Same deal as the comics one, basically.

1) The Postal Service: Give Up

2) Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism

3) Fischerspooner: #1

4) Rufus Wainwright: Want One

5) David Bowie: Reality

6) Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell

7) The Dandy Warhols: Welcome to the Monkey House

8) Underworld: Underworld 1992-2002

9) The Rapture: Echoes

10) A Perfect Circle: Thirteenth Step

11) The Mars Volta: De-Loused in the Comatorium

12) The Strokes: Room on Fire

12) Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man: Out of Season

There you have it. Sorry to Radiohead and Outakst and Deftones and Marilyn Manson and Metallica. And to the White Stripes, but to be honest I don’t understand the fuss about Elephant at all.

I really can’t recommend the Postal Service and Death Cab and Beth Gibbons records highly enough.

Do you think we can discuss comics online without resorting to personal attacks or name-calling or de-linking or multi-blog ersatz flame wars when we disagree?

I’m just askin’, is all.

Haven’t done one of these in a while.

Editor Axel Alonso announces some of the upcoming plans for the Marvel Knights imprint–assuming the agent-provacateur role vis a vis unabashed superhero fans from the oustered Bill Jemas in the process. Hee hee! The occasional excess of Alonso’s rhetoric aside, Marvel Knights has traditionally been the petri dish for the types of comics storytelling that helped turn Marvel proper, and indeed the mainstream industry at large, around. The Marvel Knights style (which I once described as “slightly more sophisticated, slightly less continuity-wonky, usually better”) has produced more hits than misses–or at least the hits have been bigger and better than the misses have been lousy flops–and I’m happy to see Marvel sending more of their big (and, not coincidentally, movie-related) franchise characters in that direction. By the end of April ’04, the imprint will include titles starring silver-screen superheroes Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, the Hulk (whose book was, as I’ve said, already a Marvel Knights book, in tone if not in name), the Punisher (I think–they’re still doing a non-mature-readers series even while moving Garth Ennis’s Punisher work over to MAX territory, right?), and, if rumors can be believed (and my sources tell me that in this case they can), Blade.

Gee, when you read it all together like that, it’s clear which editor the Marvel bigwigs feel they can trust with the high-profit franchises, isn’t it? Surely it’s only a matter of time before an X-book starring central X-characters makes the migration into Alonso’s stable. Meanwhile, Captain America continues to be the red(whiteandblue)headed stepchild of Marvel Knights: His title has never gelled satisfactorily. However, the Robert Morales/Chris Bachalo iteration of the book is, even after one issue, easily the most promising version thus far (not counting the rollicking “What If the Nazis Had Won?” version by Dave Gibbons and Lee Weeks), so there’s hope even there.

In other Marvel imprint news, Bill Sherman enters the Marvel Age fray, asking defenders and detractors alike to postpone judgement until, y’know, we actually see the books. I’ll reiterate what I said on my last post on the topic: “[Everything] hinges on whether the books are any good, and (to a lesser or greater extent, depending on your perspective) whether or not they sell. But the principle behind the thing is as sound as it gets, in my book.” (Bill also picks up the Velvet Underground quoting baton and runs with it, God bless ‘im.)

David Fiore chimes in on a related topic: the “innocence” of the Silver Age, specifically blogger Alan David Doane’s feelings on same. Responding to Alan’s quote in my post on the topic yesterday (in which Alan described the “innocence” in question as a belief in the happy-family Bullpen model of Marvel comicmaking, subsequently belied by the awful treatment of Jack Kirby and the cynical statements and actions of 1980s Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter), David writes:

Look ADD–as a personal reaction to the history of Marvel Comics, your statement is perfectly valid, and I sympathize with you… However, the problem is that you allow these feelings about “corporate fuckery” and the business/contractual side of the comic book world to seep into every aesthetic judgment you make, rendering your criticism (at least of superhero comics) absolutely valueless….

The point is this–criticism deals with texts! It cannot concern itself with the manner in which the texts are created (or to whom they are marketed). The builders of the Pyramids suffered even more grievously at the hands of their masters than Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko did–we have to put that out of our minds when we’re appraising the works themselves qua works of art… I have no problem whatsoever with editorializing against the slimy business practices of corporations (or Pharoahs)–just don’t let that stuff (or your hurt feelings about Marvel as “bad father”) lead you into making critical judgments that you are unable to support with textual evidence…

This is a not uncommon phenomenon when critically evaluating comics as art. One of the best comics critics I’ve ever read has said to me that the aesthetic enjoyment or enrichment you get out of a given comic should not even be a consideration if the business practices involved in its production were immoral. He wasn’t referring to the Silver Age comics themselves–the years and years of comics derived from them were his target–and I don’t even think he’s necessarily wrong in some cases (how many of us, for example, want to hear whether Frank Miller gives his blessing to a particular version of Elektra before we buy it? Or refused to buy the collection of Alan Moore’s Captain Britain work until it was properly accredited?), but it’s important to remember this mindset when evaluating the work of critics dealing with this industry.

On the other hand, ADD does seem to have a sense of humor about himself, as his comment at this Franklin Harris post makes clear.

Stuart Moore does the advocacy bit for the “superheroes plus” genre. Saying that straight-genre comics won’t attract a wide readership (gee, why do you think that’s the case?), he argues that by setting superhero stories in a solid genre framework (crime, espionage, science-fiction, etc.) you can draw in an existing readership and, in a semi-stealth fashion, broaden their horizons, leading eventually to a more robust variety of comics. A nice theory–if it weren’t for the fact that this just isn’t happening. Superhero fans now have several years of popular, acclaimed “superheroes plus” stories under their belts–and Stuart Moore’s hard work at Vertigo and Marvel Knights played no small part in this–and yet the Direct Market still shows no signs of being able to sell anything that’s totally costume- or powers-free. It would appear that, as I’ve argued before, the key factor for superheroes-plus stories isn’t the plus, it’s the superheroes. No, straight-genre stories don’t sell, but that’s because of excessive superhero dominance of the market, and is not something that can be fixed in any substantial way by doing more superhero stories, even great superhero stories, of any kind.

Moore is, however, correct in saying that normal “people aren

Eric Spratling just kills with this hysterical beatdown of the astoundingly ham-fisted anti-Bush political commentary in recent issues of Avengers, which Spratling calls “a MoveOn.org ad in disguise.” The straw-man arguments and de rigeur Nazi comparisons the book makes–about everything from 9/11 to Iraq to AIDS–are so fantastically simplistic that you literally won’t believe a grown-up wrote them. (Unless, of course, you’ve read the political commentary of seemingly every other “grown-up” in the industry, in which case this will just seem par for the course.)

I suppose one could make a joke here along the lines of “this is what you get for ever thinking ‘Geoff Johns was a great writer, a wonderful writer, the kind who was doing all he could to [bring] a kind of joy and fun (though tempered with appropriate seriousness) back to mainstream comics,'” but far be it from me to do that.

Tremendous round-table discussion amongst left-liberal hawks over at Slate today. When all is said and done, it will include essays from superstar regime-change advocates Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria, Kenneth Pollack, and more. Fascinating reading, for several reasons:

1) Several of the correspondents seem to be using entirely different sets of facts. Witness the range of opinion on whether or not the Iraqis are happy that we’re there, for example, or if Saddam Hussein was deterrable.

2) They are all able to criticize the failures of the Bush Administration, and indeed explicitly call for him to be punished for them at the polls, without saying the war was a cruel farce waged by a bloodthirsty oil cabal and it was a waste and a mistake and we never should have gone in there and BUSH LIED–PEOPLE DIED! In other words, they demonstrate a moral seriousness and thoughtfulness that’s utterly refreshing and, amongst the administration’s critics, sadly, rather unique.

3) Some of them seem genuinely concerned for the health of “international institutions.” I would say that the fault for the sorry state of (for example) the UN lies with those who’ve allowed it to become a get-out-of-jail-free card for murderous thugs and their sycophantic bagmen, not with the course of action that finally called the institution’s bluff after catastrophic failures ranging everywhere from the Balkans to Rwanda, but that’s just me, I guess.

4) It’s enormously uplifting for a jaded liberal like myself to listen to intelligent, articulate liberals use words like “fascism” and “totalitarianism” to describe the policies of people who aren’t John Ashcroft.

5) While we’re on the liberal-hawk subject, go read Pollack’s reexamination of his own case for war over at The Atlantic, too. Provided you’re not just looking for “I told you so”s to level at the Bushies, you’ll find that the timing involved in Pollack’s conclusion has changed, but the conclusion itself has not.

6) The quote of the day comes from Hitchens’s contribution to the discussion. It regards antiwar forces whose constant predictions of disaster go unremarked upon when, as they nearly always do, they prove false. “How soon they forget,” he says, “but I don’t, and I am keeping score.” And he’s not the only one.

Fellow New Yorkers may wish to view Amanda’s spot-on summary of the WB11 Morning News Team.

MARYSOL CASTRO RULEZ, LYNN WHITE DROOLZ

My cat is snoring.

If you can think of anything cuter than that, I ask you to please keep it to yourself.

UPDATE: A cuteness pile-up. So cute your brain will liquify and leak out of your ears.

The Three-In-One: In our dreams we have seen a new Dark Age. Seen all history set back by a thousand years of ignorance and war. Seen, worse than all these, a terrible flaw at the heart of things. How did this happen so quickly?

Wolverine: I guess no one thought Rome could fall, either… those guys had a postal service that could deliver mail across 170 miles in one day. They had indoor plumbing, the women were free, they had art and science and a communications network that spanned the civilized world.

Within a hundred years, it was all debris and lice.

Sometimes ya gotta take care of what you got.

—Grant Morrison, New X-Men #151

Now, I may just be desperate to find a fellow liberal-interventionist defender of civilization against theocratic fascism and nihilist terrorism out there in the great big wide world of funnybooks, but what alternate explanation for this passage by Grant Morrison can you offer?

Andrew Sullivan on the motives of the anti-gay-marriage right:

They think that the most honorable and profound gay relationship is worth less than Britney’s 55 hour marriage. Why cannot they say this? My relationship wth my boyfriend will never be as good as Britney’s to Jason – and it’s worth amending the very constitution to affirm that for ever.

Besides being (obviously) offensive to homosexuals and those who think that homosexuality is neither deviant nor a sin nor an affront to civilization as we know it, this is offensive to regular heterosexuals (your gender is more important to AGM conservatives than whether or not you’re even the least bit serious in your commitment to one another), and to anyone who cares about the state of the Constitution of the United States America (an attempt is being made to amend the document with the express purpose of enshrining discrimination against a group of Americans in the founding document of America itself; an attempt, moreover, being carried out in a desperate quest to beat the clock, as polls and demographics suggest that within a generation or two homosexual marriage will be widely accepted).

Just thought I should bring it up again.

Jim Henley and I had an enlightening back-and-forth over email about the Marvel Age line, which I discussed earlier. After first backing me up on his own blog, he later offered some insight into the uproar over M.A., specifically the manga-style remakes of the classic Stan-Jack-Steve stories:

Some of the loudest complainers are people who disdain superhero fanboyism, but by their complaints about messing with the purity of the Silver Age Marvels they sound like nothing so much as their nemeses (superhero fanboys) bitching about some flouting of The Way Things Used to Be. Why, they sound oddly like John Byrne Message Board posters.

Indeed! This attitude towards the Silver Age is something I’ve spotted before, even amongst the most iconoclastic of comics pundits. It’s understandable, to a degree: Those are some remarkable comics, and the thoroughly lousy treatment over the years of many of the people who created them, by the very companies who couldn’t exist today without them, probably makes us all view them more protectively than we otherwise would. But referring to “the lost innocence of the Silver Age,” as Alan David Doane did back during that whole Seth X-Men cover kerfluffle, implies a belief in some mythical pre-Fallen state of grace for mainstream comics. And as much as I enjoy all the great stuff from that era, I don’t think they bear being treated as Scripture very well.

This is actually something touched upon by David Fiore during that same comics-cover crisis, in a couple of posts: “[T]here is no ‘lost innocence’ in the sixties for Seth to harken back to!” and “Next we’ll be hearing that super-hero comics are only suitable for children, and are best left unanalyzed! Oh, wait, we hear that every day from certain quarters…” No, most of the folks I’ve encountered who are upset about Marvel Age aren’t as far gone as your average John Byrne or Comics Journal messboard crackpot (both of whom treat superhero comics like kid stuff, albeit for very different reasons). But given how indistinguishable Marvel Age is from everything else Marvel does, legally and logically speaking–to say nothing of all the arguments in favor of Marvel doing just such a thing–it seems that the problem is mainly an emotional, or indeed sentimental, one.

In other words, I don’t get the outrage. Well, I get it–it’s just that I don’t think it makes much sense. Marvel Age is different from everything else Marvel does only in the sense that it is literally rewriting and redrawing the Stan/Jack/Steve stuff, as opposed to simply milking it for forty years while the people whose genius made those forty years of milking possible don’t make a whole lot of money from it. Legally, I don’t think this is any more or less distasteful than everything else Marvel does; the original writers and artists are being properly credited, so in that sense it’s even better than things were for ages on end. I think the uproar is a “sacred cow” issue more than anything else, and that’s fine, but it’s no way to run a business, especially one like Marvel in the position that Marvel’s in these days.

Obviously there are aesthetic arguments about redrawing Kirby or Ditko and rewriting Lee–I’ve heard it compared to the remake of The In-Laws or, God help us, Psycho–but I think that in intent it’s a lot closer to Peter Jackson’s upcoming remake of King Kong. The point in both cases is to take a great story and make it accessible to generations that are no longer comfortable with the storytelling and film- or comics-making conventions of yesteryear. Fine by me. (The goal is also to make a lot of money, but that’s also fine by me.)

For those of us who simply can’t get past the perceived lack of respect being shown to the legacy of Lee, (and especially) Kirby and Ditko, please keep in mind that even a revamped, redrawn, rewritten version of a classic Spider-Man or Fantastic Four yarn would be a hell of a lot closer to the originals than the manga kids would otherwise ever get. Furthermore, those kids would certainly be a lot more likely to eventually seek out the original Stan/Jack/Steve stuff than they are now! I don’t think I share Jim’s confidence that Marvel might even, get this, “try to sell them the originals” if they like the newfangled versions, but it would make a lot of sense, and again it’d be a lot more likely to actually work thanks to the exposure to the material made possible by Marvel Age.

All of this, of course, hinges on whether the books are any good, and (to a lesser or greater extent, depending on your perspective) whether or not they sell. But the principle behind the thing is as sound as it gets, in my book. And my attachment to the great works of the past doesn’t stop me from seeing the need to adopt, adapt, and (as far as accessibility goes) improve, for the present and the future.

UPDATE: Alan David Doane writes:

…I definitely think there IS a “lost innocence of the Silver Age.” Whether it was actually DURING the SA or was how we later readers looked at it, specifically up to the early ’80s before the truth came out about how Marvel screwed Jack Kirby and the Shooter “Little Fucks” era is debatable, one supposes. But there was a time when even the most informed comics reader could believe at least some of the myths about comics in general and Marvel in particular, and Seth’s piece evokes that era. In a time, now, when you have to pretty much have NO interest in comics NOT to know such trivia as Joss Whedon’s contractual machinations or Ellis’s online sex-farce, I’d say that innocence is gone.

In other words, when he’s talking about “lost innocence,” he’s not referring to the comics of that era, but Comics of that era–the industry/medium/art form. That does make sense, in terms of the readers and our view of the business side of the Silver Age and its aftermath: Ignorance truly was bliss.

The English press has subjected Shawcross’s apparent rightward turn to searching psychological and cultural analysis (finally inheriting the family estate; marrying a ”socialite heiress”; cozying up to the royal family; re-enacting his father’s own political pattern, etc.). Since ”Allies” is silent on this subject, it’s more instructive to consider the possibility that Shawcross has remained true to his principles, but that a morally driven foreign policy looks very different after 9/11 than it did before.

Emphasis mine. From James Traub’s review of William Shawcross’s Allies, in the New York Times. Link courtesy of Jeff Jarvis. And there’s more:

Shawcross is scarcely the only liberal or leftist to see the war in Iraq as the consummation, rather than the contradiction, of his principles…Shawcross notes that while the neocons are considered “radical” for their insistence that evil regimes have sacrificed their absolute right to sovereignty, these arguments “sound close to mainstream liberal internationalist thought.”

I do like to think, from time to time, that I have basically the same politics as I did on September 10th, and that it’s all my former fellow travelers who’ve lost their way.

Franklin Harris responds thoughtfully to my bafflement over the libertarian arguments for isolationism. Naturally, I’m still unconvinced–deficit spending seems a small price to pay for, you know, ending mass graves and so forth; and World War II and the Cold War are fairly strong arguments for the efficacy of an aggressive foreign policy in promoting the growth of liberty abroad without sacrificing it at home–but I’m pleased and grateful that Franklin took the time to explain them to me. All the points he raises are one that hawks should remain vigilant about, at any rate.

(Regarding the Founding Fathers, my guess is that an unwillingness to be drawn once again into hostilities with the most powerful empire in the history of the world accounts for at least some of their reluctance to get entangled in alliances…)

In case you needed a reminder why traditional conservatives are nobody’s friend, take a look at what they want to do to the Constitution, to privacy rights, and to marriage as we know it (i.e. a union between two people that love each other–how do you know it?), in order to legally enshrine their irrational hatred for homosexuals. Andrew Sullivan has the goods on the Old Right’s desperate attempts to prevent the inevitable: the legalization of gay marriage, which within a generation, two at the outside, will be a fait accompli. In essence, they’re willing to give any random pair of people all the benefits of civil union, and are apparently willing to spend God knows what resources monitoring those pairs for any sign of sexual behavior, simply to avoid the civilization-destroying horror of letting two men or two women who love each other get legally wed. And they want to amend the Constitution to do it.

Like I said: these people are not on your side, America.

An object lesson.

(Thanks to Jim Dougan for the tip.)

I’ll go ahead and say it: Marvel’s “Marvel Age” initiative impresses me.

Listen, I’m as skeeved out by the endless exploitation of the Stan/Jack/Steve years as the next guy, but Marvel’s in a tough spot: The people on the business end don’t want the publishing people to do anything to which Marvel can’t fully control the licensing rights; at the same time, advances in creators’ rights (or at least a general awareness that such things exist) have lead creators to be reluctant to, well, create anything they themselves can’t own, meaning that when they work for the Big Two, it’s really a question of reshuffling the same old characters and concepts; and Marvel as a publisher finds itself beholden to a reactionary Direct Market and the failed monthly-pamphlet format, both of which prevent it from producing comics in the cost-effective and popular format young readers prefer, as well as actually putting comics where those readers would even see them. Meanwhile, there’s an entire thriving sequential-art industry–manga–that doesn’t find itself in this bind, and is making a killing because of it.

If I ran Marvel, I’d have spent the last couple of years frantically trying to find a way to repackage the best existing work the company had into a format that could tap that market. The thinking behind Marvel Age, especially as detailed by their seemingly quite-on-the-ball Sales Manager David Gabriel, shows that Marvel’s finally trying to do exactly that.

They’re even talking about switching to a direct-to-digest format, if sales warrant, and this time at least it seems that this isn’t just talk. Good for them. For now, though, it makes sense to essentially repackage old material, either directly (in the case of Runaways, Sentinel and, I think, Spider-Girl), or via modernized adaptations (Marvel Age Spider-Man). That, after all, is one of the advantages of the big American manga publishers, who have a decades-old backlog of preexisting Japanese comics to select from, translate, package, and publish at a much lower cost than producing brand-new stuff. Moreover, choosing Runaways and Sentinel for repackaging out of all their recent crop of manga-influenced titles, as opposed to the much-hyped and thoroughly woeful Trouble, shows that someone at the company is actually paying attention to the quality of the content, not just catch-phrases about art style or romantic plotlines.

But there’s still a lot more they could be doing with their books. Back at 2003’s San Diego Comic-Con, I was told that Ultimate Spider-Man was going to be converted into digests. I don’t know if this is still in the works, what with Marvel Age Spider-Man now in play, but it should be: There are now over 50 issues of this uniformly high-quality, perfectly age-appropriate book available. Moreover, success with an Ultimate book in this format would naturally pave the way for similar publishing initiatives on Ultimate X-Men, and perhaps even Ultimate Marvel Team-Up and (God willing that there are enough issues to collect) The Ultimates. The Ultimate books–including, if the first issue is any indication, Ultimate Fantastic Four–are as close to a match for the manga audience as anything Marvel’s got. Please, House of Ideas, allay our fears and do the right thing with them! (That last link courtesy of Big Sunny D.)

Meanwhile, as Shawn Fumo points out, DC are learning that manga-sized digests are the way to go from the type of source they might really listen to: the bookstores themselves. They’ll be publishing their newly-acquired title Elfquest that way, and perhaps doing more experiments a la Death: At Death’s Door, but they should be looking into wholesale repackaging as well. Their various animated-series adaptations would be perfect for younger readers, and I remain 100% convinced that a digest-sized reprint of the complete Sandman run would be a goddamn blockbuster. (Similar arguments could be made for quite a few Vertigo series, especially Transmetropolitan.)

Honestly, this is something that even altcomix publishers could learn from. I’d certainly be interested to see how some old Love & Rockets stuff, particularly Jaime’s, would do in manga format; I’d imagine quite well. Blankets is a great fit as well; it may be tough to shoehorn that book into a digest without splitting it up, but could trade dress be experimented with in an attempt to catch the eye of shoujo fans? Hell, even Jim Woodring’s Frank stuff might find an interesting new, young audience if repackaged appropriately. I don’t want to get carried away here, but there are many possibilities. And from a publisher’s viewpoint, I’d think they were both intelligent and enticing.

One, two, three, what are we fighting for? From the Council on Foreign Relations‘ page on the new Afghan constitution (link courtesy of Instapundit):

The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan…states that no Afghan law