Is it weird that I tend to respond only to those political issues that find their way into the comics blogosphere? I think it’s weird.

Jim Henley and Jason Kimble are up in arms that the U.S. military has arrested the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam Hussein’s seemingly countless right-hand men and the theoretical instigator of much of the ongoing insurgency/terrorist campaign. I think my difference of opinion with Jim and Jason can be summed up pretty neatly like thus: Jim (at least; don’t know enough about Jason) assumes that the army generally acts wrongly; I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, believing that they’ve learned that the kind of brutal and stupid tactics employed during many 20th century wars not only look bad, but are militarily inefficient. But beyond that general difference in philosophy, why is it so inconceivable that al-Douri’s wife and daughter may have done something wrong themselves? Hell, in the U.S. itself, I think they should be throwing the ghoulish wife of ghoulish CEOs like Tyco’s Dennis Koslowski in prison right along with her hubby, as she is fully complicit in the looting he did. We don’t know the specifics of the al-Douri situation (again, perhaps this brings us back to the larger philosophical difference between Jim and myself) but at the very least his family can reasonably be suspected of knowing where he is, making them material witnesses; moreover, they are likely in possession of stolen goods and funds, and may well be implicated in some of his crimes as well. “Collective punishment” isn’t an applicable term if the people you’re punishing have actually done things deserving of punishment.

I just heard the following phrase:

“Despite President Bush’s campaign promise to avoid nation-building…”

…as a lead-in to a story on Iraqi and Afghan reconstruction. Gee, what a liar that Bush is, huh? I mean, it’s not like anything happened since he became President that might make him reconsider his foreign policy stance, right?

David Fiore responds to the minor tizzy he worked the collective comics blogosphere (yours truly included) into with his posts in favor of the mainstream-company superhero-property model of storytelling. Basically, he says, “my bad!” He says he didn’t mean to give the impression that this mode of narrative production is the tops, just that it’s a lot more interesting than many writers are giving it credit for. I’ll certainly grant him that–some of this stuff is just crazy. I think many “serious” art scholars might look at it the same way they look at “outsider art,” which is probably the last thing Dave has in mind, but honestly, there’s genuine formal weirdness inherent in this kind of storytelling that belies its critics’ claims that it’s all adolescent power-fantasy simple-mindedness.

Also on the Fiore beat is Matt O’Rama, who works himself up into an unseemly lather over Dave’s use of critical-theory vocab but scores some as-yet unanswered points against Dave’s assertion that authors lack, uh, authority over their creations.

Shawn Fumo attempts to analyze Marvel’s latest actions toward The World At Large. For those of us who want the company to succeed, the moves can be baffling, but I know that there are enough smart people in there to actually make some progress given time and latitude.

Eve Tushnet reviews Ito, Moore, and Millar. Her comments about Ultimate X-Men are particularly enjoyable. That book really did provide some highly entertaining ass-kicking popsplosive bang for the buck.

Lotsa yuks over at Derek Martinez‘s place, who’s rounded up the good, the bad, and the ugly of the year in comics. (Link courtesy of ADD; Derek, I’ve got no idea why I hadn’t blogrolled you, but consider that problem rectified.)

BEST SUBJECT HEADING EVER

Kevin Melrose discusses the sad level of bare-minimum suggestions for comics retailers to improve their image. It’s funny, because it’s true.

Mick Martin needs manga recommendations. Help him out, and tell ‘im Sean T. sent you!

Finally, my Thanksgiving suggestion to you: Give thanks for good comics! Sitting on my bookshelves right now are unread copies of Dave McKean’s Cages, Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse, and two volumes worth of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. I’ve still got half of Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar, Jim Woodring’s The Frank Book, and Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer to go through. And if that’s not enough, I can flip through my already-read copies of various books I got this year, like Unstable Molecules, Clumsy, Unlikely, AEIOU, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Blankets, Kramers Ergot 4, Teratoid Heights, Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, Battle Royale, Tomie, Ripple, 100%, DK2, New X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, Rubber Necker, Powers, Alias, Daredevil, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Ultimates, Incredible Hulk, Truth, Born, Vikings, Forlorn Funnies, Tepid, Big Questions, Chrome Fetus, Amazing Spider-Man, Savage Dragon, Astro City, The Filth, and on and on and on, to say nothing of older stuff I first came across in the past 365. We comics fans (can’t believe I’m using that formation, but there you have it) really do have a lot to be thankful for, if we’re lucky enough to know where to look.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

I’m not trying to contribute to the whole “argu[ing] endlessly” bit here, but the fact that even intelligent comics fans still feel comfortable calling manga formatting a “trend” is pretty much why the industry’s in so much trouble in the first place….

The other day, a good friend of mine who’s half Jewish said matter of factly that he’s of the belief that within 10-15 years, we’ll see another Holocaust. I was surprised to find myself not entirely in disagreement. Anyone who’s been following European (and of course Muslim) political discourse recently could tell you of the shocking level of Jew-hatred that’s pretty much taken for granted at this point.

Case in point: this cartoon has just won an award from the British Political Cartoon Society. I know, I know, we go through this little two-step every time some hack shits out a sledgehammer-subtle indictment of Ariel Sharon & Israel–“he’s criticizing a man/a government, not being an anti-Semite!” And as usual, I call bullshit: Anti-Semitism has always presented “legitimate” political concerns as a false face (anti-capitalism, anti-Communism, pacifism, protectionism, and on and on). Moreover, such cartoons inevitably tap into a centuries-deep resevoir of anti-Jew imagery (hook noses, money-grubbing, puppet-mastery, the blood libel), or compare the Jewish state to the anti-Jewish state, namely Nazi Germany, or indeed swipe ideas directly from the Nazis themselves. And this one, in which Ariel Sharon is show devouring a Palestinian baby, is no exception. However noxious you happen to find Sharon or his policies, this is the equivalent of, say, drawing Colin Powell in a loincloth, chucking a spear at Iraq while raping a white woman. It’s anti-Semitism in its new, more respectable outfit: anti-Israelism. So much classier than brown shirts and armbands, isn’t it?

But what’s even more troubling than the fact that this cartoon was drawn and then published by people who one imagines are not drunken skinheads but respected members of the political journalism community, is that that same community saw fit to say that this is The Best of what they have to offer. The cartoon came out and was widely criticized, and you know what the British Political Cartoon Society thought? They thought that not only did this cartoon deserve to be defended, but that a message needed to be sent to the world at large: This is truth. This is courage. This is the way the world should be viewed. We should look at a drawing that would be at home in the most grotesque propaganda of pogroms and Inquisitions past, and think to ourselves, “bravo.”

It’s got me thinking something very, very different.

David Fiore, God bless ‘im, has been breathing some rareified air of late: In a couple of posts, he essentially argues that the best art is like big-company supercomics–never-ending, closure-free, static characters, obsessively concerned with minute variations on a very limited number of themes, and without an author to speak of. I wholeheartedly agree, which is why I’ve advanced my theory that General Hospital is the finest narrative work of the 20th century.

I kid!

I appreciate what Dave’s saying on some level–formally, at least, “normal” mainstream genre-comic storytelling is interesting, insofar as it’s so goddamn bizarre. But the assertion that it’s superior to narrative art as we know it in virtually every other form (aside from soap operas, and perhaps professional wrestling) is so transparently ludicrous to me that I wonder if I’m missing something. Hey, I like superhero comics as much, if not more, than the next guy, but I like superhero comics by certain people, and when those certain people stop working on a given superhero comic, I tend to not like that comic anymore. As characters/concepts, some of the superheroes are pretty fascinating–which is, I suppose, why I tried out works featuring them and subsequently discovered good authors in the first place–but privileging them over the people who write and draw them? That way lies madness! I mean, we’re basically talking about favoring run-of-the-mill post-Lee/Kirby/Ditko Marvel fare (it’s got to be “run of the mill,” since we’re rejecting the influence of the author, so those cries of “what about XXX’s run on XXX” will be unheeded, thanks!) over, say, Chris Ware (or Alan Moore or Frank Miller or Grant Morrison, by the way). I understand that it’s difficult to reach an objective standpoint in art criticism, but, uh, c’mon.

Moreover, despite what Dave suggests, when freed from the constraints of the product-producing mainstream machine, creators do have godlike control over their creations. They can’t control viewer reactions, obviously, but viewer reactions change what’s on the page not one whit. What’s there is what’s there is what’s there.

John Jakala has some further thoughts on this, focusing on David’s rejection of endings. Listen, we’ve all been burned by a lousy ending, but we’ve all been burned by lousy beginnings, too. Should we just give up writing, then? Dave, I’m glad you’re enjoying the trees and all, but there’s a whole forest out there!

So I’m at the X-Men 2 DVD release party at Jay-Z’s 40/40 club last night (well, that was a hoot to see in print) and it occurred to me, it’s not very hard to be Mark Ronson, is it? I enjoyed the set he spun, but seriously, I could have played Wu-Tang’s “Pinky Ring” into the Stone Roses’s “Fool’s Gold” into the Rolling Stones’s “Emotional Rescue” easily enough, and for a lot less than $5000 an hour, too. “Pass That Dutch” into “Once in a Lifetime”? Happens in my iTunes every day, folks. This cat is like the patron saint of twentysomething rock nerds.

I’ve always wanted to use that as an entry title. It doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m actually going to say, but it’s pretty amusing, no?

Anyway, Alan David Doane has written up his picks for the Best Comics of 2003. I’m glad that he ignored all the cavilling that goes on about whether or not reprints or first-time collections count as having come out in a particular year. If you can’t count The Frank Book, Palomar, and Quimby the Mouse in a Best-Of list due to some technicality, it’s really not much of a Best-Of list, is it?

I agree with pretty much all the books he’s selected that I myself have read (I’ll reserve judgement on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II till I read it in its collected form, however; issue by issue I found it relatively disappointing). I do feel that he’s overselling Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier a bit. Visually, the book’s frankly incredible, and it’s inspiring to see a relatively young cartoonist attempt a work of such ambition. However, I think that towards the end Hornschemeier’s desire to deliver an emotional knock-out punch forces the story off the tracks of believability a bit. Like Craig Thompson’s Blankets, this is a gorgeous, involving, moving, but not-perfect work, one that I’m reasonably certain will be surpassed by its creator in his subsequent efforts.

I might come up with a list of my own, provided I develop the attention span to look through what I bought this year to figure out what actually was released this year–a possibility, if not necessarily a strong one. I’ll tell you right off the bat that Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights and Marc Bell’s Shrimpy & Paul and Friends would be near the top of the list, and Bendis and Morrison’s genre work (particularly Daredevil, The Filth, Powers, and New X-Men) would be represented pretty highly as well. But till then, if you’re looking for Christmas shopping ideas for the irredeemable nerd in your life, Alan’s list is as good a place to start as you’re likely to find.

Floppies/Pamphlets/Singles stink

Manga is the future

Rinse

Repeat

UPDATE: John Jakala has expressed to me his wish that I’d written the above in haiku format. Eager to throw him some sort of bone (since that whole comments-feature thing just ain’t gonna happen), and seeing as I’m not one ever to turn down the opportunity to write haiku:

PERENNIAL TOPICS OF DEBATE

a haiku by Sean T. Collins

Manga’s the future

Pamphlets/Floppies/Singles stink

Lather, rinse, repeat

Terriffic interview with Clive Barker over at his official fan site, Lost Souls. This one gives a progress report on virtually every project the man’s working on these days, and there’s something like two dozen of them. Most promising among them are a film version of the masterful short stories “The Midnight Meat Train” and “Dread,” originally from his Books of Blood anthologies; the “final” Hellraiser/Pinhead story he’s been talking about writing for some time now; plans for further installments in the three (!) series of novels still ongoing in his ouevre–the Abarat Quartet, the Galilee saga, and the Books of the Art; and the first rumblings of a mythological-in-scope series he plans on beginning in his late 50s, a Tolkien-like endeavor which he promises will dwarf everything else he’s done. C’mon, Clive–we don’t have eternity!

1) Ol’ Dirk Deppey gives Brian Bendis quite the ribbing today about the superhero scribe’s description of his upcoming Secret Wars project. Personally I think Dirk’s being unfair. Yes, Bendis’s choice of words–“A gritty real world take on the idea of a secret superhero war”–is, ahem, unfortunate. But Bendis’s work to date has evinced none of the ghastly, unimaginative, dreary cliches that his dopey phraseology calls to mind. We’ve seen any number of mindless atrocities in comic-book form touted as “gritty, real-world takes on superheroes”; I’d like to give Bendis the benefit of the doubt that this won’t be one of them.

2) The ongoing effort to shoot the zombie that is pamphlet-format comics in the goddamn head once and for all, most recently taken up by Franklin Harris, has met a couple of opponents, namely Johnny Bacardi and Tegan Gjovaag. Johnny and Tegan rightly point out that floppy comics are easy enough to travel with (I’ve taken many on airplanes myself; like Johnny, I bag-and-board mine, so they’re both thin and relatively durable). Tegan also deflates Franklin’s argument that collectability makes floppies too precious to actually read. Franklin alleges that today’s small print runs equate to big bucks later on, but he overlooks the fact that those small print runs all end up in the hands of anal-retentive bag-and-boarders (ahem) who are convinced that their copies of the Death of Superman will put their kids through college one day. Beyond the artificial demand created by things like Wizard’s price guides, most floppies won’t be worth much of anything. So hey, read ’em all you want!

But these little niceties, alas, amount to a fart in a hurricane compared to the overwhelming evidence that the world at large has less than no use for the stupid things. Tegan claims that “the form has worked for well over 50 years. Tegan, define “working well,” would you? No one buys them except a coterie of, what, 250,000 or so diehards in an increasingly insular market whose idea of growth seems to consist largely of puffing up its cheeks as it thrusts its head in the sand. The comics that sell in big numbers–manga–and the comics that make a big pop-cultural impact–trades and graphic novels–are unsurprisingly in a totally different, much more book-like format. That’s what the kids are reading, and to quote Mrs. Bobby Brown, I believe the children are our future. And then there’s the whole angle of cost-effectivness–don’t make me break out The Manga Stack of Intimidation…

Stuart Moore has detailed all the reasons that the industry is stuck with pamphlets, largely thanks to the backwardness of its current audience and retailership. But just because we have to rely on them now doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking to, and planning for, and doing our best to bring about, the future.

Once they find these guys, who I think it’s safe to assume have not aged at all due to their ingestion of an elixir derived from hidden jungle herbs, they should have them take their ancient warrior skills and hunt for the Abominable Snowman. Does this not make sense to everyone?

Thanks to the generosity of John Jakala, I read the two-volume horror series Tomie, by manga creator Junji Ito, this week. To quote Lost Highway, “that is some seriously spooky shit, sir.” The very concept–human being as tumor–is one familiar to any fan of Anglosphere body horror–Cronenberg and Barker, for example. But here, it’s pursued with a mad capriciousness, fusing the tumor metaphor with the viral metaphor to produce something truly terrifying and seemingly everlasting. The imagery is as strong as you’re likely to come across in a comic; the carpet that gives birth to a horde of empty-socketed faces is a favorite of mine.

However, I wonder if I didn’t stumble across a big obstacle to the effectiveness of comic-book horror, something we’ve been talking about around these parts for ages: Later that night, as I lay me down to sleep, some of those horrifying images started filtering into my mind again. This tends to happen when I watch or read something really frightening–but unlike those peskily persistent pictures of the Shining twins or It‘s evil clown Pennywise, these mental images appeared complete with panel borders and folded-back page edges, as though I was looking not at the image itself (the “real thing”), but the book itself! It’s hard to be truly kept up at night by the recurring image of ink on a bunch of pieces of paper…

Holy Moses, was I ever right. I posted the hell out of myself today. There may be more to come–who knows?–but for now you’ve got:

(1) Gay marriage stuff

(2) Horror comics stuff

(3) General comics stuff

(4) Jim Treacher avenged

(5) Terror attack stuff

(6) Bush’s speech stuff

(7) Saddam/al Qaeda stuff

(8) Anti-war protestor stuff

(9) Smutty silliness

Fire at will!

“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy.”

–George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Yesterday, in the parking lot at the train station, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “BUSH LIED – PEOPLE DIED.” I’ve often wondered why the anti-war movement (if a contingent that can only muster one-eighth the amount of protestors that took to the streets against a fox-hunting ban can be called a movement–I’m sorry, I should be above cheap shots, shouldn’t I?) have stuck so hard to these strident, all-caps claims of mendacity.

Then I listend to Bush’s speech at Whitehall Palace yesterday. Here was the most powerful man on the planet repudiating the realpolitik of decades past that saw the free world coddling Middle Eastern tyrants and thugocracies, repudiating ethnicist claims that Muslims are incapable of participating in democracy, calling for the establishment of an independent democractic Palestinian state, taking Israel to task for provocative and unjust policies yet defending its right to exist untrammelled by random violence, calling for an end to the rising tide of anti-Semitism, defending the removal of genocidal madmen in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, calling for the rights of women to be respected around the globe, demanding increased levels of freedom and tolerance from our so-called friends in the Muslim world, declaring that dictatorship is always harmful, asserting the need for freedom of speech, press, and religion, citing Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic internationalism as a good to be returned to, and generally declaring his intent to “raise up an ideal of democracy in every part of the world.”

This is the most radically liberal speech I’ve ever heard an American president give. It’s a tremendous break from years of “looking the other way” when it came to the behavior of friends and enemies alike in countries that contain one fifth of humankind. It advocated policies that have been close to my bleeding heart for years, policies I never thought I’d hear advocated by this or any President.

If I were the anti-war left, I’d be yelling “BUSH LIED!” too. The kind of cognitive dissonance a speech like that would engender in me would require nothing less than to deny that the man meant a single word he said.

This morning, after hearing about the appalling dual terroist attack in Istanbul today (the second such attack in a week, this one levelled against people guilty of being British as opposed to guilty of being Jewish), I was listening to the joint press conference being held by Bush and Blair, and this question stood out:

“What do you say to people who today conclude that British people have died and been maimed as a result of you appearing here today, shoulder-to-shoulder with a controversial American President?”

I’ll let Blair himself answer:

“What has caused the terrorist attack today in Turkey is not the President of the United States, is not the alliance between America and Britain. What is responsible for that terrorist attack is terrorism, are the terrorists. And our response has got to be to unify in that situation, to put the responsibility squarely on those who are killing and murdering innocent people, and to say, we are going to defeat you, and we’re not going to back down or flinch at all from this struggle.”

The fact that it is necessary for a major world leader to have to take the time to say something like that is disturbing to me. Unfortunately, the notion that we may now blame Bush/the U.S./the West/Jews for every terroist-attack death everywhere is becoming increasingly popular.

Fortunately, it’s an easy argument to defeat. Before 9/11, this cowboy president of ours had made it absolutely clear that he was planning on keeping his hands off of not just Iraq, but really every other country on the planet. Remember the whole “no nation building” thing? Back then, he was criticized as being too isolationist by the same people now convinced he’s out to conquer the world. What, then, prompted Islamist terrorists from atomizing 3,000 people that day? Bush’s interventist approach toward Texas?

Similarly, take a look at that MSBNC article about today’s attacks. It points out that up until today, the most deadly terrorist atrocity in Turkey’s history was a 1977 assault against leftists. Surely they weren’t advocating an imperialist oil war at the time.

And as Christopher Hitchens points out, one of the synagogues devastated last Saturday had already been the site of a terrorist attack, back when Reagan and Thatcher were in charge of the US and UK and Saddam was our friend. Unless those terrorists were time travellers, it’s difficult to understand how their actions were caused by the regime change policy.

It’s also difficult to understand the mentality that leads one to ask a question like that one from this morning’s press conference, but I’m trying. You can’t defeat what you don’t understand, after all.

Well, I was right–I’ve posted a lot today so far, and there’s no end in sight. Right now your options are:

(1) Jim Treacher avenged

(2) Terror attack stuff

(3) Bush’s speech stuff

(4) Saddam/al Qaeda stuff

(5) Anti-war protestor stuff

(6) Smutty silliness

Pick yr poison!

I don’t really have all that much to say about the Massachusetts court’s decision regarding gay marriage, because I’m just too damn happy about it. Gay people are normal people who feel love just like anyone else, and deserve the basic human right to enshrine that love through marriage just like anyone else. End of story.

I respect the arguments made by same-sex marriage opponents like Eve Tushnet–who, insofar as she is gay herself, may be reasonably excluded from the ranks of gay-bashing troglodyte SSM opponents like John Derbyshire–but, frankly, I don’t buy a single one of them. Maybe it’s because I actually happen to be married, but the idea that as such I’m just some cog in a societal machine designed to produce and properly rear babies is dehumanizing and ridiculous to me. Doubly so, because, unless you accept specious and antequated theories about gender roles that successful same-sex or one-parent families are currently giving lie to day in and day out, it actually winds up being an argument for gay marriage, not against it. (Moreover, scratch someone who’s constructed elaborate legal and philosophical arguments against gay marriage, and more often than not you’ll find someone who thinks that God doesn’t like homosexuality underneath. That’s not the God I know, to put it mildly; and even if it was, that’s not how we do things in the United States of America, thank, well, God.)

Human rights were extended to a large group of humans the other day. Bravo.

Die, pamphlets, die! Franklin Harris lists all the reasons why the conventional comic book needs to go away. Unfortunately, Stuart Moore has already listed all the reasons why they can’t, not if the industry wants to stay afloat right now. This tension is what Mick Martin unconsciously picked up in his follow-up post to Franklin’s.

Bob Morales, the writer behind the controversial “black Captain America” miniseries Truth, gives a lengthy interview over at Newsarama today. I liked Truth quite a bit. It took a couple of issues to get going, and along the way there was a misstep or two (the execution of hundreds of black soldiers, for example; Morales concedes this was based on urban myth more than anything else, and I think it gives people predisposed against a series examining the shady doings of the U.S. military an easy excuse not to take the book seriously), but once it kicked into gear it became one of the most startling and disturbing horror comics (well, that’s what it was) in recent memory. Morales even redeemed some of the unrelenting harshness with a kindly, humanistic coda. Well worth checking out when the trade collection is at long last released.

Also at Newsarama, Brian Bendis talks about his upcoming Secret Wars project. If you guessed it’d involve black ops, well, you’d be right–you’d be right 99 times out of 100 at Marvel these days. But seriously, folks, I’m looking forward to this, despite its being a remake of one of the most egregious emblems of 1980s funnybook dopiness, because Bendis has an uncanny knack for taking the absolute most fanboy-button-pushing geekiest ideas imaginable and executing them in a remarkably non-fanboy fashion.

Speaking of Bendis, Jason Kimble eloquently defends the man’s work against his detractors (John Jakala being a prominent one). John was certainly mistaken in calling Bendis’s dialogue ripped-off Tarantinoisms–it’s actually ripped-off Aaron Sorkinisms. But Bendis is actually better than Sorkin, because the dialogue is crafted (as Jason suggests) not to sound clever, but to sound human.

Steven Grant argues that comics should be the new drugs. Actually, he argues that comics should be vehicles of unfettered and boldly original imagination, which is absolutely correct (and, as usual, it’s kind of a bummer that this even needs to be said), and then slaps an “edgy” catch-phrase on top, which I could do without. But his points remain rock-solid. (And keep in mind, altcomix fans, that this does not mean everything has to be gonzo fantasy–Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of the most imaginative comics I’ve ever read. There’s more than one way to skin a Cheshire Cat.)

I always dig when NeilAlien starts talking about Dr. Strange, even when I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Bill Sherman advocates the slow-and-steady approach to Love & Rockets, saying that things take off in Volume Two. Forager goes contrarian, saying the hardcover Palomar collection is too big and unwieldy to really sink your teeth into. But contrary to his opinion, I actually did curl up in bed with it last night (yep, went out and bought it yesterday). Haven’t read very far yet, but it’s tough not to be impressed as hell with that first “Chelo’s Burden” story, isn’t it? When was the last time you saw a comics story told that way, anyway?

In that same post, Forager responds to my defense of Top Shelf as a company not primarily concerned with style over substance. I’ll grant him that Top Shelf is definitely tied into the mini-comics aesthetic, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And I also think he’s right that the success of Blankets is in part attributable to its larger-than-life format, but not simply for the novelty factor J.W. describes–it also happens to be the best way to have told that particular story. I’ve said in the past that little previews of the book left me cold, but reading the whole massive thing made everything “make sense” to me. It’s to Craig’s credit that he insisted on releasing the thing the way he did, rather than serializing it into much less effective individual installments.

Big Sunny D responds to my assertion that Jimmy Corrigan isn’t really horror despite his claims to the contrary by… agreeing? Man, this is why I love the comics blogosphere–you don’t see this happen on message boards, well, ever!

Chris Allen joins the Ross/Riefenstahl fray, mainly in service of his belief that Ross is great. In so doing he fires a couple shots my way for mocking how Ross draws all his superheroes as pudgy dimps, which point of view I proudly stand by. (No offense to gym teachers or guards at women’s correctional facilities.) Chris, I wasn’t going for “cheap yuks” at all–I really do think the way the characters look is a problem. We’re clearly meant to be impressed by Ross’s heroes, and instead we think “wow, these look like slightly overweight people in goofy superhero costumes.” (In other words, they look like his models, who tend actually to be slightly overweight people in goofy superhero costumes themselves.) That’s the biggest obstacle to Ross’s artistic project, not the allegations (unfounded, I think) of fascist undertones.

Shawn Fumo has a long post on manga, in response to a Johnny Bacardi post that essentially wonders what all the fuss is about. Shawn’s argument is that while the American comics mainstream attempts to graft the conventions of one genre (supeheros) on to a variety of genres with which they are occasionally incompatible (or at the very least in which the juxtaposition is not rewarding, particularly for young readers), manga repeatedly utilizes a certain set of narrative tropes (ie. methods of plotting storytelling, not capes and spandex and so forth), which work equally well in a variety of genres. I think this sounds more limited than Shawn intends it to; check out his post and see what you think.

John Jakala replies to Dave Intermittent in a similar pas de deux about the merits of manga. John argues that the reason kids like manga is that it’s actually entertaining and geared towards them, two things the bulk of mainstream American comics can’t seem to manage; as a grown-up, “your mileage may vary.” (There is plenty of enjoyable, adult-centric manga out there, though.) Anyway, Dirk Deppey’s similar assertion was John’s inspiration here.

Rick Geerling offers an extremely long and impassioned rant about what the hell is wrong with superhero comics anyway. He charges that the industry-dictated need to keep the franchise characters’ storylines open-ended for decade after decade strips them of all potential for true change, innovation, and lasting resonance. He’s got an uphill battle to fight if he thinks DC’s going to let Bruce Wayne die so that we can enjoy our copies of Arkham Asylum more, but the point’s a fascinating one. This is actually an argument that comes up when discussing the philosophical ramifications of immortality–the idea that you need death to be able to weigh and make sense out of life, because death puts a cap on things, giving you a sense of scale, relativity, purposefulness, etc. Is the same true for comics? Alan Moore, in his introduction to early collected editions of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, argued that it was, that legends lose their impact without a denouement. I’ve certainly seen it argued that the big superhero characters have all been stretched well past the point of diminishing returns–despite what the marketing departments would have you believe, these aren’t mythological icons that arose out of the collective unconscious, and therefore cannot sustain the repeated use that the gods of old could. I still enjoy a good Spider-Man or Batman or even Superman story, when they come along, but would I enjoy them more if they gained the sense of finitude and permanence granted by closure? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…