I’ll be talking The Newsroom, The Comeback, The Affair, and Homeland on @HuffPostLive at 4:50pm. Tune in here!
The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil is now available for purchase
“Is there anything more tragic than such a scene of failed self-erasure, when we are reduced to the obscene slime which, against our will, persists in the picture?” (Slavoj Zizek, The Thing from Inner Space)
“Jesus Christ.” (Tom Spurgeon)
A meditation on fucking as the final integrative attempt of a flagging psyche, on the refusal of the sensual half of the self to be repressed. It also includes incest, voyeurism and attempted murder. This comic was scripted by Sean T. Collins, and drawn by Julia Gfrörer, based on “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe. It contains pornographic imagery and is intended for mature audiences. Xerox printed on lavender text weight paper, saddle stitched, 24 pages, $5.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/210813489/the-hideous-dropping-off-of-the-veil
Buy yourself a copy of the new comic Julia and I made! It’s filth, just as Edgar Allan Poe intended.
Comics Time: Earthling
Aisha Franz’s faces are an architectural marvel. Their features bunch up in the center of great round white circle heads crowned with hair that looks sculpted from clay. They’re bookended by apple cheeks drawn with a perpetual blush rendered as circular gray scribbles, as though a physical ordeal or an uncomfortable emotion were always only scant seconds in their past. Eyebrows, wrinkles, creases, and smile lines push the eye toward the beady eyes and pug noses they ring. (The look is very Cabbage Patch Kids, but there’s a reason those weird-looking things made millions.) They broadcast emotion from the center of the head like a spotlight focused down into a laser — curiosity and confusion, peevishness and puckishness, boredom and loneliness and anger and, very occasionally, satisfaction and delight. In a book where Franz’s all-pencil style — the lack of inks and the deliberately boxy and rudimentary props and backgrounds suggesting a casual, tossed-off approach completely belied by Franz’s obvious control of this aesthetic — works very well, those faces work best of all.
The story is another matter.Earthlingtells the not-quite-multigenerational tale of a suburban mother and her two daughters — one on the cusp of puberty, the other of college. The book derives its title from the storyline of the younger daughter, who encounters and attempts to befriend an alien visitor she hides in the toy chest in her room. But it’s equally concerned with her older sister, who’s negotiating the needs of an estranged best friend, a physically eager but emotionally aloof suitor, and an absent father whose scheduled return is impending; and with their mother, who alternately seeks to discipline and connect with them while pondering a turning point in her own past. None are happy; all deal with their unhappiness alone. That’s the only choice allowed them in the book’s closed emotional system. Franz casts every supporting character as mean, manipulative, or oblivious. She paints her protagonists with a similar palette, or at least portrays them as so fixated on their own difficulties that they are useless to one another. Thus the storytelling deck is stacked against each to such a degree that we are forced to come to the same conclusions they do: no one understands them, the situation is hopeless, and only rash renunciations of responsibility or intercession by a well-timed savior can liberate them. Perhaps inadvertently,Earthlingteases out the undercurrent of narcissism that those of us who suffer from depression often suspect, and fear, helps fuel those gray-pencil periods in our lives, but only to reinforce it.
Comics Time: The Basil Plant
As an object, The Basil Plant is not much to look at. The same can’t be said of author Laura Lannes’s cartooning — as economical and as energetic as a well-delivered joke, with a thick, versatile line, and figurework that alternately recalls Anders Nilsen and Gabrielle Bell as played for laughs. The package containing that cartooning, however, is a bog-standard staple-bound minicomic, about 4.5″ x 3.5″, black and white, xeroxed, one page = one panel, its sole two-page spread not even located in the center of its 28 pages. You’ve seen a million of these things if you’ve been to a single small-press show. If you pick it up with the intention of reading it, you’re probably disinclined to be impressed. This is because you’re a sucker, which is what Lannes is counting on. The Basil Plant relies on your belief that you know what you’re in for. You think you know, but you have no idea.
I reviewed The Basil Plant by Laura Lannes for The Comics Journal.
STC @ CAB; The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil
Come see the total fucking dreamboat pictured above, yours truly, at Comic Arts Brooklyn tomorrow! This year’s CAB will see the debut of The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil, a new pornographic comic inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” written by me and drawn by Julia Gfrörer. It’s a follow-up to our previous Poe porn collaboration, In Pace Recquiescat (based on “The Cask of Amontillado”), which will also be there, along with everything else Julia’s done lately. I’ll have copies of Flash Forward by me & Jonny Negron, too.
The show runs from 11am-7pm at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church, 275 N 8th St., in Brooklyn. Come find me at table U28, where I’ll be spending a bunch of time alongside Julia and Michael DeForge; I’ll be easy to spot as the third-sexiest person at the table. Hope to see you there!
The 10 Craziest Things We Learned from “The World of Ice and Fire”
2. Tywin Lannister was an even bigger bastard than we thought.
Before he became the not-so-proud patriarch of the dysfunctional Lannister clan, the future Lord Tywin was a fed-up heir trying to clean up his weak father’s messes. As you might expect from the future architect of the Red Wedding, this mostly involved killing a lot of people. The most famous incident involved Tywin’s slaughter of every last man, woman, and child from House Reyne, who’d risen in rebellion against their Lannister overlords. In both the books and the show, Tywin’s revenge was immortalized in the song “The Rains of Castamere”; the HBO series has featured versions by both the National and Sigur Ros, and when the band at the Red Wedding started playing it, that was the tip-off that the shit was about to hit the fan.
But we’d never learned the specifics of the massacre until now, and they’re somehow even more cold-blooded than the song made it sound. Castamere, the Reynes’ castle, was a mostly subterranean stronghold, extending deep underground into the old gold and silver mines through which the house had made its fortune. When Tywin attacked, the Reynes and their followers retreated underground, thinking the complex below was impervious to assault. It was — but it wasn’t waterproof. Tywin had his men redirect a river into the few remaining cracks and crevices. Tywin’s rain washed the Reynes right out of existence.
| The 10 Craziest Things We Learned From ‘The World of Ice & Fire’ | Rolling Stone
I wrote up a list of weird, wild, wonderful stuff from The World of Ice and Fire for Rolling Stone. In other words, the publication that gave us Hunter S. Thompson paid me to write about Sothoryos. This is bat country! |
The 20 Scariest Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen
RAVENOUS (1999)Don’t let the snakebit production (two directors came and went before Antonia Bird was brought aboard) or the jarring score put you off. Ravenous is a roaringly good cannibal-horror movie, and one of the finest film examples of the “Weird West” subgenre, which situates supernatural evil amid 19th-century America’s wild frontier. Trainspotting’s Robert Carlyle chews more than just the scenery as the lone survivor of a Donner Party-style expedition, while Guy Pearce, Jeffrey Jones, and Jeremy Davies are among the motley crew of a remote Army outpost who try to find his lost companions — and fall into his trap. Spectacular gore, genuinely funny black comedy, and a surprisingly powerful exploration of cowardice in the face of violence make this one worth sinking your teeth into.
I have a couple of entries in Rolling Stone’s fine list of widely overlooked horror films. Find them…if you dare!
HuffPost Empire
I’ll be talking the Boardwalk Empire finale, Homeland, & The Affair on @HuffPostLive today at 4:55pm. Watch it here.
The Deep Ones
by Sean T. Collins & Julia Gfrörer
Julia and I made a comic about sea monsters, their meaning, and their menace. You can read it at The Nib and buy it in “Deep Trouble,” the latest issue of Symbolia Magazine.
You can also follow the inspiration blog we made for the comic, the-deep-ones.
Q&A: Terence Winter on the end of “Boardwalk Empire”
Nucky started the series as a crooked politician, but as Prohibition continued he became more of the traditional gangster. Was it the law that unleashed the criminal in him?People were made millionaires overnight by Prohibition. If you were willing to traffic in illegal alcohol and run the risk of getting arrested or hijacked by other gangsters, you had to be prepared to do things you hadn’t done before — like murdering people. That’s what Jimmy was warning Nucky about.
You know, there was no shame about it. People had been drinking beer their whole lives, and suddenly it’s illegal? It was pretty hard to convince anybody other than the temperance movement that alcohol was this bad thing. It was just illegal, not morally wrong. Your average man on the street had no intention of giving up his daily beer or scotch — he just had to figure out how to do it. So these guys weren’t looked down upon. It’s not like they were heroin dealers or murderers. They were providing a service, a commodity, that most people found innocuous.
There was also a collision of historic events that not only made the gangster world possible, but were tailor-made for it. You had a generation of young men coming back from World War I who spent the last two years in trenches killing people for free. Now, suddenly, all you have to do is guard a truck and maybe shoot somebody, and you could make a fortune. Guys lined up all the way around the block to do that, since they’d basically been doing exactly that for nothing. You had all these disenfranchised, disillusioned young men who were perfectly willing and able to get into that business.
There’s a character on the show who says: “The premise of fiction is that people have some sort of connection to each other. But they don’t.” Is that your conclusion as well?
I think it’s a matter of perspective. I’ve always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get. Jimmy once said that all you have to worry about is when you’re alone at night. You run out of booze and you run out of company, and [then] you’re really alone with your thoughts.
I interviewed Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter about the upcoming finale, and his next project with Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Bobby Cannavale, for Rolling Stone.
Comics Time: Gast
Murder mysteries are defined by their central, structuring absences. A hole occupies the space where a life once lived. That hole can never be filled. But through an investigation of the facts, an uncovering of the truth, and a pursuit and capture of the killer, we can define and discover the shape of the hole to a degree of accuracy sufficient to put a cover on it, so that the still-living may proceed past it once more.
Gast, a graphic novel of exquisite and accomplished empathy and restraint by alternative-comics veteran Carol Swain, tells a story centered on a hole far harder to close up than most. It proceeds with the methods and mechanics of investigation and discovery. The scene of the crime is visited. The victim’s routine is examined. The friends and acquaintances of victim and suspect alike are questioned. Evidence is recovered and cataloged: a discarded make-up bag, a shell casing, a stain on the bedroom wall. Means, motive, and opportunity are all established.
But there is no crime, because killer and victim are one and the same. There is no pursuit, no arrest, no trial, no conviction, because there can’t be. We don’t so much as see the dead person once — not as a corpse, not in a flashback, not in a photograph. All we have is what is learned by a quiet, curious eleven-year-old girl, Helen, a lover of nature and long walks who must piece together even the most basic of facts about the deceased. At first we don’t even know the deceased is a person: Helen is simply told of a “rare bird” who killed himself nearby, and as a Londoner newly arrived in the rural region of Wales where the story is set and unfamiliar with the antiquated expression, she starts her search looking for an actual bird. Like the pages of the ever-present journals, Helen starts with a completely blank slate. Over the course of many long wordless walks and quiet conversations with both her human and, mysteriously, animal neighbors, she slowly fills the tabula rasa with discoveries: suicide, gender dysphoria, the allure and peril of solitude, and the life and death cycle of this farming community and its inhabitants. She learns that most adult of lessons: We each of us have roles we play in the lives of others, shapes we take in their worlds—shapes that can be integral to those lives’ landscape yet still not save us.
The HuffPost Affair
I’ll be talking The Affair, Boardwalk Empire, and Homeland on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert at 5pm today. Turn on tune in!
“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Seven: “Friendless Child”
“You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?”—Bobby Bacala, The Sopranos
“You tell yourself it’s quick, but you don’t know. You can’t know, until it’s you, and then you can’t tell anyone.”—Nucky Thompson, Boardwalk Empire
In an echo of the New Jersey gangster masterpiece that spawned it, Boardwalk Empire‘s penultimate episode ever — “Friendless Child” — walked Nucky Thompson right up to the edge of the great unknown. He’s lost everything now, or close enough not to make much of a difference. His unlikely right-hand man Mickey Doyle and ruthless, loyal bodyguard Archie were tossed on the pile of bodies that’s been mounting around him for years — a levee of corpses designed to protect his kingdom by the sea. But that empire, too, has fallen, traded away for the life of a nephew who wants nothing to do with him to a trio of crime lords who couldn’t possibly intend to honor the agreement. When they break it, they’ll break it with a bullet.
But now that Nucky is alone – now that there are no more plans to hatch, deals to make, wars to fight – what does he see in his isolation? A letter from Gillian Darmody, and the sight of her face staring back, begging for help. Her plea and her gaze are an indictment of the terrible crime Nucky committed by bringing her to theCommodore in order to begin his long road to power. (A decision, we learn tonight, he made knowing full well the fate that awaited her.) By having her direct them not just at Nucky but at everyone watching the show, Boardwalk makes this act’s importance clear in no uncertain terms. That final shot puts young Gillian at the center not only of the frame, but by extension the episode. It suggests that the suffering of the series’ greatest female character is no less important than the moves and machinations of the men fighting for control of the empire she eked out an existence within. It shows that that empire would not exist without the suffering of Gillian and countless other people like her. It’s the series’ gutsiest, and most moral, move to date.
I reviewed tonight’s penultimate Boardwalk Empire for Rolling Stone. I cannot stress enough that if this show were the vapid, self-serious shoot ’em up it’s made out to be, Gillian Darmody would not be where she is in this episode.
BLACK FRIDAY: HALLOWEEN MIX 2014
i made a mix of scary songs for frightened people // download it here // track list in lyrics field in metadata // listening suggestion: let it all take you by surprise // your childhood is over
HuffPost Dead
I’ll be talking Boardwalk Empire, Homeland, and (god help me) The Walking Dead on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert show at 4:40pm today. Click here to tune in!
And if you missed last week’s show, watch it here!
“Boardwalk Empire” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Six: “The Devil You Know”
I can’t really excerpt anything from my review of tonight’s Boardwalk Empire without ruining it for someone. If you’ve seen it, though, please read the review.
The 30 Best Twin Peaks Characters
1. Laura Palmer
She gave the show its central mystery, and its zeitgeist-conquering catch phrase: Who killed Laura Palmer? But even though her death is literally what made the story possible, it’s her life that made it matter. Unlike the macabre MacGuffins of so many post-Peaks dead-girl mysteries, Laura was not a beautiful cipher, existing solely to inspire the male detectives investigating her murder. She was a vibrant, complicated character in her own right, the person who best embodied the small-town-secrets theme, and who paid the highest price for those secrets. Her life, and the suffering that ended it, were always foregrounded. And our glimpses of her in the series – a videotape, an audio recording, a diary entry, a visitation from Another Place – were all merely a prelude to her starring role in the prequel film Fire Walk With Me, featuring actor Sheryl Lee’s tear-down-the-sky performance of a character coming to grips with the most profound cruelty imaginable. “She’s dead, wrapped in plastic”? Yes. But she’ll live forever.
I ranked the 30 Best Twin Peaks Characters for Rolling Stone. I got so much out of doing all this writing about this show, which I love deeply and think is one of the two or three pinnacles of the entire art form of television. I hope it shows.