The old blogroll has changed substantially over the last couple weeks or so. Peruse and surf!

One prominent addition to said blogroll is Heidi MacDonald, former Beat columnist and current Beat blogger. You may remember that I was touting the potential of Heidi to do a great blog in the Gawker/Kicker/Wonkette mode waaaay back when. Lo and behold, that’s what she’s done, and she’s already breaking stories left and right. My favorite so far: Dark Horse will be rereleasing its Sin City volumes in time for the film version’s release, in manga-digest format. Could it be that my old “it’s the format, stupid” mantra (blog-initiated, retail-tested) is a belief that’s shared by the movers and the shakers?

Here’s an announcement that took me by surprise: Veteran-scribe-turned-hot-new-thing Bruce Jones is leaving Marvel. Huh. I can see how people might think that his conspiracy-laden Incredible Hulk saga bears diminishing returns, but I flipped through my trade-paperback copies of the series the other day and was amazed at how readable and enjoyable they remain. This is in no small part due to the editorial latitude afforded him by top-notch ed. Axel Alonso, as well as Jones’s own ability to coax career-best work out of artists ranging from John Romita Jr. to Lee Weeks to Mike Deodato (and who’d’a thunk that one?). Jones was also a reliable go-to guy for a variety of Hulk- and Wolverine-related miniseries, the most recent of which, a Hulk vs. Thing thing, was only recently announced. It’s a big surprise to see him defect to DC, and it makes one wonder who’ll be the next in line to chafe under the more rigorous editorial demands that fellow ship-jumper Chuck Austen described.

Lots of people are saying lots of interesting things about Spider-Man 2, a film about which I couldn’t come up with something interesting to say if you paid me. (Well, yeah, I could: Can we have a moratorium on films that include a scene in which a character, pushed to the brink of despair by the horror of his own actions, clenches his fists, closes his eyes, raises his face to the heavens and screams “NOOOOOOOOO!” to no one in particular? There, that will be $150, please.) With Dave Fiore’s encouragement I’m going to let my thousand-word summary of the film stand: It’s clear to me that I’m on so different a wavelength regarding this film than are my usual interlocutors that discussing it would be futile for all concerned. I’ll say simply that it’s my belief that the fascinating insights into both the superhero genre and larger points of aesthetics and ethics being generated by the film speak more directly to the high quality of the pundits involved than to the film itself. (For what it’s worth, I think Johnny Bacardi‘s positive but measured assessment is much more in line with the intellectual and filmic weight the film can actually bear in and of itself. Ditto John Jakala‘s pan.)

The blockbuster interview of the moment is at PopImage: Jonathan Ellis speaks with Grant Morrison, and the amazing and inspiring quotes ensue as you knew they would, and as they do with the regularity of Old Faithful whenever Morrison speaks. I found his points about the too-easily-forsaken Wild-West potential of even “mainstream” comics particularly well-taken, as well as his refreshing lack of equivalency about Magneto’s terror campaign (the fitting end to which has already been retconned out of creation by the House of Ideas). (His argument that manga is where the hip-now-pop energy of comics is these days is certainly borne out by my sojourn in retail, that’s for damn sure.)

Also worth a read is Chris Butcher’s intro to the interview, in which he recounts the life-changing impact Morrison’s Invisibles had on him. The Invisibles is by far my least favorite work of Morrison’s; I found it difficult to follow in an annoying, poorly executed way, not a challenging way. Moreover, any impact it may have had on me was diluted by the fact that I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy long before; that book had the “Life-Changing Conspiracy Mindfuck” spot in my mental bookshelf well and truly filled. Still, the fact that a comic book can change someone’s life speaks well both of the form and of the practitioner in question. (And I like the Chris Butcher we have as a result.)

As part of his ongoing crusade against wasting time discussing superhero comics, Tim O’Neil has posted two of the longest, most considered analyses of supercomic continuity I’ve ever seen. (I dunno, maybe he’s going for some of that Morrisonesque Filth-style innoculation? Or maybe (seriously this time) he just really likes supercomics and gets frustrated when they don’t live up to his very specific expectations. I’m going with the latter.) Now, I’m an unapologetic admirer of (good) supercomics, and yet not even I can imagine not reading a particular book because of its inconsistent portrayal of the freaking Absorbing Man. Still, Tim’s main point–that writers, in choosing to either ignore continuity or dredge up its longest-forgotten elements, should always consider how this would effect the tone of the story and thereby its success in evoking the desired response from the readers–is an insightful and necessary corrective to a debate about such issues that too often devolves into blanket pro-and-anti camps.

Finally:

The late-night slots of Comedy Central and Cartoon Network have become a graveyard where failed cartoon sitcoms endlessly cycle through their six episode initial commitments. The least lamented is the odious right-wing Simpsons knock-off, Family Guy.

–R. Fiore, “The Glory That Was The Simpsons,” The Comics Journal, Special Edition Volume Four, Winter 2004.

Well, Mr. Fiore, I could challenge your definitions of both “least lamented” and “right-wing” (???), but I think I’ll go the more succinct route: As Nelson would say, “Ha ha!”

(Link courtesy of Kevin Melrose. That’s something we in the blogosphere should just tattoo on our foreheads, isn’t it?)

It’s Eightball Appreciation Day over at Comic Book Galaxy! Alan David Doane offers an encomium for the Daniel Clowes series in general and Eightball #22 in particular. Also up at CBG is a revised edition of the Eightball #23 review I originally wrote for this blog.

Meanwhile, back on the Gloeckner beat, ADD feels much the same way about Gloeckner’s comics as I do, and says as much in his run-down of the Phoebe-centric latest issue of the Comics Journal, found here.

Point is, if you’re looking for comics that deliver on the promise and potential of the medium, look no further.

Happy Birthday, America!

And what better way to celebrate than with some goodies all related to one of the three or four greatest living cartoonists.

First of all, I know this is sort of old news, but only at MoCCA last weekend was I finally able to pick up a copy of the Journal’s Winter 2004 Special Edition, which features both an in-depth overview of Phoebe Gloeckner’s career by Tom Spurgeon and a brand-new “photoromance” in which Gloeckner discusses several unlikely people who’ve provided her with artistic inspiration. (It also features a game of “Sexual Memory” that is one of the more bizarre things she’s ever done, and as you can guess if you’re at all familiar with her work, that’s saying something.)

Second, the most recent regular issue of the Journal has both a one-on-one interview conducted by Gary Groth, portions of which are excerpted here, and a review of The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Donald Phelps. Like the Special Edition, this issue is definitely worth picking up if you’re at all interested in Phoebe’s work: Not only does it feature another original photoromance, but the interview contains a great sidebar about the long and winding road that Diary took before finally being reviewed by the Journal, which is just happening now, over a year and a half after its release. (This has been a topic of some interest to me ever since I interviewed Phoebe, as astute ADDTF readers might recall.)

Finally, did you know that Phoebe is blogging again? Yes, she’s back! Go say hello. And buy her books, if you don’t already have them, because the simple fact of the matter is that comics don’t come any better.

Hench

There’s hardly a vein left in the big superhero-comics motherlode that hasn’t been mined to near depletion. Neo-traditionalism, mad ideas, revisionism, retro, decompression, superheroes-plus (as in “plus crime/romance/sci-fi/what have you”): To quote the Barenaked Ladies, and God knows I try not to make that a habit, it’s all been done. You’re forgiven, then, if you greet Hench, the umpteenth iteration of “a realistic take on superheroes” to come down the pike, with something less than enthusiasm.

You are not forgiven, however, if you let that prevent you from giving the book a try. You’ll find your forebearance amply rewarded. In Hench’s slim 80 pages writer Adam Beechen establishes himself as a bona fide talent: a writer with a firm grasp on the interplay between the demands of character and plot, a command of genre convetions solid enough to make his undermining of same come across not as cheap shots but as smarts, and an ability to walk the well-worn paths of realistic superheroes and street-level crime tales without a stumble into cliche.

Hench is told mainly in flashback, as Mike, our protagonist, holds a gun to the head of a bound and incapacitated superhero named the Still of the Night. Mike is a career criminal, and his speciality is “henching,” serving as manpower, muscle, and cannon fodder for the various, nefarious supervillains that populate the world of the book. Slowly he tells the story of the choices he made–and the choices made for him–that brought him to this pass, a pivotal moment during which he must choose between becoming a murderer or, quite possibly, becoming the victim of one at the hands of the terrifying hero at his feet.

The story would be little more than a case of deja vu–Rehashtro City, if you will–if it weren’t for Beechen’s skill in depicting the emotional logic of Mike’s downward trajectory from football phenom to three-time loser. Beechen realizes that the presence of flying, bulletproof people who fight or commit crime is not a “get out of a semblance of normal human behavior free” card for a writer. As written by Beechen, Mike gets involved in supercrime for that most quotidian of reasons–money–but this is just a small part of his motivation for keeping at it. Right from the get-go he’s honest with himself about the odds for success in this field: As Randy, the ex-footballer friend who gets him involved in the life, puts it in one of their initial conversations on the topic, “Figure two out of every three jobs, you’re either going to jail or you’re going to the hospital and then to jail.” What makes Mike an ideal henchman isn’t just the poverty that leads so many to a life of crime, but an unextinguishable desire to be told what to do and to do it. Even when he’s helping to plot the overthrow of the U.S. government or risking capture at the hands of an alien crimefighter, Mike’s a linebacker at heart. The coaches may change, but as we see time and time again as Mike immerses himself in a particular supervillain’s world (the neo-fascist Shadow Army, the occultist Hellbent, the masochistic Pain Freak, and so on) only to do his time and forget about them afterwards, the coaches don’t matter. It’s getting back in the game that counts.

By the end of Mike’s story, he’s taking increasingly dangerous, borderline-suicidal jobs, with criminals like the radioactive Half-Life and the dangerously unhinged Pencil Neck. He’s become one of those people who say things like “I could do a five year bid standing on my head” and mean it. He’s lost his family (though, sadly for all involved, not his attachment to them), and he’s all but lost his ability to picture a better way of living for himself. If this sounds familiar to you from some of the better crime films you’ve seen, it probably should. The superhero trappings give Hench a selling point, but like all good superhero stories, it’s the truth behind the capes that counts. Hench has it.

That’s not to say that there’s not a single misstep in the book. The climax of the book centers on Mike’s decision as to what to do with the Still of the Night, who it turns out is part of that breed of “heroes” who’s as crazy and violent as the villains he fights. As the copy on the back of the book proclaims: “Heroes. Villains. The line between them has never been thinner.” Unfortunately, outside of the confines of the world of superhero fetishists (and yes, I’ll count myself in that number), I’m just not sure this is a particularly useful point, or an incisive glimpse at some deeper human truth. It doesn’t take too much insight to point out that a gibbering sociopath who dresses up in costume and beats the crap out of people every night may, in fact, be a not terribly heroic individual. “We’re not so different, you and I,” the villain always says to the antihero. “No duh,” I say to them both.

And then there’s the art. I suppose Ken Lowery is right: Manny Bello’s storytelling is always clear. Moreover, there are occasional visuals–the weird spirals and circles that comprise Half-Life, for example, or Mike’s refreshingly idiosyncratic appearance–that impress the reader. But overall one can’t escape the feeling that Bello is that guy in your algebra class who draws those really awesome pictures. Back in algebra class they were indeed really awesome, but the distance between algebra class and becoming a published comics artist must be paved with more growth than Bello has undergone. The art often looks hurried and unfinished, laced throughout with the kind of shortcuts that should get beaten out of artists at their very first portfolio review. There’s more to crosshatching than drawing a few rows of Xs, for example, and there’s more to drawing buildings (and cars, and chains, and guns–especially the gun that’s central to the entire story, for Pete’s sake!) than taking a ruler and drawing some rectangles. Finally, the conceit of reproducing famous stand-alone images from the ouevres of the great superhero comics of yore is amusing, but Bello lacks both the skill to depict these homages with enough accuracy to impress and the imagination to subert them in a compelling fashion. In the final analysis, seeing facsimiles of the poses and pin-ups of Kirby, Ditko, Romita, Steranko et al simply makes one pine for the originals. (In much the same way, the relatively hefty pricetag–thirteen bucks for 80 black-and-white pages–makes one pine for a manga digest, where you can get three times the page count for three bucks cheaper.)

But for fans of superhero stories who are looking not for something different–that’s next to impossible to find–but for something that distinguishes itself, Hench is a discovery. Reading it, you know that it won’t be long before the Big Two are beating a path toward this talented writer’s door. We can only hope that he can tell other kinds of stories with the deftness and confidence he brought to this one.

Chuck Austen is leaving Marvel.

I was never as enthusiastic an Austen basher as some, for a few reasons. One, U.S. War Machine is one of my favorite supercomics ever, his artwork on the Elektra miniseries that Brian Bendis wrote is maybe the only time a non-Frank Miller or Bill Sienkievicz take on the character worked, and even The Eternals was sleazily entertaining. Second, I quickly figured out a good rule of thumb for parsing his work: If he can show nipples and disembowelment, it’s probably pretty good, and if he can’t, run for the fucking hills. Three, once I establish that someone’s book isn’t very good–now see if you can follow me on this one–I stop reading it. I abandoned his X-Men stuff when they started fighting werewolves and taking atrociously sophomoric, nearly braindead swipes at organized religion (not my favorite thing in the world, but even if the Catholic Church was run by a clone of Adolf Hitler, attacking it still wouldn’t justify that nightmarishly bad Nightcrawler storyline), and I haven’t looked back. That’s the good thing about comics: No one’s forcing you at gunpoint to buy them, or even read them in the store. In my head, Magneto is still dead, Nightcrawler is still a mutant, and that two-issue New X-Men coda Austen did exists only in the Negative Zone.

It’s mildly disturbing to see the role that Marvel’s backtracking away from pushing the boundaries of what mainstream, superhero comics could be played in Austen’s ouster. If Austen’s dopey PG-13 work on X-Men is out of bounds, what are the odds we’ll see something like Unstable Molecules come along again anytime soon? On the other hand, Marvel’s reliance on Austen to work on franchise books, work he was quite obviously ill-suited for, was a genuine problem for the company. By excusing himself from the table, Austen just made Marvel’s job–making good comics–that much easier.

(Link courtesy of Kevin Melrose.)

Alan David Doane has five questions for Bluesman and Castaways writer Rob Vollmar.

Tim O’Neil takes a look at the work of rising star Kevin Huizenga.

NeilAlien offers a surprisingly heartfelt MoCCA recap.

They write things like this.

Even aside from its solely ignorance-based conflation of all comics with superhero comics, it reflects that unique head-in-the-sand avoidance of innovation and mass culture in the guise of Standing Astride The Stream Of History Yelling Stop that is cultural conservatism. They’re still fighting the late ’60s culture wars in a way that’s just as embarassing as their liberal nemeses’. It’s also fairly entertaining to note that the rhetoric here employed is completely indistingushable from that of the rabidly Bush-hating socialists who likewise view the superhero genre with apoplectic disgust. Which once again proves my theories about political extremists: Weak minds think alike.

(Link courtesy of Kevin Melrose.)

UPDATE: Franklin Harris has links to responses from other conservative writers who think superhero comics are just fine, thank you very much. (He also indulges the stupid desire to use the word “chickenhawk,” but whaddyagonnado.)

You know that expression, “fish or cut bait”? Last week I cut bait. Expect more blogging. I’m certainly expecting it from myself.

In one of his two MoCCA semi-recaps, Chris Butcher (who I’m pretty sure I almost met at one point, when someone named “Christopher” came up to talk to Jeffrey Brown when I was talking to him at one point–belated hi, Chris!) points out accurately that there was a breakout book at the con, and that book was Sam Hiti‘s End Times. This seems to be the book that has the people who’ve bought it talking. Keep an eye out.

Also on the altcomix beat is Alan David Doane, who more or less pans Fantagraphics’ new young-cartoonist anthology Blood Orange. I came pretty close to buying it myself, but without a unifying theme that I’m interested in or long-form work from an artist I like, it’s tough to justify buying anthologies when you’re on a budget. Unsurprisingly, ADD says the best stuff comes from Marc Bell and John Hankiewicz, though I’d be interested to see Ron Rege’s contribution as well. (His McSweeney’s Israel/Palestine minicomic was as strong formally as its political point of emphasis was problematic, though his ghoulish depiction of Hamas’s eminences grises was a daring and powerful choice.) Generally, it’s just good to see Alan back in action.

Special for Johnny Bacardi, whose frequent Bendis true-believer posts are a welcome, articulate, passionate, and (oh yeah) hilarious anecdote to the rote Bendis-bashing that’s become common in the blogosphere: Bendis talks at great length (as does Joe Quesada) about his controversial upcoming run on The Avengers at both Newsarama and The Pulse. This guy starts thinking about superheroes at a level where most writers leave off. I’ll be buying it. (Links courtesy of Graeme McMillan.)

Dave G. reviews The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Planet of the Capes, praising the former and burying the latter. I think they’re up to different things–DK2 is a celebration, PotC is a lynching–and I think they’re at different levels–PotC is good, DK2 is a fucking brilliant landmark–but I don’t see why you can’t like both of ’em. (Link courtesy of John Jakala.)

Eve Tushnet reviews Gyo (she doesn’t like it) and Planetes (she likes it a lot). I disagree with her about Gyo–I think the “what’s the point?”ness of it is the point, and the sheer randomness of the concept is part and parcel of that; to be fair, decay and physical corruption are things that really do freak me out, so maybe that’s part of my admiration for the series. On the other hand, I couldn’t agree more with her assessment of Planetes, which is maybe the best regularly-published series of any kind on the racks these days. You know how people occasionally go nuts about certain titles and try to sell the shit out of them to their readers–Sleeper, Street Angel, Demo, that sort of thing? Folks, Planetes does that for me. There is literally no reason why you shouldn’t like this book. It’s intelligent and beautiful and at 240+ pages for ten bucks, it’s a great buy to boot.

Finally, John Jakala was right: Discount Comic Book Service is amazing. I’ll reserve final judgement for once I receive my books, I guess, but for now: Go ye and shop!

Guy Leshinski mulls over an issue I’ve talked about many times: Alternative cartoonists’ worrisome tendency to make their comics into objets d’art, regardless of the impact their design decisions make on readability and shelvability.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the fact that Chris Ware crams comics onto every available square inch of the books he releases–the world needs as many Chris Ware comics as he can get. And I love the fact that comics is still enough of a Wild West medium that, when it comes to format and design, nearly anything goes. On the other hand, I also feel that there’s a desire, conscious or not, on the part of some alternative cartoonists to have their work be seen as part of the high art tradition. As a result, the books get more and more precious, to the point where you’re practically afraid to open them and read them; they also get bigger and bigger (like Quimby the Mouse or Jimbo in Purgatory), making them both difficult to read without a place to rest them and difficult to store without putting them on their side and having them jut out a foot and a half from your bookshelf. On the small-press side, you get die-cut silk-screened multi-part productions like NON #5, which are lovely to look at but hard to read and next to impossible to produce in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if that’s not the point as well–“Look, see, comics aren’t mindless mass entertainment product!” I also remember the reaction from some segments of the Comics Journal board toward my proposal that certain altcomics be released in manga digest format–this was viewed less as a potentially lucrative business decision and more as a moral failure, perhaps because it would make the books more appealing to a large audience, rather than less. (Not coincidentally, the then-unrelased McSweeney’s that inspired Guy’s essay was held up as the “right” direction for comics to go.)

To quote Paul Pope, “Man, that’s just not the battle for me.”

Foreword: Petty patronizing hyperbole aside, my pal Milo’s recent posts on the preponderance of superhero-centric writing in the comics blogosphere has had at least one positive effect: convincing me to get off my duff and blog more often about alternative/art comics. But the altcomic that I’d like to talk about today also happens to be a superhero comic. Dramatic irony, or poetic justice–you make the call! Also, SPOILER ALERT.

Eightball #23
Daniel Clowes
44 pages, full color, $7.00
Fantagraphics

Okay. When I said Daniel Clowes’s new comic, Eightball #23: The Death-Ray was a superhero comic, I was exaggerating a bit. Oh, sure, it’s an explicit response to the genre–a critique, even–but it properly belongs to another maligned type of genre fiction: the serial killer narrative. The superhero trappings throughout this pitch-black work provide an easy in for discussion, not to mention one of Clowes’s trademark meta-references to the history and ephemera of the medium in which he is so alarmingly proficient, but in the end The Death-Ray is about superheroes in the same way that The Silence of the Lambs is about psychiatrists. The professional inspiration of the killer is interesting, but it’s the fact, the existence, of unflinching, unreflective evil that’s the point.

The Death-Ray‘s protagonist is Andy, to whom we are introduced when he’s a twice-divorced middle-aged dog owner, but whom we mostly follow during his years in high school. (In fact, we’re not even sure we’re following the same guy, at least initially; I had to go back and reread the opening high-school sequence (“The Origin of Andy”) before I realized that the brown-haired, skinny kid in it was, in fact, not a girl.) Andy is a quiet, nondescript kid of no discernible social strata in his school, whose only friend is bespectacled, somewhat arrogant crypto-Nietzschean student named Louie. Raised by his aging and ailing grandfather following the deaths of his father, mother, and grandmother, Andy discovers upon smoking a cigarette (one he initially thought must have been laced with PCP) that he gains superhuman strength with the introduction of nicotine into his bloodstream. A letter addressed to him from his late scientist father explains that this incredible power is a result of an experimental hormone he treated Andy with during his childhood. It also reveals the existence of another experimental weapon: A yellow gun resembling a science-fiction blowdryer, that fires something referred to by Andy’s dad as a death-ray. We soon learn that when Andy (and only Andy) pulls the death-ray’s trigger, whatever he aims it at is erased from the face of the Earth. With the advice and encouragement of Louie (who, following a trip to New York City, has become enraptured with the exhibitionistically angry punk movement), Andy sets about finding a way to use his newfound powers for good, in pursuit of the “something big” for which he feels his tragedy-laden life has destined him.

And oh, geez, where to go from there. Eightball #23, like its predecessor #22 (Ice Haven), is a staggeringly rich and dense work. Like #22, #23 is divided into numerous subsections of varying artistic styles, each with its own old-fashioned sub-title. Unlike #22, though, #23’s subsections would be difficult to understand if read on their own; the individual titles are less a mechanism of the paradigmatic writing method involved in the previous issue (in which individual vignettes about various characters cohered to tell an overall story, a la Altman) and more a convenient method of simultaneously transitioning from one scene to another, setting up and/or commenting on the scene at hand, and tying the entire work back to the superhero and melodrama genres with which Clowes is constructing his new work.

Primarily drawn in a slightly looser, sketchier style than is customary for Clowes, the art of The Death-Ray conveys a sense of terrible urgency, as though this was a story Clowes felt he had to tell as soon as possible. (This despite the two-year gap between issues—it sure doesn’t feel like it’s been that long.) Switches between one style and another are not done with the rigorous regularity of #22; there’s less of a sense of “I’m aiming for something different with this section” and more of “this is just the most efficient way for me to keep the story going at this clip.”

The primacy of the need to get this story out is reinforced within the narrative itself by the way Clowes has Andy, the book’s narrator and in almost every scene its focal character, tell us the story. Rather than using traditional thought balloons or thought caption boxes, Andy’s thoughts and narration are contained in actual word balloons. There is a slight difference between the balloons that contain narration/interior monologue and the balloons that contain actual—the former are slightly rectangular, the latter have the usual rounded shape—but the overall effect is that wherever Andy goes, whatever Andy does, his personal view of the world is not just inescapable but dominant. It’s a brilliantly evocative technique, familiar to any reader who’s ever gone through the motions of interaction with others yet spent the whole time in his or her own head. (As Andy puts it, not of his way of thinking but of his use of his superpowers, “somebody has to impose some kind of structure on the world, I guess. Otherwise everything would just fall apart, wouldn’t it?”)

Andy, then, is very much the star of his own movie. That is also one of the themes of the book: The degree to which pop culture molds individuals’ expectations of themselves. Andy’s adoption (largely at Louie’s behest) of a superhero’s costume and vigilante techniques make next to no sense given Andy’s actual life experience, even given the incredible introduction of superpowers into it; after all, Andy surmises that his father simply intended for his son to become as strong as the athletic kids in his grade and “turn myself into the most popular kid in school.” It’s the boys’ exposure to funnybooks and, one assumes, the Batman TV show, that convinces them to use Andy’s super-strength and death-ray to fight crime, such as it is. The multiple sub-titles that Clowes assigns various sections of the book—”ON PATROL,” “THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE DEATH-RAY,” “THE LAST STRAW”—further drive home the artificially constructed nature of Andy’s self-perception. Moreover, the occasional sequence depicts Andy and Louie swinging along city rooftops and battling crooks in the traditional superhero manner, even as they themselves continue discussing the far more quotidian battles in which they’re engaged. (The occasional “Right again, old chum!” is thrown in, but only to demonstrate the depths of the budding psychosis; we know that this was not spoken aloud, but it’s no less an accurate depiction of Andy’s mindset for that.) And it’s not just mass, mainstream culture that’s to blame, by the way. Louie’s cookie-cutter punk outlook is as much a catalyst in the terrible events that follow as is the boys’ familiarity with superhero tropes, since it gives Louie’s preexisting contempt for nearly everybody a cultural framework in which to thrive. Punk does little more for Louie than providing him an avenue to get laid, making him a bigger asshole than he already was, and giving him an excuse to pick fights—which he then cites as proof that other people are assholes who deserve what they get.

Indeed, the real problem besetting Andy and his supposed sidekick is the arbitrariness of their actions in combating crime and bad people. Simply put, the disconnect between the crimes committed and the punishment Andy and Louie dish out is so great that the act of punishment itself becomes meaningless. Andy and Louie use a discarded wallet as bait, then bully the impoverished man who picks it up, committing a “crime” that couldn’t even have occurred without the boys’ intervention. Andy roughs up a couple of burglars who he spies running off with an old man’s TV set, but even before he catches up with and knocks the snot out of them, they’ve dropped the TV, destroying it; it’s clear from the old man’s expression that he can’t afford to buy another. A girl Louie has the hots for gets smacked around by her father; Louie and Andy beat the man, but do so as he’s walking the girl’s beloved dog, who runs away, thus making her even more upset. Louie constantly tries to persuade Andy to have at a high-school meathead named Stoob with whom Louie has a long-standing and incredibly stupid grudge; it gets to the point where Louie lies on the sidewalk motionless in front of Stoob in hopes that the kid will kick him, in order to “prove” that Stoob deserves to die. In a sequence that quietly hits home for the grown-up Andy, a bartender is rude to a man who’s drinking because his grandmother died that day; Andy subsequently beats the oblivious barkeep to a bloody pulp. The beginning of the end for Andy and Louie occurs when Louie’s resentment toward his sister Teresa’s drug-dealing boyfriend leads the boys to indulge Teresa’s ex’s semi-veiled request to take the man out permanently. As Louie, abuzz with newfound moral qualms, puts it to Andy after the event, “You know, C.J. was an asshole, but he didn’t deserve to die. You didn’t even know the guy.” This from the kid who came up with the whole idea in the first place, as Andy immediately points out to himself. Louie may have had enough, but by now Andy is too far gone, too attached to the notion that he finally has the ability to “impose structure on the world,” to stop.

So at last we come to the heart of Eightball #23’s darkness: We’re witnessing the birth of a serial killer. Murder has never been far from the surface of Clowes’s work—with the exception of Ghost World, all his major works have contained violence or the threat of violence—but this is his most thorough (and not coincidentally his bleakest) examination of the subject to date.

The day before I bought this comic, I used my employee discount to pick up Michael Newton’s The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. In it, Newton quotes a jailhouse monologue from prolific serial murderer Henry Lee Lucas:

It’s a damn shame about people, it really is. We are surely the ugliest creatures in all of nature. Look at you: What have you ever done? What gives you the confidence to sit there with a smirk on your face like you’re better than me? You think anybody cares about you? Guess what—they don’t. You can lie to yourself all you want, but the rest of us are wise to your scam. You should have been an abortion or sold into slavery. Who gave you the right to take up space in my world? I’ve never done anything to anyone they didn’t deserve. My justice is nothing if not merciful. Does that mean I’m soft? Hell no. You think I’m afraid to erase you from the landscape? Look, I know what you’re thinking. Hell, maybe you’re right. It’s a lot of responsibility, but I’m not one to complain. I’ve got a job to do like everyone else. Who am I? Your worst nightmare.

Chilling, horrifying…and fictional. That wasn’t Lucas at all, but our hero Andy, toward the end of the book, in one of the strongest sequences Clowes has yet created. Throughout this grotesque monologue the present-day, middle-aged Andy’s “mask of sanity” remains intact: He returns from the grocery store, puts away his food, strolls over to his closet, reaches inside, walks up to his apartment building’s roof, surveys the green below him, eats his TV dinner. It’s only just now, after several readings of the book, that I’m realizing that the thing he reaches into his closet to grab is the death-ray, that his talk about “eras[ing] you from the landscape” is no idle chatter, that the bell-shaped silhouette in the eighth panel of this sequence is not the doorknob to Andy’s apartment but the muzzle of the death-ray as outlined against the evening sky, and that the man sitting on a park bench below Andy (the appearance of whom made me nervous, in a Charles Whitman-referencing sort of way, but little more) has just become his next victim. The insipid banality of the Rambo quote that ends the passage merely heightens the horror: Andy has no real insight into why he does what he does beyond the cheesy vigilante morality of Hollywood.

And this momentous act is not the only one that happens in a caesura. At the end of the book we see a partial line-up of Andy’s victims, answering the section’s sub-title’s question, “Why did Andy destroy you?” We learn that the two divorces Andy has spoken of having were caused by men with whom Andy’s wives cheated, men who Andy then murdered. We learn that a brief conversation between the teenaged Andy and his housekeeper, in which the housekeeper implied that her daughter had been taking drugs, led to the execution of a man whose crime was nothing more than selling the daughter some weed. In the same way that the disturbing crime at the heart of Eightball #22, as well as its resolution, took place between the panels, so too do many of the killings in #23. It’s as though, to our central character, they’re hardly worth mentioning—the events he does choose to depict are assumed to be explanation enough. Given the circumstances, Andy seems to suggest, any one of you would have done the same.

As with nearly all serial killers, sex is a key component of the killings, although not as obviously as with some. Most serial murderers hunt within the gender to which they are sexually attracted (as an aside, this gives lie to the notion that The Silence of the Lambs is homophobic: Buffalo Bill is not gay at all, but a woman-hater whose transsexualism is intended as a mockery of both homosexuals and women; we even see Polaroids of the guy with strippers at one point). This is not the case with Andy, as near as we can tell’he maintains an idealized long-distance relationship with his “girlfriend,” Dusty (“I hadn’t stopped loving her—and still haven’t to this day, come to think of it,” he says 24 years later, though once again this is likely just an attempt to assign meaning to a life where none has truly existed). But he displays true, romantic feelings (which it nonetheless appears he is trying to hide from the reader; he never describes them to us, and the one time he does address them directly in the context of a dream about having sex with her, he talks to her (“you”) directly) toward his African-American housekeeper. Clowes clearly wants us to see this attachment as an integral part of what makes Andy into what he becomes. The key sequence in which Andy discovers the truth about his superhuman inheritance from his father, “THE ORIGIN OF THE DEATH-RAY,” begins with two panels of disembodied sexual dialogue (“Fuck me, Andy!” “Yeah, baby—that’s it!”), and eventually includes yet another (“Oh Andy, you fuck me so good!”). It’s not until two-panel daydream sequence pages later that we learn the idenity of speaker: Dinah, the housekeeper who keeps the place from falling apart as Andy’s Pappy becomes more infirm. Andy eventually makes his feelings for Dinah clear to her by attempting a kiss; by the very next panel, she’s gone, and the placement of this sequence just before the most traumatic one in the book implies a causal relationship between Andy’s actions in the former and his actions in the latter.

Similar goals influence Louie’s behavior. Right after a scene in which he and Andy discuss their lack of superheroic motivation (“Look at the Hulk—his wife died, or something”), Louie spots the girl on the basis of his crush on whom he and Andy would later assault her father. It’s Louie’s later discovery of a pretty punkette that leads to the moral conversion that catastrophically unravels his relationship with Andy. (Yes, the “one friend in the world” the grown-up Andy refers to is not Louie, to our surprise.) Moreover, nearly all of the victims of Andy we know of have some sexual connection to him, whether they’re the men who ‘fucked his wives” or the dealer who sold grass to his beloved housekeeper’s daughter. And finally, of course, there’s the unspoken sexual dimension of Andy and Louie’s relationship itself. Paired killers are not at all uncommon, from the Hillside Stranglers to Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, and often the killings serve to consummate the sexual tension that the killers themselves aren’t (or, sometimes, are) willing to consummate themselves. It’s no coincidence that, just before Andy and Louie’s traumatic “break-up,” Louie seems to have found an actual girlfriend and Andy has finally acted on his love for Dinah. The two don’t need each other anymore. (It’s also no coincidence that the one scene we see without the interceding viewpoint of Andy is of a weepy Sonny, Louie’s sister’s lovelorn ex-boyfriend and the man whose desire to win her back sets the ultimate breakdown between Andy and Louie in motion. In the world of serial murder, love and death are inseparable.)

Of course, Clowes’s usual pitch-black insights into the human condition are omnipresent. Whether it’s Pappy’s cri de coeur (“Oh God, why can’t I remember things?”) and his inability to recall that his wife Sarah has died (“Dear S” reads his unfinished letter to her); Andy’s “girlfriend” Dusty’s tragicomic pose with a garden hose, using it as a microphone, lipsyncing to the radio with braces on her teeth; carrot-topped Stoob’s sensitive acoustic-guitar wooing of a pretty girl; Louie’s pre-NYC assessment of punk music (“You like this?” “I dunno…I think so. It makes me want to kill somebody.”); the fact that the mechanism Andy’s dad chose to activate his latent superpowers will likely give him lung cancer….You’ve got to laugh to keep from crying. It all culminates Andy’s closing address to the reader, delivered on what we assume is the Fourth of July after a run-in with a grown-up Stoob (you can insert the de rigeur “It’s about Iraq!!!” reading here, if you absolutely must):

He couldn’t fool me. Underneath it all, he was still the same guy. Nobody ever changes.

That’s not to say that everybody’s an asshole. I know better than that. Hell, you’re probably a decent person yourself. There are plenty of you out there.

For you, Mr. and Mrs. Decent Citizen, I’ll do anything. Just say the word.

You’ve got a friend in old Andy.

Of course, we don’t. But in the same way that Andy’s thoughts superimpose themselves against the events of his life, it’s Andy’s view of The Way Things Are, not ours that has the final say. Andy’s among us, and we’re his one friend in the world. Maybe he is our worst nightmare, after all.

Alternative Comics’ Jeff Mason writes that the Child Online Protection Act, which essentially would have mandated a PG-rated Internet, has been permanently defeated thanks to today’s 5-4 Supreme Court ruling. It disturbs me that it was that much of a squeaker, but this is good news for those of us who think that the First Amendment guarantees the right of adults to talk to each other like adults. The text of the ruling is here; I’m sure details will wind up on the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s homepage. (By the way, aren’t you a member of that yet?)

The Missus was there, too. Here’s her take.

The third annual MoCCA Art Fest was this weekend, and it seemed to be a more…professional affair than the previous two years’ shows. Overall, I think that’s a good thing.

For starters, the show was spread over both Saturday and Sunday this time around, a necessary expansion indeed. The first MoCCA (like “Frankenstein,” the creation has stolen the creator’s name) received such positive word of mouth that the second MoCCA (as I mentioned in my report on the event) was about as crowded as that Who concert where people got trampled to death. The addition of a second day meant that festival goers could, y’know, move around freely; it also made all of the tables accessible, whereas last year the crowds around the more popular retailers and creators were sometimes thick enough to actually prevent browsing of their wares.

The second day meant added room, board, and meal expenses for the exhibitors, though. Those I spoke to all seemed moderately pleased with their takes–for the bigger small-press entities going to a con is usually a break-even proposition at best, so even landing just slightly in the black is a pleasant surprise. In terms of busyness, I heard multiple accounts from multiple people as to whether Saturday or Sunday was The Big Day, so I’ll take that as a sign that sales were spread out pretty evenly over the course of the weekend. (I’d imagine that post-Harvey Award hangovers knocked quite a few shoppers (and sellers) out of commission on Sunday morning, however.)

Aside from the second day, the other big difference between this year’s show and last year’s was the absence of a giant breakout success story, a gauntlet thrown down in the collective face of alt/artcomix. Last year saw the debut of two enormous, powder-blue books–Craig Thompson’s Blankets and editor Sammy Harkham’s Kramer’s Ergot 4–that not only set the con-goer conversational agenda but continue to have a massive impact on the alternative comics scene. Indeed, several factors seemed to compound the sense that these books were Something Big: the relative youth of their creators; their out-of-nowhere, unprecedented place in the artists’ respective ouevres; their publication by relative upstarts (Blankets publisher Top Shelf boasted From Hell in its stable but had yet to home-grow a true breakout book; Kramers was, for all intents and purposes, self-published); and, of course, the massive, Mjolnir-esque size of the books themselves. The buzz books of MoCCA 2004, by comparison, were long-awaited installments in long-respected ouevres from long-admired creators published by a long-running institution: Daniel Clowes’s Eightball #23 and Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Purgatory, both from Fantagraphics. Jimbo was big, by the way–it’s a tall hardcover not unlike the Quimby the Mouse volume Fanta published last year–but even so it failed to have the heft of last year’s smashes (literally if not literarily, of course). The fact that Fanta sold out of both books by Saturday afternoon could either have heightened or diluted their buzz, depending on your outlook.

From an personal perspective, another change in the make-up of MoCCA was the relative preponderance of more professional-style self-publishers and indie houses, as opposed to the DIY minicomics creators who dominated years one and two. This may have been all a matter of perception: This year I was actually on a budget, so I was hesitant to walk up to a doe-eyed mini maker and flip through his or her wares, knowing as I did that it’d have to knock me out to persuade me to buy something, and knowing as I did that this was unlikely. In other words, I sort of had my starving-artist blinders on. But observers of the scene may recall an early (and largely hyperbolic) outcry from the mini types about what was perceived to be a shift toward glossy, semi-pro, genre-centric, pamphlet-sized publishers of the type reminiscent of the 1980s black and white boom or the third-tier Image titles of the Valentino era. To these eyes, it seems like this did happen, at least a little bit.

The big story of the con is likely to be Craig Thompson’s sweep of the Harveys. Capping off a success story that began in earnest at this same place last year, Thompson came to MoCCA still riding the success of Blankets (he was by far the most popular creator on the floor, if autograph lines are any indication) and left with Harveys for Best Artist, Best Original Graphic Album or whatever the heck they call it, and Best Cartoonist, the three categories in which he and his work were nominated. Thompson’s trumping of brilliant veterans like Chester Brown, Joe Sacco, and Jaime Hernandez is unlikely to temper the anti-Blankets backlash, nor ease tensions between what for want of better terms have come to be known as the Team Comix camp (centered around Top Shelf) and the Fuck Team Comix camp (centered around Fantagraphics), but I’d be a lot more upset if he didn’t actually deserve the accolades. Thompson’s fellow creators, it seems, think the book is indeed all it’s cracked up to be. (Despite my initial misgivings, they’re right.)

My personal big story of the con was all the time I got to spend with a couple of my favorite cartoonists. While they were in town, Jeffrey Brown stayed with the Missus’s best friend Karolyn, while Craig Thompson stayed with the Missus and myself. Both of these gentlemen are talented, dedicated artists, and both also happen to be really nice guys. It was a pleasure to host them. (By the way, Brown’s new minicomics and Thompson’s new collection of portrait prints, along with the new Eightball, the most recent folk tale adaptation by Matt Wiegle, and Phoebe Gloeckner-heavy issues of the Comics Journal and the Comics Journal Special Edition, were the finds of the con for me.)

Special thanks this year go out to the illustrious Jim Dougan, with whom I wish I could have spent more time; Brett Warnock, Chris Staros, and the entire Top Shelf crew, whose behind-the-bar booth served as an unofficial home base for us over the course of the con; Karolyn, who advised us that security at the Harveys gets pretty lax when everyone’s had five or six Grey Gooses (indeed it does!); the good folks at La Rondure; and everyone who recommended The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to the Missus and I, who watched it in our belated-anniversary-getaway hotel room before crashing the aforementioned lightly guarded award ceremony. See you in San Diego!

A cautionary tail…

Craig Thompson (in shirt that does not read “This is not a BEER BELLY–It’s a gas tank for a SEX MACHINE”) and Sean T. Collins, 12:43am, June 28, 2004, North Bellmore, NY.

John Jakala writes in:

Is Milo being serious in his latest entries? I have a hard time telling how much of his writing is sincere vs. sarcastic [I’ve found many people have this problem with deciphering Milo–ed.], but I generally enjoy his writing most when I assume he’s being ironic. But “clueless Merkin douchebags”? I guess part of the problem is not knowing who he’s referring to (other than Parrish Baker, whose comments I grant were pretty lame, but I hardly think everyone’s arguments should be tarred with the same brush just because one blogger makes some crass, tasteless statement).

If he’s serious, I have several problems with his arguments/rhetoric. One, all the clueless douchebags were responding to Tim O’Neil’s terribly reductive arguments, not to your out-of-context TCJ excerpt. Two, the fact that Neilalien quoted something doesn’t mean that he approves of it. Three, yeah I can understand why those who have had more direct experiences with fascism would be troubled by things that remind them of those regimes, but that still doesn’t make superheroes essentially fascistic. Four, supercomics gave us Ray Tate and Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Milo-age