw The Complete Far Side or a Calvin & Hobbes book at your local Android’s Dungeon? Any guesses as to how many copies of The Complete Peanuts Vol. 1 the place has ordered? The bitch of this is, of course, that the reactionary retailers we hear from from time to time may in fact be right–maybe altcomix and even strip collections and manga won’t sell in the DM. But that, paradoxically, is because the DM has worked too well as a superheroes-only vendor. Retailers would have to break decades-old habits held to with devotional fervor by both themselves and their clientele in order to draw in consumers for these other genres, who’ve long come to associate DM shops with Superman and nothing else. Many, I’d guess, wouldn’t survive the transition. And yes, this is the fault of superhero comics.

Over at Tim O’Neil’s blog, Comics Journal editor emeritus Tom Spurgeon writes in to make many of these same points, drawing on information gleaned from his years at the Journal, and as an employee of indie comics stalwart Fantagraphics. Tom also points out something I hadn’t really thought of–the superhero companies have been so effective at creating an environment where only superhero comics sell that it’s next to impossible for them to publish anything but superhero comics. DC still tries some noble experiments, but the majority of even its most unorthodox ventures still center around the “extraordinary man”; Marvel, one-time publisher of the genuinely bizarre Epic line, has by now pretty much said that superheroes are and will be all they do, forever and ever amen.

Listen, I know that superheroes are popular enough and that these companies can make pretty decent bank from superhero fans; I know that the genre isn’t hated by the people of the real world as it is by the anti-genre partisans that claim to speak for said real world here within comics debating circles; I’ve heard all the arguments saying that there’s nothing wrong with these publishers being niche publishers and these stores being niche stores; but doesn’t it strike you as close to wantonly self-destructive for publishers and the market that keeps them afloat to have set themselves up in such a way as to fundamentally preclude diversification?

POSTSCRIPT: It’s worth noting that, as Dave Intermittent points out, there’s always some definitional hinkiness going on when comics is discussed, due to the fact that by comics one can mean

1) The art form/the medium

2) The industry/the business

3) 22-page floppy pamphlets

4) Trade paperback collections of same

5) Graphic novels

6) The publishers

7) The distributors

8) The consumers

9) The readers

10) The fans

11) The creators

12) The retailers

13) The direct market

14) The bookstore market

15) American comics

16) All comics worldwide

And on and on and on. For example, in his most recent post on the topic, Franklin says this:

To be clear, I’m talking just about 22-page comics, not graphic novels. Still, it is even more obvious that superheroes aren’t squeezing other genres out of the graphic-novel sector, because in bookstores manga is “squeezing out” superheroes.

So, among 22-page comics, the superhero genre is the last genre standing following an industry-wide decline that began in the late 1950s. And in bookstores, superhero graphic novels are losing the battle for shelf space to manga. Either way, I don’t see how superheroes are to blame for driving out other genres.

In a way, the definitional fuzziness works to his advantage: He’s able to argue that superhero comics aren’t stifling the sales of non-superhero comics, because non-superhero floppies don’t sell well anyway, and because non-superhero graphic novels sell better in the bookstores than do superhero graphic novels.

But if you focus the debate on the Direct Market itself, as I have tried to do, these supposed mitigators of superhero hegemony are revealed to be nothing more than the consequences of that hegemony. 22-page non-superhero comics don’t sell well because the Direct Market is built to sell only 22-page superhero comics, and it’s been this way for years–the people who shop in the Direct Market aren’t interested in non-superhero comics, and the people interested in non-superhero comics no longer shop in the Direct Market. Non-superhero graphic novels sell better than superhero graphic novels in the bookstores because they’ve been forced into the bookstores by the complete domination of the Direct Market by superhero comics–fans of non-superhero comics go to the bookstores because that’s where they can find what they want, while fans of superhero comics don’t go to the bookstores because they can already find what they want elsewhere, at shops designed around their needs in toto.

Unfortunately for all of us, non-superhero companies still do enough business in the DM–which despite its best efforts to limit the field to one genre is still the main place to get any kind of comic, not just superhero ones–that if the DM were to implode, it would take nearly the entire American comics industry with it. Indie publishers still mainly rely on those “good comic shops” to keep them afloat; good comic shops still mainly rely on superhero companies to keep them afloat; superhero companies still mainly rely on crappy comic shops to keep them afloat; crappy comic shops still rely on superheroes-only readers to keep them afloat; superheroes-only readers are a dying breed. Non-superhero comics readers, therefore, are unhealthily tied to their superheroes-only bretheren in terms of whether or not they’ll be able to read any comics at all.

It’s a problem for everyone, in other words.

Found a couple of interesting essays on the ramifications of fast-moving zombies. (I love being a horror geek.)

Slate‘s Josh Levin traces the zombie genre from its roots in the Carribean-hypnotist flicks of the 1930s through the Romero/Fulci Golden Age of the late 60s and 70s and the fast-acting video-game undead and their motion-picture spinoffs of the late 90s and early 00s, culminating in the critically-acclaimed one-two punch of 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead. Have we reached the tipping point as to public pereception of zombies as being slow or fast?

Blogger Tim Hulsey, meanwhile, thinks that fast-moving zombies lack the sociopolitical relevance of slow-moving ones. No, I’m not kidding, you genre snobs. (Link courtesy of the Slate article.) He makes some solid points over the philosophical, almost poetic resonance of the prevailing zombie-attack image of the original Romero films–that of a lone human succumbing to a slow but unstoppable mob of zombies, arms outstretched, mouths gaping.

But isn’t there something to be said for the image of Sarah Polley’s zombified husband, launching himself across rooms, bashing down doors, leaping on car hoods, running full tilt down the street in a frantic effort to slaughter and consume the woman we’d seen him make love to in the shower and then snuggle with in bed not five minutes earlier? I certainly think there is.

Aside from the fact that fast zombies have shock potential that’s scary as shit, and present the kind of palpable threat that makes you recoil physically from the thought of being caught up to by one of them (I’ve certainly had more nightmares about zombies after 28 Days Later and the new Dawn than I did before them), fast zombies also take the impersonalized mob metaphor of their slow-moving counterparts and make it horrifyingly individual. Yes, they still move in packs, but any one zombie of this new breed will stop at nothing to murder you, and indeed the ability to do so is well within its grasp. In an age where taking the bus or the train to work is an act of substantial courage, where a handful of men can slaughter thousands and rewrite the course of history with nothing more than stuff you’ve got lying around your garage or tool box, isn’t the fast-moving zombie deeply, almost uncomfortably, evocative?

POSTSCRIPT: Now might be a good time to point you back, once again, to my initial spoiler-y review of 28 Days Later. I think both movies were excellent, though it’s worth pointing out that I detected any number of logical errors and plot holes in 28DL, whereas DotDv2 really only had one, which was that every character, most of whom had probably never handled a firearm before in their lives, was able to hit fast-moving targets in the head–while running, no less, and sometimes while running backward. These folks got more head shots than Delta Force, I’m telling you.

Slate‘s David Edelstein takes a giant shit all over Lars von Trier’s latest exercise in sadistic misogyny masquerading as An Artistic Statement, the Nicole Kidman-starrer Dogville. Apparently von Trier, a consummate bullshit artist whose crassly manipulative Dancer in the Dark nearly drove its open-hearted genius of a star Bjork insane, has added a heaping helping of ignorant and facile anti-Americanism into his usual formula of undergraduate misanthropy and sexualized violence. Normally I’d expect a certain class of film fan and quote-unquote intellectual to eat this shit up with a spoon, but I wonder if von Trier hasn’t finally jumped the philosophically and artistically bankrupt shark that’s been swimming around in his very shallow idea pool for so long.

It’s the Battle of People Who Haven’t Seen the Movie They’re Battling About!

One of my favorite bloggers, Mr. John Jakala, takes me to task for my bashing of Lars von Trier’s new movie Dogville. He says that it’s not fair to hold the off-screen bad blood between von Trier and Bjork, the star of his last film, against the director’s work itself. He also says:

I suspect that what’s really bugging Sean is the (in his view) “anti-Americanism” that supposedly pervades Dogville. How accurate that label is I really can’t say. Again, I haven’t seen the film yet, nor am I interested in reading any specific reviews or criticism of the film until I have seen it. But in any event, can’t an artist create worthwhile (i.e., challenging, thought-provoking) art even if his politics disagree with ours? Or is it now the case that, in art as well as in politics, you’re either with us or against us?

No, what’s really bothering me is that von Trier is a misogynistic pig who beats up his women characters and calls it art. The kneejerk, ignorance-based anti-Americanism–which isn’t a valid “politics” any more than misogyny or anti-Semitism is–is merely icing on the intellectually and artistic bankrupt cake. And it’s not just me that’s picked up on von Trier’s lazy America bashing–I’ve seen similar views expressed in Slate and The New Yorker (the latter by David Denby!). We’re not exacly in Weekly Standard territory here.

Meanwhile, I mentioned the Bjork thing not because I think behind-the-scenes shenanigans necessarily affect the work itself, but because von Trier’s apparent treatment of his star perfectly mirrors his treatment of his women characters. Hitchcock’s treatment of women in his films is problematic for many, and of course he sent Tippi Hedren to the hospital, yet Hitchcock is terrible to everyone in his films, and Hedren worked with him again and never has anything but nice things to say about him when she’s interviewed. Women are always specially singled out for torment and abuse in von Trier’s work, and Bjork not only won’t work with von Trier again, she won’t work on ANY film again. I think that says a lot more about von Trier than your average backstage spat, particularly since it meshes so well with the fate he appears to think women deserve if his films are any indication. That’s the the thing about artists like von Trier and (to use an example John cites) Dave Sim, as opposed to the typical financial or interpersonal skullduggery evident behind the scenes of many artistic projects–the unsavory aspects of von Trier and Sim’s off-screen personae absolutely are tangible within their art itself.

As an aside, Bruce Baugh wrote to me on the topic of von Trier, saying the following:

Dogme 95 ate his brain. It’s a shame, because his early work _does_

deserve its reputation, I think. I love The Kingdom and The Element Of

Crime, in particular. But whenever someone slides from saying “this is

how I prefer to work” to “this is the only legitimate way to work”,

well, huge sucking vacuum follows. It’s too easy to slip into a

situation where you never get your basic urges checked or questioned.

I absolutely agree with this. In film school I learned very quickly to run away from any filmmaker who’d penned anything close to a manifesto. Their work may have its moments, but aside from one or two genuinely good films at most they’re pretty much useless both as artists and as commentators on the human condition. Von Trier may have abandoned the rules of Dogme 95, but you can’t abandon the the kind of mind that allows you to think writing manifestos is a good idea in the first place. Or as Denby put it in his review, “Like so many revolutionaries, von Trier can

Here’s J.W. Hastings on those crazy neocon New Gods, and on how the “multiple leaps of logic” derided by critics of superhero stories actually enable the genre to transcend a-is-a reductionism and emerge into the more powerful realm of metaphor. As J.W. puts it:

The ethical questions the best super-hero comics–like Morrison’s X-Men–raise are not “What responsiblity would you have if you had superpowers?” but “What do you do with the responsibility you do have?”

Exactly.

Speaking of the X-Men, Dave Intermittent explains how he fell in love with them, and through them with comics. In the process he deflates the argument for making “comics for kids”–kids, he say, don’t want them.

Good stuff all. Enjoy.

Attention all new(ish) comics bloggers! You may not be aware of this, but blogger Dave G. runs a superb update/referral page, which can be found here. If you know how to ping Blo.gs, you can be a part of the page. It’s a really easy way to keep readers up to date on when you last posted, and it’s rapidly become the number-one traffic generator for this blog and many others. If you’re new to the blogging game and haven’t gotten on board the page, you really ought to.

Okay, I’m just saying this because having you all on the Comic Weblog Update Page just makes my surfing a lot easier. But it’s good for you too, honest!