As you’ll perhaps remember from this post, I

This year

Courtesy of Franklin Harris comes this article claiming that Marvel stockholders dumped their holdings after The Hulk did less business than expected. I dunno, man–the all-time record-holding June opening weekend seems pretty good to me, and I’m not sure that anyone thought this movie was as much of a sure thing as, say, Spider-Man (no challenging art-film moves in that bad boy) or even the X-Men sequel, which had a built-in audience of people who liked what they saw in the first one. It’s also conceivable that folks are experiencing some “blockbuster fatigue” at this point in the season, especially after so many moviegoers felt that they got burned by The Matrix Reloaded. Seems to me that unless these stockholders were especially squeamish, which doesn’t seem likely considering they bought stock in Marvel Comics, The House of Badly Conceived and Executed Business Ideas, they were just looking for a convenient date to dump stock, and right after Marvel’s final big release for the season was as good a time as ever. But let the gloom and doom commence, as it does after every Marvel movie that fails to make $200 million its opening weekend.

(Note: I was half-jokingly accused this weekend of colluding with Dirk Deppey, to whom this entry is dedicated, to drive up one another’s real estate. Bullroar, I say!)

Courtesy of Josh Marshall (courtesy, in turn, of Bill Sherman) comes this NYT op-ed piece by Kenneth “The Threatening Storm” Pollack, refuting the comical claim that Iraq’s WMDs and WMD program were merely a figment of Bush Administration’s war-crazed imagination even as he points out the potentially grave questions to which the administration has opened itself. Pollack, as always, argues that while the destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime was necessary, the timing (Spring 2003) wasn’t necessarily so necessary. It’s refreshing to come across someone who is able to criticize Bush (or at least his team, for stretching the WMD evidence to convince the public that we had to go in when we went in and no later) without a) resorting to hysterical Watergate-esque rhetoric about lies and scandal; b) advocating a fairly wholesale derelicition of duty when it comes to addressing the real, frightening, unconventional and therefore challenging security threats posted to us by the fascists, theocrats and terrorists of the Middle East; c) lambasting the United States as war criminals and oppressors while ignoring the several orders of magnitude more heinous behavior of Saddam Hussein and his ilk. Pollack’s piece, as well as anything else he’s written on the topic, is a must-read for any serious students of American foreign policy in the region.

(FYI: I’m never going to get too exercised about this WMD issue, as I’d happily roll into any given country tomorrow if it meant deposing another nightmarishly dictatorial regime (particularly one with which we were once complicit); this, to me, would be the liberal way to use our unprecedented military power. But it’s important to keep our politicians honest, if only because dishonesty or disingenuousness might make support for future actions more difficult to garner (the boy who cried wolf syndrome). We mustn’t be hamstrung in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia simply because the Bush Administration got lazy or timid about making the real case for invasion of Iraq and instead took a short cut by drumming up fears about relatively un-threatening WMD programs.)

From a letter by writer Tim O’Neil in today’s Journalista:

QUOTE: “…(sing it with me, people!) Comics Ain’t Just For Kids Anymore, Just The Silly People In Tights!!!…If Marvel tries to pry open the book market for Spider-Man, they will be wasting their time. Now, one way they could circumvent a great many of the problems you discussed in your article is if they just realized that grown men and women do not want to read superheroes and concentrate their efforts on getting Marvel books stacked in the children’s and young adults sections.”

From today’s Gotham edition of Daily Variety:

QUOTE: “The debut of The Hulk marks the seventh consecutive No. 1 box office opening for Marvel, dating back to 1998’s Blade. The $62 million Hulk bow ranks as the third highest of that group after the still-stunning $114.8 million opening for Spider-Man and $85.6 million for X2: X-Men United last month.”

We report. You decide.

Actually, no, you know what? I decide. And I decide that this whole “superheroes are keeping adults from reading comics” theory is well past its expiration date. I know I harp on this a lot, but like characters in the lousy superhero comics that are supposed to be representative of the genre, the damn idea keeps coming back from the dead.

People, the only people who are so adamantly opposed to any stories involving people with extraordinary powers and a flashy fashion sense that they’ll actively shun huge portions of an entire medium to avoid them are people like O’Neil who, for one reason or another, have let their own bad experiences as either a comics creator or a comics fan warp their sense of reality. Out in the real world, almost no one is going to refrain from seeing a movie or reading a book that’s otherwise good simply because a guy in his pajamas uses magic or mutant powers to fight crime. If the writing is good, if the acting is good, if the director is good, if the story is good, people go to see the movie. Why should this be any different for comics?

Of course, it’s bad that superhero stories make up such a disproportionately huge chunk of the entire comics medium, at least in America. It’s quite conceivable that there are people who don’t even know there are comics that aren’t about superheroes, and that isn’t good. As my wife often says, “I know cantaloupe is good, I can understand why people like cantaloupe, but I’m just never in the mood to eat it.” There are probably plenty of people who don’t have anything against superheroes per se, but are unlikely to dive into a medium they’re convinced has nothing to offer other than the spandex crowd. But again, it’s not superheroes in and of themselves that’s the problem–it’s the conception that that’s all comics have to offer. Even if they wouldn’t go into a store, if you handed these people a really good superhero comic, they’d read it, spandex be damned.

In O’Neil’s defense, he does stick to saying “grown-ups don’t read about superheroes”–I guess even die-hard superhero haters can’t deny cold-hard box-office fact anymore, and are forced to keep this zombiesque theory alive simply within the confines of print media. But again, I just don’t see any evidence that superheroes, in and of themselves, are the obstacle.

The idea that comics are for kids? Okay, that’s a good potential culprit, but it’s not just the superhero genre that’d be implicated in such a view: Many folks would be factoring romance comics, horror comics, Mad Magazine, Archie, and the daily strips into that assessment as well.

My guess? There’s something about the pamphlet format most comics are still sold in that suggests cheapness, flimsiness, throw-awayability. That’s just a guess, but it’s better than trotting out the old “no one likes superheroes” bit. I don’t care if you promised it filet mignon and a date with Lassie–that dog simply won’t hunt.

I

The stupid internet here at stupid work is stupid down all the stupid time, so if the posts are slow to come, that’s why. It’s not that I don’t love you, is what I’m saying.

My internet connection was down all day long today, except first thing this morning, when I fiddled with the big comicsphere post a bit. This sucked. However, I used the free time to be productive!*

*This is a lie.

On the heels of my one-two punch (more like a wussy little slap) against Radiohead–a bemoaning of their post-9/11 politics coupled with a faint-praise damning of their new album–Bill “Gadabout” Sherman writes:

“Picked up a copy of the new Radiohead disc last week, incidentally, and, you know, I kind of wish that they’d followed up on the political rantwork promised in its title and cover (which reminds me a bit of the back cover to the Mothers of Invention’s Absolutely Free – now there’s an album that knows how to be disrespectful to the president: it opens with an impersonation of LBJ doing “Louie Louie.”) If they had, it might’ve made the album more exciting.”

Seriously! Political brio isn’t necessarily a guarantee of “interesting music”–I’d imagine that NOFX’s The War on Errorism sucks, for example–but Bill’s right: the biggest problem with Hail is the lack of life. However, I’m actually starting to enjoy it more now that I’ve been flipping through Radiohead’s back catalog on my

iPod–bouncing around through various songs on Pablo Honey, The Bends, and Amnesiac has helped me contextualize Hail through their already extant body of incredible work, as opposed to through a political issue about which the band and I disagree passionately. But Bill’s still right–a little chutzpah would have made the whole enterprise more invigorating. (I still enjoy my Rage Against the Machine records, for example, probably for that very reason. Well, that, and the fact that I never took Rage’s hardcore Communism very seriously. I mean, the hammer and sickle on Tom Morello’s baseball caps is supposed to represent a viable political and economic ideology? C’mon–you’ve GOT to laugh at that!)

Sayeth James:

“What if the mullahs fall before, say, September? The second anniversary of 9/11 would be marked by much general astonishment at what OBL et al began. Two years, three countries. Syria would have its come-to-Issa moment. Kim Il Jong would have to switch to extra-absorbent Depends, since he would probably be wetting himself anew each time he turned on CNN.”

My sentiments exactly.

(By the way, he also talks about Brian Eno & David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which is always a good idea.)

The Iranblogging continues.

First, courtesy of Instapundit, comes this bit of analysis from Austin Bay:

“Don’t underestimate the strategic effects on Iran of Saddam’s demise. Saddam presented Iran with a long-term threat, one the ayatollahs could use to legitimate a degree of internal militarization. Now, the Butcher of Baghdad’s gone. Iranians have seen Iraqis dancing in the streets. Is it time for the Theocrats of Tehran to take a hike?”

I’ve made this argument for some time, after being persuaded by books such as Michael Ledeen’s The War Against the Terror Masters and Ken Pollack’s The Threatening Storm that the various fundamentalist/fascist/terrorist regimes of the Middle East are all interconnected, and that when they start falling, the demise of any one will accelerate the downfall of the others. As in George Orwell’s 1984 (and here’s one case in which its actually appropriate to utilize the Orwellian comparison), Iran’s ayatollahs used the presence of a hostile next-door neighbor as an excuse for their own draconian militaristic policies. The fear they drummed up in the Iranian populace was not without some justification, mind you: Saddam had attacked Iran in the past, largely unprovoked, and during the course of their disastrous war proved himself willing to deliberately inflict massive suffering on the civilian Iranian population even when such actions had little or no practical or even propagandaiacal strategic results. With Saddam, his army, and his weapons out of the picture, it’s going to be a lot tougher for the ruling theocrats in Iran to convince their people that they need them in charge. (Moreover, many of the young people involved in the anti-theocrat demonstrations are probably too young to clearly remember the war with Saddam in the first place, making it an even less effective incentive for compliance.)

That Instapundit item also pointed the way to this Slate round-up of the current situation in Iran, both regarding the protests and Western efforts to force the country to curb its nuclear weapons program. If you ask me, here’s where the current “Where’s the beef?” WMD fiasco in Iraq will be the most damaging to the administration (and the world): If intelligence about Iraq’s capabilities couldn’t be believed, won’t it be even more difficult to convince the world (who, it must be said, all seem in agreement that Iran is further along the nuclear path than Iraq was, if not as far as North Korea) that Iran’s capabilities are threatening as well?

No, not the Coldplay song. Bill Sherman’s doing quite a good job at cataloguing the abuse of that particular band’s music. (With a little help from yours truly, of course….)

A bit of background for the non-fanboys (hint: If you don’t know what “fanboy” means, then this part of this entry is for you): A while back there was something of a shitstorm over the cover for Marvel’s upcoming teen romance comic, Trouble. Written by the clever (if occasionally insufferable) Mark Millar, the book’s cover features an actual photograph of two bikini-clad teenage girls. But as Dirk Deppey points out and Jim Henley backs up (they’re both long entries, so you’re welcome to take my word for it), the controversy, such as it was, stemmed solely from the fact that the comics fanboy community automatically associates “bikinis” with “Vampirella,” which is to say with “comics that give me a big boner.” Underage girls in bikinis, then and therefore, equals child pornography. But had these human caricatures ever browsed through the young adult section at their local Barnes & Noble, they’d have seen dozens of similarly themed and targeted books with precisely the same sort of covers. Marvel’s intent, believe it or not, wasn’t to titilate–it was to fit into a preexisting market, one that fanboys and the retailers/enablers didn’t recognize or understand.

But then there’s this. It’s the cover for the proposed second printing of the first issue of Trouble, in case the first print run sells out in comics shops due to unanticipated demand. It features an illustration of the book’s teenage female protagonists (by fanboy fave Frank Cho) that can only–and only too aptly–be described as “titilating.”

I don’t necessarily have much of a problem with Cho’s art: Unlike many comics cognoscenti who think he’s an uninspired rip-off-artist hack, I actually the pin-up girls that are his artistic bread and butter are kinda sexy. But personally he seems unsavory, having teamed up on several occasions with the unfunny Scott Kurtz to let their collective “we’re deliberately ignorant of art- and alt-comix!” flag fly in a series of appalling message-board flame wars and inside-joke-ridden gag strips. (We’ve all experienced the occasional snobbish excesses of alternative, indie, and underground comics, but to assert, as they did, that all altcomix are pretentious unreadable garbage is to be so self-evidently stupid as to nearly preclude a rejoinder. It’s reminscent of those conservatives who, in response to an admittedly annoying diatribe from the Left, proudly flaunt the fact that they waste a lot of gasoline in their SUVs, or that they just ate a really great piece of veal, or that they love smoking cigarettes, or that they find the Diceman funny. Folks, the Left may be annoying at times, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and all that stuff is still hella stupid.)

Sorry for the digression–the point is that Cho’s art is all about the tease, and using it as the cover for a teenage-girl romance in an effort to appeal to precisely the same fanboy and retailer demographic that’s the target for his wank-fodder cheesecake is all kinds of inappropriate. Marvel has to prove that it knows the difference between using mature themes appropriately to tell good stories and using them inappropriately to sell good stories (or worse, bad ones).