Dirk Deppey has the depressing scoop on the ignominous end of the Jesus Castillo obscenity case. For those who are unaware, Castillo was arrested and convicted of obscenity charges for the “crime” of selling an adult comic book, from the adult section of his comic book store, to an adult. Why is this a “crime”? Because all comics are for kids–at least according to the Texas D.A. that prosecuted him, and all the various juries, judges, and appellate courts that heard the case. In other words, please go support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which bankrolled Castillo’s defense, an undertaking as costly as it was just.

In much less grim news, Mark Millar is previewing his four (!) upcoming titles for various publishers. I know I’ve kicked the Scotsman around a bit for Trouble (and his politics, and his press releases) but with three (!) of these new books looking like revisionist superhero tales of various stripes (one of which will feature the masterful widescreen art of JG Jones), it looks like Millar is once again playing to his quite considerable strengths. (I always liked his first arc on The Authority better than Warren Ellis’s, for example, and his Marvel titles (particularly the first arc of The Ultimates and the entire Ultimate X-Men run) are sexy, unpredictable popsplosions.)

(I guess it’s odd that I’m an evangelical supporter of an anti-evangelical graphic novel. Oh well…)

Ask and ye shall receive: Eve Tushnet offers her own, as-yet-undecided perspective on Craig Thompson’s magnum opus. I think she hits on one of the most interesting questions about the book, one that I haven’t unravelled despite actually interviewing the guy about it: To what extent is Craig’s narrative voice unreliable? That is, does he really believe everything is as “perfect” as the narrator depicts it? And is he really as sincere in his teen-year convictions as the narrator makes it seem? In addition, she offers some insight into the relationship between evangelical fundamentalism and kitsch art, one I hadn’t thought of before. Finally, it’s always fascinating to hear about what makes for “good comics” for people who aren’t already immersed in the art form. This book has people like Eve and my wife Amy talking about comics, which is a damn good thing for this incredibly insular medium.

Meanwhile, over on the TCJ.com messboard, the illustrious Scott Bukatman leads an exodus from the interminable, intolerable fightin’-’bout-the-Baby-Jesus Blankets thread, and is generating some interesting discussion (provided this one doesn’t get bogged down in a chat about the book’s price point, or the fight Lorna Miller apparently wants to pick with Coop…).

(See that? It was a complex pun involving “love and marriage, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” and “putting the cart before the horse.” Ha.)

Senator Rick Santorum continues to say deeply creepy things about love, sex, and marriage. Moreover, they’re things that are just as troubling to heterosexuals as they are to homosexuals, though thanks to our wonderful news media you’d never know it. This time around, he argues, quite passionately, that marriage is about procreation, not love. Among the many troubling logical extensions of this belief are the notion that there’s nothing really wrong with arranged marriages, and that infertile couples, or (God forbid) couples who simply don’t want to have kids have invalid marriages. I feel that it needs to be repeated: This man is a senator.

With each statement, Santorum makes a little more apt my half-joking comparisons of the GOP’s cultural conservatives to the Taliban. He’s a true reactionary, a bona fide fundamentalist and theocrat, and he has no business being a major player in a major political party.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan is all over him; scroll down for a related discussion of how the Roman Catholic Church has officially condemned homosexuality but never felt moved to make similar statements about slavery. God help us all.

The Roxython continues over at Bill Sherman’s, where he juxtaposes an eloquent review of Roxy Music’s third album, Stranded, with an extremely funny run-down of overused words found in Roxy reviews. Isn’t it that kind of conjunction of the unexpected that made “Mother of Pearl” such a great song, Bill?

(BTW, gentlemen, a propos of Roxy’s gorgeous album covers, I seem to recall rather thoroughly, ahem, enjoying the cover of Country Life when it appeared in Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Album Covers issue when I was in seventh grade or so… )

I’m not so nuts about the most recent story arc in Mark Millar’s The Ultimates. Normally I’m peachy keen on the “decompressed” storytelling style, in which big events are stretched out over several issues, but this alien-invasion plot seems reeeeeally stretched to me. A couple of issues ago, we spent an entire installment watching the Wasp get chased around a base being told, repeatedly, that there was no escape; meanwhile, her compatriots Thor, Iron Man, Nick Fury and Captain America spent their half of the issue putzing around an abandoned island that might as well have had a big Hollywood-style sign that read “DEATH TRAP” on a mountaintop somewhere. This issue felt like more of the meandering same to me, with some Authority rehashing thrown in for good measure. Besides, I’m kind of soured on Millar’s dialogue, as I’m fond of pointing out. Still, I’m holding out hope for a good conclusion, and of course Bryan Hitch’s art is always pretty much stunning. Anyway, point is that Johnny Bacardi liked this last issue just fine, and in his review he emphasized the book’s main strength–the delightfully sleazy reimagining of these iconic characters’ personalities. That makes the book worth picking up even when other aspects of it are driving you nuts.

Johnny B. also presents his own “Top Twelve Comics Everyone Should Read” list, a la Dave Hill (and myself, incidentally). It’s a really idiosyncratic list–his and mine have literally no overlap. Check it out.

Over at Rich Johnston’s column… well, I think “yeesh” is the word for it. Still and all, it’s pretty entertaining to watch Marvel work us online rumormongers like the rented mules that we are.

Dirk Deppey has a round-up of some of the recent wave of very public Fanta-bashing, including an update on the Rick Veitch vs. TCJ grudge match, and a breif foray into mocking humorless Pro-Gay Comics Creators who spend their time and energy attacking equal-opportunity offenders like Angry Youth Comix creator Johnny Ryan instead of the Taliban wings of Roman Catholicism and the U.S. Congress, who present a much clearer and more present danger to the lavender set right about now.

In the “ADDTF today, Journalista tomorrow” department, here’s a link to a purportedly anti-Semitic cartoon, drawn by Tony Auth for the Philadelphia Inquirer, that’s making the rounds in the warblogosphere lately (courtesy of LGF). Initially, I thought, “That’s not really anti-Semitic, just knee-jerkingly stupidly anti-Israel, which sadly isn’t so rare a breed of editorial cartoon. The Star of David is Israel’s political emblem, after all, so I guess that makes it less ‘offensive,’ though it certainly doesn’t make it any less ‘dumb.'” That’s all I thought was going on–until I discovered that Auth swiped the image from the goddamn Nazis. Check it out. Everything old is new again, eh?

(Not to digress too much from the comics stuff, but I remember reading, and I often repeat to others during discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that anti-Semitism seldom occurs without some ostensibly “real” political greivance to give it some street cred: “Those Jews are all Communists!” “Those Jews are all capitalists!” “Those Jews are agitating for war!” “Those Jews are agitating for peace!” “Those Jews are spreading the plague!” “Those Jews are waging genocide against the Palestinians!” Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you, and just because your complaints about Israel may have some validity don’t mean you’re not, for all intents and purposes, an unreconstructed Jew-hater.)

Finally, a quick musing on something depressing about Tim Sale’s recent exclusive contract with DC, and his refusal to work with any writer other than Jeph Loeb: Having seen some of this guy’s original pages at San Diego, I feel like he’s an art-comics creator struggling to be free. The elegant line work, the expressionistic composition, the sheer languid beauty of his stuff–this guy could be the next Dave Mazzuchelli, if he wanted to be.

Steven Den Beste argues persuasively that the proposed anti-gay-marriage Constitutional amendment is an affront to everything we hold dear and sacred as a country and a democracy. Um, yeah, basically.

Jim Treacher “sings” the “praises” of David Rees and Rolling Stone as only Jim Treacher can. (You’ve got to understand, Jim, David understands things. He understands things in a way only Jann “Peaceful Easy Feeling” Wenner can, uh, understand.)

Yes.

A recent TCJ.com messboard thread cleared up a lot of pre- and mis-conceptions I had about the inner workings of the Comics Journal, a magazine with which I think most comics lovers have had a love-hate relationship. Editor Milo George gave me permission to reprint, and thus preserve for posterity, his extremely informative post on the question of the Journal’s review policies in particular and “mission” in general. I think you’ll find it quite educational.

—–QUOTE—–

There are eight bazillion reasons why the reviews we publish aren’t up-to-the-moment; nearly all of the publishers don’t send me review books in a timely manner — I generally get a big box of a pub’s latest releases two or three times a year, so most of them have been out for a few months before I even see them. Publishers often send review books to someone here who isn’t me, which means that I often get books late or not at all. A lot of the small-fry non-comics publishers who put out comics are amazingly tight with review copies — if I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard “But I already sent Fanta a review copy [not addressed to you],” I could afford to buy most of the books I need — which slows things up. Some critics are agonizingly slow — I have a think piece that I commissioned for the 2001 Year In Review that’s still inching toward completion [when it’s done, it’ll be fucking great, though] — some critics are good but require scads of rewrites before I have something I’m proud to publish. But most importantly, despite finally have a big enough wrecking crew to cover everything that deserves timely coverage, I don’t have enough pages to publish the crit I have in the increasingly claustrophobic two-interview 128-page format. At the moment, Gary’s considering a change in format that would get all the stuff I like — twice as much [thus much more timely] criticism, all of the columns, some comics, Blood & Thunder, Newswatch, On the Boards, Viva and my recast of the multi-interview format in each issue — as well as solve a number of sales issues involving cover features, which would in turn allow the magazine to cover worthy subjects that would be sales death in the current format.

That said, I don’t view the JOURNAL’s criticism section as an ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY-like source for comics readers to use to help them decide if they want to buy FUNNYBOOK X or not, nor do I think that people will “digest” a work and have no need for another examination of the work, ever. I think the JOURNAL should be dedicated to giving readers more tools to engage the material they read and new ways to view the art form, not tell them what to buy or give people something to pass around at a comics book of-the-month club and never look at again. For example: I’ve never read 1994, I’ll probably never read 1994, but I don’t think a season’s gone by in the last 12 years that I haven’t read “Seduction of the Ignorant,” Carter Scholz’s magisterial essay about 1994. When I was a TCJ reader, it was no hair of my ass that UNDERSTANDING COMICS wasn’t examined in depth for a few years; I was happy to read a few genuinely interesting essays about UC in TCJ #211. Most of them were good reads, they enriched my reading of UC and helped me to better articulate my thoughts on the book. [The same can be said for Dylan Horrocks’ essay on the form chapter of UC that was scheduled for the UC issue but appeared two years later.] I do my very best to shoehorn as much crit as I can into every issue, but I’m more interested in making the section [and my chunk of magazine] a satisfying, cohesive read, not picking and slotting the articles chronologically. There’s no expiration date for good criticism.

I really don’t have an overarching take on the magazine’s mission because I’m kept out of the Newswatch war room, and news is half of the magazine’s mission. It probably results in a subtly schizophrenic magazine, but not distractingly so. In the 4/5 of the magazine’s pages I’m responsible for, I’ve worked to broaden and deepen the field of magazine’s coverage — launching columns on manga, web comics, cartoonist craft, world comics and, fingers crossed, one devoted to editorial cartoons starting late this year; going outside of the direct-market funnybook field for interview subjects, like Sickles, Flessel, Bolling, Rooum, Herge, Panter, John Cullen Murphy, Fort Thunder, Keiji Nakazawa, McGruder, Griffin and Steve Bell; and doing what I can to run the best, most interesting crit I can get in the Firing Line and Bullets — to give readers a better sense of the medium’s big picture as well as show them the little details of the subjects examined. That’s as close to a mission statement as you’ll get from me at the moment; the rest is all run by instinct.

As for no review of DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL: I have a pretty good idea of what comics I want to short list as the books of the year. Until I discovered [this week] that the book came out late late last year, I had plans to name it as one of them, with a review on one of my best writer’s back-burner. With pages at a premium, I’d rather run a review of a work I know isn’t a book of the year now than run a review of something that will be a BotY now and then figure out how to cover it in the Year-In-Review section in February. Anyway, I have one of the magazine’s best writers working on a DIARY review, due toot sweet, as we speak.

We’ll have to agree to disagree about the noteworthiness of Grant Morrison’s X-Men, though.

— Milo, big honkin’ narrow-minded elitist

(Is it a good idea to do these rundown-style posts, instead of breaking each one up into its own li’l individual post? I wonder. Maybe people just say “Oh Christ, enough!” and skip these things. I dunno.)

In the “Eat This, Matt Hawes” Department (story courtesy of Newsarama), Joe Quesada has had his contract extended, sharp X-book editor Mike Marts has been promoted, extremely ecumenical Tsunami chieftain C.B. Cebulski has been made the head of a new talent department with indie-friendly David Bogart, and Axel “Shouldn’t Be Doing Superheroes” Alonso has been promoted and given even more books to run. Looks like things at Marvel aren’t going so bad after all!

Eve Tushnet (link courtesy of Dirk Deppey)joins NeilAlien in demolishing a recent stupid anti-superhero screed, an in so doing references Dostoyevsky often enough to prove she’s a true Daughter of Eli. Seriously, this is some erudite stuff; in the spirit of my rant from yesterday, we superhero boosters need more Eve Tushnets.

Eve also begs to differ with my take on Kurt Busiek’s and Alex Ross’s Marvels, and you know what? She’s right. People who are ignorant of Marvel’s complex character history are actually the ideal audience for this book, because it puts them in roughly the same befuddled-cum-awed position as the everyman who’s witnessing all the superpowered events in the book. I thought of this briefly as I wrote my dismissal of the book the other day, but ignored it, to my detriment. I still have plenty of problems with Marvels, but they’re attributable to flaws in pacing and dialogue (can we stop calling them “The Marvels,” for Pete’s sake? If you’ve come up with a euphemism for superheroes–marvels, capes, costumes, powers–it’s best to not beat the damn word into the ground), not to the need to be familiar with the whole history of the Marvel Universe. That’s unnecessary, ultimately. (No pun intended.)

Bill Sherman worries about trying to get through the 600-page colossus known as Blankets. Don’t worry, Bill–it’s as readable a comic as you’ll ever come across, and you should blow through it in a couple of hours.

(Eve, you should read it, too–I’d love to hear what you think!)

Speaking of Blankets, you can watch this TCJ.com thread, ostensibly on the subject, continue to disappear up its own asshole, in the memorable words of The Missus. It’s depressing how readily the most intelligent and well-read group of comics fans on the Internet will mire itself in stupid petty pissing matches. This goes double when they do so instead of engaging the text and images of one of the most important comics in recent memory.

A far more productive TCJ.com thread can be found here. In it, Comics Journal editor Milo George (at the behest of yours truly) thoroughly explains the reasons behind the Journal’s idiosyncratic review policy. It’s an extremely worthwhile post; speaking from experience, many problems people have with the Journal arise from simple ignorance of how the magazine is actually run, so transparency of this level is extremely enlightening.

In a roundup post of his own, Big Sunny D thoughtfully responds to a recent Four Color Hell post praising Warren Ellis’s revisionist superhero books of the late 90s and early aughts. Sunny argues that, entertaining and influential though these books may be, they’re ultimately flat character-wise, simplistic politically, and a dead end when it comes to the wide variety of image and emotional affect of which superhero comics are capable. As proof, I’ll offer Ellis acolyte Mark Millar’s Trouble (boy, I sure have fun kicking that book around, don’t I?), which, stripped as it is of the black-ops and meta-humans and evil Anglo-American neo-fascist government officials that were the bread and butter of the Ellis/Millar widescreen-superhero books, reveals just how lame the stuff that’s left can be. (I also agree with Sunny’s contention that Grant Morrison’s hilariously ambitious New X-Men mops the effing floor with The Authority.)

So the addle-brained old coot in the Vatican has taken time out of his busy schedule of child-molester protecting, genocidal-dictator enabling, and general acting like an outtake from the upcoming comedy blockbuster Weekend at Popey’s (that was Amy’s joke) to issue some statements about the real menace facing the world today: The Gays. In a 12-page statement His Bighatwearingness called homosexuality “against the natural moral law” and “serious depravity,” called the adoption of children by gay couples “doing violence to these children,” and called the legalization of gay marriage “gravely immoral,” “deviant,” and “the legalization of evil.” It’s important to remember, however, that he honestly believes he’s just relaying the faxes he receives from the Baby Jesus or whatever.

This continues to prove my twin theories that a) The Jesus that the Pope hangs out with is an asshole compared to the Jesus I’ve heard about all my life; b) Yes, you can be one of the four or five people most responsible for the fall of Communism and still fritter away the last vestiges of respect that I might have for you.

(I’m starting to think this was maybe the wrong post to write the day I first add Eve Tushnet to my blogroll. Hi, Eve! Sorry!)

Fortunately for His Doddericy, the War On Buttfucking is picking up world-wide, with our nation’s President finally getting his priorities straight, ignoring the legions of Islamic radicals who want to kill us all and an economy with all the energy of a three-toed sloth with chronic fatigue syndrome, and focusing on the most pressing issue currently before the most powerful nation in the history of the world: The need for a fucking Constitutional amendment to prevent The Gays from ever picking out wedding photographers. This is in keeping with his “compassionate conservatism” theme, because as we all know the floral arrangements at a gay wedding would be anything but conservative.

Good God, but has the whole world gone fucking mad? Is this really something that Bush thinks is a good idea to do? Right there in the Constitution, enshrined along with Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Slavery, he wants Freedom from Ever Having to Hear the Words “I Now Pronounce You Wife and Wife”? Is he hitting the bottle again? Pabst Blue Ribbon’s really hip these days, you know.

I’ll say this in Bush’s favor, though: At least his political party has a rich history of fag-bashing to which he can proudly cling. Saint Clinton of the Democrats (who if you recall led America through an Unprecedented Golden Age of Liberal Enlightenment during which all the homeless moved into mansions paid for with their dot-com millions, racism was unanimously banned forever and ever amen, and Osama Bin Laden was cowed into hiding by the twin forces of having his pain felt by the Understander-In-Chief and having an ibuprofen factory in the Sudan destroyed) had no such excuse when he lobbied for and signed the noxious piece of hate-law called the Defense of Marriage Act, which of course is still in effect and makes Bush’s proposed Constitution-tampering completely redundant. Saint Clinton, you see, felt that The Gays would set a bad example for our nation’s children when it came to honoring the sanctity of marriage, which we all know must remain solely the sacred bond between a power-crazed woman, a revoltingly promiscuous and hypocritical man, and his dozens upon dozens of trailer-trash mistresses and cock-sucking interns.

Note to the Pope: How’s God coming along with that whole “blessing America” bit?

Over in his most recent Waiting for Tommy column, comics gossipmonger Rich Johnston repeats the “Blair Lied” allegations made by the BBC–while in the pages of the Guardian, leaked transcripts of Parliamentary hearings are printed in which said allegations are revealed to be lies themselves. Ignorance is inexcusable, Rich.

I love it when comics and politics come together!

Return.

Of.

The.

King.

Trailer.

(NOTE: The only perceptible difference between the high-res version and the lo-res version is that the high-res version takes approximately 20 times as long to download. Go lo, people. Link courtesy of Dave Hill.)

Sweet Eris–Steven Den Beste is a Discordian? Do you hear that, Kennyb? We are not alone!

I know I’ve been uncharacteristically harsh on fanboys lately, seeing as how I’m pretty much a fanboy myself, at least insofar as I still read and enjoy a good many superhero comics. But I think that just as I’ll argue passionately that superhero comics are not automatically junk–or automatically junk provided no one named Kirby, Ditko, Cole, or Moore was involved with them–I think it’s equally important to lambaste, mock, excoriate, ridicule, and otherwise make life unpleasant for people who read only superhero comics, or comics from superhero publishers, and have the audacity to claim they “like comics.” Besides the fact that you’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice if you’re not reading more of the brilliant material that’s out there, you’re also doing actual comics fans a disservice by making us look stupid by association–by, I don’t know, saying that Outsiders #2 was the best comic to come out in a given week (thanks to ADD for pointing that out), or by trying to get your wife into comics by giving her a copy of Trouble as an example of comics with multi-dimensional characters. These are examples of either appalling ignorance or abyssmal taste, and I don’t think we (all comics readers, and this goes double for comics readers with blogs) should brook either of them. No, I’m not expecting everyone with JLA/Avengers on their pull list to run out and buy copies of Teratoid Heights, but going a little further afield than an Eye of the Storm book (or, for those truly radical types, Strangers in Paradise) is the least we should expect out of comics “journalists.”

What’s funny about my increasingly opinionated takes on comics is that a) I make my living, at least in part, dealing with comics companies and creators for A&F; b) I’m working pretty hard at becoming a comics creator myself. A while back I decided that I wasn’t going to ever put any of my comics opinions up for public consumption, because hey, if I were an accountant, I couldn’t go around talking about how much the partners at my firm suck in the pages of the CPA Journal. But at a certain point I realized I care too damn much about comics, and about my own artistic/creative/critical integrity, to soft-pedal this stuff. I’d like to think that most comics pros would appreciate a little tough love, since it shows you respect them enough to tell them the truth about their books; if Marvel’s drive to recruit comics journalists as writers for their Epic line is any indication, they might even believe you really do know what you’re talking about when it comes to what makes a good comic. Let’s hope this really is the case, for comics’ sake.

Johnny Bacardi offers up his own take on the music of Roxy Music. I think the fact that a couple of sentences about Roxy in an unrelated post of mine led to a big multi-site Roxy extravaganza is a fantastic argument in the blogosphere’s favor, don’t you?

I wonder what Whitney would say about the kids of Palestine, then, who are being groomed into Jew-hating killbots at an alarmingly young age, as this heartrending slideshow by Charles Johnson makes clear. Even though I’m more sympathetic than many people towards the idea of a Palestinian state, it seems ludicrous to me to think that everything can be solved if Israel just makes enough concessions, when this is the kind of appalling child-abusing parallel universe so many Palestinians apparently live in. I guess the hope is that if by some miracle Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah and Al Aqsa Martyrs and their ilk are weakend politically, other, less insane Palestinians won’t be afraid to say, “You know what? I don’t think my three-year-old needs to hold an actual AK-47 and chant ‘Death to Israel.’ He’s got a birthday party to go to.”

Whoops! The other day I wrote something about a Bill Sherman article but forgot to link to it. Here ’tis, correctly hyperlinked and everything:

Following up on my “Don’t throw out the New X-Men with the Namor“ take on the current anti-Bill Jemas scuttlebut, Bill Sherman succinctly sums up The Trouble With New Marvel, and also puts it into some historical perspective.

In their ongoing effort to destroy all that is good in the world, the folks at the BBC bring you this story (link courtesy of James Taranto) of how scientists have determined that there is no Loch Ness Monster.

I’ve been a fan of Nessie since I was very young (I was one of those people who had a not-so-temporary flirtation with the idea of growing up to be a cryptozoologist), so these reports are always pretty depressing for me to read. But nothing really tops the let-down I felt after actually visiting the Loch, during a travel-story assignment for A&F. The Loch and its surroundings are unbelievably gorgeous, the people are ridiculously friendly, and while in Scotland everyone subsists on the three food groups of meat, beer, and cream–that all goes in the plus column. But then you go to the Official Loch Ness Monster Museum. Don’t get me wrong, the museum’s great too; unfortunately it makes plesiosaur promises (in the form of every possible iteration of plesiosaur-themed merchandise imaginable), but then takes you on a voice-over’d tour of the history of the Nessie phenomenon that ends with the assertion that whatever legit sightings of large animals in the loch may have occurred were in all likelihood sightings of large sturgeons that wandered into the lake from the sea. There’s just an extra helping of disillusionment to be had when you’re told that the local myth-cum-tourist-attraction is just a big fish by an institution dedicated to perpetuating the attractiveness of said local myth-cum-tourist-attraction.

Oh well. Aleister Crowley and Jimmy Page believed in the damn thing enough to move there. Good enough for me, right?

Following up on my “Don’t throw out the New X-Men with the Namor“ take on the current anti-Bill Jemas scuttlebut, Bill Sherman succinctly sums up The Trouble With New Marvel, and also puts it into some historical perspective.

Speaking of the recent flare-up in the Marvel/DC cold war, DC is continuing to slowly leak out announcements about the high-profile creators it