Carnival of souls: Special “spoke too soon” edition

* I saw it first via George R.R. Martin himself: Game of Thrones has been renewed for a second season. EW’s James Hibberd talks to some HBO suits about the renewal, ratings, viewership, the length of the second season, the DVD release, and so on.

* I enjoyed the measured reviews of the pilot episode from Sean P. Belcher and Jason Adams. Room for improvement, reasonable confidence that it will.

* Wow: Tokyopop folded. I like Becky Cloonan’s take on it as much as any. A smooth operator with no real interest in publishing got lucky, basically. The film is a saddening bore ’cause we’ve seen it ten times or more.

* Chris Mautner’s interview with Gilbert Hernandez is an absolute monster. Beto publicly walks away from his career-making work. Gutsy and admirable.

* Make sure to check out Alex Dueben’s interview with Daniel Clowes as well.

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force is going on hiatus, so now’s a great time to read the whole thing.

* 30% off everything PictureBox sells until April 30th. Buy that Mat Brinkman print for me, will ya?

* Clive Barker reports that Abarat III draws closer and closer.

* This year’s excellent roster of Stumptown award winners includes Emily Carroll, Zack Soto, Michael DeForge, Johnny Ryan, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Lisa Hanawalt.

* Matt Maxwell talks Benjamin Marra, Tom Neely, Brandon Graham, Nate Simpson and more in his epic Stumptown con report. He also got Marra to draw goddamn Pinhead.

* Michael DeForge, still great.

* Jonny Negron sighting!

* Ganges #4 appears to be on the way.

* Chris Mautner salutes Mome with a list of his six favorite stories from the anthology.

* I think these two MoCCA con reports from Darryl Ayo and Alex Dueben indicate that despite it being a small, focused show, people’s experiences are very different depending on what they’re there for.

* New Ben Katchor strip!

* I liked this “The Strokes vs. the ’90s” piece by Tim O’Neil very much, maybe the most of any of his music posts.

* Finally:

Baby note

Helena Christine Collins came home from the hospital today, at the tender age of negative two weeks old. She’s not much of a co-blogger, as it turns out, so blogging will be sporadic and light for a while. Thank you for your patience.

Game of Thrones thoughts: Season One, Episode One – NON-SPOILERY edition

Alright, fuck it, this is for people who haven’t read the books, or at least haven’t finished reading them.

I realized that with minimal tweaking, the post I wrote for my dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire blog could just as easily appear over here. Since perhaps there are people who haven’t read the whole series but would like to discuss the show over here, that’s exactly what’s happening.

Keep in mind that by “NON-SPOILERY” I mean “this review will spoil nothing that takes place after the events depicted in the pilot.” It will, of course, be SPOILERY for the pilot itself. I’d like this to remain true for the comments, please — stick only to the events of this episode.

So if all you’ve seen or read of all this is what aired last night, here you go!

—–

* Quibbles up front! And yes, they’re pretty much just quibbles.

* I think my biggest problem with the pilot episode, and given how much of that problem arises from changes the filmmakers made to the material from the book we can perhaps extrapolate that to the series in general, is Michelle Fairley’s Catelyn Stark. There’s nothing wrong with her performance, I suppose; she’s just doing what she must with the material, and there’s the rub. The combination of aging all the characters up and changing her motivation in this early part of the story — in the book, she wanted Ned to take the job as the King’s Hand, thinking his increase in power and prestige would make the family much safer than they’d be if he had the stones to turn his friend down — makes Cat’s character a lot less interesting. As a woman in her mid-thirties who was married off during a time of war and basically got right to work bearing her teen husband some heirs, and who then advocates for her husband to take an influential, potentially dangerous gig in the capital rather than risk the equally potentially dangerous dimunition of prestige and power that not taking the job would entail, and who worries after a brood of children none of whom are older than sophomores in high school, Book-Catelyn feels a lot more vital and interesting and difficult to predict, and her plight less familiar, than her middle-aged mama-bear TV-Catelyn counterpart. It’s very early yet, and things may change, but nothing Fairley has been given in the pilot or in any of the previews I’ve seen have enabled her to complicate the character or do much more than play the warm but concerned and stern protective mother and loving wife. She’s a dramatically inert character, far too easy to get a handle on versus pretty much all of the other major players, and that’s no good, because her relationship with her family is the emotional heart of this volume, and we need to find her interesting so that we find that relationship interesting as well.

* The aging-up bothered me more across the board than I thought it would, actually. In re-reading the series, I’ve found that everyone’s relative youth makes their plights so much more powerful. Book-Ned is supposed to be, what, 35? My wife’s 35, and we just had our first child, who’s still negative two weeks old; imagining the two of us with five children, two of whom are teenagers, is one of the book’s most rewarding frissons for me. So too is Book-Bran’s young age—thrown out the window at what, eight? And Book-Robb, who’d be the Lord of Winterfell if Ned takes the job, is what, 15? And so on and so forth. I miss all of that.

* And I miss the subtle message that this medieval lifestyle forces you to do a whole lot of living before you live very long, too. For a long time my mind had a hard time wrapping around the idea of the Targaryen’s as this storied dynasty given that they were only around for 300 years; I was used to Tokien’s millennial timeframes. But when girls are married off the moment they get their first period, and when the cream of your soldiery is 17 years old or so, and when people are considered very, very old at 65, 300 years is an awful long time.

* The critics were right—there was a lot of exposition in this episode. Fewer long stories and explanations of relationships than I anticipated however. For the most part it came in the form of ADR dialogue like “That’s Jaime Lannister, the Queen’s brother!” So it was more clumsy than boring.

* The Dothraki were a bit ad-hoc, no? Perhaps the intention was to avoid any stereotyping of a specific ethnic group, so they cast people from many different ones and combined them. This is what Peter Jackson did with the scary natives in King Kong, if I recall correctly. And in that sense, okay, fine, but when so much care is given to the details of the Westerosi societies, the Dothraki look a bit too much like a casting call for tan-skinned actors.

* If you’re going to call them the White Walkers exclusively, doesn’t that increase your obligation to actually make them white? Don’t get me wrong, they were creepy as heck, but it’s still a bit odd. (In the books, they were mostly called the Others, which I guess the show felt it couldn’t do due to Lost.)

* Finally on the quibble front, Ramin Djawadi’s score was about half-very good (the spooky scenes, the opening credits) and half-“you’re kidding, right?” The “heroic” music when the King’s party enters Winterfell…I was hoping a few of them would be clip-clopping along with coconut shells.

* That said, well done overall.

* Obviously the big critical question raised by nearly everyone who’d seen the pilot early is whether or not newcomers to the material could follow it. It feels weird to be able not to address this central issue, but since I’m not a newcomer, I really can’t. It seemed easy enough to follow to me; yes, there are a lot of characters, but surely serialized television has taught us it’s okay not to have everyone straight by the end of the first episode. But I’m not going to stake my take on the episode on a yay or nay proclamation on this score.

* With that removed from the equation, I can focus more on what I liked best about it: the acting. It’s as though both the filmmakers and the cast realized how hard their task was in this first episode, and went out of their way (Cat excepted) to give everyone little bits of business to separate them out from fantasy cliches. I loved the “shaving Jon, Theon, and Robb” scene with its weird forced intimacy between three very different kinds of “sons” to Eddard Stark and the jokey, casual, but fraught with tension locker-room relationship that’s evolved between the three of them. I loved Daenerys’s dead-eyed stare as she endured first her brother’s inspection and then the scalding water of her bath—these are eyes that have seen too much and prefer to look inward. I loved Viserys’s foppish trot and alarmed exclamation as Drogo rode away without a word. I loved the opening shot of the ill-fated Night’s Watch trio, waiting for the gates to open, already playing the roles they’ve selected—smug, grim, hyper-alert—to help them survive in this world. I loved Tyrion’s unique, booze-seasoned combination of arrogance and self-loathing in his conversation with Jon. I loved Jaime’s “I heard you the first time” to Cersei at the end, already knowing what she wants him to do, trying in vain to put it off, coming to grips with knowing that he’ll do it anyway. There’s enough of all that sort of thing to give me a lot of confidence about the rest of the season. When the exposition and introductions die down, the material will have more room to breathe, and if the cast and crew keep filling the space with these idiosyncratic moments, we’re in good shape.

Game of Thrones thoughts: Season One, Episode One – SPOILERY edition

If you have read all four volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, I invite you to read my thoughts about last night’s premiere episode over at my ASoIaF blog, All Leather Must Be Boiled. As always, the post contains some spoilers for the books if you haven’t read them, so please beware.

Game of Thrones programming note

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to write weekly “Game of Thrones thoughts” posts, but if I do, they will appear on my SPOILER-FILLED blog for people who’ve read all four volumes in A Song of Ice and Fire so far, All Leather Must Be Boiled. I’ll link to each post from here, but please, do not click through unless you’ve read all four books so far.

If I end up partcipating in a less spoilery discussion of the show somewhere, I guess I’ll link to that, too.

Fanmaker alert: Read the first 80 pages of A Game of Thrones for free

Brilliant idea: Random House has made the first 80 pages of A Game of Thrones available to read for free online or as a downloadable PDF. When I tell people to read the book, I say, “Give it till page 80 or so. If you don’t like it by then, hey, no harm no foul.” But in all honesty, I literally don’t know anyone whose picked it up on my recommendation, read till page 80, and didn’t like it. Seriously, not one. You have nothing to lose but, I dunno, an hour or two on the train tonight or on Sunday afternoon this weekend or whatever. Give it a shot, see what you think.

(via Westeros)

Three bits of writing and a performance that I quite liked recently

The pursuit of an Awesome Job is not something I think of as particularly worthwhile endeavor. I say this as a person who likes his job a lot. The idea that there’s a Really Awesome Job that will be totally fulfilling and provide all kinds of meaning and value to your life is not helpful. People deserve jobs where they can use their brains, feel respected as a human beings, and not hate themselves or feel like they are settling. That is a Good Job. Once you have that, you can focus on finding value in the other parts of your life. That’s the shit that matters.

Kevin Fanning

One of the vocal styles in question comes from band member Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, who sings in starry-eyed, raise-your-voice harmonies that can resemble, at various moments: earnest children baying around a campfire; lonely goatherds calling from hill to hill; some sort of monkish or liturgical concern dedicated to solemnly singing the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” in the apses of Gothic cathedrals; or possibly the way two people might try to sing in harmony on clear quiet nights if they were stranded on South Pacific islands about 200 yards away from each other. Which is to say: Lennox’s vocals are distinctive and hard to hear without dreaming up slightly fantastic settings for them to belong in.

Nitsuh Abebe, “Panda Bear’s Tomboy is Animal Collective’s Latest Magic Trick”

Friends have been recommending Martin’s books to me for a while, but I chose not to read them (for now, at least), wanting to see if the series could stand on its own and be both comprehensible and interesting to a newcomer. And it is. I probably struggled with identifying the members of the Barksdale crew in the early episodes of “The Wire” as much as I did trying to sort out the members of the House of Stark.

Alan Sepinwall, “HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones’ an epic, mature, well-crafted fantasy series”

–Richard Hawley, “The Ocean” live in Holmfirth, October 1, 2009. Unexpected and breathtaking guitar solo at the end.

Carnival of souls: My interview with Daniel Clowes, Mome, MoCCA, more

* Career highlight: I interviewed Daniel Clowes about his new book/old New York Times strip Mister Wonderful for The Comics Journal.

I immediately thought, “I should try to think of who would be the ultimate, quintessential New York Times Magazine reader—a schlubby, middle-aged guy, the kind of guy I would see reading the New York Times on Sunday morning at a café in Oakland—and make him the hero of this romance.”

* I was quite excited to see that my friend and collaborator Matt Wiegle put up a post on his coloring process for Destructor today. Look at this thing, man.

* Mome, Fantagraphics’ long-running anthology and page for page the heftiest alternative/art comics anthology in American history, is calling it quits with this summer’s volume 22. Obviously, I’ll miss it quite a bit. Tom Spurgeon broke the news and revealed the reason why: Editor Eric Reynolds wants to spend his energies elsewhere. The Comics Journal’s Rob Clough interviewed Eric at greater length about his decision. At Robot 6 I chimed in with some thoughts on the series’ evolution, high points, and possible successor institutions, one of which is likely your RSS reader. And Fanta’s Mike Baehr has preview pages from the final volume.

* Searching through my bookmarks for MoCCA reports I recall that I’ve seen a lot of people say that minicomics sales were for shit this year, yet the only in-depth report I’ve got saved is from L. Nichols, who said she had her best year yet (not good enough to come back next year, fwiw, but still). Peggy Burns from Drawn & Quarterly has the best photos. Dan Nadel’s pix are pretty good too. So are Nick Gazin’s.

* Adrian Tomine, Optic Nerve #12, August. Woo! Apparently it contains “Amber Sweet,” which was his very good piece for Kramers Ergot 7, or at least a story that shares that title.

* Tom Brevoort takes the high road in talking about the need for diversity in superhero comics. That takes patience.

* Whoa, wait, Conor Stechschulte is doing an erotic comics anthology called Sock that Zach Hazard Vaupen’s contributing a strip called “Anal Sex” to? People, you need to tell me this kind of thing.

* My favorite part of this Topless Robot interview with Jeffrey Brown about his Transformers parody Incredible Change-Bots Two is the part where he says he liked the Insecticons so much that he’d make them the good guys when he’d play with them even though they were “really” evil. That was such a part of playing with action figures when I was a kid — the way your favorites and fascinations warped the established storylines and continuity established by the TV shows or what have you. I made the Rat King a huge huge antagonist for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; I think they teamed up with Shredder against him. For me, the “main” G.I. Joes weren’t Duke or Hawk or Flint, but Mainframe and Roadblock.

* I’m not even close to having finished this interview with Anders Nilsen, which means it’s quite long, which is a good thing where interviews with Anders Nilsen are concerned.

* Comixology’s Karen Green on comics about animal rights. I love Sheep of Fools; I think I’d die if I saw Sue Coe’s book about the vivisection of dogs. (Via Graphic Ladies.)

* Matt Seneca is posting pages from his graphic novel in progress Affected at its own site.

* The lineup for Floating World’s house anthology Diamond Comics is rock-solid.

* Here’s an exquisitely nerdy post from Tim O’Neil on various points of superhero interest and disinterest.

* All bound for Mu-Mu land: Tom Ewing spent the week blogging about the KLF. The fact that there was a huge dance hit in the ’90s featuring Tammy Wynette singing Illuminatus! references is quite possibly my single favorite crazy thing in the history of pop music.

* Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a lengthy interview with John Carpenter’s musical collaborator Alan Howarth.

* Finally, fucking Axe Cop is astounding.

Carnival of thrones

I’ve been reading a lot of Game of Thrones reviews as they’ve gone up today, mostly from mainstreamy sites or their nerd (or TV-nerd) subdomains, and it’s one of those times when you realize just how idiosyncratic the critical enterprise really is. People will single out the exact same thing for discussion, then characterize it in diametrically opposed ways. The first few episodes are talky and have a lot of storylines, and this is either brilliant television with which newcomers to the material will be enraptured, or bad television with which newcomers to the material will struggle. Daenerys has a lot of sex scenes, and this is either one of the season’s strongest storylines given additional heft by a brilliant performance embodying the book’s most complex heroine, or an embarrassing throwback to the clumsy sexuality of countless dimestore fantasy novels and b-movies endured by an actress who has to try to find something for the books’ least interesting character to do. Peter Dinklage is such a stand-out that he either deserves an Emmy or throws you completely out of the show any time he opens his mouth.

Personally I get the sense that normals will follow things just fine. A friend who screened the first few episodes but hadn’t read the book loved them, as did critic Alan Sepinwall from that same vantage point, so I think the sorts of people who are civilian enough not to have read the books but who would be predisposed to checking out an HBO adult-fantasy series to begin with will be alright. As Sepinwall points out (see links below), it probably took most people a long time to tell a Landsman from a Weebay on The Wire, too. Moreover — and again, credit to Sepinwall here — HBO’s great shows have tended to need a while before they went from “ooh, interesting” to “holy shit, best ever”; Sepinwall pegs this to a point a few episodes into Season One for the shows he talks about, but I can tell you that for me, The Sopranos only became The Sopranos with “University” in Season Three, while it’s quite literally impossible to grasp how ambitious The Wire was gonna get until a few episodes into Season Two, when you realize that nope, they’re not kidding about the dockworkers.

Judge for yourselves:

Nick Baumann, The Atlantic

Dan Feinberg and Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

Ryan McGee, Boobtube Dude

Alyssa Rosenberg, The Atlantic

Maureen Ryan, TV Squad

Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Carnival of souls: MoCCA, Paying For It, L’Association, Game of Thrones of course, more

* This is the first year since the festival’s inception that I was unable to attend MoCCA. How was it? The first report I came across was from Secret Acres’ Leon Avelino, and it jibes with the overall impression I’ve gotten on Twitter and the like of a successful show, moreso perhaps than its previous two years in the Armory location.

* Nick Bertozzi debuted Rubber Necker #5 at the show! OMG I can’t wait

* Two of my favorite critics have reviewed Chester Brown’s Paying For It. Here’s Chris Mautner; here’s Tom Spurgeon. And here’s my review, if you missed it.

* Must-read of the week: The Comics Reporter’s Bart Beaty on the death of L’Association, arguably France’s best comics publisher. L’Asso is a bit like if Image Comics were founded not by a bunch of hot Marvel artists, but by Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, Chester Brown, and Los Bros, and its acrimonious break-up and potential downfall is therefore that much more fascinating and train-wreck compelling.

* I quite enjoyed this 25-minute making-of documentary on Game of Thrones. I dare say it was mostly stuff even I hadn’t seen yet, and I’ve watched a whole lot of these preview video things. The Eyrie is stunning.

* I think the latest GoT trailer, titled “Poison,” is my favorite so far. It plays up the mystery angle, which I think will be important to a lot of newcomers’ understanding of what it is that they’re watching.

* This New Yorker profile of author George R.R. Martin is well worth signing up for the free four-issue digital-edition subscription to read. It has an especial focus on Martin’s anti-fandom, the people who’ve loved all or most of the books released so far but now hate Martin for taking so long to produce the remaining installments. The depth and dedication of this anti-fandom is far, far greater than I ever imagined, and reading about them is fascinating, in a “What hath Internet wrought” sort of way. (Via Westeros.)

* Hope Larson basically got her gig adapting Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time into a comic by saying “I wouldn’t mind adapting A Wrinkle in Time” in an interview the book’s publisher read. Love it.

* This is pretty neat: Gollum actor Andy Serkis will be the second unit director for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

* The extremely talented cartoonist Dustin Harbin is ending his diary comic. I still owe him a review of the collection that came out through Koyama Press. In the meantime, I’ll be staring at this drawing he did.

* ComicsAlliance has posted a series of interviews with the folks who run the production of those Marvel Super Heroes: What The–?! videos for which I am a contributing writer. Here’s Alex Kropinak, here’s Jesse Falcon, and here’s Ben Morse.

* Michael Shannon is General Zod. Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Joe “Jog” McCulloch reviews Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch and Frank Miller’s The Spirit, making me sadder than ever that I haven’t seen either one yet.

* Related: Frequent ADDXSTC commenter rev’D really didn’t like Sucker Punch.

* Jason (yes, Hey, Wait… Jason) reviews Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale.

* Here’s an enormously uplifting look at the surprisingly, faith-in-humanity-inspiringly progressive treatment of race in Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie by Jeet Heer.

* Zom of the Mindless Ones takes a look at Frank Miller’s rewardingly off-model, possibly Bowie-inspired Joker in The Dark Knight Returns. It’s really tough to have the DKR Joker as your first in-comics exposure to the character, because it really is so different from how he’s portrayed pretty much anywhere else — he barely speaks, and smiles twice — yet so effective for all that. I think part of why the “evil homosexual” subtext (if anything in a Miller comic could be called subtext) of the character has never bothered me the way it otherwise might is because he’s not portrayed as a figure of giggling, creepy revulsion, but as this sort of godlike, implacable killing machine. There’s a feminized elegance to him, but it’s the elegance of Pinhead.

* Rob Clough reviews the intriguing-looking international comics anthology Gazeta.

* Tom Brevoort on Jim Shooter.

* Alt Screen lists all of New York City’s special film screenings — revivals, previews, festivals, repertory, special appearances, and so on. Very cool resource. (Via Chris Weingarten.)

* Dave Kiersh’s latest comic is partially about my current place of residence, Levittown, NY.

* My friend and collaborator Isaac Moylan will kill himself if he doesn’t finish this comic that’s “kinda about suicide” within one year. Draw, Isaac, draw!

* Brian Chippendale’s Puke Force webcomic drops episodes like this on you without warning every once in a while.

* Jonny Negron draws David Bowie. And draws him well.

* Another rollicking Fight or Run battle from Kevin Huizenga. I’d have run, too.

* Michael DeForge’s abandoned comics are better than most people’s not-abandoned comics.

* Finally, my God, Frank Quitely draws He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Look at the way this thing bristles. It’s all swords and spears and blades. He gets it.

Housekeeping note

Over the past few days I’ve noticed that attempting to load this site was absolutely CRUSHING whatever browser and connection I used to do so. I’m not sure why — I suspect that a single video or image was the culprit, but I couldn’t figure out which it might be — so I placed the bulk of some of my longer recent Carnivals and music posts behind “read the rest of this entry” cuts. I really hate doing so, because I love scrolling down the front page and seeing 40 million images fly past, but needs must. Please let me know if you’re still having any trouble viewing the site.

Carnival of thrones

* Here are the first 14 minutes of Game of Thrones season one episode one. Good God did it look gorgeous in HD. I ordered HBO for this.

* My pal Rob Bricken republished my list of reasons to read A Song of Ice and Fire on Topless Robot. Besides being flattering, this also gave the piece the potential to reach a lot more people, and at this point I’ve read enough people saying it convinced them to give the books a try to make it hard for me to keep track of them all, which is hugely gratifying. Do check out the comment thread to see the shape of Larger Nerddom’s reaction to the books, pro and con.

* Please don’t forget I have my whole own VERY SPOILERY ASoIaF blog now, ALL LEATHER MUST BE BOILED. I think that if I end up doing a “Game of Thrones thoughts” series of posts about the show as it airs, I’ll probably put it up there, just to avoid confusion about the level of spoilers involved.

* Zack Soto has started an all-ASoIaF fanart Tumblr that I helped him name, which is rad. Here’s his version of the Hound.

* Reviews of the advance copies of the first six episodes sent out to select critics have been coming in. Of particular interest to me and possibly to you if you’ve been following my Game of Thrones updates over the months are the ones by Winter Is Coming, Myles McNutt, and Westeros. That last one goes in-depth into what has changed, and when those changes do and don’t work, but not in apoplectic fanboyish fashion at all. Both inside and outside ASoIaF fandom and general nerddom, to say the reviews have been rapturous is not overstating things.

* George R.R. Martin finished another couple chapters in A Dance with Dragons last week. At this point he’s finished more chapters than he originally said were left to finish and he’s still not finished with the book, which is kinda funny.

* He’s also been making the big-media interview rounds. This New York Times interview with him is worth clicking over to for the title alone.

* Other interviews I’ve enjoyed include Den of Geek’s chat with Alfie Allen (Theon) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys); the Evening Standard’s interview with Clarke, Harry Lloyd (Viserys) and Richard Madden (Robb); and Den of Geek’s interview with Jason Momoa (Drogo). In all cases you get the sense of young, ambitious, attractive actors getting their first taste of being involved with an extraordinary, potentially very popular project; it’s vicariously exhilarating. (Via Winter Is Coming and Westeros.)

* Very endearing stuff here: Winter Is Coming interviews the young actresses Maisie Williams and Sophie Turner, who play Arya and Sansa respectively.

* Martin holds up Lost as an example of how not to end a series; Martin fan Damon Lindelof says “ouch.” So did I.

* Finally, do NOT click this link unless you’ve read all four books, but Tower of the Hand’s recent series on Littlefinger is precisely the sort of in-depth, intelligent writing about ASoIaF I’ve been hungering for.

Carnival of souls: Special “no Thrones” edition

* Tom Neely thinks the curator of the 100 Euros art show, Antonio de Luca, may have stolen his artwork. Beware.

* Ed Brubaker is relaunching his excellent Captain America series as a period piece called Captain America and Bucky, focusing mainly on the latter, co-written by Marc Andreyko, illustrated by Chris Samnee. I’ll be there like I’ve been there for everything Brubaker has done with these characters and their milieu.

* Dan Nadel sings the praises of Ben Jones and his new Cartoon Network show Problem Solverz. Did anyone do better than me and remember to set their DVRs for it last night?

* Zach Hazard Vaupen started a webcomic called Rusted Skin Collection! It’s smutty and funny!

* My movie-going days are dunzo, but I must say that this comment by Jon Hastings (aka the Forager) and this review by Oscar Moralde have me reconsidering my ambivalence toward seeking out Sucker Punch. Sayeth Moralde: “This critical paroxysm against Sucker Punch is quite possibly the most colossal collective misreading of satire since Paul Verhoeven was accused of being a fascist for Starship Troopers.” Now that’s the kind of statement that’ll make me sit up and take notice. Equal time: Curt Purcell.

* Speaking of “Hmm, I guess I better check that out” pieces, Eve Tushnet loved Lake Mungo.

* And speaking of Curt Purcell, he continues to write eloquently about any number of things; here he is on one of the key aspects of Lost‘s final season.

* Another day, another terrific Comics Grid piece, this time Jacques Samson on anonymity, facelessness, and the “perfect progressive tense” of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #18. You really ought to be following this site.

* Tim O’Shea talks to Jess Fink about (mostly) her fun porn comic Chester 5000 XYV.

* Tom Spurgeon visited the Center for Cartoon Studies, and all you got was this in-depth report.

* Matt Seneca has launched a dedicated site for his comics. Check ’em out.

* Dustin Nguyen draws Spider-Man and his amazing rogues gallery. I love drawings like this, where an artist with a certain aesthetic basically creates a “set” of characters from a particular property. If I could draw, I’d draw shit like this all the time. (Via Agent M.)

* Uno Moralez is drawing things just for me at this point, I’m pretty sure.

* This is what the new version of Rob Liefeld’s Avengelyne looks like. Wow. The artist is Owen Gieni.

* It’s cool to see Gary Panter incorporating the influence of people he influenced.

* Check out lots of Strange Tales II process art at ComicsAlliance.

* This slow, vocoded George Michael cover version of “True Faith” by New Order is one of the stranger things I’ve heard in a long time. That is not to say I don’t like it, though. Certainly the combination of lyric and artist is enormously apt in this case. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Music critics really, really need to stop treating unusual versions of a certain genre as rebuttals to that genre. That goes for critics on both the pro and con side of any given debate, by the way. First of all, genres are built to be broad, or else you’re not talking about genre, you’re talking about formula. Second, when you definitionally remove unusual instances of genre from genre, you’re hamstringing that genre; rock, for example, would be Chuck Berry and Elvis to this day. Third, I just think it makes no more sense to hold up (say) James Blake as someone out to do (say) R&B or soul or dubstep “right,” whether you’re for such an attempt or against, than it would to say Scott Pilgrim was Bryan Lee O’Malley trying to do shojo manga or videogames “right.” Influences may be incorporated without becoming a commentary, positive or negative, on those influences.

Comics Time: Paying For It

Paying For It
Chester Brown, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2011
292 pages, hardcover
$24.95
Buy it from D&Q
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My publishers wanted this book to be called PAYING FOR IT. I don’t like the title — there’s an implied double-meaning. It suggests that not only am I paying for sex but I’m also paying for being a john in some non-monetary way. Many would think that there’s an emotional cost — that johns are sad and lonely. There’s a potential health cost if one contracts a sexually transmitted disease. There’s a legal cost if one is arrested. If one is “outed,” then one could lose one’s job and also suffer the social cost of losing one’s friends and family. I haven’t been “paying for it” in any of those ways. I’m very far from being sad or lonely, I haven’t caught an S-T-D, I haven’t been arrested, I haven’t lost my c areer, and my friends and family haven’t rejected me (although I should admit that I still haven’t told my step-mom.

So far, I’ve been paying in only the one sense. (Since this is a memoir, “so far” is all that’s relevant.)

But let me be clear that my publishers did not force the title on me. I chose to give in to what they wanted. If I had insisted, they would have allowed me to put whatever words I wanted on the cover. I love and respect Chris and Peggy and realize that this is a difficult book to market.

–Chester Brown, in the entry pertaining to the Cover in the “Notes” section of Paying For It

“Difficult book to market”? Get outta town, Chet! When a review copy arrived at my house unexpectedly this Saturday, I tweeted, and quite seriously meant it when I did so, that having an infant in the neonatal intensive care unit was literally the only thing stopping me from dropping everything and reading this book right then and there. A parametric memoir from Chester Brown, the parameters of which were one of the great North American cartoonist’s experiences with prostitution? Appointment reading! Maybe it’s tough to market to the great unwashed, but you’d have to pry this thing out of my hands to keep me away.

As it turns out, Brown is right about the title his publishers selected. With its punning double meaning and slightly censorious elision of what, exactly, is being paid for, it’s all wrong for this straightfaced, blunt, even didactic sexual autobiography/soapbox lecture. “Paying for Sex” would be far more appropriate. Drop the cap from the “For” to make the phrase less idiomatic, insert the actual act back into the proceedings, and be as matter-of-fact and up-front as possible about what’s going on — which quality, not at all coincidentally, is a big part of why prostitution appeals so much to Brown in the first place. The social cues he seems unable to pick up on, the rituals he is congenitally incapable of performing, the years and decades of accrued guilt and sense of failure he built up from missing out on potential romantic or sexual relationships, the elaborate and to-him draining emotional quid pro quo of sex within the context of the few relationships he was able to enter into and maintain (that’s the context in which he really “paid for it”)…all of that disappeared the moment he told his first whore “Uh, I’d…like to have vaginal intercourse with you.” (“Yes, that’s what I really said,” he assures us helpfully in the “Notes” section.) It seems a shame to add a level of kabuki to the title of a book so fixated on taking it away.

This is not to say that humor has no place in the book. On the contrary, this thing is fucking hilarious. Much of this stems directly from how Brown draws what he draws. His Harold Gray tribute from Louis Riel has been abandoned (with the exception of Brown’s brother Gordon, who’s drawn like a Riel refugee). In its place are rigorous, unyielding two-column eight-panel grids filled with tiny, tiny people drawn in as smooth a line as you’re likely to see anywhere; “painstaking” is the word that comes to mind. Foremost among these tiny people is Brown himself; his self-caricature is gaunt to the point of skeletal, an impression enhanced by the pupil-hiding blank voids of his everpresent eyeglasses. (One of the “Notes” reveals that by a certain point in the narrative he’d begun wearing contact lenses, particularly when patronizing prostitutes, but he didn’t want to confuse the issue.) Seeing his eyeless face in three-quarter profile over and over and over and over and over again, page after page after page, is bizarrely hysterical after a while. It is the least sexy self-portrait possible — not just unsexy, but almost devoid of the energy one would think would be required to have sex at all. In the many scenes where Brown is accompanied by his best friends and fellow cartoonists Seth and Joe Matt, the portraiture gets funnier still. Watching the three bespectacled men — Brown balding and sullen, Matt babyfaced and effusive, Seth impossibly dapper and never without his suit, fedora, and cigarette — walk in lockstep down the city streets like some sort of morose urban Three Amigos is one of the unexpected comedic highlights of my comic-book year so far.

I know, I know: What about the fucking? Pretty funny too. Throughout the book Brown uses a sort of dilation effect to center one’s attention in each panel, tending to shade in the periphery of the panels with a circle of black, like an old silent movie. This is barely even noticeable until you hit the sex scenes, which tend to show a bareassed Brown silently thrusting away at the crotches of the whores in question, usually with several different physical configurations per encounter (which is to say per chapter, since each experience with a prostitute gets its own chapter). Before long Brown’s mid-coitus interior monologue features him calmly assessing the pros and cons of each prostitute — he thinks about how she stacks up against previous women he’s been with, whether or not to patronize them again, what kind of review he’ll give them on a website for clients of Toronto escorts, and so on. It’s so deadpan he might as well be in the produce aisle squeezing melons.

Which is the point. In the lengthy, handwritten prose section that ends the book — first a series of polemical Appendices detailing Brown’s exact position on the decriminalization (not legalization! keep the government out of it!) of prostitution and his responses to arguments against the profession, then a response from Seth to his depiction as a character in the book (“The truth is, Chester seems to have a very limited emotional range compared to most people. There does seem to be something wrong with him.”), then another series of Notes on various points of interest in the book — Brown advances an admittedly quixotic vision of a world where paying for sex is an utter commonplace, a practice so pervasive that the need for professional prostitutes is lessened because you or I would have no problem exchanging money for sex with our attractive friends and acquaintances and vice versa, the same way we might go to movies together or send a friendly email. The important thing to Brown isn’t just decriminalizing the supposed offense of giving or receiving money for sex, it’s deflating the romanticized aura of the act itself.

As you’ll learn at great length from Brown, both in monlogues within the comic and in the prose material appended to it, the book isn’t so much about prostitution in and of itself as it is about the way Brown has rejiggered his life in order to avoid the “evil” of romantic love, or “possessive monogamy” as he comes to exclusively put it. Unlike familial or friendship love, romantic love in its idealized form is exclusive — you love one person, that one person loves you, and neither of you is allowed to feel the feelings you have for one another or have the sex you have with one another with anyone else. This leads to jealousy, an emotion Brown views as immature and immensely destructive. The solution? Separate sex from its romantic context entirely. Have close friends and companions from whom you get all the benefits of friendship love, which is superior to romantic love anyway, and then have sex with people of whom your contractual obligation to whom ensures that you will have no further expectations, nor they of you. Sex is sacred, Brown argues — so it should be made available without stigma or shame to as many people as possible. What better way to accomplish this than cash?

So that’s the platform here. Brown wants to do away with romantic love, and prostitution has enabled him to do this.

Except for one jaw-dropping revelation he sneaks into the final eight pages’ worth of comics: UPDATE: Actual revelation redacted, but suffice it to say it calls into question, if not outright undermines, all the Big Ideas he’s been advancing all along. This is the key to the whole fucking thing, and he shoves it away in a single chapter! If this is the way life is to be lived in Brown World, then don’t we need to see how it’s lived if the entire project is to have any value? That’s where the rubber hits the road! So to speak!

And once you realize that Brown has pulled the knockout punch, so many other things you’d been willing to overlook due to his overall breathtaking candor and craft become harder to excuse. Every prostitute we meet, for example, is depicted as a faceless brunette. Now, it’s abundantly clear why he wouldn’t want to actually draw these women true to life even without his notes explaining this decision, but noting that he did in fact see prostitutes who weren’t pale brunettes doesn’t change the fact that that’s how he drew all of them — nor does it make the fact that he drew their naked bodies as accurately as possible but left them a faceless raven-haired horde otherwise any less unwittingly (?) revealing.

Then there’s the chapter where he has sex with a very young-looking, foreign-born prostitute who gasps in pain throughout intercourse: “That she seems to be in pain is kind of a turn-on for me, but I also feel bad for her. I’m gonna cut this short and cum quickly.” What a gentleman! In the Notes he reveals he was astonishingly naive — credulity-stretchingly so, to be honest, for someone who appears to be so well-educated in every other aspect of the literature of prostitution — about the existence of sex slaves, whom he continuously talks about as though kidnapping by force were the preferred method of harvesting them, as opposed to false-pretense illegal-immigrant indentured-servitude. “Was ‘Arlene’ a sex slave? She didn’t seem like one,” he shrugs in the Notes about this painful encounter, before quoting someone on how “outcall” prostitutes (those who come to your apartment) are unlikely to be sex slaves since they could always go for help instead. Anyone who’s watched a single episode of Law & Order: SVU or Dateline NBC could shoot this whole element of things so full of holes you could use it as a colander.

The thing is, like Brown, I don’t think the existence of sex slaves necessitates the continued illegality of prostitution, any more than the existence of labor slaves meant we should ban the harvesting of cotton or the performance of housework. He’s quite right to say that were prostitution decriminalized, law enforcement could focus on forced prostitution that much more readily. It’s the “forced” that matters, not the “prostitution.” But for a guy who’s so willing to extrapolate universal principles from his personal experiences — his mother’s disastrous, effectively lethal course of treatment for schizophrenia means schizophrenia doesn’t exist; his unhappy experiences with romantic relationships mean that romantic relationships are a categorical evil — he sure doesn’t mind leaping right the fuck past any personal experience, or those of anyone else, that might cause those principles harm. And, you know, hey, that’s how almost all of us live, to one extent or another (most of us not to the extent that we need to wonder whether or not a given sex partner is a sex slave, but to some extent at least). That’s human, and we forgive each other for it in life. In art? Art explicitly dedicated to the advancement of some philosophical and political truth? Then that’s the sort of thing you gotta pay for.

Carnival of souls: Special “one week later” edition

* I started a tumblr dedicated to (SPOILERY) thoughts on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, in case you missed it.

* I reviewed Thomas Ott’s best-of collection R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004 for The Comics Journal. I didn’t care for it.

* Over at Robot 6, I wrote about site stats for Wizard’s digital magazine.

* You’ve only got a couple more days to take advantage of an awesome sale on Lane Milburn comics. Go!

* Tom Tomorrow is Daily Kos’s new Comics Editor. Lots of intriguing possibilities there.

* Truth, justice, and the American way.

* Chris Mautner wrote a terrific introduction to the work of Frank Miller, listing the books to read first, the ones to read next, and the ones to avoid. I don’t agree with him on all of it, but it’s a cogent and at times passionately argued piece.

* Groovy Age of Horror indeed: Curt Purcell reviews Gossip Girl! Sometimes I think I have too much influence. Anyway, Curt brings his usual eye for unusual, revealing detail and his attention to structure and expectation to the proceedings.

* Curt’s also up to A Clash of Kings in A Song of Ice and Fire.

* Michael DeForge has been posting remarkable material on the daily lately. Here’s a few pages from a graphic novel he actually destroyed rather than finish and publish.

* Geoff Johns is writing an Aquaman series. Hooray!

* I’m saving this for when I have more time and energy, but Sean Belcher reviews Dragon Age II at length. I really have no idea what Dragon Age is, other than a thing a lot of people get excited about when it comes out, but I link to this anyway because the mere existence of this sort of writing seems to put paid to the notion that video games can’t be art. (Cf. this idiocy.)

* Buy more stuff from Tom Neely!

* Reach for it! J.H. Williams III channels funk for a Static Shock cover. Wouldn’t it be rad if more superhero artists did things you hadn’t seen before with color?

* Wow, this is a great Seth Fisher piece. Thanks, Corey Blake.

* Fresh from his triumphant run of drawing sexy women, Tom Kaczynski is now drawing ’80s action figures. It’s like he’s reading my mind.

* Robert Goodin covers Johnny Ryan. Indeed.

* Anders Nilsen reveals the cover for the collected Big Questions

* …and Anders Nilsen draws some covers for Richard Brautigan books.

* Really digging these promotional images for Strangeways‘ new online iteration.

* Well played, Iron Man 2.0.

* This Axe Cop kicker made me laugh and laugh.

* Uno Moralez, man. Uno Moralez. (Wait for it.)

* Sucker Punch as camp is one of the few reads of that film that could persuade me to see it. Nothing against Zack Snyder — until now he’s made three films, all of which I enjoyed, two of which I enjoyed immensely — but it occurred to me that lo and behold, I really don’t have any interest in schoolgirls fighting robot samurai. The fanservice failed to service me, in essence.

* Hey, congratulations to my old boss and friend Brian Cunningham on taking over the editorial reins for the Green Lantern line, DC’s biggest franchise.

* LOL: The Xorn retcon happened Grant Morrison didn’t write Magneto well enough. Well, they certainly showed him!

* It’s quite telling, but also strangely depressing given that he’s the person who introduced me to the phrase “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” that Andrew Sullivan believes he must formulate and articulate a position on literally every issue of import. That’s simply crazy. You’re not an expert on everything; you’ll be outright stupid on some things. So I learned to my eternal regret.

* Real Life Horror: This chart is hilariously awful, just on a “something is obviously wrong with this picture” level.

* Real Life Horror 2: War oughta be fun! People really think this way about the enterprise of killing large numbers of people to achieve a political goal, and feel no shame about saying so. Fuck those people.

* On the other hand, I do enjoy the Captain America trailer. Rob Bricken is right: The emphasis it places on Steve Rogers having been a bullied weakling until very recently reveals an element of the character too often forgotten. (I find Ultimate Captain America all but unreadable any time I come across him now for that very reason.)

* Another Game of Thrones trailer? Don’t mind as I do.

* Finally, George R.R. Martin has finished two more chapters in A Dance with Dragons. He says the end is truly nigh.

Music Time: Katy Perry feat. Kanye West – “E.T.”

I couldn’t tell you when it happened — maybe it was when I heard this chorus…

Kiss me
K-k-kiss me
Infect me with your loving
Fill me with your poison
Take me
T-t-take me
Wanna be your victim
Ready for abduction

…or when I heard this bit of Kanye West’s cameo…

I’m’a disrobe you
Then I’m’a probe you
See, I abducted you
So I tell you what to do

…or maybe it was the glossily futuristic minor-key stomp of the music, or the overall “lover as alien invader” metaphor—but at some point while listening to “E.T.” on one of the local pop radio stations in the car, I realized that if it had shown up on a mid-to-late-’90s album by KMFDM or Lords of Acid, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. The science-fictional lyrics, the conflation of love, death, and violence, the brinksmanship with nonconsensuality as turn-on, the notion that great sex is so scary you could lose your agency and identity to it, the shiny sleazy heaviness of the sound…it all sounds awfully familiar! Listen to “You Belong to Me” by Lords of Acid and “A Hole in the Wall” by KMFDM and tell me I’m wrong…
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