Six volumes in, I think it’s safe for me to declare that Keith Giffen’s English-language adaptation of Takami & Taguchi’s Battle Royale is a frigging mess.

I know Giffen’s presence on the project is at least a part of what made this book such a manga gateway drug for Western comics fans like many of us in the blogosphere, but yikes. Simply put, have you ever met anyone–kids, grown-ups, Japanese people, paranoid schizophrenics–who talk anything like this? Does anyone aside from Penthouse Forum writers and the film critic for Hustler use the phrase “a peek of pink”? What in God’s name is a “bad poking kitty”? Also–bear with me for a minute here–left out the subject in this sentence. Makes it seem casual. Sounds informal. See if it doesn’t. (Wait for it…) It doesn’t! Sounds maddening! Maddening like the bad poking kitty! Want my peek of pink! See if I don’t!

The insane idiomatic translation is certainly not all that’s wrong with this ultraviolent manga series. (To start, there’s the fact that it renders all reviewers incapable of discussing it without using the term “ultraviolent.”) While not as hole-ridden as I found the movie’s to be, the comic’s plot is still kinda wonky: If this is a reality TV show, where are the goddamn cameras? And yes, this matters beyond the “maybe they just goofed” factor–much of the plot revolves around various groups of kids trying to do things undetected by the authorities running the show. But if it is a show, shouldn’t everything that’s happening be, y’know, shown to people, especially the show’s very producers? I just don’t get it.

And as with the movie, the conventional action-thriller contrivances leave me completely cold. The film seemed to have been molded in the Simpson/Bruckheimer/Bay mold, while the manga goes the karate-choppin’ kung-fu-fightin’ leaping-forty-feat-in-the-air Dragonball route, but either way, they took a Lord of the Flies/A Clockwork Orange idea and made a Lethal Weapon/Bad Boys out of it.

And, loathe as I am to admit it, there are some manga conventions that I just can’t wrap my head around. I’ll never understand why everything is translated but the sound effects, for example. Nor can I figure out the reason behind the bizarre kabuki-like faces of the lecherous Program director and the mincing homosexual student slash Yakuza soldier (yeah, it’s that kinda book). And I’m sure John Jakala would just call it “fanservice,” but isn’t the impact of the scene in which young Shuuya shows his terminally ill mother his sand-castle sculpture of the two of them with his late, politically liquidated father a teensy bit diluted by the artist’s depiction of the mother’s bare ass? (I guess this is what John Jakala had in mind when he explained the concept of fanservice to me, but still, that’s just weird.)

So anyway, yeah, it’s a big fat mess.

Why, then, is it so awesome?

Yes, I really enjoy Battle Royale, warts and all. Giffen’s brusque, unnaturally direct dialogue has the perhaps unintended side effect of brightly highlighting the most compelling aspect of the book–the relationships between the student protagonists. The intensity of first love, adolescent lust, inter-social-caste idol worship/caretaking, best-friendship, and platonic opposite-sex friendship are crackingly well-depicted–every conversation and interaction is hard-sold by the outrageously staccato dialogue, and I for one am buying. It works. And even putting aside the words, perhaps it’s only when we throw 14 year olds into a contest in which they’re forced to murder each other that we can truly replicate the near-operatic emotional turmoil of pubescence and adolescence. All I know is that reading this book takes me right back to Garden City Middle School.

Speaking of which, would this not be the most fucking awesomest comic ever if you were a fourteen-year-old? Casting the kids in your grade in the different roles would be at least half the fun, I’d imagine. Hell, I could still tell you which lacrosse player from the GCMS Class of ’92 would be Kazuo, and which cheerleader would be Hardcore Souma, and which girl I crushed on would be Noriko. (I’d be Shuuya, duh. My buddy Kennyb would be Shogo, because he owned nunchucks and throwing stars and stuff back then.)

As for the art–well, to use my extremely limited manga reference pool, it doesn’t even approach either the lovely poetry of Planetes or the utter madness of Uzumaki, but then again it doesn’t need to. And thankfully, it steers clear of the glorified stick figures that inhabit a lot of the manga I’ve seen on the racks. It’s clear, realistically detailed when it needs to be, stylized and clever when it needs to be that, and a solid conveyer of plot-driven action at all times. And the violent interludes, when they come, are pitch-perfect. Speaking as a gorehound, that is some fine, mentally sticky, disturbing gore.

And at the heart of it all is a surprisingly effective and affecting story of one kid’s refusal to compromise his morals and his friendships. Actually, as the story expands, we’re now following six or seven kids who’ve made similar deals with their own hearts, and it all makes for propulsive reading. I’ve enjoyed this series a lot (a lot more than I expected to, I think), and as it’s been different enough from the movie thus far to make me wonder if the ending isn’t different as well, I’m truly looking forward to seeing how this one ends up. See if I’m not!

(PS: For past thoughts on Battle Royale, about which I’ve written a surprising amount, go here, here, and especially here, here, and here.)

(PPS: While writing this post I sort of wandered around a bunch of old posts and links and such, and can I just mention how neat it is to visit the Tokyopop website, as it is a comics-company site that doesn’t have the stench of death, desperation, and bilking aging fanboys about it? This just tickled the hell out of me, I tell you. Courtesy of John Jakala. Speaking of whom, how did I miss this? Hilarious!)

(PPPS: Jeebus, did I really used to be this sharp of a writer? Complete sentences, complete thoughts, and hardly an em-dash in sight. Sigh. I guess that’s how one writes when one is gainfully employed as a professional writer, and when one’s ADD isn’t so out of control that one is finally getting a scrip for it, as soon as one can get an appointment out of one’s goddamn general practitioner. Unless, of course, it’s not pro writing but writing on message boards that brings out the best in me… The horror! The horror!)

Digression over. Battle Royale is good. The end.

In his recent review of Demo #6, Johnny Bacardi voiced an interesting concern about the series overall:

OK, I understand that there is no overarching theme. nothing which will tie all these individual stories together, that these are just random, one-off looks at different young people with powers and abilities and how they cope (or fail to cope) with them. Nothing wrong with this, but it just causes a bit of a wish, in my mainstream-comics addled brain, that there was a underlying reason (a point, if you will) for all this, and it wasn’t just random instances of “young guy or gal has powers, young guy or gal gets into situation because of powers, young guy or gal deals with powers and faces the future, whatever it may be”.

Interesting, I say, because it literally never occurred to me to complain about this facet of the book. To me, this is not a bug–it’s a feature.

I realized three or four years ago that even the most seemingly anti-authoritarian genre fiction almost inevitably involves a safety valve in the form of a wise old man (or indeed a secret society of wise old men) that explains it all to our at-first befuddled hero. The tormented mutants of the X-verse have Professor X; bullied & abused Harry Potter has Dumbledore and the rest of the Hogwart’s faculty; terminally perplexed Neo has Morpheus and company; bored, sheltered Luke Skywalker has Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda; terrified Frodo has Gandalf; hell, even in the Illuminatus! trilogy the characters have Hagbard Celine and Malaclypse the Elder. No matter how cruel and terrifying the world gets, no matter how bizarre and wondrous your newfound powers are, there’s always someone around to explain the New, Secret, and Real Grand Scheme of Things, and exactly where you fit into it.

In “mainstream,” superhero comics, this can be taken to epic extremes, perhaps paradoxically because of the unruly, hobbled-together nature of the big superhero universes. (DC is famously Frankensteinian, and for all its reputation as a single, cohesive universe, Marvel certainly wasn’t conceived as such, and contains enough disparate concepts to make doing so difficult. I mean, Spider-Man has fought J. Jonah Jameson, the Punisher, the Hulk, Loki, and Galactus, hasn’t he?) The Quintessence, the Earth X saga–these are ways of assuring both character and reader (and writer) that nothing is so weird as to not have a (relatively) rational, well-defined slot to plug right into. Obviously, there’s an appeal to this approach–cohesiveness can be a fascinating thing, if the works cohere in an unexpected, thought-provoking fashion–but I can’t help but feel that some of both the potential for formal inventiveness and the thrill of the truly unknown and unexplained and therefore unbowed and untamed is lost when such devices are employed.

Moreover, I must admit that my own experience of the universe has shown me no wise men, no secret society with all the right answers. Heck, my conception of God doesn’t even gel with such things. As near as I can tell, things happen because they happen, not because of some Plan, not because of the Way Things Really Are as hidden behind some curtain of conspiratorial secrecy which, were I suddenly granted extraordinary powers, my forebears and brothers-in-arms would make themselves known to me in order to reveal. It’s just life. It just is.

I’m certainly not the first person to point out that there’s something extremely and perversely comforting about conspiracy theory. I believe it was Robert Anton Wilson who theorized that the conspiracist mindset is a modern-day replacement for belief in God: “There’s no benevolent All-Father pulling the strings, but there is a top-secret cabal of Freemasons and aliens!” If you don’t believe in the Pope, you can at least believe in the Bildebergers. You see this reflected nearly everywhere, especially in this day and age, where the terrible events of 9/11 and its aftershocks find some people desperate to create an overarching explanation–someone must have known something and used this knowledge to make something else happen–rather than face the idea that, well, we’re all just pretty much on our own. Further, in fiction and in life, some people posit themselves as anti-conspiracy; however, a quick look reveals them to be proponents not of anti-authoritarianism, but of the right kind of authoritarianism. (The comics blogosphere has recently debated whether, say, Warren Ellis is such a person.) Additionally, you see another reflection of this mindset in criticism of “messy” fiction, fiction where not everything is played out in neat little story arcs that tie up all the plotlines in a way that enables the reader or audience to perfectly contextualize all that has gone before–in other words, fiction that’s a lot like life. (My favorite example of this is the vitriol directed at Seasoun Four of The Sopranos. To me, this is maybe the finest work of fiction I’ve ever encountered; to many TV critics, this was a disaster–“Where were the arcs? Why didn’t anything happen?” (Such were the complaints when the critics weren’t busy bemoaning the lack of murders, which I think tells you quite a bit about many TV critics and their real reason for enjoying the first couple of seasons of the show.)) Such outlooks are the metafictional equivalent of comfort food. This is not to say they’re totally horrible, of course–that’s some good food, oftentimes. But it is comforting, a lot more so than the notion that there is no explanation.

In the big fiction project that I’ve been working on for the last few years, this is something I’ve very consciously built the story around. No wise men are forthcoming. No ancient underground group of mind-warriors will swoop out of nowhere to show the protagonists the Men Behind the Curtain. No curtain, no men. Even the de rigeur explanation of “the source of the disturbances”–science? genetics? magic?–is eschewed. I mean, how often do you get one of those in real life?

This, then, is what I find so refreshing about Demo. As near as I can tell there are no connections between its superpowered protagonists. The powers will never be explained, and the characters will never meet each other, nor some old bald guy who’s been running around in the superpower underground since World War II or the Victorian Era or whatever. Whatever meaning the characters glean from their extraordinary situations is just that–gleaned from their own life experiences, not from received truth or prepackaged schematics as to how everything works. It’s all up to them.

How wonderful!

(PS: If there’s a flaw with Demo’s approach, it’s not that no answers are found, but that it doesn’t seem that the characters are searching for them. Personally, I feel that the quest for the wise old man and his bag of explanations is so culturally ingrained in us that were anyone to actually be given super powers, they’d almost automatically being looking for the secret government installation or circle of occult adepts that could help them explain and control their powers, and subsequently enlist them in the battle against whatever it is people with powers are supposed to battle against. The inevitable disappointment is part of the game, you know? But maybe that’s just me.)

(PPS: Demo #6, by the way, is the strongest issue of the series yet. Its horror elements are what grabbed me, as I’m sure you’d expect, and though I’m not sure I was ever “scared” (I didn’t see the Kubrick’s-Shining influence that the artist cited), I certainly remained grabbed. The first appearance of the mysterious skeleton is bracingly surreal, and the shots of the decaying dogs are powerful and grotesque. The added element of genuine oppression, rather than run-of-the-mill suburban ennui, makes the character moments both more believable and more relatable, and gives the horrific events the selling power they need. And Becky Cloonan’s art is at its best, emerging from its influences into its own dynamic, calligraphic territory. And it’s not just the terrifying stuff she nails, either–the protagonist’s bonnie new bride, for example, is refreshingly human and real, a woman you could quite conceivably fall in love with as opposed to the usual Brechtian device connoting “PRETTINESS.” Impressive and unique from top to bottom, if this issue is, as author Brian Wood says, the template for the remainder of the series, we’re in for some very good comics.)

I started blogging outside on the deck, but you know what? It’s hot in the sun.

Let’s kick off this linkblogging entry with links to even bigger and juicier linkblogging entries. Marc-Oliver Frisch reports on Grant Morrison’s newly announced projects (Superman with Frank Quitely!) and solid industry analysis from Rob Liefeld (not kidding!), among other things; meanwhile, Shane Bailey links to basically every goddamned comics-related interview, preview, review, and news item on earth, with a bunch of interesting comic-book-movie-related tidbits thrown in. Have at ’em.

Speaking of Marc-Oliver, he directs us to this Silver Bullet Comics interview with former Marvel whipping-boy Igor Kordey, who’s beginning to rival his own archnemesis Grant Morrison’s penchant for giving quoteworthy interviews (if not Morrison’s penchant for sounding brilliant and not-insane while doing so). After reading this and some of the interviews Kanye West has been giving, I’m starting to think that rampant egomania is the new black.

Courtesy of nearly everyone on the internet comes this Newsarama interview with Brian Wood, taking stock of his Demo project at the halfway point. Newsarama’s Matt Brady makes some similar points to the ones I made in my post on the series earlier today.

Also courtesy of nearly everyone on the internet comes this interview with freshly DC-exclusive Dave Gibbons, featuring a preview of his upcoming Mod graphic novel The Originals. Said preview looks fucking gorgeous, by the by.

Dorian of Postmodern Barney has seen the Ultimate-Universe digests Marvel has quietly started selling at Target in the toys section–so quietly it seems many of the Target employees are unaware of their existence (though that’s to be expected in a big retailer like Target). I’m interested to see that this project, which I first reported about waaaaay back when and have been calling for for even longer, has reached fruition. I’m also interested to see that Marvel chose an oversize format rather than the more compact manga dimensions for the digests. AND I’m interested to see that, apparently, the books have been heavily edited, for space at least, and for content most likely. (Somehow I doubt Marvel left the post-coital Wolverine/Jean scene in the editions of Ultimate X-Men shelved next to the Harry Potter action figures.)

Note to self: If you ever write a comic involving medical procedures or military uniforms, for the love of God, have Scott at Polite Dissent vet it first!

Everybody’s doin’ it! Mike Sterling and Dave Fiore are among the blogvillians who’ve answered the comics-habit questionnaire I took on yesterday.

Otto of Otto’s Coffee Shop fame (with all these new comicsbloggers it’s getting hard to keep track of last names!) has a fascinating post on the public perception of comic books and comic book readers. I’ve said before that I think this perception is tied directly to the floppy format–I know plenty of people who’ll happily read any graphic novel you hand to them, whereas floppies are looked at in much the same way as games of pin the tail on the donkey: fun in first grade, but we’re not in first grade anymore. Anyway, Otto runs down specific reactions and preconceptions from various non-comics-readers in his life. It’s an illuminating read.

Courtesy of Jim Henley (who’s finally noticed he hasn’t been blogging comics very much lately!) comes this multi-title review post from Nate Bruinooge. His thoughts on Blankets and its position in a beaten-to-death genre offer an interesting look at the mind of a won-over Blankets skeptic. But I am a bit nervous at his threatened linkage of The Sopranos to The Authority, The Ultimates, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II, and the work of Quentin Tarantino: simply put, I don’t think The Sopranos has a thing to do with any one of those, and I like most of them. (I’ve also got a newfound respect for LoEG2 following Jason Kimble’s intriguing exegesis of same, so maybe that doens’t belong in that ballpark either.) I’ve noticed a tendency among a lot of the smarter, academia-rooted bloggers–who are in many cases the discontents of post-modernism, blogs being where they take refuge from their peers–react in an almost, well, reactionary fashion to ugly or “unpleasant” art. It always leaves a bad taste in my Texas Chain Saw-loving mouth.

Speaking of Jason Kimble, he’s announced his intention to spend June–Gay Pride Month–blogging gay issues. (Heck, he even cited my October horrorblogathon as an inspiration! Oh, p’shaw!) He kicks it off with an analysis of the semi-stealthy depiction of homosexual relationships amidst the wider tapestry of Colleen Doran’s sci-fi soap comic A Distant Soil. Good stuff.

And speaking further of good stuff from Jason Kimble, how did I miss his delightful breakdown of the psychodramatic roles of the villians in Bendis & Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man? I’m guessing I skipped the entry because it’s talking about the current arc and I’ve switched to wait-for-the-trade mode on USM, but still, this is well worth reading. I love anything that makes me think “never in a million years would I have thought to put it that way, but that’s exactly how I would put it!”

I’m really starting to jones for Walking Dead, and this interview with writer and zombiephile Robert Kirkman makes me glad I heeded my blogospheric peers and ordered the trade. (Courtesy of Kevin Melrose.)

Finally, is McSweeney’s #13 out yet? Everyone’s talkin’ like it is, but as of yesterday the store where I work didn’t have it. What gives?

Johnny Bacardi (who, like his namesake, gets better and better the more you imbibe) has posted a response-to-cum-defense-against my lengthy ruminations on Brian Wood’s Demo and the larger issues of coherence and explainability in fiction, genre fiction in particular (said post being a response to the opposing viewpoint, as voiced by Johnny B. earlier). I guess the first thing I’d like to say in response to his response to my response (aside from “gee, don’t you just love the blogosphere?”) is he really doesn’t need to defend himself against misinterpretation, because I wasn’t really trying to interpret what he said. I just kind of used his post (which voiced a sense of frustration with the fact that the disparate single-issue stories that comprise Demo aren’t tied together in any tangible way aside from theme) as a springboard an excuse to riff on some ideas I’d been kicking around on faux antiauthoritarianism and closed-system storytelling. In other words, I didn’t necessarily believe that Johnny wanted a Professor X type to show up and whisk the Demo kids off to the Danger Room–I just thought that Johnny’s frustration and the Professor X/secret-conspiracy syndrome evolved out of the same outlook.

Anyway, in his new post Johnny expands upon his frustration, now taking on “ambiguous” fiction generally as a potential refuge for lazy authors. It certainly can be that–I for one remember thinking very vividly, after watching Lost Highway for the first time, “Is David Lynch a genius, or just a really crappy storyteller?” (I think you all know which way I eventually went on that one.) Ultimately ambiguity-as-bad-writing is like pornography: I know it when I see it. Problem is, everyone thinks that, which is why half the world thinks the ending of The Birds is chilling and brilliant and the other half thinks its the biggest cop-out in film history. (Next to sparing the dog in the tunnel in Independence Day, of course.)

The other problem is that if you say you like ambiguous, messy fiction, fiction where it isn’t all spelled out neatly, you inevitably come across as a pretentious git. Every time I defend (here it comes again) season four of The Sopranos, and believe you me I defend it quite often, there’s always a part of me that hesitates–“am I sounding pedantic? ‘You really thought it was boring? I thought it was the best thing that’s ever been on television!'” I assure you that’s not my intention at all. It’s just the way my tastes run. Quite frankly there’s so little of this type of fiction–The Sopranos takes it further than just about anything I’ve ever come across, though Morrison’s New X-Men and Charles Burns’s Black Hole are contenders–that I’m just so delighted to find any of it, I’ll talk your ear off about it.

Ultimately, it’s not going to be to everyone’s liking, and that’s fine, but I suppose my goal is to get people to acknowledge the validity of the approach. (Which is a tough gig, you know. We live in a world where people will tell you in absolute seriousness that Alfred Hitchcock is an objectively terrible director. Common ground on art, even great art, is hard to find.)

So named ’cause Dave G.’s Comic Weblog Update List is down, and I’m as dependent on it as your average Brooklyn hipster is on ironic haircuts and crystal methamphetamine.

Me and my Johnny McB. have been having ourselves a back-and-forth about Demo and ambiguity in fiction–click here for the latest installment.

Fortune Magazine is covering Tokyopop these days. The article is entitled “2004–A Good Year to Get Out of the Manga Business?” Franklin Harris cites some numbers on the manga giant’s revenue and, interestingly, the percentage of same generated by American manga creators; Kevin Melrose highlights information on TP’s selection and translation process.

Bill Sherman takes a stroll down memory lane, remembering an old post in which I pinpointed a unique weakness of horror in comics, in terms of sticking power–those damned panel borders! In fairness to comics, and to Junji Ito’s comics in particular, the works of his I’ve read since Tomie break down those panel walls quite effectively, mentally speaking.

I miss Rick Geerling.

Shane Bailey wonders if the increased semi-coverage of comics (thanks to comics specialty news media like Wizard, Newsarama/The Pulse, and the blogosphere) have sucked the wonder out of comics. Personally I think wonder is overrated (gimme terror, little stranger), but that aside, the solution’s a simple one–if you feel like reading previews and reviews and interviews is harming your enjoyment of the actual comics, don’t read the previews and reviews and interviews. This goes for other media as well–Shane is right to point out that spoilers for each episode of The Sopranos are online before the episodes even air, but Paulie Walnuts is not holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go to those sites and read them. (In all fairness, though, you do kind of have to construct an airtight media-blackout bunker around yourself if you don’t catch the show when it’s actually airing for the first time. I have been burned so many times (fuck you, New York Post!) it’s not even funny.)

This, however, does not absolve the people doing the previewing and the reviewing and the interviewing from not being assholes about it. I work very, very hard at not having storylines spoiled for me in advance, and yet stuff still slips through, either because a reviewer is being overzealous, or assumes that anyone reading the review has either read the book or doesn’t really care, or (grrrr) is making some misguided pass at being cute. Still, these are relatively few and far between, provided you the reader have made the conscious decision to avoid having things spoiled for you and take the steps (and, occasionally, make the sacrifices) necessary to ensure that avoid them you do.

Clash of the Internerd Titans! Dave Fiore takes on Steven Grant‘s column taking on Jim Henley‘s contention that superhero stories are the literature of ethics. Everyone involved makes some good points–Jim’s original piece argues persusasively that superhero stories boil down issues of self-sacrifice, heroism, and the will to help one’s fellow man to the bare formal essentials; Steven rightly points out that the genre is both bigger and (all too often) smaller than that; Dave justly takes apart Steven’s straw-man argument that Jim was trying to puff up superheroes (or sci-fi) by attributing lofty metafictional ideals to their practitioners. But I don’t think Dave needs to worry all that much about coming to Jim’s defense–I see a lot of Steven’s trademark emperor-has-no-clothes schtick in his critique of Jim’s article. From the de-rigeur questioning of the ethics of superhero behavior (“The civic-virtue stuff they preach is strictly squaresville! Also, they’re vigilantes, don’t you know! Thugs!” C’mon, dude. Paging Mr. Ellis.) to the thinly veiled anti-blog digs (just curious: if we got paid a little for each post, would our lengthy collections of analysis, reviews, and random pop-cultural and political musings be more or less likely to spread those pesky blogmemes?), there’s a lot being said here that’s only tangentially (if that) related to what Jim (or anyone else worth listening to) actually said. On the upside, though, at least Jim squeaked by without being referred to as the Hand Puppet. (Maybe, since he’s the guy who provided bloggers with our New Reality, he’s the Puppeteer?)

I feel like I’m in some sort of holding pattern. At least I’ve still got listing comics links going for me.

First of all, thanks so much for all the birthday/anniversary wishes, folks! Laura, Neil, Bill, Johnny, Shawn, Kevin, Dave, and whoever else I missed–you folks are swell.

Second of all, a hearty welcome back to Alan David Doane! He’s returned to the ol’ comics internet by reviving his news & commentary site, Comic Book Galaxy. He’s even got a new blog, the first entry of which features several spot-on reviews & previews as well as an interesting Q&A about his comics habits. (He makes it abundantly–some might say unnecessarily–clear that he doesn’t dig most superhero comics, but hey, that’s our man Alan!) Seriously, it’s great to have ADD back in the proverbial game. He’s a lodestone for this stuff.

It’s nice to see the unsung heroes of corporate comics get credit where credit is due, especially in light of how much merely workmanshiplike (if that) work is done in that arena. So it warmed the cockles of my heart to see Darwyn “New Frontier” Cooke give colorist Dave Stewart a major tip o’ the hat. (Courtesy of Graeme McMillan.)

Artbomb has the scoop on several fascinating upcoming releases, including the collected Sequential (an early experimental anthology series) from Paul Hornschemeier, an alternative-superhero anthology called Superior featuring work from Jeffrey Brown, Paul Pope, and Farel Dalrymple, and The Art of James Jean, the tremendously gifted color artist for Fables and other DC titles.

Sometimes, parody is self-parodic. Christopher Butcher has the scoop.

Johanna Draper Carlson calls glam/fashion manga Paradise Kiss a comic worth reading. Alls I know is that she had me at “influenced by Velvet Goldmine.” Now that I’m more or less caught up with Battle Royale, Planetes, and the work of Junji Ito, I think this is the next modern manga on my list. I even like the cover design. (Courtesy of Shawn Fumo.)

Kevin Melrose, the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Dirk Deppey” of the modern comics blogosphere, has branched out. He’s co-founded a writer’s resource site called Scryptic Studios, featuring comics-centric advice and such for aspiring scribes and pros alike. It’s, like, professional-looking. I, for one, am impressed. Impressed and likely to utilize the site. But don’t take my word for it: Larry Young, the best PR man K-Mel ever had, calls it “a rich and entertaining site, sure to bring out the hate in the usual snarky observers of the scene.” Snark? In comics-observing circles? Whaddya talk?

Johnny Bacardi offers up a particularly sharp batch of reviews. The Astonishing X-Men review has a deliciously “oooh” line. Good stuff.

Dorian at Postmodern Barney didn’t mean to go off on a rant here… but he does, in entertaining fashion, about the X-Men relaunch, Marvel’s retailing policies, the Dirk Deppey-helmed TCJ (haven’t seen the new ish yet, myself), and the wisdom of putting out manga-sized digest versions of American comics. Dorian thinks its a waste of time and resources–if the stories and art aren’t reminiscent of manga, says Dorian, format won’t matter. But I can tell you from experience that format does matter. At my store, which I imagine is representative of the rest of the chain, the difference between getting shelved with the enormous, fast-sell-through manga section and the tiny, messy, “yeah, but where are the graphic novels?” ask-the-kids shelves of American comics is solely based on size. Dorian’s certainly right to point out that manga fans are unlikely to dive right into the Big Two’s respective slush piles, but they’re a hell of a lot more likely to do so if the books are formatted in such a way that said fans actually see them. It’s not a panacea, and it’s not supposed to be–it’s simply a question of removing unnecessary obstacles to readership. (Courtesy of NeilAlien.)

Finally and belatedly, I want to wish everyone, particularly those for whom the holiday was created, a happy Memorial Day. You’re braver than me, and I thank you for it.

Memes are fun! This one finds its way here courtesy of Johnny Bacardi. Alan David Doane did it, too. So why not?

1. Do you tend to go to the nearest store, the best store, any store, or does it matter?

If I can get into the city, I go to Midtown Comics. They’ve got the second-best selection in the city (after the amazing Jim Hanley’s Universe), but they offer a 15% discount for regulars, and the employees are very friendly and helpful. If I can’t get into the city, I go to a mainly-models/toys shop next to my gym, or use my employee discount to buy graphic novels at the bookstore I work at. And if it’s an alternative comic I’m really fiending for and Midtown’s all out, I’ll go to Hanley’s. (I do try to get there every so often, because it’s awesome.)

2. Ladies, what books do you tend to purchase, or what kind would you like to purchase (if you are a male please leave blank or supply what a girlfriend reads)?

The Missus likes Craig Thompson, Jeffrey Brown, Phoebe Gloeckner, Paul Hornschemeier, Jordan Crane.

3. What one thing would you add or change about your most frequented store (i.e. What is the worst thing about the store)?

It’d be nice if Midtown had a deeper backstock in terms of alternative comics. Their online reserve service can get you anything provided you’re buying it the week of release, but after that, you’re sort of on your own. Hanley’s has a much wider, deeper selection overall, and I love the way it’s organized, but the lack of a discount and occasional surliness make it a special-occasion-only type thing.

4. What one thing would you not change (i.e. What is the best thing about the store)?

The discount and the online reserves.

5. Do you read any small press comic books currently? Which one(s)? (examples: Lone Star Press, Avatar)

Well, of course. Fantagraphics is the tops, I think.

6. What back issues do you buy?

I’ll occasionally play catch-up with series I missed out on if I’m particularly anxious to read them, but thanks to trade paperbacks that’s usually unnecessary.

7. How do you decide what comic book to buy? Writer, artist, character, word of mouth, etc?

All of the above, except perhaps character–my favorite character is Batman and I’m not buying any regular series starring Mr. Wayne’s alter ego. I’ll probably be buying Astonishing X-Men for the characters, but that’s for what Grant Morrison did with them and an interest in seeing what the new team does to follow up more than it’s for some love of the platonic ideal of Wolverine or the White Queen.

8. Do you buy strictly current age comic books or do you buy older comic books? What kinds?

I guess it depends on how you define “older”–reprint collections are a big part of my collecting habits. (Several of my favorite books of 2003 included Palomar, The Frank Book, and Squadron Supreme, just by way of a for instance.)

9. How do you feel about graded comic books?

Who cares? To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, spending $20,000 on some super-duper shrinkwrapped copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 is God’s way of telling you you have too much money. And as for anything newer or less important than that, you gotta be kidding me.

10. What comic book related merchandise do you buy?

Not much anymore–I’m a married man. I gotta maintain a respectable home. T-shirts is probably as far as I’ll take it these days, and it’s been a while since I even bought one of those.

11. What do you read if you are not reading comic books?

Comics blogs, obviously. Rock magazines. I was on a non-fiction kick for a while–books on warfare, crime, and terrorism, mainly. I also like reading books about scenes (glam rock, freeform FM rock radio, Saturday Night Live, funk, and so forth), which is funny because I hate scenesterism. I enjoy rereading favorites–every year I read Lord of the Rings, and there’s plenty of Clive Barker and George Orwell and old Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk and suchlike that finds its way onto my nightstand on a regular basis. The Master and Margherita has been on my to-do list for quite some time, and hopefully it’s ready to be done.

12. What do you buy at comic book conventions?

Tons, and I mean tons, of comics. It helped that it wasn’t so much “me” that was buying them as it was my Uncle Abercrombie, that’s for sure. But if you’re not gonna buy comics at a comic book convention, where are you gonna buy ’em?

So, Seanieblog is one year old. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a little reminiscence about my no-longer-so-new home on the web.

Today is the real one-year anniversary of Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, seeing as how its first post way back on May 28th, 2003, was actually put up here by Kennyb, the nice man who designed the site. May 29th was the day I got on board, with an explanation of how the blog came to be, what it would be like, and what it wouldn’t be like. There’d be no lengthy reviews, I said at the time. (That rule didn’t last 24 hours.) There’d be no political screeds. (Broke that rule too, though I’ve pretty much readopted it at this point. Frankly, I feel like I’ve said all that I need to about where I am politically, and man, is it ever apparent that I’m not changing anybody’s minds here. Point is, if you’re really jonesing for a semi-comics blog that beats its pet political points to death on a daily basis, this is what Jim Henley is for. Ha ha, no, I kid.)

One thing I really didn’t realize was how deeply immersed in the world of comics I would become (and I’m damn sure my hosts here at All Too Flat didn’t, either–they were expecting comedy, I think, not complaints about Cyclops’s body condom), but you know what? I’m glad things have worked out the way they have. When I started this blog I don’t think I knew there was such a thing as the comics blogosphere, and at any rate, whatever there was wasn’t a fraction of the size of what there is now. I’m proud to think I played some sort of role in its expansion and solidification as a medium for the exchange of ideas over the past year. And I’m truly grateful for all the spectacular and brilliant people I’ve gotten to know through it.

As I mentioned yesterday, I haven’t been blogging very often lately, and quite frankly I hate this. Knock on wood, but it looks like my personal situation may soon change for the better and more frequent, more in-depth, less ADD-addled blogging may be in the offing. Simply put, I really want ADDTF to have a second birthday, and I’ll do my damndest to make it happen.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my blogfathers, blogmothers, and all the folks whose blogs provided inspiration in those early weeks and months–I’m both lucky and happy to consider them my friends: The Missus,

Ken Bromberg, Jim Treacher, Bill Sherman, NeilAlien, Dirk Deppey, David Allen Jones, Jim Henley, Franklin Harris, Eve Tushnet, David Allison, and Alan David Doane. Thanks also to everyone who’s joined the party since then. There are now so many terrific blogs and bloggers out there that I’m far too lazy to list them here, but that’s what the blogroll is for, no? And thank you to the pros, publishers, critics, and correspondents who’ve provided me with feedback. It’s an honor and a pleasure to hear from you.

And, of course, thank you, beautiful reader. If a blog posts on the Internet and no one visits it, does it make a difference? Thanks to you I need never know the answer to that question.

Here’s to another year.

This is the first birthday of Seanieblog! So huge!

I’m going to do something I’ve always been reluctant to do and apologize for the sparse blogging over the past couple of months–not just to you, beautiful reader, but to myself as well. I don’t like not blogging. God willing things will change for the better soon and I’ll be back to the blog with a vengeance.

Let’s do this quick-like–my mother-in-law’s in town:

David at Insult to Injury reviews Grant Morrison’s Seaguy #1, pointing out among other things what a great name for a villain the Anti-Dad is (considering how nearly every superhero ever has serious absent-father issues–to say nothing of those heroes’ creators) and what gorgeous, inventive art Cameron Stewart provided for the book (compare it to Stewart’s fellow Catwoman artist Darwyn Cooke’s lovely but relatively staid work on New Frontier, for instance).

Graeme, also at ItoI, reviews Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men #1, and makes it sound interesting enough for me to change my mind and pick it up. At least someone is taking advantage of Morrison’s three-year-long act of deadwood clearance, rather than gathering the deadwood up again and dumping back in again. But watch out if you go there, because there’s a BIG SPOILER for Amazing Spider-Man, goddammit.

Dave Intermittent just kills some tedious anti-suburbia screed from writer Joe Casey, and throws in a dig at the awful, fraudulent American Beauty while he’s at it. Remember when I worried aloud about Brian Wood’s take on suburban life in Demo? Dave spells out exactly what I was worried about. Oh, it’s just lovely to read.

Speaking of Demo, Dave Fiore offers up the most interesting review of the series yet. Is Demo about wanting to break free, or wanting to fit in? Or does doing the latter enable you to do the former? Fascinating stuff.

I finally got around to buying the two most recent volumes of Battle Royale today, so I got a kick out of Kevin Melrose‘s report that a bunch of Tokyo schoolboys were sufficiently inspired by the film to beat up some of their teachers.

Kevin also links to a very thoughtful Publisher’s Weekly review of Brian Azzarello’s Batman run, which pretty much confirms many of the fears I had about it after reading the first issue way back when.

Paul O’Brien has the ugly truth about Marvel’s sales–with the exception of relaunches, almost every title is trending downward. Now, that’s almost a truism in this industry–that’s why there are so many relaunches, after all–but still, it’s depressing, and it’s got to make one wonder why Marvel has (apparently) abandoned the relatively iconoclastic moves that revived their fortunes to chase the shoulder-pads-and-vestigial-straps dollar. (Link courtesy of Graeme McMillan.)

Until those no-goodniks at Broken Frontier set up permalinks for their columns’ latest installments, I’m just gonna link to the people who link to them. For example, Graeme McMillan links to Shawn Hoke’s column about Chris Ware’s comics edition of McSweeney’s. Long story short: It looks AWESOME. No Gloeckner, though. (This tends to be my barometer for these things.)

Marc-Oliver Frisch reminds me that I wanted to check out Mark Waid’s Empire. It’s nice to find someone else who admits to liking Kingdom Come too, by the way.

And that’s it. Good night friends! Sweet dreams, kids!

Genius.

To begin with, I believe that arrangements should be made now to do a full scientific study of Grant Morrison’s brain, in order to find out exactly what makes it so different from normal human brains, and try to come up with an explanation regarding how the man can produce the random, the absurd, the nonsensical, the whimsical, the surreal, the flat-out strange ideas he does, and how he can do them with such apparent ease and proficiency.

Thus spake

When I was young, younger than before

I never saw the truth hanging from the door

And now I’m older see it face to face

And now I’m older, gotta get up, clean the place

And I was green, greener than the hill

Where flowers grew and the sun shone still

Now I’m darker than the deepest sea

Just hand me down, give me a place to be

And I was strong, strong in the sun

I thought I’d see when day was done

Now I’m weaker than the palest blue

Oh, so weak in this need for you

–Nick Drake, “Place to Be”

—–

Lately she don’t care for a warmer breeze

Or shade around the base of the maple trees

Spring was on the mountain we climbed upon

Stopped to see how high and how far we’d gone

I said “Love is waiting and better days”

She smiled and placed a kiss on my waiting face

Promise what you will something good for me

Time will take it all and it will you’ll see

–Iron & Wine, “Promise What You Will”

—–

Saw it written and I saw it say

Pink moon is on its way

And none of you stand so tall

Pink moon gonna get ye all

And it’s a pink moon

Yes, a pink moon

Pink, pink, pink, pink

Pink, pink moon

Pink, pink, pink, pink

Pink moon

Saw it written and I saw it say

Pink moon is on its way

And none of you stand so tall

Pink moon gonna get ye all

And it’s a pink moon

Yes, a pink moon

–Nick Drake, “Pink Moon”

Laptop’s back! Thank you, Steve Jobs’s minions!

Yesterday I wondered aloud whether skepticism toward the new Dirk Deppey-helmed Comics Journal from folks like Dave Fiore stemmed not from a fear that said Journal wouldn’t cover superhero comics, but that they wouldn’t cover superhero comics in a fashion to said folks’ liking. Dave interpreted that as me saying that Dave has some sort of personal problem with Dirk or other Journal writers and editors, which is not what I meant at all. My point was that if the Journal gives “mainstream” criticism an honest go, that’s really all we can (and should) ask for, as opposed to expecting that they’d share our precise feelings about the merit of the books or their authors. (Or, in Dave’s case, their formal implications.) You grok?

Also on the magazine beat is Marc Singer, who’s hyping the International Journal of Comic Art, a scholarly publication edited by frequent Comics Journal contributor John Lent. Sounds interesting, if you dig the superclose analysis, and babies, I know you dig the superclose analysis.

Eve Tushnet returns to comicsblogging, God bless her, with a short and sweet review of Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home.

Speaking of short and sweet, Dave Lartigue almost never says anything I agree with, but goddamn if he isn’t dead right about Planetes, which absent New X-Men may be the most fascinating series around right now. It’s science fiction in which nothing happens that doesn’t spring directly and organically from character, and its manga art is among the most beautiful and thoughtful I’ve seen. Folks, this book is stupid good, the perfect gateway drug into manga for altcomix readers. Volume Three came out yesterday–pick up all three for the price of two movie tickets and some snacks, settle in under a tree someplace with your S.O. this weekend, and enjoy.

And speaking of both Mother and Planetes, John Jakala reviews them both as well. He loves the latter, as should we all; he also points out that my comments about the former were more tempered online than they were in my review for the Journal. In part this is because the point of the Journal piece was to praise, not to bury–the idea was that this was chosen as one of the books of the year, so I was justifying that joice (said justification being deserved any way you slice it, methinks). The other part is that it grew on me. Do I think Hornschemeier cheated a bit with the neatness of the tragedy? Yeah, probably. And I’m totally empathetic, because that’s exactly the way I cheat when I write fiction, and I mean exactly. I think it was only because I saw this in myself that I was as critical of this aspect of the book as I was, at first. But I’ve grown to love myself, so I grew to love this book. How couldn’t I?

I’m glad to see that Fantagraphics is keeping the Complete Peanuts ball rolling, but whatever happened to the subscription program they’d planned on offering? Did the syndicate or the Schulz estate put the kibosh on it? Now that I actually have to, y’know, pay for my own comics, I was sort of counting on this option.

Graeme McMillan points to two potentially interesting graphic novels, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 2 and Aaron McGruder & Kyle Baker’s Birth of a Nation. I’m intrigued, but I’d be more excited if Persepolis had actually been the knockout it was billed as (the book is really fun to read, but I’ve said it before and so have many other people: Epileptic is the best there is at what Persepolis does), and if Kyle Baker used a different color palette, and if Aaron McGruder hadn’t recently morphed into the Angry Left’s Jim Davis.

Well, I didn’t know this was happening! Neat.

Warren Ellis & Trevor Hairsine will be present at the biggest interdimensional crossrip since the Tanguska blast of 1909. (That secret and awesome movie quotation is just for you.)

Speaking of Warren Ellis, I think Marc-Oliver just exposed his dark underbelly.

Much is being made of Marvel’s intention to make a Chris Claremont-scripted epic trilogy out of X-Men: The End, but no one seems to notice that we all read X-Men: The End the first time it came out, when Grant Morrison wrote it and it was called New X-Men Volume 7: Here Comes Tomorrow.

Personal, non-comics-related note to Johnny Bacardi: Technically, they’re just really, really angry, which is why they just kill and don’t eat. (The not-eating part is worth noting by the end….)

Finally, made it, Ma! Top o’ the world!

Most of these come courtesy of Kevin Melrose and/or Graeme McMillan. I mean, don’t they usually?

ICv2 reports that manga continues to multipy and devour, just like those stench-ridden machines from the sea in Junji Ito’s Gyo. (Did you like what I did there?)

‘Kettle Black’: Pot

J.W. Hastings continues a multi-blog dissection of the politics of Warren Ellis, focusing on Ellis’s semi-secret embrace of benevolent dictatorship. J.W., I don’t know if this will affect your analysis, but hasn’t Ellis come out and said that the Authority were, in fact, the villains of their own comic book?

After all the recent superhero movies and cartoons, at a time when Robin and Beast Boy and Spider-Man have their faces all over buses, comics sales have not improved significantly at all – it’s never going to happen unless we change the pricing, the format, the content and many other things about traditional U.S. superhero books.

Quoth Grant Morrison, in a wide-ranging discussion over at ComiX-Fan that covers his X-Men run and its effect on his personal life, his many upcoming Vertigo projects, his oddly inaccessible backlist, his multimedia ventures, and his occult theories. No one in the industry gives better interview than this man. As a matter of fact, it’s difficult to think of anyone in any industry who does.

Towards a definition of comics journalism, from Jeff Chatlos. Great stuff. (In fairness to the Comics Journal, though, JEff, they have done a cover feature on Grant Morrison, and I believe one on Ed Brubaker is in the works.) I think the big obstacle to serious, comprehensive, industry- and artform-wide comics journalism is the fact that there’s next to no money to be made in it, because there’s next to no audience for it. But it’s worth hashing out what would constitute such a thing.

Meanwhile, NeilAlien doesn’t buy the notion that Dirk Deppey’s Comics Journal will be a step in the right direction as far as a “middle ground” between fanboy fawning and elitist pisstaking is concerned; neither does Dave Fiore. But are Neil and Dave demanding that the Journal not just cover mainstream/superhero comics, but cover them the exact same way Neil and Dave would? In my many calls for the Journal to engage the so-called mainstream, I’ve never demanded that they like the mainstream. I simply want them to approach it with an open mind, engage the text on its own merits rather than as a symptom or a “see what I mean?”, and do so regularly enough to keep a current record of that segment of the medium rather than falling back on decade-old conventional wisdom about what constitutes superhero/mainstream storytelling. I’m sorry Tom Spurgeon isn’t reverential enough toward Stan Lee for Neil’s liking, and I’m sorry Dave doesn’t find discussions of a creator’s career and influences particularly interesting, but the fact is that Spurgeon is (hands down, I think) the finest writer on comics there is, and that nobody tackles creator interviews with the smarts and comprehensiveness of the Journal. If this kind of engagement with the mainstream is wrong, I don’t want the Journal to be right. Now, if they cover this stuff in a shallow fashion, just to prove to themselves that all their pre(mis)conceptions are true, I’ll be going after them with as much gusto as anyone. (Case in point being Tim O’Neil’s review of Grant Morrison’s The Filth, which, as the commenters on this Gutterninja discussion thread accurately point out, seemed more like an excuse to take a whack at the big X-shaped pinata than to actually, y’know, talk about The Filth (or New X-Men, for that matter.) But honest engagement is all we can ask for, and I think one has to put one’s biases ahead of one’s judgement to believe that people like Dirk and Tom will offer anything less.

Finally, go dig Johnny Bacardi’s new digs!

A little less than a year ago I wrote a big post on manga–how it truly is the future of comics, and that American comics publishers could and should be learning valuable lessons from it. Nothing that I’ve seen or heard or learned in the intervening months has changed my mind, that much is for sure. (The simple fact that at my bookstore (which I presume to be representative of most chain bookstores), size/format alone is what gets a comic book shelved with the hot-selling manga titles as opposed to the slow-as-molasses-selling non-manga titles, should be reason enough for publishers to be paying a lot closer attention.) Essentially, what manga has done is remove unnecessary obstalces to readership; in my opinion, American publishers haven’t done nearly enough work in this regard. Anyway, I recently came across the piece in the archives, and I think it holds up rather well. Check it out and see if you think it holds up, too.

What is missing from this famous quotation? “A _____ and his _____ are soon _____.” You have three minutes. Ready, set, go!

–Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney, Bored of the Rings

Longtime reader and frequent correspondent George writes in (but always at the wrong email address–dude, it’s right here!) to bemoan the ever-larger number of variant covers cluttering up the racks of the Direct Market lately. Retailer extraordinaire Brian Hibbs spends the second half of his latest column doing much the same thing. Me, I just wonder how this industry got to the point where there’s apparently a massive amount of money to be made in catering to stupid people.

I mean, seriously, who buys these things? Is it the same people who buy Jet records when there’s at least one copy of Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak available in every record store in America? Folks, the bottom dropped out of the comics-collectability market a long, long time ago. These things now exist to have their prices artificially inflated through ridiculous publishing and production maneuvers in order to fleece fanboys who were sufficiently un-stupid to avoid buying them when they came out (or maybe they just walked to the store too slow–let’s not give them too much credit) but so fucking stupid as to want to track the damn things down and pay about forty times what they’re actually worth to own them.

And the variant covers are almost never nice to look at, by the way. I’m not sure how deep into the gimmickry we’ve gotten during this cycle, but holograms and foil embossing and blah, blah, blah–hideous, one and all. Or, it’s an ugly picture drawn by one of those artists who did five issues of an insanely popular comic, then dropped out to play video games. Or, it’s just another uninteresting pin-up looking image in a long string of uninteresting pin-up looking images, only now you get to buy the whole goddamn book over again for the privelege of owning it. People, they are not worth owning.

About the only impulse behind buying variant covers that I can understand on the consumer side of things is completism. This has resonance with me, as I’m currently waiting ever-so-patiently for the day when I have enough money that I can buy all the recently remastered Rolling Stones and Brian Eno and King Crimson and David Bowie CDs that I already own in less remastered versions. When you really like an artist, you want all the tip-top versions of that artists’ work that are available. But 9 times out of 10, there’s no qualitative difference between the original version and the one with the variant cover–they’re not digitally remastering Astonishing X-Men #1, you know? Occasionally publishers will throw in some DVD-esque supplemental material, like sketchbook pages, scripts, original pitches, and so forth, but quite frankly it infuriates me that all this stuff was lying around and being planned to be used to sucker people into buying a comic book over again after, having no idea such things were planned, they bought the first version. The big movie studios pull this type of nonsense all the time with DVDs, and that’s enough to piss people off too, even though in those cases you’re often getting three hours worth of bonus material for your additional expenditure, rather than, what, eight pages of costume designs?

And then we get into the larger issues, the ones Hibbs talks about in his column–how variants clog up market share and choke midlist and indie titles out of the stores, how they’re indicative of companies fixated on the bottom line instead of telling quality stories (which, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, is exactly how the superhero got turned around when New Marvel first came along–in other words, good storytelling makes good business sense), how they can potentially sink retailers by forcing their inventory into unnatural contortions, how the stupid fucking things can do nothing but turn new customers off of comics and often do the same to longtime readers who simply get fed up, and on and on and on.

Long story short, don’t buy variant covers. Don’t, don’t, don’t. They’re dumb. The end.

A few days ago my laptop’s monitor melted down. It’s a logic-board malfunction (because, y’know, I know what that means), and the whole laptop has to be sent back to Apple for repairs. So both blogging and responding to emails will be few and far between until I get the thing back. Just so’s you know.

“They should just make Krypto be the Spectre.”

–my co-worker Greg

Steven Berg on The Dark Knight Strikes Again. I’d say “’nuff said,” but it really isn’t, because I’ve got to mention his wondrous description of the role played by the cataclysmic Superman-Wonder Woman sex scene. It beggars belief that people can read a book with something like that in it and think that said book was some sort of play-it-safe corporate sellout. I mean, it has a cataclysmic Superman-Wonder Woman sex scene.

NeilAlien helps talk up the need for an intelligent middle ground between Wizard and The Comics Journal, and points out, accurately, that this is what the comics blogosphere has become. But with all the comics bloggers who’ve written for the Journal in recent months, is it possible that we’ll see the Journal itself become that middle ground, at least in part? I think so, in the sense that all we’re really hoping for is a magazine of criticism that’s smart without being snobby and well-read without being elitist or obscurantist, and, well, that’s Dirk, generally speaking, isn’t it?

Franklin Harris cites an ICv2 report that publisher CPM will be launching an all-yaoi (that’s guy-on-guy romance) line. People, that is hot. It’s certainly possible that I’ve just watched Velvet Goldmine one too many times, but I do think we’re slowly easing our way into a society where two hot guys making out has the same appeal to women as two hot girls making out has for men. (If you have to, chalk this up to the male cast of The Lord of the Rings–I’ve yet to meet a female fan of the films who doesn’t have a favorite mental image of some pair or other getting freak nasty). And in my opinion, you really can’t go wrong with two hot people of any gender making out. So why not show it in comics? I’m sure it’ll be more interesting than that Britney/Madonna bullshit.

I just want to point out a couple of posts by Dave Intermittent–one about comics (specifically the difference in temperament between Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison) and one not–and say that Dave has been writing very, very well recently.

Speaking of writing very well, how about Scott at relatively new blog Polite Dissent? His ten-point defense of blogs is probably the best explanation of why the medium is so strong that I’ve yet come across. But are blogs really “superior” to more traditional methods of newsgathering, both print- and web-based, as Scott suggests? I don’t necessarily think so. They have strengths and weaknesses just like any other publishing mechanism. But to the extent that they fill a previously unfilled niche, enable ideological democracy across a broad spectrum of fields, allow for specialized dialogue without the competitive-cum-belligerent interaction of messboards, and serve as a Greek chorus for those aforementioned “more traditional methods,” they’re certainly worth embracing.

Scott also has a great little collection of tips for eBaying your comics. This is quite helpful to me because I’m tentatively planning to, well, eBay my comics.

And MORE great writing! This time from Jason Kimble, to whom I clearly have been paying not nearly enough attention. Jason has produced a masterful three part analysis of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volumes 1&2, focusing on the conflict between the “extraoridnary” (which Jason reads primarily as sexuality and violence, or carnality if you prefer) and the “gentlemen” (civilized repression, or at least compartmentalization, of same). And before you start saying “Hey, he’s just taking it for granted that there’s something extraoridnary about carnality, when that really is kinda ordinary, isn’t it???” (Eve Tushnet, I’m looking in your direction), let’s keep in mind that since LoEG takes place in Victorian England, that’s a perfectly fair base assumption. Ooh, it’s all so good–the kind of writing I don’t get to do nearly often enough. (The big horror-blogging marathon was probably the last time I waxed close-reading.) And BTW, it was found via Marc Singer’s fascinating post on the same subject. You’re pretty much gonna have to read that one too.

Finally, I was reading Junji Ito’s Uzumaki today, and you know what? I’m really glad I read comics. Aren’t you glad you do too?