Heidi MacDonald responds to the furor over her anti-blog comment in Comic Buyer’s Guide by offering a sort-of apology, which is fine since it was only a sort-of anti-blog comment to begin with. But the hilarious thing about her post is that it helped me discover that Alex Beam’s infamously and genuinely anti-blog article, in which he talked about what an unreliable fly-by-night enterprise this whole writing-for-the-Internet thing is as opposed to people like him who write for Real Publications, is a victim of linkrot.

That is fucking classic.

(For more on Alex Beam, click here.)

Come back, Seth–all is forgiven!

It’s difficult to describe how gorgeous Fantagraphics’ The Complete Peanuts Volume One is. I don’t own a copy–my plans to subscribe to their subscription plan (hey, did they ever end up doing that) went away with my old job–but I flipped through it at Midtown Comics the other day, and Holy Mary Mother of God, it’s just spectacular. I’m still not nuts about Seth’s cover design, but seeing it in the actual size and shape of the book (not to mention wrapped around the book’s contents) does make it work pretty well (in spite of the design, if not because of it). And inside! The paper is lovely, the reprint quality is completely astounding, and the material itself is both adorable and laugh-out-loud hilarious. And speaking anecodtally, the bookstore I work at has already sold out of them. Congratulations to everyone involved, because if this doesn’t end up being the book of the year, I’d almost be frightened to see what is.

(And on an unrelated note that I couldn’t leave unplayed, thanks to a gift certificate and store credit, I bought $120 worth of comics at Midtown for a grand total of three bucks and change. Damn, that’s hot!)

Looks like the beloved Heidi MacDonald is auditioning for the coveted title of the comics blogosphere’s Alex Beam. (Courtesy of Franklin Harris.) Hey, Heidi, didn’t Rich Johnston sing that number on last week’s show?

Did you know that former Comics Journal editor and FOG (Friend of Gojira’s) Milo George has his own blog? Well, you do now! Try to imagine a venue where he could put his hilarious message board persona on display without having to do battle with various Danny Hellman or John Ronan sock puppets and you’ll have some idea of just how entertaining this is. Go ye and read, and tell him Sean sent ya! No, seriously. I want you to email him and tell him I sent you. HE NEEDS TO KNOW.

Eve Tushnet has been blogging titles. That is, she’s been collecting lists of people’s favorite titles, as opposed to the works themselves. (The first such post is linked above; click on it and scroll up and you’ll see a bunch more. Hey Eve–when you do stuff like this, you gotta include links to all related posts in the most recent post!) I once started a thread like this on the Comics Journal messboard, and of course I love making lists, so naturally I couldn’t resist…

COMICS

Our Cancer Year

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

Perfect Example

From Hell

Watchmen

The Dark Knight Returns

Elektra Lives Again

That Yellow Bastard

The Big Fat Kill

“Tear It Up, Terry Downe”

Human Diastrophism

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Safe Area Gorazde

ALBUMS

A Wizard, a True Star

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Presence

…I care because you do

The Idiot

Liquid Swords

This Is Hardcore

Station to Station

Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

You Goddamned Son of a Bitch

Beaucoup Fish

Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols

Tonight’s the Night

All Disco Dance Must End in Broken Bones

Standing on the Verge of Getting It On

The Dandy Warhols Come Down

White Light/White Heat

Let It Be

Let It Bleed

Kind of Blue

In a Silent Way

Here Come the Warm Jets

Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

Starless and Bible Black

Disintegration

Pink Flag

Fear of a Black Planet

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Electric Warrior

The Menace

Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks

Everything, Everything

LITERATURE

Something Wicked This Way Comes

“She Was Spittin’ and Yowlin’ Just Like a Cat”

“Survivor Type”

The Crying of Lot 49

Choke

Books of Blood

“In the Hills, the Cities”

“Pig Blood Blues”

I Know This Much Is True

1984

Homage to Catalonia

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Lord of the Flies

The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids

The Stand

“In the Mountains of Madness”

“Behind the Wall of Sleep”

FILMS

Night of the Living Dead

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3

Kill Bill

Scorpio Rising

Eyes Wide Shut

Dawn of the Dead

Rebel Without a Cause

The Wicker Man

The Killing

If my brain didn’t feel like those awful Adult ADHD commercials right now, I’m sure I could come up with more, or better. But those are the ones that are tickling my fancy right now.

“It’s like rap music, first dismissed as a trend. It’s gone well beyond a passing fad.”

Comics store owner Bill Liebowitz on manga, as quoted in USA Today. (Link courtesy of–who else?–Franklin Harris.)

Actually, that quote reminds me that I’ve got to get back to work on my startling expose, “2004 – A Good Year to Get Out of the Hip-Hop Business?”

It’s been a big week for funnybook thrills here at ADDTF. I’ve spoken with two living-legend artists by phone for a freelance assignment, I bought $120 worth of comics for a grand total of three bucks and change in actual cash thanks to a birthday gift certificate and store credit, and to top it all off, I unknowingly played a big part in the creation of the latest issue of Nick Bertozzi’s Rubber Necker, which I finally picked up.

Nick, as I hope you’re already aware, is an extraordinarily gifted cartoonist who, thematically and stylistically, seems to stand alone amongst his peer group. From his madcap league-of-extraoridnary-modernists serial The Salon to his none-more-black collection The Masochists to his modern-day Eightball anthology series Rubber Necker, he’s shown a mastery of a variety of styles, genres, and tones, all engaged with the help of fluid linework and one of the most singular color palettes in all of alternative comics.

So naturally, when I’d hire him to do illustration work back when I was an editor of the A&F Quarterly, I’d order him to draw pictures of naked people. Seriously! Nick was the illustrator for our regular video-game review column, and in illo after illo he outdid himself in the witty smut arena. (Check it out!)And lo and behold, he’s reprinted all of his “Naughty Preppies” pieces in Rubber Necker #4, and thanked me in print to boot! I couldn’t be more flattered and honored. Nick’s one of the great ones, and I’m proud to say that the world is now graced with more Bertozzi drawings of erect nipples and man-ass than it otherwise would be had I not intervened.

Go visit Nick’s website, and pick up his comics, too. They’re wonderful.

You know, I like Brian Wood & Becky Cloonan’s Demo quite a bit. It’s easily some of the most compelling work being made in its genre today. But I’m not sure you can tell that from my review of the series. Basically, I had a few concerns about the creators’ approach to teen angst and the politics thereof, but I couldn’t figure out a way to express them without coming across as unnecessarily snide and condemnatory. So I was happy to get an email from Brian Wood in which he addressed some of those concerns, and even happier that he agreed to let me post the message here, as a corrective to my earlier take on the series. Take a look:

Thanks for the Demo writeup! It’s really gratifying that so many people respond to the book.

A couple nitpicky comments, though, if you would indulge me. 🙂

“I’m not really convinced that Wood & Cloonan’s outlook on American life is any more complex: Both tend to end each issue with a list of all the awesome punkrawk music they’ve been listening to, and Wood’s politics, as expressed in his Channel Zero books, are somewhat infamously nuance-free.

(I’m certainly dreading his examination of a soldier’s life in Demo #7.)”

You of course know that my Channel Zero was written 7 years ago, when I was pretty young and not really very nuance-free in ANY aspect of my work. Besides, if you concede that the line of dialogue you quote from Demo #3 makes sense coming from the narrator of the story, why not the same from Channel Zero’s characters? It’s not an autobiographical book, and no more expresses my worldview than anything else. And I would even go so far as to say it’s not MEANT to be a nuanced work, since it deals with a rookie political thinker struggling in a very black-and-white, right or wrong world.

I don

Hey Marc Singer–email me, willya? The link’s to your left.

Demo

w: Brian Wood; a: Becky Cloonan

32 pages, B&W

12 issue monthly series

$2.95 each

(UPDATE: After you finish reading the review, read a follow-up email from author Brian Wood, and a mea culpa from yours truly, here.)

I’ve long argued that superheroic (and supervillainous) behavior is not nearly as outlandish as its detractors make it out to be. Certainly there are countless superhero conventions that make little or no sense if viewed on their own, but the combination of heroism or criminality with self-conscious pageantry is as common as your local volunteer firehouse and as potentially earth-shaking as your local al Qaeda cell. I think blogger Jim Henley articulated this best when he said that people are exactly as outlandish as they feel they can afford to be.

So what about those who can’t afford to be?

Demo, an ongoing anthology series by writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan, is an investigation of superpowers freed of the narrative and behavioral constraints of traditional heroism and villainy. Each stand-alone issue follows a different young, superpowered person through a familiar struggle–the need to escape your parents, say, or coming to terms with the death of one of them, or falling hard for a beautiful acquaintance. In each case, the protagonist’s superpower plays a unique role in spurring the crisis in question.

But unlike most supercomics, Demo‘s young, lower- or middle-class, supernaturally gifted protagonists are not moving inexorably toward teamwork or confrontation with similarly powered characters of either similar or opposing viewpoints. They aren’t assuming secret identities, donning gaudy costumes, assembling a rogue’s gallery, training sidekicks, avenging their slain parents, exploring brave new worlds, or anything like that at all. They’re just a bunch of kids like any other, but with an extra set of problems–superproblems, if you will.

You simply have to hand it to Wood for doing what 50,000,000 superhero fans on the internet have been unable to do, which is to show that there really is nothing wrong at all with utilizing the fantastic basics of the superhero genre to tell a serious story. The ability to destroy objects with your mind, to control others with a mere word, to posess super strength, to change shape–strip these concepts of the extraneous crap that’s been layered onto them for several generations of corporately-mandated change-free comics, and what emerges butterfly-like from that chrysalis is a potentially fascinating way to examine the human spirit.

It’s not just the codenames and costumes that Wood wisely jettisons, though–fundamentally, it’s the need to resolve conflict (both textual and subtextual) through violent confrontations. Even the best Marvel superhero books–hell, even ones that were explicitly designed to supplant the traditional violent-plot-resolution paradigm, like Morrison’s New X-Men–pretty much have to end with a slugfest. Not so Demo. These stories end–and that’s not really the right word for it, any more than our own stories “end”–with characters sitting in bars without drinking, or walking around the city, or walking away. Wood’s ability to bypass the traditional limits of this genre make for a surprisingly liberating reading experience.

What about the stories themselves? So far, that’s the least compelling area for me. They tend to be pretty standard teenage-wasteland tales of the type handled with greater aplomb and sophistication by the likes of Phoebe Gloeckner and Craig Thompson (and especially Charles Burns, whose stunning Black Hole has already done for the mutant trope what Wood is trying to do with more traditional superpowers). Along the way you get the kind of rote suburbia-bashing you’d expect out of Good Charlotte fans–in issue three, for example, our heroine runs down a list of reasons she hates her hometown: “Sun. Manicured lawns. Golf courses. Automobiles. White people.” Um, okay, kid–just don’t be late for study hall. And while this shallow life-sux sentiment would be perfectly acceptable for the narrator to adopt, seeing how she is, of course, fictional, I’m not really convinced that Wood & Cloonan’s outlook on American life is any more complex: Both tend to end each issue with a list of all the awesome punkrawk music they’ve been listening to, and Wood’s politics, as expressed in his Channel Zero books, are somewhat infamously nuance-free. (I’m certainly dreading his examination of a soldier’s life in Demo #7.)

But there are many moments that compensate for the simplisme. Each issue’s end is refreshingly ambiguous, refusing to serve up platitudes of either the positive or negative variety. Issue four was perhaps the most memorable in this regard: After reading those last few pages, I remember sincerely wondering what expression would be on the face of the main character in the final panel. Issue five expands that intriguing amibiguity to story length, with a seemingly strong protagonist revealed to be dangerously weak by story’s end. There’s a definite sense that the cumulative power of each new issue is greater than that of the last, which come to think of it is probably a better reason to keep buying the book than any I could offer you.

But the book’s other selling point is Cloonan’s powerful black-and-white art, which looks gorgeous on the high-quality paper stock Ait/PlanetLar has invested in for the series. Like a less manic, more manga-fied Paul Pope, her simple scratchy lines evoke the sullen emotions of the characters while imbuing them with an alluring gutter glamor. Moreover, the wide-open spaces and zipatone rampages of issue two show that she’s got many a trick up her sleeve. Occasional lapes aside (simplicity is her strength, but sometimes panels are so simple it looks like she was unable to draw them any other way), it’s difficult to imagine an artist better suited for this project.

(On a side note, it’s worth pointing out that Marvel is sort of running a parallel course to Demo with a series called NYX–which, of course, was once Wood’s to write, before a falling-out the nature of which I’m unsure of caused his departure from the book and led him to try out his ideas for the series in Demo instead. Marvel also did something similar with the first issue of its short-lived regular-joe mutant series Muties. In both cases there’s much more of a reliance on traditional melodrama–you can bet something totally awful happens, usually on a splash page at the end of the issue–and in NYX’s case there’s the format-driven need for decompression and cliffhangers. Demo‘s “one issue, one story, we’re done” take is like a breath of fresh air, and serves the material very well–we’re free to imagine what becomes of each set of characters, and Wood’s writing is open-ended and expansive enough to serve as a compelling invitation to do so. (Of course, one-shots or no, they really ought to be collected in a trade, which at this point is the, well, “format of record” for the medium. And my take is that this is a series worth remembering.)

There’s still seven issues to go, but I think I’ve hit upon the key to understanding Demo–it’s that the title means “people” in Greek. This is a series about superpowers only insofar as it’s using the basic conventions of the genre as a shortcut to the minds and hearts of the people who posess those powers. Quite simply, it’s a brilliant idea–hell, in this industry, it’s quite nearly a revolutionary one–one that I hope many more creators will utilize. And if it doesn’t put paid to the notion that you can’t do anything interesting with superheroes, nothing will.

This is fun. I was inspired to do this by reading Bill Sherman‘s blog today, but since I originally saw it at Rick Geerling‘s the other day and was all ready to do it but didn’t get the chance, I’m going to do both. First up is the other day’s, then today’s. The former will be easy enough to identify for some people; as for the latter–well, if you can get it right, I think I might have to send you money or something.

1. Grab the nearest CD.