Thickness #2
Angie Wang, Lisa Hanawalt, Michael DeForge, Mickey Zacchilli, Brandon Graham, True Chubbo, Jillian Tamaki, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, October 2011
60 pages
$12
Buy it from the Thickness website

Anthology of the year? I’d need to double-check some release dates, but it certainly seems that way to me. The second installment of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge’s art-smut comics series is an intense, diverse collection of sex comics, beautifully printed and rich enough to revisit well after your first virgin read.

Michael DeForge, god help us all, continues his juggernaut run with what could well be his best comic yet. “College Girl by Night” stars a young man who’s transformed by the light of the full moon into a beautiful young woman, and uses the time to seduce and fuck college boys. His/her narrative captions don’t comment on the night-in-the-life activities depicted in the art, but rather explain the background of the transformations, her preferred conquests (tired of her “spoiled, drunken nineteen-year-olds,” she’s “made vague plans to set my sights on Edgeton professors, posing a student seeking advice after hours”), her almost idle questions about the science of it all (“Maybe if I got pregnant, it would only show when I transformed. If I even have a uterus, that is”), fictional precedents (“When Billy changed into Captain Marvel he wasn’t technically ‘transforming’…he was having his Billy Batson body physically replaced with an entirely different Captain Marvel one”), and daydreams about starting a relationship while in female form (“I once found a Missed Connection written about me on Craigslist”). It’s funny stuff, featuring DeForge’s trademark juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane. But it’s also really, really hot stuff. His character design for the main character’s female form is a note-perfect assemblage of alluring details: spagetti-like tendrils of hair, a dusting of freckles, a short and nearly translucent dress, long lashes that flutter when she throws her mouth open in ecstasy. But then DeForge takes the ruthlessly (if ironically) heterosexual nature of the situation (as she herself puts it, “Is it hugely unimaginative that during my time as a woman, the only activities I’ve done so far is fuck myself or get fucked?”) and crashes it right into its own subtext, reversing the transformation mid-coitus and presenting the two college guys now present on the scene with the opportunity to pick up where they left off, or not. Even if your door doesn’t swing in that direction, there’s a willingness to be led solely by pleasure and desire, a “Shhhh–no one can see, so why not?” quality, that’s hard to deny.

Brandon Graham’s “Dirty Deeds” is the most lighthearted of the contributions (well, aside from True Chubbo’s), and his sense of humor isn’t mine. It’s got this bigfooted vaudevillian underground schtickiness to it that’s just not my thing unless it’s Marc Bell. (Lots and lots of puns: “prostate of shock,” “cervix with a smile,” “I was young, I needed the monkey” — that last one’s a bit of a long story.) But that’s not to say that a breezy sex romp isn’t a welcome addition to this issue’s 31 flavors. Certainly Graham’s warm, curving line is shiny and happy enough to make up for a few jokes that leave me cold, and it’s fascinating watching him use it to achieve certain unique effects — the way he crams detail into limited segments of the page, piling line on line like a soft-serve ice cream cone, while letting the rest of the page breathe, say, which in turn lets him work wonders with images of massive science-fictional scale. And he really makes the most of Sands’s red-orange risograph’d coloring, particularly with his vivacious heroine’s hair and a sexy tan-line effect using what looks like the world’s tiniest zipatone dots. I’m kind of amazed that anything would give this Adrian Tomine print a run for its money in the “Sexiest Use of Tanlines 2011” sweepstakes, but there you have it.

Mickey Zacchilli’s contribution is the most off-model of the bunch, a melancholy affair in which a Brian Chippendalesque lost girl loses her wedding ring and therefore enters some weird subterranean sex chamber, in which a brawny beast and a “slime worm” have their way with her as she worries about other things. What keeps her going is the promise of ice cream on the other side of the chamber, but the showstopping reverie begins with the phrase “All I could think about at that moment were all the various objects that I had never stuck in my vagina.” Arrayed in the closest thing to a clinical grid as Zacchilli’s noisy, scratchy line can muster, this assortment goes from “Yeah, okay, feasible for a curious young woman” (“screwdriver,” “chisel tip Sharpie permanent marker”) to “uh-oh” (“rawhide dog bone,” “rotting arm,” “disembodied head”). When added to the brusque treatment she receives from the creature who lets her in — “Thru the door Alice, Jeanette, Angie, whatever” he says, her identity unimportant — and her tears when she discovers the ice cream shop is closed, it makes for a distressing portrait of disconnect between mind and body, thought and deed.

Dare I call Angie Wang’s contribution erotica rather than smut? Wang offers a four-page start-to-finish portrait of two women — one seemingly shy or hesitant, the other taking charge — having sex. Each panel depicts a discrete body part or moment of connection. It’s a familiar panoptic effect for this kind of thing, and I usually find it to be a bit false to the experience of sex, presenting it as a sort of greatest-hits grab bag rather than a journey from start to finish where the momentum, the upping of the ante from moment to moment, is key. But Wang cleverly jettisons the mishmash approach with an array of techniques: ratcheting the panel grid back from page to page, from 16 to 9 to 4 to a final, climactic (pun intended) splash page; using tangents to connect one panel to the next; paring away dialogue and sound as she goes; altering the focus of each page, from foreplay to initial genital contact to climax to afterglow. Whether despite or because of its delicate, painterly line, it’s got oomph.

Lisa Hanawalt’s contribution is profoundly Hanawaltian. Using the tried-and-true porn setup of the teacher with the hot student, she subverts (or heightens, depending on what you’re into) the fantasy by having the pair’s taboo rendez-vous take place in full view of the rest of the class; the teacher doesn’t even stop delivering his lesson on unreliable narrators (“the narrator makes mistakes” he says as he unzips his fly). Hanawalt apes the male focus on individual body parts with alarming accuracy: “Oh god, her tits! Tiiiiiits…And that ASS,” thinks the teacher over a series of panels focusing on the student’s curves with that familiar combination of thumbs-up celebration and lizard-brain leer. Oh, did I mention she short-circuits the whole thing by giving the girl the featureless conical head of a worm while stuffing her cleavage with fibrous miniature worms, and by giving the bird-headed teacher a penis that itself ends in a bird’s head, which literally vomits its semen all over her ass and vagina when he pulls out? When she slaps a David Lee Roth-referencing “CLASS DISMISSED!” on the final panel, I’m not sure whether to run for the door or stay for extra credit.

The final two contributions hearken back to Sands’s zine roots: Ray Sohn and his anonymous wife serve up one of the funniest, grossest True Chubbo strips to date (you’ll love the Lawrence of Arabia “NO PRISONERS!” quote, especially once you see the context in which it’s being quoted), while Jillian Tamaki’s centerfold pinup intrigues with its incongruous details — a monumental topless woman kneels amid lush flowers and a small army of Russian doll-like people-shaped dildos (I think?), her implacable gaze juxtaposed with her very human bikini-area stubble and a big goofy digital watch on her wrist. They give Thickness #2 a welcome diversity of form as well as content, a “hey, here’s everything that was fit to print” feel.

Thickness #2 is the real deal: talented, fearless cartoonists working in that viscous red zone of pleasure, terror, filth, and fun where the only thing that matters is what the body does and doesn’t want, and your brain is simply forced to go along for the ride. Bravo, thumbs up, panties down.

Says Dan Nadel.

Says Frank Santoro.

Says Adrian Tomine.

Says Bob Temuka.

Says Tom Spurgeon.

Says me.

Is anyone planning to watch the Season Two premiere of The Walking Dead? I’m not, on “life’s too short” grounds. That first season was pretty bad, and there are many, many better and/or more enjoyable shows I can be watching. I’m just curious what y’all have decided. Let me know in the comments if you like.

I stopped by NYCC on Friday evening. Here’s what I saw.

* The on-site press pass situation is hilarious. Anyone could walk in off the street and grab one if they knew where to look. While I was getting mine, I watched some loudmouth gamer basically annoy a staffer into giving him one for his buddy despite both he and she acknowledging that the buddy was not press. (He walked away saying “Thank you, sweetheart,” like he was Roger Sterling.) All I needed to get mine was the outdated business card I paid $10 for on the internet. “Do you need to see my credentials?” I asked. “Um, okay, if you have ’em,” was the reply. When I actually took them out, she waved them away.

* Best cosplay: Solomon Grundy on built-in stilts. Runner-up: Ms. Marvel With Her Ass Hanging Out. As one commentator put it, “She looks like a Mike Deodato drawing, but in this case it’s okay, because she has agency.”

* From a look at their table, I’m pretty sure the Suicide Girls were 14 years old.

* Some people smelled bad. The rain on Friday did not improve the aroma. I don’t go in for the smelly-nerd stereotype, but for what it’s worth, I pass through Penn Station twice a day every day and don’t encounter the Pigpen-like clouds of stink, so it’s not just a phenomenon of crowds, I don’t suppose.

* I walked past an enormous cosplay group photo session for some anime I didn’t recognize at all. Nerddom is bigger than ever and there are worlds within worlds, man, worlds within worlds.

* The picture of comics presented at this thing makes San Diego look like the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. I wonder if the show could make a go of building up an alternative or literary comics presence if they put their mind to it. I sort of doubt it. As a NYC metro-area commuter show, it’s competing for those readers with more targeted area cons like BCGF, MoCCA, and even KingCon. For those traveling longer distances, including some of the bigger publishers, the larger East Coast also offers SPX and TCAF. It’s great to see Top Shelf and NBM tabling next to each other, but you’d need Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly at the very least to approach some kind of altcomix critical mass, plus a dedicated programming slate, and no one involved appears to have much interest in that. This is one situation where I think Tom Spurgeon’s frequent suggestion of independent counterprogramming that cross-honors passes from the main event might make a lot of sense, but you’d be fighting for PR oxygen against a show that’s damn near San Diego in size without people’s ingrained inclination to go to San Diego no matter what.

* I spent about two hours walking the floor. I could have spent a lot more than that, hours permitting, I’m sure, because I do enjoy the sheer spectacle of it all. That’s just one of those things you either like or don’t, like how for some people Guinness is too heavy to drink and for others you can knock down pint after pint. But the spectacle is the extent of what it offers, to me at least. The flea market of back issues, original art, t-shirts, toys, and tchotchkes; the big booths hawking video games or wrestling or cartoons or whatever with loudspeakers and music and women in tight clothes; long lines of readers excited to meet Marvel and DC creators; cosplay, cosplay, and more cosplay; Nerd Nation at its best and worst, from happy teen couples to middle-aged men loudly complaining about Ryan Reynolds’s CGI Green Lantern costume and everything in between. I left at closing, knowing I wasn’t missing much by not going back again the rest of the weekend, but also knowing I could probably quite happily spend days and days in there.

* If you like talented superhero/genre artists, then Artists Alley was pretty terrific, if you ask me. I met Chris Burnham and walked past David Lloyd and Geof Darrow, just for example. There were definitely dozens of people hawking sad-looking self-published indy superbooks, but there were also some real talents in there.

* I went to a wonderful party on Friday night thrown by some of the younger Wizard alums that encompassed representatives of Marvel, Dark Horse, CBR, ComicsAlliance, The Comics Journal, Hasbro, Diamond Select, and MTV; scheduling conflicts were all that kept DC, Archaia, Archie, and Newsarama from having staff there as well. We’ve done alright! There and elsewhere, I met for the first time people I’ve talked to online for literally years. For the first time I met Sean Mackiewicz, who had been my source for dozens of DC freelance assignments over the course of two or three years, and Steve Wacker, who’s my editor on the Spider-Man comic I wrote that comes out in a couple weeks. Twice I bumped into my old boss Pat McCallum, who now works at DC but whom I hadn’t seen in years, possibly since the day he left Wizard. Moreover, I think this is what I like best about NYCC: It brings people I know and love in the industry together in Manhattan. It’s a rare case where I really do prefer the socializing surrounding the event to the event itself.

I believe I am two episodes into Season Three. SPOILER WARNING.

* The key to Don Draper is war. I’ve thought this ever since the pilot episode, before I knew…anything about him, really. There’s a moment in that first hour where he takes a nap in his office, and slowly the sounds of explosions begin echoing in his head. I believe at some point before that we caught a glimpse of his Purple Heart, but that sound cue (effectively cribbed a few years later by Game of Thrones) was the moment when I realized that something happened to him out there, wherever there was. Everything we’ve seen since lends further credence to this notion. Dick Whitman became Don Draper in an explosion in Korea. The prospect of “total annihilation” sends him running from an aerospace conference directly into a lost fortnight of the soul. And I think it’s his candor about the Cuban Missile Crisis making him “sick” in his letter of apology to Betty that precipitates their subsequent reunion as much as anything else. I don’t think I’ve wrestled with this enough to boil down what Don’s experiences in Korea did to him and mean to him to a single sentence, but I promise you it’s not for lack of trying. But I do believe that the hole in Don, the part of Don that’s so hard to define — that hole was created by being blown open.

* My recent experiences with miscarriages, pregnancy complications, premature childbirth, and fatherhood have humbled me by showing me just how beholden to biography criticism really is. Man oh man, am I ever a mark for neglected-baby shit now. Every glass of booze or Lucky Strike that goes into the mouth of one of the pregnant characters is like nails on my mental chalkboard, and when Peggy rejected her baby that first night, or when Betty left the gynecologist’s office without a checkup and then proceeded to do various things he’d instructed her not to do anymore, I had a tough time getting around that with them. The funny thing is that, like my wife, I’m more pro-choice after our ordeal than I ever was before it. I think it’s the noncommittal quality of Peggy and Betty’s ways of dealing with their unwanted pregnancies that bothered me. If Betty had gone to that “doctor in Albany” that Francine told her about rather than simply going horseback riding again like it ain’t no thing, I’d have been much more okay with it and with her. Make a decision, is what I’m saying. I dunno, this shit’s complicated.

* Duck Phillips’s self-immolation was the show at its meanest. The guy’s only crime, it seems, was just not quite playing the game right. Everybody else gets to be a drunk — he has to be an alcoholic. Everyone else cheats — he gets a divorce, and doesn’t even have a 20-year-old secretary to show for it. Everyone else thinks big and takes risks — his big thoughts and risks never seem to pan out. When he finally shoots for the moon, he’s not Neil Armstrong, he’s Gordo the ill-fated space monkey. Sure, I was rooting for Don, and was invested enough in Duck’s defeat to literally shout “He doesn’t have a contract, you dope!” at my laptop screen out loud on the train, alarming the woman in the seat next to me. But even so, watching his seemingly successful office coup and business masterstroke end with his former boss dismissing him by saying “He could never hold his liquor” was a gutpunch. And like that, poof, he’s gone.

* That whole storyline was another terrific case of misdirection by the writers, of course. The entire time Don was wandering around California incommunicado, I anticipated a total meltdown or freakout when he returned to find Sterling Cooper sold out from under him and Duck Phillips calling the shots. Instead he collected his half million dollars, blithely offered to quit, and destroyed Duck’s career with seven syllables: “I don’t have a contract.” It was like one of his “magic pitches” (I wish I remember who introduced that phrase to me), where he has just the right idea at just the right time. He didn’t even break a sweat. He’s a miracle man.

* Betty’s post-adultery rapprochement with Don was one of the show’s few too-predictable moments. They’d been building up to it for so long that I had no doubt Betty would cheat one time only, “getting it out of her system,” in order to welcome Don back to the family. In general I find the supposed epiphanic value of sex to unhappy suburban women overvalued in fiction, as if there’s a whole nation of Joan Allen in Pleasantville out there just one bathtub frig away from Freedom. Still, it could be worse: They could have made like the odious American Beauty and made the housewife’s sexual satisfaction an object of ridicule and contempt. Personally, if you’re gonna go the whole When Hausfraus Fuck route, I prefer the Hellraiser option.

* Less predictable, and much more troubling for that, was the fallout for Joan’s rape by her fiancé. Specifically, there wasn’t any. I expected the Holloway facade to finally crack, but this was no life-altering trauma for her, because this is par for the course. If marital rape (I know they weren’t married yet, but I don’t know an adjectival form for fiancé) still occasionally has a hard time mustering outrage today, imagine what it would have been like then. Like smoking while pregnant or after a pair of heart attacks, perhaps for some people it’s something you don’t even know is bad. It was the show’s most depressing depiction of the era’s misogyny this side of all those avuncular or leering male doctors dispensing unsolicited life advice with each exam. Their lives are not their own.

* People told me Alison Brie’s Trudy Campbell would improve, and lo and behold. She and Pete are so different together, so much more understanding of and genuinely interested in one another’s feelings and opinions, in that first episode of Season Three that it almost feels like a continuity error. But I guess that if you peg it to Pete’s falling out with Trudy’s father and his own mother, you’ve got the precipitating incidents you need.

* Speaking of potentially jarring character transitions, I was a bit surprised to see Don back up to his old poon-hound tricks again with that stewardess in Baltimore before the Season Three premiere was even over. I figured we’d at least see him make an effort to stay faithful to Betty before failing. And yet this felt much less like plothammering to me than…well, I can’t say, but another acclaimed drama of recent years featured a womanizing, hard-drinking leading man who briefly reformed only to lapse back into bastardry when the demands of the writers required it. There — perhaps because the original development felt so well-earned — the reversal felt cheap and trollish. Here it’s another clue in the mystery of Don Draper.

* What makes it all the more puzzling is that both Don’s apology and his subsequent lapse were juxtaposed against two of the clearest indicators that he could well pass the Good Guy test. Don came home to Betty after we learn that he’s friends, close friends, platonic friends, with the woman whose dead husband’s identity he stole. For that kind of genuine, easy affection to develop under that kind of hideous circumstance, Dick Whitman must be some hell of a guy, right? And after he cheats, he discovers that Sal is gay, but subtly makes it clear to him that he has no intention of either outing nor ostracizing him for it. It’s not just that Don’s displaying admirable tolerance for a man of his era, although that’s awesome. It’s that he’s not a hypocrite. He knows how important keeping a secret and playing a part can be, so he doesn’t hold it against Sal. That’s admirable, in its way. (He’s been hard on Betty for being too sexy for others’ enjoyment from time to time — flirting with Roger at dinner, wearing a bikini to the pool — but while I can’t imagine him reacting well to her actual cheating, I feel like these bother him as breaches of decorum rather than as acts of mote/beam optometry.)

* Don to Peggy: “You’re not an artist, you solve problems.” Copywriters, this is our gift. This is our curse.

* Peggy Olson’s A Series of Unfortunate Hairstyles

* No, semi-seriously: Elisabeth Moss is an attractive lady, but in Peggy it’s tough to see. I had a real holy-shit moment recently when I realized that the girl in that uncomfortably intimate Excedrin Migraine commercial that had driven my wife and I crazy for years during Judge Judy was none other than Sterling Cooper’s newest copywriter because the voice and the eyes were virtually the only thing recognizable about her. That commercial is predicated, more or less, on the appeal of being close enough to this dewy-eyed, breathy-voiced young lady to make out with her, whereas Peggy, to me, has been defined by the awkward middle part of her bangs. Even her makeover at the hands of Bob Dylan enthusiast and noted pervert Curt Smith didn’t fix it. Only when she took a swing at reenacting Ann-Margaret’s Bye Bye Birdie performance in the mirror at home was I reminded that hey, my goodness.

* Sterling silver-tongued.

* Another gasp-out-loud-on-the-train moment: The save-the-date for Roger’s daughter’s wedding. The missile crisis material was so effective — it was the first time the show really affected my personality throughout the day, making me nervous and paranoid — that I was looking forward to seeing how they’d deal with Kennedy’s assassination despite its potentially hackneyed nature. Turns out they’re gonna run right into it full speed. This should be interesting.

* Don got to where he is — at the top of his profession, basically untouchable even by the new owners — because everyone respects his creative talent. Creative talent could make you in that world. I don’t give a fuck about fedoras and suits, but that’s something worth getting nostalgic over.

* Is it time to start shipping Don and Peggy? Deggy?

Daybreak
Brian Ralph, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, 2011
160 pages, hardcover
$21.95
Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

* Sparkplug Comic Books will continue, under the watch of Dylan Williams’s wife Emily Nilsson, his friend Tom Neely, and his colleague Virginia Paine. They haven’t decided whether or when they’ll be able to start publishing new work, though they’d like to, but they’re continuing to sell and promote the company’s existing, excellent line-up.

* Amazingly, Netflix has backed down off its previously announced plan to divert its DVD subscribers into a separate service with the absurd name Qwikster. I look forward to reading retractions from the folks who wrote that that was secretly a brilliant maneuver. As I said at the time, regardless of the underlying thought process, repeatedly and publicly antagonizing your customers with sweeping business-model changes that make your services more inconvenient and more expensive, delivered first with no real explanation and then with an “apology” that amounted to “sorry for doing that horrible thing, now here’s something even worse, something so bad that I, the CEO of the company doing it, seem on the verge of tears about it” is — surprise! — a bad business move. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen a popular consumer company do, and now it’s doubly so.

* My chums in the Partyka collective will be part of the Desert Island Comic Zine Party for kids at the Whitney Museum this Saturday afternoon. Sounds like a good time for the little ones.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Interesting insights into Ghost World and Shortcomings may be found in this Daniel Clowes/Adrian Tomine panel report.

* Bob Temuka’s post on the Jaime Hernandez/Locas material in Love and Rockets: New Stories #4 is appropriately emotional and dead-on. I talk a bit about it here.

* Buy the original newspaper edition of Frank Santoro’s Storeyville, direct from his dad’s storage space!

* The revived Wow Cool publishing/mail-order outfit is impressive.

* Here’s a very pretty picture of Batman by Rafael Grampá.

* Via everyone: Liquid Television is now online in its entirety, along with related weird animated programs and station IDs from the MTV vaults. That was a real atom bomb of alt-culture for people of a certain age, one that if I’m not mistaken slightly predated Nirvana’s opening of the floodgates for that sort of material and was therefore even more of a cultural category error when in arrived on our teevees between Janet Jackson videos.

* Tom Spurgeon’s nine thoughts on the DC relaunch’s success. Of the batch, I was struck by point six — DC’s newfound insistence on regular shipping will require fill-in slots that should provide better opportunities for new or new-to-the-company creators than the usual miniseries and tryout books — and point nine — the unpleasant-to-much-of-the-online-fan-press tone of many of these successful books will force a generation of journalists weaned on the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit of comics return to cultural prominence in the ’00s to reexamine those assumptions.

* It’s spoilery so I’m staying away (even though it says it’s not spoilery, the first thing they talk about was spoilery as fuck), but Clive Barker talks to his official site Revelations about the recently released Abarat: Absolute Midnight, the third book in his lushly illustrated YA fantasy series. I recommend you read the intro, however, as it details what seems like a hellish last few years for Barker in his personal life — surgery, divorce, death. He’s one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met in this business, hugely generous in spirit, so every time I hear about these things I feel just awful for him. Still, you have to figure that if anyone’s capable of channeling real life awfulness into his art, it’s Clive Barker.

* Box Brown’s Retrofit Comics is up to its second old-school alternative-comic-book-format release, Colleen Frakes and Betsy Swardlick’s Drag Bandits. To paraphrase Barton Fink, I got a feeling we’ll be hearing from that Colleen Frakes, and I don’t mean a postcard.

* What’s Closed Caption Comics member Mollie Goldstrom been up to?

* It bears repeating that Tales Designed to Thrizzle #7 is on the way.

* It also bears repeating that Jim Woodring is posting things like this five, six days a week lately.

* Hellen Jo draws girls masturbating for Vice. These are illustrations for an article on the topic that is the Vice-iest Vice article ever to Vice, so be warned, but still, it’s Hellen Jo drawing girls masturbating. (Via Same Hat!)

* I have no brief whatsoever with “the Milkyway films of Johnnie To Kei-fung,” but this David Bordwell piece on To’s work begins with an explanation of his elliptical storytelling method that should be of great interest to Jaime Hernandez fans.

* Would you like to watch Synth Britannia, the synthpop-focused edition of BBC4’s wonderful series of rock docs, on YouTube in its entirety? Of course you would. (Via Matt Maxwell.)

IT OCCURS TO ME I SHOULD BE SPOILER TAGGING THESE

* I just finished the Matthew Weiner-scripted episode toward the back end of Season Two in which Don Draper has his Los Angeles idyl with the idle rich Eurotrash and their aptly/portentously/heavyhandedly-named scion Joy. While Don’s out there fiddling and relearning not to say no to things he wants (Joy, you are setting a bad example), Rome’s burning in the form of Duck Phillips’s attempt to cement his position, and take over Creative, by having his old British company buy out Sterling Cooper. What I love about this development is probably just long-form fiction writing 101, but here it is:

At the end of Season One, Don was faced with a choice. He could hire an outside applicant to take over his old position as he moved up to partner, with Duck the leading candidate, or he could promote Pete Campbell. Neither Don nor we in the audience wanted him to do the latter, for a number of reasons: 1) Pete was too big for his britches and didn’t seem to deserve the promotion on a professional level; 2) Pete was generally an obnoxious creep even by Sterling Coo standards and rewarding that behavior would have been unpleasant to watch; 3) Most directly, Pete attempted to secure the position through blackmail, and both on a “Crime Does Not Pay” level and in the sense that Don is a more likeable character than Pete, we wanted to see that fail. So Don hires Duck, then ends Pete’s game of chicken by deliberately crashing into him, and finally emerges victorious and more secure than ever. Hooray! In the moment, it looked like he made the right move.

And in the moment, he probably did make the right move! Promoting Pete under those circumstances would have been disastrous for Don, and probably not so hot for the company either. (Or for Pete, I suspect.) But this outcome — which Don selected and fought for, taking a risk and reaping the reward — had the unintended consequence of completely undermining his own happiness and power at the job. (At least I think it will — I haven’t seen how the deal with the Brits turns out yet, as I’m no further than the episode where it was first brought up.) What a great technique for the writers to use: They gave their character what he wanted, but instead of either a happy ending or a pat “be careful what you wish for” as a result, they use it as the seed from which something he absolutely doesn’t want will eventually grow. The Don vs. Duck line emerges not as a direct continuation of the Don vs. Pete line, but off on a tangent we couldn’t have predicted, and one we couldn’t have followed if Don and Pete hadn’t been made to collide in the first place. It’s Curt Purcell’s idea of narrative shrapnel (warning: A Song of Ice and Fire spoilers at the link) writ large. And it’s a great way for writers of serialized fiction to keep their stories going when seeming endpoints are reached.

* As if a film studies major couldn’t have enough fun making hay out of the name “Don Draper,” they went and made his real name “Dick Whitman.” Drop a “D” from the former and add an “e” to the latter and you’ve got an A in the class.

Maybe it’s just the YouTube of “A Real Hero” talking, but I find myself more warmly disposed toward Drive today than I was when I wrote this. I still feel that when a film of this film’s obvious intelligence dances this close to the whole “down these mean streets a man must go” necessary-violence thing, it’s a lot tougher to get past than when a film of obvious stupidity does so. (I watch Road House a lot.) And I still maintain that the film didn’t push the Driver far enough in one direction or another emotionally for us to have a working context for his violent outbursts. But in retrospect I can see little pointillist moments almost coalescing into something emotionally coherent. His completely unknown past prior to six years ago; the way he draws the line at violence but nevertheless still possesses a familiarity with and talent for the criminal world; the totally convincing viciousness of his threat against the guy he once drove when they bump into each other at that diner; the effortless rapidity with which he adjusts to kill-or-be-killed violence; his obvious guilt over his involvement with Standard’s final criminal act and subsequent death; the slow-mo shot of him looking horrified after he kills the man in the elevator; wearing a mask the one time he intentionally sets out to kill someone; leaving the cash behind; leaving Irene and Benicio behind even though no one’s out to get him or them anymore; even Standard’s lingered-on homecoming speech about how what he did in the past was shameful, but now he’s got a second chance…If I were the theorizing type, my theory would be that once upon a time the Driver was a real rough customer, but he changed, and the events of the film brought out a side in him he’d long suppressed, and so he abandons the woman and child he’s come to care about rather than subject them to it again.

The reason I’d love for this to be a little more than theorizing is not because I need things spoonfed to me — what I’m calling for is more emotional information, not more plot-fact information — but because it would be interesting for the film to have developed the Driver more in this regard. I don’t know if Matt Seneca was kidding when he suggested the film should have shown the Driver crying after he killed the two guys who attacked him and Blanche in the hotel, but amen to that. That’s a scene I’d have liked to see.

But I saw plenty of lovely things. The film was impeccably cast and delightfully acted, from Gosling’s quiet kindness to Ron Perlman grinning Noo Yawk gangsterisms. The ’80s look and sound was luscious and unpretentious. The violence was refreshingly hideous, mitigating against the redemptive role it plays in the narrative. And even if it didn’t quite get there emotionally, I do feel like it tried, and it had enough other things going for it that, to a degree at least, it can be forgiven for stopping short of where it needed to go. In many ways my entire life up until this point has put me on a quest for sad trash, and Drive comes pretty close.

* Must read #1: This piece on Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later by Glenn Heath Jr. for Not Coming to a Theater Near You is the best review of that movie I’ve ever read. It just gets everything about it right.

* Must read #2: Rob Clough on virtually all the comics of Michael DeForge. A thorough examination of the best young cartoonist.

* You can now purchase <i>Thickness #2, the erotic comics anthology edited by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, and Chameleon #1, the god-knows-what anthology spearheaded by Jesse Balmer and Jonny Negron, at their respective websites, and I don’t see why you wouldn’t.

* Over at Robot 6 I used this Brandon Graham Habibi tribute as a springboard for all sorts of related links: More Habibi pro fanart at Floating World, Nadim Damluji’s essay on Habibi and Orientalism, the Inkstuds video interview with Brandon Graham, and more. Click on over and check ’em all out.

* Comics distributor Haven has shut down. As George R.R. Martin might put it, the Direct Market for comic books in North America is now a monopoly, or near enough as makes no matter.

* Dash Shaw loves Blind Date.

* Laura Dern is trying hard to persuade David Lynch to direct another movie. Related: Man did I have a crush on her circa Jurassic Park.

* Jeez, this webcomic slechtemeisjes that Kevin Czap uncovered is stunning. He says the resemblance to Henry Darger is coincidental, which is also stunning.

* Randall Munroe channels Uno Moralez.

* Jesus, Renee French.

* Jim Woodring has been killing it lately.

SPOILERS AHOY

You’re right, I am quite imaginative with my post titles. Thank you!

As the credits rolled and I contemplated the final decision made by the Driver as depicted in the final two shots, I thought to myself, “At this late stage, with all the other players eliminated, why wouldn’t he choose to go back to Irene and Benicio, if they’d have him?” I think I might have an answer, about which more later, but my main internal response to that question was just to shrug and wonder how you could really know anything about this guy as written.

“By their works ye shall know them” is a decent standard to apply to fictional depictions of bastardry and brutality, I think, but there was simply no way to apply it to the Driver in any way that made sense. Though he exuded a crinkly-eyed, quiet kindness throughout the film, especially in his tender interactions with Irene and Benicio but more revealingly with Shannon and especially Standard, and though he repeatedly insisted upon remaining an unarmed and inactive participant in the crimes he facilitated as the driver, he’s suddenly Jason Bourne at the drop of a hat when threatened. Not only is he a ruthlessly efficient killing machine, he’s cruel on more than one occasion: threatening to torture Blanche, actually torturing Cooke.

The problem on a structural level is that his actions, in and of themselves, are virtually indistinguishable from those of Bernie Rose, an equally proficient and brutal murderer who, like the Driver, does not seem thrilled about having been placed in this predicament. But Bernie’s clearly a bad guy by the standard of the film — as Benicio might say, just look at him, does he look like a good guy to you? But that distinction, between the good savagery of the Driver and the bad savagery of Bernie, is unearned. I know what Bernie is because of what I see him do. I see the Driver do similar things but I’m supposed to “know” that he’s something else. Is he?

I suppose you could say that that slow-motion shot of the Driver as he stares in apparently guilt-stricken horror at Irene after he crushes the guy’s skull in the elevator, coupled with the rivers of flop sweat pouring down his face as he confronts Nino over the phone while holding a hammer to Cooke’s head, is an indication that the Driver is deeply uncomfortable with the violence he’s forced to perpetrate. If that’s the case, then it follows that he leaves Irene and Benicio behind out of concern that he’s no good for them, even though they’re unlikely to be menaced by gangsters anymore. But his unthinking skill in this department, and those flashes of cruelty, are really hard to square not just with his niceness to his friends, but with all our other knowledge of his character — the hardworking kid who showed up at Shannon’s shop and worked for a song, the talented driver who doubles for the star of the movie and persuades gangsters to invest hundreds of thousand of dollars in a potential racing career, the getaway driver who limits his involvement with heists to five minutes of nonviolent chauffeuring.

The answer to the riddle is likely that the Driver’s just a type. He’s the reluctant hero, the good man forced to be a hard man. But while I can accept all of Drive‘s other thoughtful, beautifully executed homages to the Hollywood tradition — the Risky Business/Body Double score, the Taxi Driver lights in the windshield, the Lost Highway/Mulholland Dr. Weird Los Angeles vibe, the Man With No Name near-mute nameless protagonist, whatever — I have a hard time accepting a movie-person in place of an actual person. I didn’t used to, but I think I do now. I feel like the movie knew it needed to make the violence really horrifying to deflate the surrounding Coolness, and I’m glad it did, but I don’t think the emotional violence was commensurate. And to the extent that our satisfaction with the movie hinges so much on an emotional connection with those final shots of Irene knocking on the Driver’s door to no avail and the Driver driving away, a lack of emotional veracity elsewhere blows a hole in the whole thing.

* I’m currently seven episodes into Season Two, I believe.

* Sex: Has there ever been a show this effectively and uniformly sexy in its sex scenes? I am no more the kind of person who says “The sexiest thing is what you don’t see” than I am the kind of person who says “The scariest thing is what you don’t see” when discussing horror movies. I mean, grow up. But nearly every sex scene on this show compares so favorably to the pneumatic breast-bearing cheek-clenching sweat-drenched thrustfests on comparable pay-cable programs that I’m starting to wonder if I should reconsider that position. Look, I like seeing attractive naked people, especially attractive naked women, I’m certainly not going to lie about that. And if we lived in an alternate universe where HBO had picked the show up after all, I’d reblog an animated gif of a nude scene involving virtually any of Mad Men‘s female cast members and cameo players so fast your head would spin, I don’t care how confused the readers of Superheroes Lose would get. But it seems as though the show’s necessitated focus on buildup and afterglow, anticipation and satisfaction, forced them to become peerless portrayers of desire and arousal. These, of course, are the hottest things about sex. You can see naked people in all sorts of contexts, but you can really only see truly turned-on people tear into one another in just the one. It’s in that glimpse of the performance of desire, and the subsequent glimpse of its fulfillment, that the erotic really lives. Bobbi Barrett isn’t even my type, but the scene in which she’s lying in bed face-down with Don face-down in turn on top of her, both of them panting and sweating after a job well done, as she talks about the air-conditioned sensation of being both hot and cold and then asks Don, basically, not to take his dick out of her yet…shit, man, that’s one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on TV.

* Violence: Would you believe that for the longest time, as I promised myself I’d watch this show but never got around to it, I worried that I’d somehow find it less compelling because the main characters are advertising executives rather than mafiosi, medieval knights, cops and drug dealers, cowboys, outer-space soldiers and killer robots, gun-toting crazy people stranded on an island someplace, and thus the chances that someone might get killed during any given episode were much, much slimmer? To be clear here, what worried me was what that would say about me, not about the show. I am so used to drama in which the ability of characters to kill other characters provides an instant high-stakes atmosphere, an array of dramatic story possibilities and emotional consequences, that I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle one in which the worst that could happen was, I dunno, someone gets fired or his wife leaves him or whatever. Now, if you look at my comics-reading habits, I have no preference for violent fiction; if anything it’s the contrary, as the sort of reading habits that privilege action-based genre work of whatever sort to the sneering exclusion of so-called New Yorker navel-gazers are perhaps my biggest pundit pet peeve. My prose reading list works in much the same way, though I do less prose reading and thus it can get a bit more lopsided toward violent genre work depending on what I made a point of plowing through recently. But for some reason, I’d be hard pressed to tell you the last movie I saw in a theater or on DVD in which someone wasn’t violently assaulted or killed. With TV it’s an even stronger bias, because one of my favorite aspects of all my favorite millennial shows is my uncertainty that any given character will live to see the end of any given episode. With Mad Men, by contrast, I’m reasonably sure no one will shoot Joan Holloway in the head at any point. Of course, it turns out that that certainty doesn’t hurt my enjoyment of the show in the slightest, and I’m just as capable of loving the narrative and execution here as I am in a Chris Ware comic. And the absence of violence as an ingredient in the everyday lives of these characters as opposed to the characters on Lost, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, or even Twin Peaks means that when the threat of physical harm does arise, be it intentional (the possibility that Don might kill his half-brother to shut him up, Don’s brief shoving match with Betty during their disagreement over corporal punishment, Don’s really unpleasant quasi-sexual-assault on Bobbi when he threatens to ruin Jimmy if he doesn’t apologize to the Utz owners for insulting them) or accidental (Don and Bobbi’s car crash, Bobby Draper burning his face on the stove), the bottom of my stomach really drops out.

* Just noticed this as I wrote that last sentence: Bobbi and Bobby.

* Speaking of Bobby: God, the Draper kids are just crushingly cute, somehow without being cutesy. Another absurd casting coup. When Bobby said to Don “We’ve got to get you a new Daddy”? Oh man, I’m getting choked up just writing it out.

* And speaking of that line: It’s possible I just wasn’t paying the proper amount of attention, but it seems to me like Season Two emphasizes the killer quotables more than Season One. I’m thinking of “We’ve got to get you a new Daddy”; “You’re garbage. And you know it” ; Don encouraging Peggy to power through her psych hospitalization by saying “It didn’t happen. It will shock you how much it didn’t happen”; Trudy asking Pete that if they don’t have a baby, “What’s all this for?”, and Pete replying “I don’t know.” I certainly don’t mind.

* And speaking of Trudy: I hate to say it, but Alison Brie is maybe…miscast? I love her on Community, and obviously she’s one of the prettiest people on television, but her broad brittleness works for comedy — particularly for a caricature like Adderall Annie — in a way it just doesn’t for drama. Certainly not for maybe the broadest and brittlest role on the show to begin with. There might be a way to bring some extra shading to that status- and baby-obsessed nag (not that the two obsessions are at all separate, mind you!), but Brie has yet to find it at this stage.

* Close your eyes and Vincent Kartheiser sounds almost exactly like Steve Buscemi.

* Every once in a while — and I mean every once in a while, not all the time — I’m able to see past the suits and dresses and smart hairstyles like they’re some kind of Magic Eye poster and see the twentysomething kids underneath the Sterling-Coo staff and their significant others. I spent my twenties feeling like I was playacting being an adult, and I damn sure didn’t wear a suit unless someone was dead or getting married, so that’s the experience I’m bringing to the table when evaluating Pete’s ambition or Ken’s good-time sexism or even Betty’s Donna Reed routine. The contrast may not be quite as striking as it is with the medieval-realistic ages of the characters in A Game of Thrones (the book, not the show) but it’s still pretty damn striking. I’m glad I’ve never been didn’t forced to perform adulthood the way they needed to/wanted to.

* Like Ray Wise, Grace Zabriskie, and (er) Robert Blake before him, Patrick Fischler, aka the Winkie’s dream guy from Mulholland Drive, will forever emit a dark luminosity that is the price of proximity to something terrifying that David Lynch directed. Every time I see his crass and unfunny dinner-jacket insult comic character Jimmy Barrett, I half expect some horrible person from another place to emerge and drive everyone insane. The funny thing, though, is that I first started thinking of him in these terms before his sudden snap into the rawest fury we’ve ever seen from anyone on the show, when he confronts Don about having an affair with his wife. With the flip of a switch he goes from jocular overbearing ballbuster to a curdle-faced desire to utterly annihilate another human being with words: “You’re garbage. And you know it.” The furrow-browed incomprehension on Don’s face was astounding. This is a man far more accustomed to the fawning treatment he received earlier in the episode from the unctuous English Cadillac salesman than he is to somebody telling him “You know what? Your constant terrible behavior does in fact make you a terrible person!” That the messenger was as big a creep as Jimmy Barrett — that Don’s conduct is so loathsome that it has the power to genuinely hurt and disgust even a guy like that — only made it worse. It was a knockout moment.

* The big question for me right now is a related one: What turned Don into Don? I get why he ran away from his past, why he adopted his new identity, but why play it this way, with the heaping helping of amorality? Especially because he doesn’t seem like a bad guy inside? I mean, it’s not just that he obviously cares about his wife and kids — so did Tony Soprano — it’s that the knowledge that what he’s doing would hurt them if they knew about it seems to genuinely be weighing on him. He’s not just thinking of their feelings as pesky inconveniences. Even when he offers to run away with Rachel after Pete finds him out, it’s clear he’s motivated by terror so profound it’s overwhelming his feelings about his family, not that those feelings are ephemeral. (I think that in many ways he hates the life he’s formed with and around his family, but he doesn’t hate Betty, Sally, or Bobby.) So what gives? Is it really as simple as Bobbi’s claim that you find a job and then become the person that does the job, and the person who does Don’s job must needs be a dick?

Love from the Shadows
Gilbert Hernandez, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2011
120 pages, hardcover
$19.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

For reasons unknown to me, I did not create a Comics Time entry for this review, which was posted on April 20 at The Comics Journal. I’m just rectifying the situation now. Please visit TCJ.com for the review.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Did you know that Michael DeForge launched a webcomic last month? I didn’t, and I even linked to one of the episodes. (Which I wouldn’t have posted in its entirety if I’d realized it wasn’t just an excerpt from some other project. Sorry, Michael!) It’s called Ant Comic and there’s a new installment every other Monday. So far it’s been pretty troubling.

* Brigid Alverson interviews Box Brown on his alternative comic book throwback publishing outfit, Retrofit Comics. It’s the most revealing piece I’ve yet read on Retrofit, with lots of interesting details about how the sausage is getting made. The insight on the relative costs of printing versus shipping is worth the price of admission alone.

* All of DC’s “Crisis” mega-events no longer happened in the new DC Universe. Dan DiDio announced this on Twitter over the weekend a month after the relaunch began, which is how things work when you’ve planned a relaunch since October 2010, I guess? To me, more interesting than the continuity questions this raises is what this means for DC’s view of and future marketing of book collections containing the Crisis comics. When the company last rebooted its decades-long storylines this thoroughly, with Crisis on Infinite Earths 25 years ago, book-format collections were basically a non-factor. Now they’re a huge part of DC’s business, and historically the publisher has been better at packaging and promoting (and heck, just keeping in print) its major books from throughout its history. Obviously all those stories still exist just as you remember them, and one’s enjoyment of them has nothing to do with what’s going on now — but comic fans tend not to see things that way. Now, neither DC nor its retail partners can point to Crisis on Infinite Earths, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, or Final Crisis as books you “need” to read to understand this or that, or as an intro course to the DCU, and future reprints can’t count on that sense of “this happened!” urgency to get themselves over. I wonder what they’ll do with them.

* The move’s also noteworthy given just how big a part of Dan DiDio’s tenure at the company books with the word “Crisis” in the title have been. The Brad Meltzer-written Identity Crisis served as a sort of statement of purpose for the then-new DiDio regime, reintroducing the “Crisis” concept, injecting a kind of troubling degree of sexualized violence into the DCU, and more or less kicking off the new event-comic era. Infinite Crisis was the first full-fledged line-wide crossover either of the Big Two superhero publishers had done in years, and marked the ascent of writer Geoff Johns to the top of the industry. Final Crisis was a somewhat stickier wicket: Grant Morrison’s take on the line-wide event was one of his most divisive books ever, and though it sold well, by the time it wrapped up DiDio was publicly making fun of it during convention panels. Still, it set up Morrison’s well-received and high-selling Batman run of the past several years, especially the storyline involving Bruce Wayne’s “death” and return; since Morrison has basically been allowed to continue writing Batman with his continuity unchanged, who knows what to make of Final Crisis‘s retconning?

* Lisa Hanawalt reviews Drive. Saving this one for later.

* Gahan Wilson says there’s no sexism among the male and female New Yorker cartoonists. That’d be nice!

* Finally for the Robot 6 roundup, I posted a few more thoughts on Emily Carroll’s new webcomic, Dash Shaw & Jesse Moynihan’s old Lost comic, and Benjamin Marra’s new Gangsta Rap Posse issue over there.

* Image Comics is going same-day digital with its monthly comics offerings, through the retailer ComiXology. As Tom Spurgeon put it at the link, “the specter of total Direct Market collapse as soon as comics gained same-day availability has been punched in the face and pushed out of the moving car by DC Comics with their New 52 initiative.” That’s a heck of a phrase-turn, but I think at this early juncture it’s only dispositive in terms of retailer jitters, not the long-term health of brick-and-mortar stores and other print outlets.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch on the comics of David Lynch, plus various new releases of note.

* Man, that Giorgio Comolo guy sure can draw Kirby characters.

* Jim Woodring at his most Lovecraftian.

* Good new comics news #1: Benjamin Marra has released Gangsta Rap Posse #2! It looks like this:

* Good new comics news #2: Emily Carroll has started a new webcomic called “Margot’s Room.” The way it works is that you click the objects listed in the text at the top of the landing page to read it.

* Good not really new comics news: Frank Santoro’s interview with Forming author Jesse Moynihan for the Comics Journal contains, in its entirety, the Lost-inspired comic “Spiritual Dad” that Moynihan and Dash Shaw did for The Believer a while back. Just scroll down.

* Did you know Brian Chippendale has a prose science-fiction short story blog?

* Here’s a sentence I’m excited to write: Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Community creator Dan Harmon.

* David Allison (aka Illogical Volume) connects Darkseid to the inescapable gravitational maw of contemporary capitalism as part of The Mindless Ones’ month-long series of essays on bad guys. What I like about this essay is that it makes Darkseid a lot more dangerous an idea than if we regard him as simply a celestial fascist, one of “those guys,” the obviously evil goosesteppers no self-examination is required to oppose. As much as I enjoy Final Crisis, no one was ever likely to come down on the “oppression” side of “freedom vs. oppression.” The original Jack Kirby conception of Darkseid and Anti-Life as war itself, whereby any violent opposition to Darkseid is itself Anti-Life, is a much stickier proposition, as is Illogical Volume’s suggestion of a humanity-devaluing socioeconomic program so pervasive that opposition is all but literally unimaginable. That’s the hallmark of a good dystopia, after all: No chains required.

* The CBLDF puts the Comics Code’s head on a stick and mounts it on the city wall.

* Craig Thompson, Habibi, Arabian Nights, Orientalism.

* The end of the first paragraph in Graeme McMillan’s brutal drubbing of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror may be the most devastating line I’ve ever read in a comics review.

* Another wonderfully weird image/gif gallery from Uno Moralez.

* This is a sculpture of a creature from Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark illustrations, by Kezeff. It is marvelous.

* Real Life Horror: The President can have Americans killed without charge, trial, or conviction at any point around the globe now, apparently, so that’s pretty fucking exciting.

* Finally, start your October off right with TERROR STAIN, the latest in Chris Ward’s annual series of Halloween mixes.

* Last night, during my stint enjoying the hospitality of the Long Island Rail Road, I finished the first disc of Mad Men Season Two. With a little more than a full season under my belt, I find that I still don’t really relate to it on a competence-fantasy level — but what I do relate to is what Don Draper is so competent at. He’s a writer! A copywriter at that! I’ve now read and watched so many stories about people who murder other people for a living that watching people spend time trying to figure out the right turn of phrase for a headline feels bizarre. Bizarre, but good.

* The best part is that Mad Men nails the main pleasure of copywriting: Using creativity to solve a puzzle. Case in point: Don, Sal, and Peggy try to figure out the right tagline for their Mohawk Airlines ad. Don rejects the initial sexual-adventure angle he’d helped develop in their previous meeting, instead focusing on Sal’s background illustration of the traveler’s little daughter. On the spot, Peggy suggests a series of taglines reflecting this new direction, and she and Don tweak and reject them until she arrives at the magical “What did you bring me, Daddy?” She knows it’s right, Don knows it’s right, Sal knows it’s right. I know that sensation! I’ve gotten it myself during my dayjob writing copy for a bookseller, and during freelance gigs writing jacket copy for graphic novels, and in meetings at my old magazine jobs, coming up with coverlines. The thrill of recognition was palpable.

* Which leads to a surprising insight: Don’s work life is actually pretty good! I expected him to be embroiled in cutthroat office politics the entire time, but at least up until this point, his work-related problems are actually personal problems in work drag: his problematic relationship with his client Rachel Mencken; an unexpected intel coup by his envious underling Pete Campbell; a quickly avenged and forgotten pass at his wife by Roger Sterling. Those events aside, Don has a creatively and financially fulfilling job. He has the full support of his superiors; even the one time that Cooper gainsays him by insisting they keep Campbell, Sterling immediately steps into the breach to safeguard Don’s authority in Campbell’s eyes. He has the nearly worshipful admiration of everyone at the office, from his bosses (who are also his friends) to his employees (including Pete, his own protestations to the contrary). He’s good enough at his job to actually deserve that admiration, moreover. He wants a raise, he gets it. He wants to make partner, he gets it. In fact, hiring Duck Phillips and discovering that he disagrees with the decisions Duck’s making in his old job is the first time Don goes up against anything resembling a structural problem with his job. No wonder he’s sacrificed or marginalized so much outside of the office.

* Peggy’s arc is a lot more disheartening than Don’s, because it entails her becoming a worse person as a function of getting better at her job. I’d be lying if I told you that my own recent experiences with miscarriage, premature birth, and fatherhood didn’t color my perception of her decision to reject her baby. Simply put, that scene made me cry at my desk. (It’s been tempered somewhat by the revelation that she handled her I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant moment badly enough to be classified as mentally ill and/or maternally unfit by the state.) But it’s not just what she’s done about her baby. I watched in something approaching horror as she dismantled the pretty young voice actress she cast in the commercial for the weight-loss vibrator thingamajig, thinking that she was harping on a perceived lack of confidence to compensate for her own — but this blossomed into full-blown horror when I realized she did this on purpose so that she could ingratiate herself with the unctuously macho Kenneth Cosgrove by providing him with easy pickings, breaking the actress apart so he could sweep in and reassemble her around his dick. Peggy appears to have learned what it seems a lot of viewers don’t learn from Don and company’s behavior, which is that you can’t separate the competence fantasy from the competence nightmare.

* Don’s most profound violation of Betty’s trust was neither his many affairs, nor his lies about his name and background. It was his collusion with her psychotherapist. I’m not really sure if what I’m about to say truly squares with the reality of these situations, but I can’t help but feel that both his adultery and his identity are matters of withholding himself from Betty. These are areas of his life he has chosen not to share with her. But by violating her privacy in therapy, he’s actively invading those areas she chooses to keep from him in turn — socially sanctioned areas at that, unlike his own. It’s vile. And when I realized that his purloined phone bill would reveal not phone calls to mistresses (he was always pretty careful about that) but phone calls to the doctor, I gasped.

* Betty handled it differently than I thought she might, by the way. I think I expected a “press a button and she falls apart” physical collapse akin to — well, I won’t say, but another prominent drama involving a husband who cheated on his wife, when the wife was finally confronted with this in a way she couldn’t avoid. Instead, in true Draper fashion, she shrewdly uses her knowledge to voice her concerns and suspicions about Don’s infidelity, knowing that either a) the doctor wouldn’t dare tell Don about this, thus preserving her privacy, or b) the doctor would tell Don about this, thus starting a conversation she couldn’t bring herself to start on her own.

* But first she breaks down and cries and confides to a nine-year-old boy. I found her two interactions with her divorced neighbor’s sad little kid enormously affecting. The first, in which the kid busts in on her while she’s peeing and she subsequently gives him a lock of her hair, was like the fulfillment of every young boy’s first pre-sexual kindling of the erotic impulse. That’s a topic I don’t think I’ve ever seen addressed, except in cheesy Franco-Italian sexual-awakening movies about sultry brunettes who turn their little villages upside-down. But it was also enormously revealing of how desperate Betty was for sexual and romantic validation, and how little emotional sustenance her friends, husband, and work as a homemaker and mother were providing her. That second parking-lot interaction was all of that writ large, with the bonus violation of the era’s rigid insistence on the sacredness of childhood. She forced the kid to be an adult — in a tender and sad and empathetic way, so much so that even the kid realized this person needed taking care of, but yeah, that’s what she did. It was brilliantly written, and frankly January Jones, whatever her faults elsewhere, couldn’t be more ideal as this porcelain-doll wifebot who occasionally cracks in profound and dangerous ways.

* Back to Don for a moment: My favorite part of the slow-burning Dick Whitman reveal came before you even knew it was a reveal. It was the first time we ever heard the name “Dick Whitman,” when a fellow commuter bumped into Don on the train and used this unfamiliar name. For the entire conversation, I thought that this guy simply had it wrong, that it was a case of mistaken identity, that Don was rolling with it because doing so was easier than correcting him, that a point was being made about Don as an unperson, a meticulously constructed generic man-shaped void. And I think those last couple of points still stand, regardless. What an eerie, haunting little scene.

* Another detail I enjoyed: Don and Pete’s on-again, off-again, bonafide camaraderie — the camaraderie of enemies. In the course of my life, from grade school till now, I’ve had, I dunno, half a dozen dudes (always dudes) who’ve actively sought to hurt me and/or were out to get me in some way. In all cases this weird affinity develops with them in a way that doesn’t exist with more run-of-the-mill critics or unpleasant acquaintances. You get to know someone you hate, and when you get to know them, a closeness develops whether you want it to or not. In one case in my own life, a guy I almost came to blows with once in high school (unbeknownst to me — our mutual friends kept him away from me) literally did the look-back-on-it-and-laugh thing a year later, when we became friends in college. We wouldn’t have gotten there if we hadn’t started someplace else. So I totally buy the seemingly genuine concern, respect, and pleasantness that breaks out between Don and Pete every now and then. As Bert Cooper told Don, one never knows how loyalty is born.

* A couple of quick notes on two key supporting players. You’ll note that when I did a quick list of actors on this show who are easy on the eyes, I didn’t mention John Slattery as Roger Sterling. I dunno, there was something slightly avian and predatory in his sharp gray features. But Jesus can that guy talk. Hand me a mic and a phonebook, for real. What great casting, to make him the guy for whom bon mots are a way of life. He’s a juggernaut of verbal charm. The most troubling thing about his move on Betty Draper or his attempted twincest threeway on the night of his heart attack wasn’t the morality of the deeds, but how clumsy he was in suggesting them. That’s how you knew something was wrong. That’s sharp writing.

* Watching these DVDs was my first-ever glimpse of Christina Hendricks in a noncleavagecentric capacity. If you’ve only ever known of her in the context of your suspicion that Tumblr was developed as a slightly inefficient Christina Hendricks photo delivery mechanism, watching her act — specifically, watching her play Joan Holloway, who is herself a ruthlessly efficient Joan Holloway delivery mechanism — is a revelation. That’s a part that could be very one-note and very dull in someone else’s hands, but Hendricks brings the character to her own tenaciously curated form of life. Always you see the effort behind the effortlessness, but just a little of it, just enough to prevent her from lapsing into caricature on either side of the line. Hendricks makes “making ‘making it look easy’ look hard” look easy.

Lightning struck near one of the main hubs of the Long Island Rail Road last night during rush hour, which means that a commute that usually lasts from about 5:15 to 6:30 desk-to-door took me until about 10:50 instead. I’m positive that LIRR decision-makers made a lot of awful decisions during this process and all year round, but it’s not them I’m really angry at, because they’re not responsible for the philosophical underpinnings of why they don’t have the money that would have been required to prevent this from happening in the first place, where individual bad decisions wouldn’t matter as much as they did and do because the whole operation would be better on a structural level. And here is my rant on this topic.

I’m actually a lot better off than most people because I work in One Penn Plaza, the skyscraper on top of the LIRR commuter destination Penn Station. I don’t even need to go outside to get to the trains — there’s an entrance to Penn right from my building. Thus I have a journey of about three minutes from desk to train platform, unlike people who have to worry about walking and subways and such from elsewhere in town. So I heard the train was suspended at about 5pm, where normally I’d leave my desk at about 5:15 to catch a 5:23 home. So I just hung out for a while. Around 6:10 a fellow stranded coworker told me that they’d announced on the LIRR website that service should be resuming in about 15 minutes, so I went downstairs to Penn to check out the big board of departure times over the police barricades (they weren’t letting anyone else into the LIRR area). It said the next train to my stop was at 6:53, which I figured could be a reasonable estimate rather than just some number that went up automatically. So I bought some baby stuff in the Duane Reade down there and came back out to wait. At about 6:25 or so they threw some trains up on the board, then took them down about five seconds later, then put a few back up again. AT 6:29 they announced a 6:21 train on which my stop was the second stop. I hopped on, got a great aisle seat right next to the bathroom, fired up my Mad Men Season Two Disc One DVD, and away we went…

Fast forward to TWO FUCKING HOURS LATER, spent mostly parked in various locations, when we FINALLY arrive in fucking JAMAICA, which is usually not even the fucking HALFWAY POINT of my commute. Our train can’t even fully platform, because the train ahead of us hasn’t fully left the platform yet. After another half an hour of sitting around, they open the doors to the cars that are on the platform so people can get out and walk around, at which point the platform PA announces that service has been suspended again. After about another half hour of hesitation and bathroom-line-waiting, I decide to take my chances with taking a cab home from Jamaica after hearing a new announcement that they’ve completely powered down the tracks because people have gotten out of trains stranded on them and are walking around down there, which is basically a sign that nothing will move for hours and hours. But when I get to the street I discover that about 10,000 other people had this same idea. Asking my wife to come pick me up would be stupid because she’d have to bring the baby, and I’m guessing it’d take her half an hour just to get NEAR Jamaica Station at that point, since all the streets around are crowded with stranded commuters, horrendously inconvenienced locals, cars, cops, cop cars, buses, ambulances, barricades, taxis and gypsy cabs trying to score fares, significant others and car services trying to pick people up, etc etc, and I can just imagine the baby deciding she doesn’t want to be in the car anymore at that point and spending the next hour or so screaming. So I’m debating what to do–do I take the E back to Penn and sleep at the office? Do I take it someplace else in Queens and try to get a cab from wherever that is? Do I call one of my city slicker friends and try to get a place to crash? Then I look up and see I’m about two feet away from a bus stop for a route that goes to Floral Park, about a five minute drive away from where my mom lives. So I get on the bus and give her a call, and once I reach the end of the line she picks me up and drives me home. I walked in the door approximately four and a half hours after I normally get home.

FUCK THE LONG ISLAND RAIL ROAD, but more pertinently, FUCK THE REPUBLICAN PARTY from Ronald Reagan onward for deliberately refusing to invest in this nation’s vital infrastructure, because their primary goal is to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, and the means to that end is to completely delegitimize government as a solution for social problems since solving social problems costs money that could otherwise be handed to rich people, and the best way to delegitimize government is to make sure everyone’s interaction with any government or quasi-government agency is unpleasant and failed so that people think “government is the problem,” and the best way to do that is to refuse to fund vital services from public education to mass transit and transportation infrastructure because they are most people’s main daily interface with government power.

Page 17 of “Destructor and the Lady” has been posted.

Getting close to the end now.

Prison Pit: Book Three
Johnny Ryan, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, September 2011
120 pages
$12.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

For today’s Comics Time review, please visit The Comics Journal.

Matt Zoller Seitz explains what’s wrong with Terence Winter’s sumptuous but slightly shaky Boardwalk Empire, which returned last night. I appear to enjoy the series a lot more than Seitz does, although I agree with him that it hasn’t hit the heights of the likes of Deadwood or The Sopranos. But vanishingly few shows in the history of television have, after all. If Boardwalk Empire was the worst we could do, we’d be doing pretty damn great, which Seitz has no problem saying.

Seitz’s complaint is that despite being exquisitely dressed, shot, and acted, the show writes character in a comparatively perfunctory and haphazard way, especially compared to the evident glee it takes in delivering gangster genre goodies. In other words, his critique is the mirror image of my circa-Season-One-finale praise, which is that (unlike The Walking Dead) it takes genre stuff I’m predisposed to like (which The Walking Dead has) and surrounds it with lusciously pleasurable filmmaking on other levels (which The Walking Dead doesn’t have). That it has a hard time going further than that — that the writing is inconsistent enough (cf. my complaint about Margaret’s yo-yo morality) to prevent it from getting there — is Seitz’s beef.

The thing is, though, that I do think it has greatness in it. Richard Harrow’s explanation of why he doesn’t read anymore, for example, is maybe my favorite line in television history. “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” That is the most brutally bleak thing any TV character who isn’t Livia Soprano or BOB has ever said in my hearing. What makes it even more vicious is that it’s an indictment of the very enterprise its writer was engaged in at that moment. This is followed by a scene in which an unusually empathetic Jimmy Darmody takes Richard back to Johnny Torio’s brothel to relax, at which point some small talk about Jimmy’s piece gradually becomes, to the viewer’s dawning horror, a litany of the arsenal possessed by Harrow, a man who has just professed feeling no connection to the rest of humanity whatsoever. Here’s an example where not only is there brilliant, philosophically minded character work being done, but it actually enhances the bloody, scary gangster stuff in the process.

Harrow is, I think, the emblematic figure for what I believe to be the theme of the show, a theme Seitz hasn’t been able to put his finger on, which is that violence, in war and elsewhere, is just run-of-the-mill corruption and shittiness with its mask off. The Great War that made monsters of Harrow and Jimmy also provided Al Capone with a readymade backstory for why he’s the tough customer he’s made himself out to be, and is used by the Colonel as a justification for the sneak-attack slaughter of a warehouse full of black people, and is echoed in the sectarian strife of Ireland that pops up here and there among Nucky Thompson’s Hibernian politician pals, and on and on and on. If The Sopranos is about how people will choose to do the wrong thing if it’s easy enough, and Deadwood is about the price of doing the right thing anyway, Boardwalk Empire is about the pervasiveness of the wrong thing, so that you’re all but locked into supporting it in one way or another. In his essay, Seitz wonders what Jimmy Darmody’s motivation is — I think it’s your basic post-Great War Lost Generation nihilism. Why constantly bite the hand that feeds? Why not?

Again, Seitz is absolutely right to say that the inconsistent character work muddies the waters. The kindness in Nucky that Margaret saw in Season One and which separated him distinctly from Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen is a lot tougher to detect when he’s complicit in the Ku Klux Klan’s hatecrimes. And Harrow’s bracingly direct expression of human disconnect doesn’t jibe with his now apparent obsession with idealized family life. But somewhere in here there’s a statement about the enormity of man’s inhumanity to man that’s fixing to be made. As long as the show continues to be so pleasant to watch as it meanders its way in that direction, I’ll meander with it.