Rich Johnston’s rumor column is a real bonanza of Marvel & DC gossip this week. Things seem to have reached a tipping point in the battle between the two companies.

For the past three years or so, Marvel, under the direction of Editor in Chief Joe Quesada (with assists from former DC/Vertigo editors Axel Alonso and, up until a year or so ago, Stuart Moore), have done their damndest to become the “cool” publisher, wooing some of the biggest (and occasionally best) mainstream writers and artists, putting them on the big-name superhero’s books, and letting them run wild. Though fanboy reaction has been decidedly mixed (“How dare they screw with my favorite tights-wearing do-gooder!”), New Marvel has generated more sales, publicity, critical acclaim, and (most importantly) damn good books than any superhero-company regime in recent memory. (Brian Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil, Bruce Jones’s Hulk, Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men and The Ultimates, Pete Milligan’s X-Statix (nee X-Force), (to a lesser extent) J. Michael Straczynski’s Amazing Spider-Man, and (to an enormous extent) Grant Morrison’s New X-Men are seen as having led the charge.) Comparatively conservative AOLTW division DC responded largely by playing dead, occasionally growing a star in their Vertigo or Wildstorm subdivisions only (usually) to see those stars snatched up by Marvel’s creator-friendly editorial regime.

Recently, things have changed. Marvel President Bill Jemas, never one to shirk from rubbing fans or retailers the wrong way if he thought it was good for the company, is now thought to be doing the same with creators through his increasingly intrusive editorial hand. Jemas himself is probably caught in the crossfire between the more money-minded Hollywood side of Marvel (where the real cash is harvested anyway) and the comparatively ars gratia artis publishing wing. Meanwhile, DC’s new Editorial VP, Dan DiDio, has made it his goal to ape the old Joe Q. business model, fighting to get big creators, give them big money, assign them to big characters, and tell the bigwigs at DC and AOL to leave them the hell alone. This has paid off with a slew of big-name superhero guys signing “exclusive” contracts with DC in recent months and, especially, the past couple of weeks. In the crazy world of comics publishing, exclusives don’t mean as much as you’d think they might–allowances are usually made for work already promised to other publishers; occasionally work is allowed to be done for indie companies, the main point being “Don’t work for The Other Big Company”; sometimes creators work so slowly that despite being “exclusive” with a company, said company may go months or even over a year without actually publishing any of their work–but still, they’re a barometer of which way the mainstream’s superstars think the wind is blowing. Lately, it’s been blowing in DC’s direction, with tons of high-profile projects either announced or rumored to be in the works. All told, DC has either gotten or is said to be gunning for Art Adams, Chuck Austen, Brian Azzarello, Chris Bachalo, Mark Bagley, Brian Bendis, Bryan Hitch, Bruce Jones, Adam Kubert, Jeph Loeb, Alex Maleev, Mark Millar, Grant Morrison, Eduardo Risso, Greg Rucka, Tim Sale, Mark Waid, and Bill Willingham, just to name some–a far cry from the company’s previous don’t-rock-the-boat approach to its big characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern et al).

Momentum began gathering in earnest at the San Diego Comic-Con, where DC took advantage of Marvel’s reduced presence by announcing exclusive contracts with Rucka, Sale, Loeb, and (the big shocker) Morrison. Things promise to reach critical mass in two weeks at Chicago’s WizardWorld convention, where both companies (Marvel will have a pretty big contingent on hand this time) promise huge announcements. ADDTF just might have a couple of representatives on hand, and they’re waiting with bated breath for the fireworks to start.

In his column, Johnston points out that even the most thorough poaching of Marvel by DC could turn out good for the former company, freeing up room on the big books for the up-and-comers currently working with smaller characters in the Tsunami and Epic lines. If such a promotion comes hand-in-hand with less interference from corporate or editorial, this might all well be a blessing in disguise.

…for proving to me that The Money Pit is almost as funny in Spanish as it is in English. God, what a funny movie. The part where Tom Hanks laughs at the bathtub that fell through the floor may be my favorite scene in any comedy ever.

According to the Comics Continuum (link courtesy of Markisan Naso), Marvel’s Hollywood head honcho, Avi Arad, said plans continue apace for Elektra, Iron Man, Deathlok, The Fantastic Four, Blade 3, The Punisher, Spider-Man 2, and (dum dum DUM!) Hulk 2. In other words, the kinda sorta disappointing showing of Hulk 1 (again, I’ll just say that I don’t know how anyone in their right mind expected this weird, weird film to make Spider-Man box) was not a deathblow to the Marvel Movie Money Machine, as some are beginning to theorize (love how that link is subtitled “freefall,” Dirk!). ‘Course, it remains to be seen how well each of these projects will do, but the gravy train’s still rollin’. Moreover, as Jim Henley points out, you don’t need movie tie-ins to make big bank off superhero licensing–just ask DC Comics! (On the other hand, you may not need them–but it helps.)

My take? I don’t see “superhero-comic-book movies” as a trend, because unlike other recently deceased Hollywood fads (teen movies, self-reflexive pop-culture-reference-laden horror films), the superhero flicks produced so far are sufficiently differentiated from one another to offer distinct moviegoing experiences for the audience, even if only because the biggest of the characters (Spider-Man, the Hulk) are already familiar enough with the audience to qualify as individual experiences simply by virtue of their lead characters alone. Aside from that, Spider-Man was a rollicking adventure for kids and young teenagers that captured the retro vibe grown-up fans were looking for; Daredevil was a dark, operatic take on a pulp hero that most viewers weren’t already familiar with as a comic-book superperson; the Blade movies were action-horror that few people associate with the superhero genre anyway; Hulk was a weird “term-paper blockbuster,” and moreover was more King Kong than Superman; the X-Men movies were sci-fi action with enough queer theory thrown in to keep things interesting for the hipsters and, again, less awareness of the franchise’s comic-book roots; The Punisher could go one of two ways: a supergrim Death Wish kind of movie or a live-action Road Runner cartoon a la Garth Ennis’s early issues on the comic series; Fantastic Four is rumored to be either sci-fi adventure or a sci-fi tinged suburban dramedy–either way, not too Super; Elektra is a hot-chick-kicks-ass movie waiting to happen; Deathlok will most likely be a black Terminator; Iron Man I’ve heard they’ll be selling as James Bond with more gadgets; I know it’s not Marvel, but even the relatively bomb-y League of Extraordinary Gentlemen would have been number one at the box office its opening weekend had its studio not made the dumbass decision to release it against another period quasi-fantasy swashbuckler–one with the full might of Disney behind it–The Pirates of the Carribean, and again, civilians have no clue that League was a comic book first.

These differences may look superficial to people heavily invested in the theory that you can’t mine anything worthwhile out of the spandex-wearing set, but the average person (as I’ve said time and again) does not share this anti-superhero bias, and if a superhero movie is unique and interesting enough, they’ll go see it.

I’ve now watched The Fellowship of the Ring so many times it’s like a form of comfort food for me. Having a three-and-a-half hour version of your favorite movie comes in handy when your wife is out of town and you only get about 15 channels that aren’t Spanish or Home Shopping. Today I was watching it with the director & writer commentary track playing, and it’s still a tremendously entertaining film, in part because of the incredible level of detail and love (they wouldn’t have bothered with the former if they hadn’t had the latter) invested into every shot by the production team. A few brief musings three of my favorite moments in the film:

1) The post-Moria mourning scene. If I had to guess, I’d say it was this sequence that made moviegoers realize they weren’t just watching a great action film, but a great film, period. Most action movies gloss over the death of even the most important characters, content with someone shouting “Noooo!”, then having someone else pat them on the back, toss them a cold one, say “He was a good soldier,” and then it’s back to ass-kicking. Here we emerge from the incredibly intense and dark underground realm of Moria into an otherworldly, blindingly white hill, the sun blazing down. The diegetic sound is removed, leaving us instead with a single mournful boy-soprano voice singing a song of grief. The individual reactions to the fall of Gandalf by each member of the Fellowship are catalogued in uncomfortably intimite close-ups: Gimli the Dwarf enraged, struggling to return to the mines and slay the orcs who brought them to this sorry pass; Boromir of Gondor, holding Gimli back, his face showing that he knows only too well how futile the seeking of vengeance would be; Sam the Hobbit, collapsing to the ground in sorrow; Merry & Pippin, clinging to each other, seeming to wonder just how culpable their silly antics were in their friend’s death; Legolas the Elf, a look of stunned surprise on his face, one totally unaccustomed to seeing the death of a friend up close; Frodo, who in the words of director Peter Jackson has a look of grief on his face “so powerful that it should frighten the audience”; Aragorn the ranger, who allows himself only a moment of pure sorrow before reluctantly assuming the mantle of leadership placed upon him by his fallen friend. Boromir says of the hobbits, “Give them a moment, for pity’s sake,” but Aragorn insists on spurring them on, knowing that the orcs on their heels will show no pity should they catch up to the greiving fellowship. The performances are amazing, but the imagery alone–the white light, the barren hill–say almost all that needs to be said. This was when everything clicked for me, sitting there in the theater: “This isn’t just great–it’s a masterpiece.”

2) I first saw the Moria mines sequence in a press screening several months before the release of the film. That 15-20 minute chunk was released and shown at Cannes, and then at select locations for members of the media. I saw it in New York with a friend, and when we left–completely floored, of course–he said “This is the first movie that captures the sheer scale of good fantasy. Moria was exactly as big on the screen as it was in my head.” For me, the shot that established this scale once and for all was not the big reveal of the Great Hall, but the arrow’s-eye-view shot of the orc archer as he gets killed by Legolas. At this point, you’ve had some more or less vertical overhead shots that simply show the space immediately surrounding where our heroes are running down the ancient staircase in the Mines, or shots taken from right among them. Suddenly you’re strapped onto an arrow, flung hundreds of yards over an enormous chasm, and ram right into an orc’s forehead. We then switch to a shot from right behind the orc–or where he used to be, because he’s plummeting deep in to the chasm the arc of the arrow just described. Using strictly intrafilmic means–the arrow, the body of the orc–Jackson defines the space of the Mines breathtakingly. This shot sequence didn’t receive nearly the level of attention of the equally brilliant Orthanc “helicopter” shot, in which the camera panned over the gates of Isengard, past the fiery pits in which Saruman’s orcs were working, up the tower of Orthanc on the wings of Gandalf’s friend the moth, then rocketed back down the tower deep underground and stopped at an orc swordsmith’s anvil. It may not have been nearly as showy, but it was just as effective, and for me, perhaps even more impressive.

3) Another smart bit of film wonkery came at the very end of the scene on the snowy mountainside in which Boromir reluctantly returns the Ring to Frodo after the hobbit drops it. As Boromir turns his back from Frodo after handing it off and mussing his hair, his shield clanks against his back with a THUD. That simple foley-art sound effect force the audience to notice Boromir’s distinctive round shield–which we next notice near the very end of the film, when its simple presence near the base of a tree is used to indicate ominously that Boromir has gone off from the Fellowship to track down Frodo. One split-second sound effect does the work of probably thirty seconds exposition. Fantastic.

He might not even know we exist, but Gary Groth’s getting quite a lot of attention from the comics blogosphere over his recent critical call to arms. Alan David Doane (whose writing is always sharp, even when it’s 180-degrees from my own POV, and who moreover has yet to give me a hard time about having the initials ADD in my blogbreviation) offers a brief take on Groth’s return to the pages of The Comics Journal. At this point, there seems to be something of a consensus forming about the piece: We all wanted to like it, and we all did, sorta. His heart and mind were both in the right place, but something about the essay seems to have left us all a little let down. I’d liken it to an opened bottle of soda you left in the fridge while you were on vacation. You made sure to screw the cap on extra tight, and the fridge was extra cold, and when you get back from the airport you’re all dehydrated from the recycled air on the plane and you pour a glass and take a big gulp and ahhhh! Delightfully chilly refreshment… except that it’s a little… flat. Alan, Bill Sherman, and I all applauded Gary’s sentiment, but each of us seemed to be looking for a little something more. I think we all also agree that the additional essays on criticism by Greg Cwiklik and Rich Kreiner that flanked Groth’s piece (not to mention actual good criticism in action, in the form of by Darcy Sullivan and Daniel Holloway, as well as the hugely rewarding interview with Mad-man Will Elder conducted by Groth himself) provided just such a little something.

Also worthy of note in Doane’s piece is his lament that the Journal is “not entirely holding the moral high ground when it comes to providing critical analysis of worthwhile, groundbreaking works.” It turns out that Journal editor Milo George is well aware of this fact–indeed, it’s part of his plan! This thread on the Journal’s message board indicates that timely reviews of even major works are not a priority at George’s Journal. As someone who believes that (for better, in most cases; for worse, in some) the Journal is the magazine of record for the comics medium, it upsets me to see that a premium is not placed on documenting the works that define the state-of-the-art-form as they come out. Important books can wait months or even more than a year before being discussed in the Journal’s pages, and though I may be simply back-seat editing at this point (it’s just the editor in me; I happen to think the Journal’s as good now as it’s been since I’ve been reading it), I think the comics-reading public’s the poorer for this–to say nothing of the creators of the work in question, who surely feel the dearth of good print criticism as dearly as we do, or of the Journal itself, which I believe would be more of a living, breathing thing if it were an up-to-date chronicle of the medium’s best (and worst).

Read this story about how the seige on the Tweedle-Dee & Tweedle-Dum Hussein’s final hideout has led to a bonanza of intelligence and tips, including one that enabled the capture of Saddam’s bodyguards. Then read the last two paragraphs of the main section, brought to you by Reuters. I’ll paraphrase: “While this may seem like good news, EVERYTHING ACTUALLY JUST SUCKS.” The overall opinion of Iraqis is asserted with no corroboration, no justification, no documentation; a completely unrelated story is tacked on just for shits and giggles at the Americans’ expense. Both are 100% pure spin. It’d almost be breathtaking, if it weren’t so insulting.

Newsblogging is the future, baby. When I spin stuff, I link to the source so you can spin it right back at me.

…but holy crap, is this adorable or what?

Bill Sherman offers another thoughtful take on Gary Groth’s call for more rigorous comics criticism, emphasizing the actual need for service-journalism style “reviews” as opposed to criticism proper. He also points out that the comics blogosphere is more willing to dole out negatives, and do so fairly eloquently, than perhaps Gary gives us credit for. Although in fairness to Gary, comics blogs are still a relatively rarer content model than webzines, news sites, fan sites, and message boards, all of which seem to be more of what Gary was talking about in his “they’re sometimes good, but” dismissal of online criticism. (Also, even the non-“fannish” sites Bill lists, this one included, take superhero comics seriously, so in Gary-Land, how good could we be? 😉 )

Mark my words, Bill: Next year’s San Diego Comic Con will have a panel on comics blogging.

President Bush met today with Abu Mazen Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Prime Minister and Holocaust expert. Why “Holocaust expert”? Because anyone who asserts, as Mazen Abbas does, that the Jewish body count was exaggerated, and indeed that Jewish Zionists encouraged and covertly aided what “Holocaust” there was so as to shore up sympathy for the creation of a Jewish state upon the war’s end, is obviously privy to information I’ve never come across. (Link courtesy of LGF.)

I certainly support the cessation and dismantling of Israeli settelements on Palestinian land–the settlers seem like precisely the kind of religious fanatics we’d all be better off without. I wouldn’t mind seeing Ariel Sharon get the boot, as he seems to be a clumsy idiot unable to formulate any kind of coherent policy towards the Palestinians. And I also support the eventual creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, provided the society living in said state emerges from its current nightmarish murderous anti-Semitic death-cult theocratic fascist configuration. And I wholeheartedly support putting the kibosh on the loathsome, ineffectual, corrupt liar and murderer Yassir Arafat. But just because Abbas isn’t quite as bad as Arafat doesn’t mean he isn’t also a scumbag of the first order. The fact that he has yet to renounce his ludicrous attempt to blame Jews for the Holocaust (I’m sorry, “Holocaust”) shows that maybe he isn’t quite the Partner In Peace we’re all hoping for.

So Amy’s out of town, and in order to entertain myself I’m watching movies with the two V’s (violence and vomit) that I couldn’t otherwise watch. So far I’ve gone through Femme Fatale, Road to Perdition and Near Dark (very good, pretty good, disappointing), with Gangs of New York and a revisit of Body Double (Clive Barker’s personal Brian DePalma Film Recommendation to me!) on the way.

A good session of snuggles’d blow ’em all away at this point.

* At any rate

* Ostensibly

* By a fairly substantial margin

* At this point

* Dovetails nicely (haven’t used that in ages, but it’s ripe for a comeback)

* As is his wont

* Death-cult

* more blah than perhaps blah blah blah

* “scare quotes”

* stupid goddamn

* Team Comics

* Blogosphere

* Altcomix luminaries

* Blah blah blah–blah blah blah–blah blah.

* Blah blah blah (blah blah blah (blah blah) blah blah) blah.

* The Missus

The almost comically eloquent writer Victor Davis Hanson fires another diamond bullet to the brain of the Chris Matthewses of the world with this tremendous essay on Iraq. In it, he points out (among other things) that much of the money, materiel and personnel committed to Iraq for the immediate future are simply being moved from one place (Saudi Arabia and other loathsome Middle Eastern kleptocracies) to another; that we’ve lost fewer troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined than died in the Beruit Marine barracks terrorist attack back in the 80s; and that despite repeated statements to the contrary by this very administration, there still hasn’t been another major terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. In other words, we’re doing something right. Please go and read this fantastic piece. (Link courtesy of LGF.)

It’s been quite a Roxy Music roundtable in the semi-comics blogosphere lately, as the Roxy conversation mentioned in this piece by me begat this post by Johnny Bacardi begat this post by Bill Sherman begat another post by Johnny Bacardi. So it’s time for me to throw my hat back in the ring re: Bryan, Brian & Co.

I discovered Roxy Music thanks to the film Velvet Goldmine, which I’ve often and accurately said changed my life a few years back. Bowie’s definitely my primary VG-inspired obsession, but Roxy runs a very close second. And I’m one of those guys who enjoys every stage of Roxy’s career: the early, weird, Eno-driven glam; the more elegant glam of Stranded and Country Life, the transitional albums like Siren and Manifesto, and the yuppie pop of Flesh and Blood and Avalon. The thing that amazes me about this band, aside from the raw experimental zeal of the early albums and the seemingly effortless pop perfection and glamour of the later ones, is the utter confidence with which lead singer Bryan Ferry offers his paeans to romance, handed down from sources as diverse as Rudolph Valentino, Bob Dylan, Kurt Weill, Elvis Presley, Edith Piaf, Christopher Isherwood, Marilyn Monroe, Fritz Lang, Andy Warhol, and Humphrey Bogart yet somehow made not only new but completely convincing and moving by the sheer ability and versitility of the guy’s voice and the clever simplicity of his lyrics.

If I were forced at gunpoint to pick a favorite, I’d probably have to go with Avalon, surprisingly enough. I know it’s less adventurous, etc., but the instant I hear those first few notes of “More Than This” it’s like I’m off to another world. And the hits just keep on coming: “Avalon,” “Take a Chance with Me,” “To Turn You On,” and (especially) “True to Life” straddle the line between luxury and gloom, romance and loss, richness and emptiness better than any other line-up of tunes I can think of. And the production is simply gorgeous.

But I really do love almost all the other records, too. Aside from Avalon (and possibly For Your Pleasure), Stranded is, I think, the most solid, best-structured Roxy record. There’s simply no denying the juxtaposition of the exuberant “Mother of Pearl” and the quietly tragic “Sunset,” that’s for damn sure. And besides being Johnny & Bill’s favorite Roxy disc, it’s Brian Eno’s as well, despite the fact that he’d left the band (on somewhat acrimonious terms, at least as far as Bryan Ferry was concerned) just prior to its recording. It’s companion disc, Country Life, besides having one of the best album covers ever, also has the epochal “Bitter Sweet,” the super-urgent “The Thrill of It All,” and the swirling violin woodwind and string vortices of “Out of the Blue” (which in its live version on Viva! is just unbelievable). My only quibble: CL should have ended, as Roxy albums at their best tend to do, on a quiet (if not down) note with “A Really Good Time,” rather than in a musical salute to Jerry Hall with “Prairie Rose.” But hey–that’s what iPod playlists are for!

The first two Roxy records are like Bjork 25 years before the fact. Like the Icelandic maverick at her best, there’s simply not a boundary or a rule that Roxy accepted back then. Song structure, vocal techniques, instrumentation–they’d simply try anything, and goddammit, they got it to work, whether it’s “growing potatoes by the score” in “If There Is Something,” unleashing a prog-rock explosion in “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” watching Brian Eno walk away in “For Your Pleasure,” “flying down to Riooooooo” in “Virginia Plain,” watching LaGoulue and Nijinsky do the Strandsky in “Do the Strand,” or crooning an impossibly romantic salute to Humphrey Bogart in “2HB” (my favorite Roxy tune). This music must have just blown people’s brains out their ears when they first heard it.

Though the mid-career trifecta of Siren, Manifesto and Flesh and Blood are not my favorites, the highs are still ridiculously high. “Love Is the Drug,” for all its association with Roxy’s abandonment of glam, is a seriously propulsive dance track with an undeniable syncopated rhythm and those killer “ohhhhh”s from Mr. Ferry. Manifesto’s title track, with its ever-ascending list of what Bryan Ferry, at that point the living embodiment of all things luxe, stands for is both a great song and a great idea for a song. Flesh and Blood’s “Oh Yeah” is an overwhelmingly affective evocation of whatever happened to the teenage dream, and “Over You” perfectly blends post-disco New Wave-isms with, get this, the Byrds.

And then of course there are the non-album singles “Pyjamarama” (with a Pete Townshend opening and yet another ridiculously romantic lyric) and “Jealous Guy” (a John Lennon cover released at a time when, after the legend’s death, everyone was indeed dreaming of the past).

Basically, this band was a killer. Their entire catalog never leaves my iPod.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Virtual Dog Shit Creator.

Maybe this makes me sound regionalist or sexist, but when you’re calling technical or customer support and you get a woman with a Southern or Midwestern accent on the line, don’t you just say “Thank you, God”? They are invariably the friendliest, most helpful, most knowledgeable people working in any given support department. Men, people who sound like they’re from a big city or the East Coast, and people with foreign accents–you might as well hang the hell up. But talk to some woman who sounds like she might have been in a Wal-Mart commercial and not only will your problem get fixed, but you’ll probably end up paying less money for more service and maybe even get a free hat or something. It’s uncanny. It’s to the point where if I get through, I’m just going to ask to be transferred to the person who sounds the most like Dolly Parton.

Speaking of accents, my in-laws are from West Virginia. This means that very early on in my relationship with The Missus, a lot of inbreeding & redneck jokes were employed. This also means that only slightly less early on in my relationship with The Missus, I spent some time in the local hospital traction unit. I’m glad I learned that lesson the hard way, though, because (though maybe the last paragraph runs counter to this, but what the hell! I contain multitudes) nothing makes you sound like more of an asshole than making fun of someone because they sound different–particularly if they sound Southern or country or Noo Yawk/Noo Jurzey. Time and time again my somewhat unreconstructed “liberal” coworkers say things to the effect that they hate Bush because they don’t like listening to him talk, and they were absolutely merciless to Jessica Lynch (Private First Class Lynch to them, thank you very much) basically because she’s an Appalachian who never took a course on public speaking. All those much-vaunted egalitarian ideals of so much of the Left seem to disappear when confronted with a voice that twangs (or, on the flip side, says things like “whaddayagon’do”).

Every night I try to watch the news, and the only news channel I get at this point is MSNBC. Normally this isn’t so bad, but Chris Matthews is in his own freaking world at this point, spending hour after hour after hour saying things like “what did the president know, and when did he know it?” about the goddamn Nigerian uranium story. I know many people have said what I’m about to say many times in ways far more eloquent and persuasive than I’m about to, but for the love of fucking Mike, Democrats, give the goddamn uranium story a rest. Nobody else cares. Nobody. You may think this is the worst thing that any government has ever done ever, but you are in the goddamn minority, and the more you shreik about it, the more you start to look like the Republicans who kept the equally idiotic Lewinsky blood-feud going long past its sell-by date. I know, I know, war is more serious than blowjobs, blah blah blah, but Clinton lied under oath, and Bush read a line that had been vetted by several dozen other people and is still supported by the British intelligence to whom he attributed the claim right there in the speech. I know you hate Bush. I know the sound of his voice and the sight of his face makes you want to vomit. But Democrats, here’s a news flash: most people don’t feel this way. Most people don’t believe he’s lying to them every time he opens his mouth, most people didn’t make up their mind on the war over the Nigerian uranium claim and therefore feel bamboozled, and most people are not going to all of a sudden reverse their support for a popular war that we already won. And win it we did, despite all the “quagmire” and “the Iraqi people want us out” nonsense that anyone who’s honestly paying attention and has ever done some research into military history can see right through. You may want all the above to be true, but most people don’t. Whether or not you’re in the right, change your goddamn tactics and change them now, because they’re appealing only to people who enjoy saying things like “Bush stole the election” and “it’s all about oil,” or to German kids who think the CIA flew the planes into the World Trade Center, or to British leftists who think that Tony and Me by Georg Bush book is funny, and that’s not enough to get you into the White House. So please, please, please, please, please, shut up about the stupid Nigerian uranium story. Even if you’re 100% in the right about it, shutting up about it will actually give you much more of a chance to fix the underlying problems of which it is symptomatic than continuously screeching about it night after night will. Consider dropping the story to be, as you believe Saddam Hussein was compared to Dubya, the lesser of two evils.

Another glimpse into Matthews’s psyche was afforded by a comment he made in an earlier segment of the show about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. As you might now, in a move roughly tantamount to tipping over the coffins of 9/11 victims (the ones of whom enough pieces were found to put in coffins, of course) and giving the bodies the finger, the government has kept sealed 27 pages of the 9/11 report, and it’s believed those 27 pages are a damning indictment of the Saudi government’s role in failing to thwart, if not tacitly or not-so-tacitly encouraging or even directly funding, the attacks. Matthews’s guests, including relentless terrorism expert Stephen Emerson, denounced the Saudi government over and over again, and denounced the administration for seemingly bending over backward to avoid any unpleasantness with these murderous douchebags, who use their fluke-of-geography oil money to spread their poisonous death-cult ideology, Wahabbism, into mosques and schools all over the world. Matthews, who agreed with the guests, closed the segment by saying “This is something we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives.”

Not if the hawks can help it.

If you actually read what the policymakers behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are on record as saying, the wars are more than just an effort at direct punitive retaliation for 9/11, or to enforce scads of UN resolutions and regulations on Iraq, or (heaven help us) to acquire more oil. It’s an ideological campaign against the sexist nationalist luddite homophobic Jew-hating war-crime-committing murder-suicide pact known as radical Islam, which as practiced by thousands and supported by millions is the root cause of this war just as the radical Christianity embraced by millions in medieval Europe was the root cause of that society’s ills. Among the many purposes for the Iraq War was the fact that it’d enable us to pull our troops out of Saudi bases and put them into Iraqi ones (at least for the time being), to modernize and open up an enormous amount of oil fields that would be operated by a friendly democratic government and whose revenue would go to the country’s people, not some UN-sanctioned grift that fed Baathist apparatchiks and their miserable genocidal writing-Korans-in-his-own-blood boss. In other words, as many hawk policymakers and thinkers would gladly tell you, it was a war to divorce ourselves from our odious gender-apartheid suicide-murder-exporting client regime, the House of Saud. The antiwar people yelling “What about the Saudis?” seem to have failed en masse to do any research on the subject, as the road to Riyadh runs through Baghdad.

And if this policy continues, which I sincerely hope it will, by the time I get old I won’t have to talk about Saudi support of terrorism, except in the past tense.

I’ve never read J.M DeMatteis’s for-grown-ups comics, like the Moonshadow book I always hear about; nor am I part of the DeMatteis/Giffen Justice League cult. But I’ll always have a soft spot for the guy, because his Kraven’s Last Hunt is the best Spider-Man story I’ve ever read. (With the possible exception of Brian Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man series, of course. But until that book came along Kraven was my favorite webhead tale by a very, very substantial margin, and at any rate I prefer Mike Zeck’s art on Kraven to Mike Bagley’s on Ultimate (even though Bagley has improved as the series has gone on, and it has a weird vibrant energy to it that’s much greater than the sum of its seemingly pedestrian parts), and at any rate I don’t think Bendis has yet told his definitive Ultimate Spider-Man story. Phew.)

So I was intrigued when I heard that DeMatteis will be writing a children’s/young-adult fantasy title for CrossGen’s creator-owned imprint called Abadazad. The concept, and especially the title, sound a lot closer to Clive Barker’s kid-fantasy epic Abarat than they do to the classics DeMatteis cites as influences; the fact that Abadazad will be a comic and Barker’s book is prodigiously illustrated only enhances the comparison. But even if we dock points for originality, I’ll be excited to see artist Mike Ploog back in action. Ploog worked on the early years of Marvel’s Ghost Rider, and his art had this freaky sloppy melty pop vibe that was an undeniable joy to look at. I’m very interested to see where he’s at today.

Actually, I do–I just couldn’t resist paraphrasing John Lennon.

A post on this Comics Journal messboard thread praising Craig Thompson’s book Blankets for exposing the “pap” and “hypocrisy” of modern-day American Christianity led me to post the following:

I think the book is far less judgemental than Juliette’s making it sound. I myself am a thoroughly lapsed Catholic who has a hard time believing in a personafied God with an active will at all, yet I always find the vitriol heaped on Christians by artsy-fartsy types–“Those goddamn Christians are so judgemental! Fucking assholes, I hope they burn in hell!”–to be extremely off-putting. I thought Craig did a tremendous job of showing exactly what he found unpleasant and stultifying about his fundamentalist upbringing and the Christians he came in contact with while growing up without leaping to broad generalizations about “pap” or “hypocrisy.” After speaking about it with Craig personally, I came away with the feeling that his big problem with Christianity as an organized religion was the judgement passed on non-Christians and the overemphasis on heaven as opposed to the divine within everyone, not that he thought Jesus was bullshit or that he felt that everyone was molesting children the second they got home from Bible camp. (I’m pretty sure that not once does he show a Christian preaching against something, then doing it himself–so so much for exposing hypocrisy or whatever.)

Anyone could write a book full of ad hominems and stereotypes about the big bad Christians, but Craig took the time to throughly explore the doctrine that caused him to reexamine his faith and come to a new belief on his own. Good for him for not taking the easy way out.

Via Instapundit, here’s an article on a disturbingly egregious violation of journalistic ethics in which the Reuters news agency substantially rewrote a bylined reporter’s article in order to insert thoroughly biased and roundly discredited accusations about the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. The article is written by the reporter herself, who finds herself wrongfully accused of the offending and baseless slant of the article. Gosh, I sure am grateful the news media is impartial–could you imagine what it’d be like if they weren’t?

To paraphrase the Fresh Prince’s mother, if they think your government murdered 3,000 of its own citizens and destroyed a major hub of its own economy in downtown Manhattan, you don’t need ’em, ’cause they’re not your real friends.