I see from Rich Johnston’s latest, interminable column (scroll waaaaaay down) that Alan Moore, one of the best goddamn writers in comics history, has joined the moonbat brigade.

QUOTE: “Any previously unthinkable political action can be instantly validated by the magic words 9-11….”

Seriously, America–the rest of the world has realized that nothing important really happened that day, so all countries should go on behaving in exactly the same way, since that’s the safe thing to do. What was the big deal? Get over it already!

Daredevil: Liked it better than Spider-Man. There was just something kind of clunky and arbitrary about the way Spider-Man’s plot moved forward. Daredevil, on the other hand, had this weird emotional-turmoil operatic logic for its structure, and damn if it didn’t work like a charm. Like an opera, you don’t see a movie like Daredevil for the realism–you see it for the spectacle, for the emotional immediacy, for the out-of-their-heads-with-anger-and-grief characters, and for the singing, or in this case the fight scenes. The fight scenes serve the same purpose as the singing, of course–as a grandiose, artistic metaphor for the heightened emotional states of the characters. This was something that Daredevil understood quite well, as did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (I think I stole that notion from someone, so my apologies to that person) and the Daredevil comic storylines from which the film borrowed the most heavily, Frank Miller’s Elektra saga and (with John Romita Jr.) The Man Without Fear, and (especially) David Mack’s Parts of a Hole. (Mack’s femme fatale, Echo, basically had her backstory grafted onto Elektra’s for the film’s version of the latter character.)

Three final thoughts:

1) Wasn’t nuts about the decision to make Daredevil a killer at first, but they made this decision with an eventual redemption in mind, and (again, to my surprise) it worked.

2) Someone somewhere (once again) pointed out that DD’s alter ego, lawyer Matt Murdock, magically switches from some sort of bizarre private criminal prosecutor (it seems clear we’re not in civil court) to a defense attorney. Arrgh. Didn’t anyone read that part of the script?

3) Did Jon Favreau write his own lines?

The Hulk: God, what a strange, strange, strange film. I think it was a failure, but a noble failure. In a way, what with the expressionistic comics-influenced framing techniques and the emphasis on extradiegetic colors and imagery (all those desert shrubs and rocks and all those cell cultures and microbes), it was like Ang Lee doing King Kong by way of Douglas Sirk. But it was slow, so very slow, and none of the characters were three-dimensional or likeable enough to warrant taking that slow ride with them. Eric Bana, the lead, has soulful eyes that generate sympathy, at least, but he’s so underwritten that it never graduates to empathy. The bulk of The Hulk (nyuk nyuk) seems dedicated to conversations between different pairs of people about how impotent they are to fix whatever it is they’re talking about–this does not a riveting drama make. But when Bana Hulks out, the film comes alive. The big fight scenes were uniformly tremendous, and if you don’t laugh out loud when the Hulk beats one tank with another tank’s gun turret, Mister, you’re a glummer man than I. If as much time had been spent on developing the characters into likeable people as was devoted to creating beautiful imagery, innovatively using comics-style panels as shot-to-shot transitions, and making kick-ass CGI sequences, you’d have had a hell of a film.

Two final thoughts:

1) I didn’t like director Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the first time I saw it either, so maybe this film will grow on me as that one did.

2) Whoever thought this difficult, difficult movie was going to make Spider-Man style bank was probably literally on crack.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Certainly the best of the series thus far. Rowling does “unfair” better than anyone else I can think of. I think the success of the series directly stems from the way she is able to convey the capricious, arbitrary, vindictive exercise of power by adults and bullies over children, something to which all children can relate. And I think what makes the books so quickly-readable is that readers want to plow through the unfairness until they get to the point where the unfairness is exposed and Harry is vindicated.

Two minor gripes about the ending (SPOILER ALERT!!! gosh, that was fun to write):

1) Gee, you mean Harry and Voldemort’s destinies are inextricably linked, and one day they’ll have a duel to the death? Get out of here! I had no idea!!! Seriously, that was the big secret? Talk about a lousy payoff.

2) The last chapter, as I noticed when I first read the Table of Contents, is called “The Second War Begins.” Uh, really? Looked to me like Harry got on a train and went home, just like he did in the last four books. If you’re going to title a chapter “The Second War Begins,” how ’bout, I dunno, beginning the Second War in it?

Hey everyone–don’t forget to thank Al Jazeera for wishing us all a Happy Fourth of July!

(Actually, heaven forbid that I suggest Al Jazeera may have released this Saddam Hussein tape on the 4th of July in order to irritate the United States. Just because the tape was made on June 14th doesn’t mean they sat on it until it would be maximally embarassing to America, heavens no. It probably just happened to take them exactly that long to determine that it was newsworthy. They’re just another unbiased regular-old news network, after all.)

Apologies for the incredibly lame entry title, but the purpose of this post is to encourage you to do two things:

1) Go read this Pulse interview with Phoebe Gloeckner, the amazing writer and cartoonist behind The Diary of a Teenage Girl and an all-around awesome person.

2) Have a happy Fourth of July!

3) Read this elegantly and angrily written overview of the situation in Iraq by Victor Davis Hanson. (I still can’t get over the fact that I link to National Review Online, but Hanson’s a very different animal than, say, John Derbyshire. I also saw him talking about the Battle of Thermopylae (of Frank Miller’s 300 fame) on the Discovery Channel the other night, so that’s neat.)

4) Buy the stunning anthology of Christopher Hitchens’s Slate columns on Iraq, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. He gets into the highest dudgeon I’ve ever seen him get into in the book’s conclusion, aiming a furious j’accuse at Saddam enablers everywhere, from the first Bush administration to the current “peace” movement:

QUOTE: “Those twelve years [between Gulf Wars I & II] were eaten by the locusts. The trunk of the tree of Iraq as allowed to rot, and its branches to wither. And all the time, a huge and voracious maggot lay at the heart of the state. Trade turned into a racket, the market was monopolized by the Mafiosi, the sanctions screwed the poor and fattened the rich, and palaces with gold shit-houses were constructed to mock the slum dwellers and the conscripts. A class of lumpen, uneducated, resentful losers was bred. When the Great Leader wanted to be popular, as on the grand occasion of his last referendum, he declared amnesty of the thieves, rapists and murderers who were his natural constituency. (The political detainees stayed where they were, or are: It will take years for us to find and number all their graves.) To his very last day, the Maggot continued to divide and rule: to pump gangrene and pus into the society, disseminating lies and fear and junky religious propaganda. And there his bastard children were, when the opportunity for hectic destruction and saturnalia presented itself. If it is truly possible to be wise after the event, then I associate myself again with those who believe that the Saddam Hussein regime should have been deposed in 1991. There would have been some severe moments, but Iraq would now be twelve years into the process of nation-building (or rebuilding) and many unlived or blighted lives could have been lived in the risky atmosphere of self-determination.

“I stress the element of risk because it so often seemed to me, before the battle was joined, that many of its critics were demanding the impossible. Assure us of a painless victory, they said, and we might consider lending our support. Assure us, also, of an immaculate conception of the project, unspotted by any previous compromises and betrayals. Assure us above all that oil is an unmentionalbe bodily secretion, unfit for discussion in polite company. I grew impatient with this. As Frederick Douglass once phrased it, those who want liberty without a fight are asking for the beauty of the ocean without the roar of the storm. (It’s been put more terseley more recently: ‘No Justice–No Peace.’)”

This guy hates totalitarianism, and I mean hates it. And he has nothing but contempt for excuses for its perpetuation. Is there really any other way to live?

Happy Fourth, once again!

I was out shopping today and I saw a postcard of that famous picture of the sailor kissing some woman on the street after the end of World War II. I thought for a moment about everything that picture said about the situation those two people found themselves in. Years of indescribable horror, violence, sacrifice, and tragedy, and then, victory. Of course, things weren’t really over–decades of reconstruction and occupation would follow (and the latter bit still continues today)–but the joy these people felt at the successful completion of this horrific but necessary endeavor so moved them that they just started grabbin’ strangers and makin’ out. (Free love, two decades early?)

The sheer scope of atrocity that was World War II kind of helped put the endless stream of awfulness coming out of Iraq in perspective for me. Having been away from the Internet for a while I was getting all my news from the local paper and TV stations here in Colorado, and it’s all talk of “slipping into open revolt” and the like. And of course in the anti-war blogosphere (heck, even in its comics-related subsection–hi, Franklin! hi, Jim!) there’s barely restrained glee, not at the deaths of soldiers and Iraqi civilians, of course, but at the political ramifications of same for the Bush administration. There, it’s “the beginnings of a full-fledged guerilla campaign.”

But war is difficult. Actually, war is horrendously, mind-bogglingly awful. And compared to the horrendous, mind-boggling wars we’ve fought in the past, we’re actually still ahead of the game. The casualty level, both for American troops and Iraqi civilians, remains astonishingly low given the immensity of the action we’ve undertaken. The erosion of civil liberties in Ashcroft’s America (TM) during the So-Called War On “Terror” (c) is troubling, but also trifling compared to that under Presidents Nixon, Johnson, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Lincoln (to say nothing of the old-school from the early 18th century). Americans may be growing aware of the difficulty of the task at hand, but they’re not giving up on it, and neither is the military, and neither is the government–and neither, for that matter, are the majority of Iraqis. It’s not a civil war, it’s not massive daily uncontrollable rioting, it’s not the Tet Offensive–it’s the same kind of pointless vengeful bullshit that history’s losers perpetually engage in on their way down the chute.

What I’m saying is not that in a matter of months we’ll see sailors grabbing girls in front of the TRL studio in Times Square and getting their smooch on. This war is not World War II. But nor, in countless important ways, is it Vietnam. The bad news is still bad, and the deaths are still awful. But they are not in vain.

I’m proud to see U.S. troops deployed to countries that need them, particularly in neglected, impoverished, war-torn Africa (prouder still when I get the impression that the man sending them won’t shit his pants and pull them out after one rough firefight, unlike some presidents I could mention). But I can’t help but feel that the “invitation” extended to the U.S. by the UN to commit troops to Liberia wasn’t an almost solely politically motivated attempt to embarass the administration. Sending a small contingent of troops (too small to be tactically effective in any real way) to help keep the peace in a country that doesn’t have peace to keep and in which the U.S. has no economic, political, or security-based interests isn’t exactly a recipe for an auspicious military action. It looks like Bush is going to give it the OK, which like I said is actually pretty great. But the UN is well aware of its track record in “peace keeping” (please see Rwanda, Korea, and any nation ever discussed by Joe Sacco)–second in ignominy only to France’s–so this reads like a ploy to sucker the States into committing troops in a place where little palpable progress will be made (that is, if it’s the UN and not the U.S. that’s running the show) in order to prevent them from doing things elsewhere, 2,000 troops at a time.

(So naturally, Howard Dean’s all for it!)

Daredevil was a better movie than Spider-Man.

Yeah, I said it!

Since that’s not the kind of thing you can just blurt out in polite company, I’ll be elaborating at some point. Watch this space.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

I’m on vacation! In beautiful Colorado, to be exact, hence the lack of updates. I may be posting sporadically throughout the remainder of the week, though, so stick around.

As a reward for your loyalty, here’s a link to Amanda Collins’s MoCCA recap, and a bit of how she feels about Craig Thompson’s soon-to-be-smash-hit graphic novel Blankets. Enjoy!

Gosh, but Andrew Sullivan sure is good when he tears into the Taliban wing of the GOP. Check out this excoriation of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s deeply creepy comments made in the wake of Canada’s gay-marriage decision and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Texas’s anti-sodomy laws. It really is frightening how huge chunks of a major political party in the United States of America openly advocate the kind of all-pervasive, all-intrusive theocracy against which we currently are waging a massive unconvential war. The more Republicans like Frist and Santorum are allowed to take center stage, the bigger threat an openly social-liberal candidate like Howard Dean will pose to Team Bush in 2004.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love giant squids. Or octopi. Whatever.

Seriously, bigger than the St. Augustine octopus? It’s entirely appropriate to say that this discovery is HUGE.

Haven’t seen it yet. Most people I know who saw it hated it. But NeilAlien liked it, and that’s endorsement enough for me!

Best quote from a drunk teacher at The Missus’s end-of-school-year faculty party:

“Loosen up! It’s the month of summer!”

I don’t care how much of a geek this makes me sound like: this is fricking awesome.

Don’t I, Jen Davis? Don’t I?

Marvel’s nascent Epic imprint, as most comicsy folks know at this point, is purported to be the House of Ideas’ attempt to give newbie and up-and-coming writers and artists a crack at getting their work published by one of the biggest companies in the business. It’s a pretty good deal, but between the company’s fuzziness on what the status of creator-owned books would be, the kerfluffle over recruiting comics journalists as potential writers, the apparently heavier editorial hand being used on the books than was advertised, and general antipathy to the current Marvel regime, the move has generated a surprising amount of animosity in some quarters. The snarkiest among the comics punditosphere have speculated that, what with the volume of pitches an open call for submissions is sure to generate, it’s all some sort of Machiavellian plan to overwhelm rival companies’ editorial and submissions departments with the slightly retooled rejects that are likely to come their way once the rejection notices start getting sent out from Marvel HQ.

Well, once company appears to have quietly headed the stampede off at the pass by creating its own open-call system. While reading the latest issue of Hellboy’s Weird Tales from Dark Horse Comics, I noticed a full page ad featuring DH publisher Mike Richardson in Uncle Sam regalia, informing us all that we’re wanted to write, draw, or otherwise do somethin’ for the Dark Horse army. The ad directs prospective talent to this “new recruits” page, which spells out the submission guidelines for the DH cattle call. Unlike Epic, Dark Horse is asking that submissions have their team essentially completed, i.e. writers and artists must submit in tandem. They’re also looking for more than just a first-issue or “pilot” script, which is what Epic claims is sufficient for full consideration; they want ten finished, consecutive pages of art, the full script from which those pages originated, and tight plotting outlines for the remainder of the storyline. But other than that, DH offers far fewer storytelling caveats than Epic, which essentially encouraged talent to revamp existing Marvel characters in a very specific, origin-oriented, chronologically-told fashion (and to a certain extent discouraged them from trying anything else). No guidelines are given for the type of story the company’s looking for, which could mean a crop of genuinely creator-owned new titles might result from the program.

One of the most enticing aspects of Dark Horse’s program is their guarantee that, provided their instructions are followed to the letter, every single submission will be personally evaluated by head honcho Mike Richardson. Like Bill Jemas at Marvel, Richardson is the buck-stops-here guy at his company, and decisions are ultimately his to make. By bypassing Dark Horse editorial (not to mention DH’s frustrating “next, please” portfolio reviews at conventions), this process can help weed out a lot of contradictory advice to writers and artists and save people on both sides of the equation a lot of wasted time. Of course, the flipside is that Richardson, like Jemas, is a busy man, and may not be able to devote the right level of attention to the stories and art that end up on his desk.

It will be interesting to see what kind of projects stem from this initiative versus those in the Epic camp. It’ll be equally interesting to see how other big companies–particulary DC, home of the now-notorious post-lawsuit “no unsolicited submissions from anyone, period” policy–react.

I mentioned Craig Thompson’s massive autobiographical graphic novel Blankets in my MoCCA recap the other day. The book isn’t even officially out yet and it’s already the subject of much speculation and controversy. Part of this is due to the rapturous reception Thompson’s debut book, Goodbye, Chunky Rice, received. Some people felt it didn’t deserve the ecstatic praise people were heaping on it, so it was the victim of a backlash (one that, even if you agree with its contention that the book wasn’t a masterpiece, was just as excessive as its adherents were saying the praise they were reacting against was). (Whoa, how’s that for syntax?) Another part of the trepidation is due to a general antipathy to teen-angst autobio, which many feel is just as unnecessarily dominant in the alternative-comics sphere as superheroes are in the mainstream comics world. I myself still haven’t read the book, but I admit that certain previews and a few flip-throughs leave me wary.

Not The Missus, however. After seeing it on the kitchen table, she opened to a random spot in the book and was immediately enthralled. She read the whole thing yesterday, before I’d even gotten a chance to read it myself. She happens to relate to its source material quite a bit, having grown up, as Thompson did, in a devoutly evangelical Christian household, and because she had a long-distance letter-writing romance just like Thompson’s (with me, actually). But clearly the book pulled her right in and compelled her to plow through all 600-odd pages, which believe me is a rare thing for a comic to achieve with my wife. This might well be the breakthrough book some people are predicting it’ll be.

I went to The Missus’s end-of-the-year faculty party yesterday, and holy shit, people, teachers effing throw down. Ass-grabbing, crotch-grabbing, vodka shots, married people grinding non-spouses on the dance floor, pouring beer from a story above into a waiting teacher’s open mouth–I was almost waiting for Andrew W.K. to drive a motorcycle out of a twenty-foot cake with three hundred roman candles burning on it. And I can tell you one thing–she ain’t never going to one of these things alone, no siree bob.

Well, I’ve gotten a grumpy email from an underground comix luminary. I’ve arrived!

My blog item about a recent anti-war cartoon in Reason magazine by legendary Hate author Peter Bagge was referenced in this Comics Journal messboard thread, which led Peter to defend his work both there and in a couple of email messages to me.

Taking issue with my comment that he appears to blame the woes of the world on WalMart shoppers, Peter pointed me to this cartoon, where he cops to being a mall shopper himself.

I stand corrected. But then on the message board thread about the strip, Peter said:

QUOTE: “I also don’t know how I can NOT portray average Americans as anything other than dunderheads when most of us believe that Saddam used chemical on our troops, that WMDs WERE found, and that Iraqis took part in 9/11, even though no one in the government or the mainstream media has even SUGGESTED any of the above!…We’ve become such a pathetic and horrible nation of people that it’s gone way BEYOND ‘funny.'”

I certainly share his confusion and disgust about those kinds of poll results (9/11? Huh??), but it just seems like a lapse of emotion over logic to leap from there into general misanthropy about “average Americans.” I may have gotten Peter’s motive for attacking them wrong–he likes WalMart, they like WalMart, it’s all water under the bridge–but I feel I accurately characterized his overall feelings about them.

In a subsequent email, Peter defended the character he depicted in the strip by saying:

QUOTE: “I don’t see how what I wrote applies to any specific economic class, or any specific group of Americans. That’s why I drew a wide variety of people, even if you and others still denigrated all of them as ‘stereotypes.’ I was targeting the majority of the American public who DO believe in all these aspects of the Iraq war that either aren’t true at all or that I find morally reprehensible.”

I definitely got that last part, but I still feel that Peter employed the different “types” he drew as representative of their peer groups. And hey, fine–there’s nothing wrong with stereotype (call it “caricature,” it’s a less loaded term) in satire. I just think it conveyed a sort of anti-middle class/Middle American bias that thwarted the political efficacy of the cartoon, regardless of whether this was the cartoonist’s intent. (While we’re on the subject of political cartooning, Tom Tomorrow” does a pretty good job of skewering the American attitudes he feels deserve skewering without using pictorial stereotypes, due to his effective use of clip-art style generic, uh, “peoploids.”)

Finally, Peter took issue with my rhetoric a bit, saying it was “high school” of me to say his own outlook was “tedious in high school.” To which I can only reply, I know you are, but what am I? In all seriousness, I wasn’t dissing him as immature (he’s obviously a sophisticated guy, but at any rate, what’s so bad about being like a high schooler anyway?), just saying I outgrew way back in the day the outlook he seemed to be espousing. But I think my big rhetorical mistake was saying “YOU can’t help but feel that” Peter was attacking Middle America, not “I can’t help but feel” that way. It’s me writing this thing, after all, and it’s presumptuous and dopey to speak for the general “you.” So I’ll take a hit on that one, no problem.

All that being said, what I take from this is that this Internet thing has its pros and cons. I think Peter thought I was being a much bigger jerk than I really was, but since he doesn’t know me, how could he judge? But on the plus side, I had a one-to-one debate with Peter Freaking Bagge. And I think (cheesy after school special music GO!) we both learned something about the effects of his comic strip. And he was such a cool guy about it that he let me post quotes from his emails on my freaking website. Three cheers for fighting about politics and comics on the World Wide Web!

Eff this, man. I’ve been drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon for half a goddamn decade already. Inspired by my uncle and father-in-law, I started drinking it because it’s cheap, the can looks neat, Dennis Hopper drank it in Blue Velvet, and as far as cheap beers go, it tastes really good. (Jesus God, it’s so much better than Coors Light, just for example.) Long have I complained that it’s so hard to find on Long Island–in the years I’ve looked for it out here I’ve only found it once. If this idiotic retro-chic reported-on-in-square-publications trend makes it easier for me to buy PBR, great, but that doesn’t make this trend any less obnoxious. Pabst Blue Ribbon deserves better than hipsters.