Okay, again, not this day, but a day:

I certainly enjoyed [Alan Moore’s] Watchmen more than I have most of [Moore’s] ABC line, but let’s remember: a guy smearing his shit all over Bristol boards in the eighties would sell far more copies than a comic written by Shakespeare, drawn by God, and released in 1999.

Marc Singer, during a discussion of the recent “kids and comics” kerfuffle that takes both the Chabon and Bendis/Millar sides (rightfully) to task.

Well, quote of Thursday, July 29th, anyway:

I’ve heard a few people call this and other new X-spinoffs “unnecessary”, which always makes me kind of wonder what Marvel/DC comics are “necessary” to begin with.

—Steve Pheley

I’m not even sure I agree, but well said! Steve also offers a capsule review of Avengers 500 (aka the issue that begins the whole “destroy all Avengers” thing) that’s a useful corrective to the “Bendis is an overrated hack and this is a gargantuan sack of shit and you shouldn’t be killing characters and it’s lazy shock tactics and blah blah blah” stuff goin’ ’round.

Back before my trip to San Diego I was pretty comprehensively blogging critical reaction to Dan Clowes’ Eightball #23. A handful of late entrants have since filtered in, namely Adam Stephanides’ musings on emptiness and joylessness in both protagonist and creator, Marc Singer’s reading of the book as an anti-current-administration political tract (coupled with his usual harsh take on Clowes in general), and Jog the Blog’s explanation of how the political content could be much less political than it seems. Read them all.

Carnet de Voyage

Top Shelf Productions

When a glorified sketchbook is a more compelling graphic novel than three-fourths of the official output that comes down the old funnybook transom, you know you

So I’ve seen clips about the San Diego Comic-Con on nearly every show that’s run this weekend on the E!-VH1-MTV celebrotainment continuum: Best Week Ever, E! News Weekend, The Soup, ET on MTV, and on and on and on. Now, of course they have the hosts put on coke-bottle glasses and talk about how they’ve never known the touch of a woman after each segment ends, but generally the tone isn’t “I’m embarrassed to be here” so much as it’s “hey, this is kinda neat–and oh, look, isn’t that Jessica Biel?”

This excites me anyway. I simply could not have been happier with how these films turned out, and it’s only recently occurred to me how wonderful that is.

This I liked. I’d certainly be up for seeing what he might do with Galactus.

If you enjoyed Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart’s astoundingly imaginative and deeply emotional miniseries Seaguy and would like to see Morrison’s planned second and third Seaguy miniseries actually get published, please go and sign this online petition. Sure, such efforts are usually about as vain as resisting the fun-filled fascism of Mickey Eye, but it’s worth a shot, right! Adventure, ho!

(Link courtesy of Graeme McMillan.)

Has Warren Ellis become the least interesting “interesting” writer alive?

I’m feelin’ too lazy to write up a full recap of my own. What can I say? Even when you don’t have a giant clothing corporation buying $500 worth of comics for you, San Diego Comic-Con is nerd heaven, particularly if your nerd tastes are as catholic as mine are. It’s an indy con, a superhero con, a movie con, a party, a freak show, and a flea market all rolled into one.

If you’re looking for a more in-depth assessment, I recommend the takes of Heidi MacDonald (who still doesn’t have an RSS feed–I think she’s just being difficult at this point) and Steven Grant. Rich Johnston was a little disappointing this go-round, but ymmv.

Grant Morrison yet again delivers an interview so good and quoteable that it’s sort of a literary masterpiece unto itself. This time he’s talking up his upcoming DC projects, a JLA run and a very ambitious project called Seven Soldiers. In the process he takes potshots at both Identity Crisis and Hush & its “let’s do a greatest-hits album for a story” imitators. (The latter of which, come to think of it, seems as squarely aimed at his protege Mark Millar’s plans for Spider-Man and Wolverine as earlier interviews’ comments on gratuitious badass-isms, paramilitary chic, and the aping of action cinema seemed targeted at Millar’s Authority, Ultimates, and Wanted. (All of which I like, by the way, but I take his point.))

Meanwhile, a blog called simply John and Belle Have a Blog has put together several strong superhero-centric posts. First is an essay on superheroes and time, looking at both the nostalgia factor and superhero stories’ open-endedness before culminating in a rather dismissive assessment of Alan Moore. Second, and much stronger, is an examinaton of the way in which superhero stories can or cannot handle “realism”. There’s also a digression on the way superhero stories accrue moments in the manner of a picaresque but, unlike as in a picaresque, insist on accruing really really big moments. It’s great writing, and includes a link to more great writing in the form of one Timothy Burke’s essay on the perils of continuity. To go the whole hog and force the fictional world to incorporate superpower-created advances and setbacks (a la Watchmen or Squadron Supreme), to ignore such advances and setbacks completely (a la any superhero comic that involves teleporting, or the massacre of an entire city or country), or to strike a compromise and try to inhabit an unrealistic world realistically (a la Astro City)? That is the question. Finally (though it only touches on superheroes tangentially, in a spoilery discussion of Unbreakable) there’s a post on infodumps and infolocks in genre fiction.

Given where I’ve been spending my days lately, these are all a lot of fun to read.

Links courtesy of NeilAlien and Kevin Melrose.

I’ve reviewed Craig Thompson’s new book, Carnet de Voyage, for Comic Book Galaxy. Go check it out!

Bad panels today

Tracking down cheap comic books

Smelly hot and moist

See you there!

Between Identity Crisis and Avengers Disassembled, and this whole idea of using rape and murder to clear out dead-weight characters and give the survivors something to talk about, I

Yep, I’ve updated the big Clowes/NYT piece again. Here ’tis. Or just scroll down.

Today I was walking past the local comics shop and I saw a poster for the new Firestorm series. “The fallout begins in May!” read the tagline. Turns out they were off by about two months, but were otherwise all too accurate, huh?

The massive New York Times Magazine/Eightball recap continues to grow. Scroll down or click here for Update Round Five.

Meanwhile, the invaluable Egon points out that Last Gasp will be publishing a collection of Justin Green’s wonderful musician biographies, Justin Green’s Musical Legends. These remarkable strips ran for years in Pulse, Tower Records’ free in-house magazine. If you’re like me, you spent quite a bit of time during your youth both browsing the aisles at Tower and attempting to impress its employees with your musical taste and acumen; reading Green’s strips in that magazine was a critical part of this ritual. I can’t wait to pick this one up.

When I was in the local comic shop the other day, I flipped through the latest issue of Mark Millar’s Marvel Knights version of Spider-Man, and you know what? It looked like a damn good time. Spidey getting the crap knocked out of him constantly? Reminds me of how I looked at the series back when I was a little kid. Ooh, that’s scary! Ooh, that’s dangerous! I hope he’s okay! I’ve got no idea whether the series maintains such feelings beyond an initial impression, but I’m intrigued.

(O’course, I was “intrigued” by Red Son, and remembered enjoying it well enough, but in retrospect it doesn’t have much to recommend it beyond the sharpness of its Elseworlds premise, the cleverness of its denouement, and the idea that there really isn’t much of a difference between Stalin’s Soviet Union and George W. Bush’s United States. If you don’t subscribe to that political position, the other ideas can’t really carry the series. Anyway, for a contrary take on Millar’s Spider-Man, head over to the Grotesque Rampage forum.)

Another superhero series controversial for its violence is Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis. The series was billed as something that will shake the DC Universe to its roots; so far it’s done so through rape, murder, and Clockwork Orange-style reprogramming of criminals by the DCU’s ostensible heroes. Now, I’m pretty open about being a fan of violence in fiction, even violence toward women, which I don’t believe is necessarily misogynistic. (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Kill Bill are two of my favorite films, after all.) However, I think a good indicator of misogyny is if you can picture the author of a given work treating male characters in a similar fashion. (This is why I am not a fan of Lars Von Trier, who’s established himself as a one-trick pony in terms of doling out the rough stuff.) Given the company- and commerce-driven constraints of the DCU, not to mention the reactionary tendencies of many of its fans, my guess is that Identity Crisis falls in the latter camp. (There’s also something genuinely awful about the notion of the Justice League brainwashing criminals, but as always I’m hesitant to let allegiance to fictional characters get in the way of a creator’s ability to tell a good story (which I’m not sure Identity Crisis is, mind you). I really couldn’t care less about the storied history of Kingpin and Bullseye, for example, if you can get a good story out of Daredevil crushingly humiliating them. Which you did, if you ask me.) Anyway, you can go back to the Grotesque Rampage Forum to hear me explain my views more fully. Tim O’Neil, meanwhile, is outraged, not least at the fact that DC has apparently stopped even pretending that children read superhero comics. I’m not all that upset–The Killing Joke was arguably even more fucked-up, and that was done years ago, and I don’t recall being scarred for life after reading it, though I was, what, a freshman in high school by then and was fucked-up enough as it was–but it really is worth considering what went into this decision on DC’s part.

That big NYT/Eightball thread got updated several times today. Just scroll on down.

Finally, I just want to say that with my new home theater sound system set up, Kill Bill is fucking awesome.

We’re up to round 4 of the updates, on both issues this time.

It occurs to me that eventually my big roundup of discussion on Charles McGrath’s article and Dan Clowes’s comic book will get rotated off the front page. So I’ll be doing this sort of thing from time to time: Go here to read about two things that will be shaping the landscape of comics for a long time to come.