Real-world concerns have hampered the ability of Matt Wiegle and myself to post new Destructor pages quite as often as we’d like, so we’re trying to make it up to you with supplemental material. Matt has just put up another process post, one that talks a bit about how he lays out each page to better surmount the challenges presented by the script, while I’ve been answering reader questions. If you’ve got any questions yourself, let us know!
Lose #3
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
Koyama Press, May 2011
pages
$5
Buy it from Michael DeForge
It’s one thing to take a Chris Ware/Daniel Clowes middle-aged sad-sack comedy of discomfort and plop it into a slime-encrusted anthropomorphized-mutant-animal-inhabited post-apocalyptic hellscape that looks like Jon Vermilyea staging a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles revival in the middle of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s quite another thing to do this well. And it’s still another thing to do it so well that while the whole is indeed more than the sum of its parts, the parts work all on their own, too. That’s the achievement of Lose #3, the latest installment in Michael DeForge’s old-school one-man alternative comic series.
In past issues, as well as in his minis and anthology contributions, DeForge has proven adept at crafting razor-sharp embodiments/lampoons of what have been termed “first world problems” and placing them in the mouths of fantastical, outlandishly designed and drawn creatures and monsters and superheroes and giant mecha and what have you. (“I feel like things have been weird between us lately,” reads the image of the shaggy faceless beast rolling around on the ground — that sort of thing.) And he does that here, too, to cringingly devastating effect: The text for the opening one-pager is a letter from a fresh-faced intern high on his first trip to NYC to his mother back home (“I asked if there were any paid positions opening at the magazine in the fall. They said things were still up in the air for now. Fingers crossed, I suppose!”), juxtaposed against the images of a naked man riding a spotted deer through a debris-strewn wasteland in order to pour the coffee he purchases at a still-standing chain coffee house into the maw of the creature that lives in his cave. Toward the end of the collection, ants wax pessimistic about life in these weird, dark times (“But, like — why do we live this way? It’s — it’s nuts that this is the ‘norm’ for us,” says an ant about the potential for human beings to burn them with magnifying glasses) and debate whether or not to move the dead body of a friend when its pheromones start attracting a crowd (“Just leave it. It’s a party”) Even in the main story, there’s a bit where the two teenage sons of our divorced protagonist talk about The Wire that nails the clichés of that particular conversation so accurately even without mentioning it by name (“The show introduces a new part of the city at the beginning of each season, so it’s always, like, BOOM! Bigger picture! BOOM! Bigger picture! You know?”) that I wanted to delete my old blog entries about the show.
The innovation of “Dog 2070,” Lose #3’s centerpiece story, is, well, that it’s a story, a look at a very shitty month in the life of a middle-aged flying-dog-man-thing. He concern-trolls his ex-wife over her current husband, his attempts to connect with his teenage and twentysomething kids are rebuffed with casual cruelty, he fixates on his own problems to the pint where he can’t empathize with cancer patients, his neurosis leaves him equally unable to spend his time at the computer productively writing or unproductively masturbating, he drunkenly confronts his middle-school son’s ex-girlfriend after a cyberbullying website the kid made about her nearly gets him expelled from school, he ends up in the hospital after a freak gliding accident. It’s easy to focus on the yuks here, which are abundant in the same way they are in Wilson or Lint — the sudden reveal of our hero Stephen’s inebriation when talking to his kid’s ex is impeccably timed to elicit an “Oh, Jesus” guffaw, and DeForge nearly always chooses dead-on details to illustrate the guy’s creepy self-absorption, from giving his ex-in-laws gifts on Thanksgiving just to stay in their lives to interrupting a conversation about a co-workers chemo to announce he’s begun therapy as research for his screenplay. (The flying scene, in which a soaring Stephen sums it all up by saying “Sometimes it’s as if I forget we’re able to glide!,” then crashes into a bird, is a bit on the nose, though.) But DeForge reveals the true emotional stakes in a pair of dream sequences as recounted by Stephen to his therapist. In the first, we watch the flesh slowly slough off his daughter, who recently attempted suicide, before she fades away from view; in the second, he and his former family, reduced to four-legged animalistic versions of their anthropomorphized selves, fight over a scrap of meat. “I just feel so ashamed I don’t know why. I’m watching it and I just feel awful.” This, of all the notes he hits, is the one he chooses to leave us with, a nightmare representation of a failing man’s worst fears and shames, to which he has no adequate response and to which no adequate response is provided. That’s when you realize that these emotional stakes have been present all along, hiding in plain sight: In the omnipresent beads of sweat oozing down Stephen’s fleshy body, in the debris-strewn streets and burned-out buildings that form a backdrop for the story, in the walls that seem to sweat and drip and bleed themselves. Something is wrong, the art says, even as the narrative chronicles the banal travails of a relatively normal guy. DeForge doesn’t need to come right out and say it himself. Lose #3 isn’t the bolt-from-the-blue paradigm-shifter I’ve seen some people describe it as, but it’s a confident enough comic that it doesn’t need to be, pushing its author out of his comfort zone only to discover he’s perfectly comfortable here, too.
* The San Diego Comic Con International gets its first comics-centric counterprogramming slate in the form of Tr!ckster, a mini-con centered on indy guys like Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and Scott Morse. Now we need an artcomix show and we’re all set.
* Over at Robot 6, I talked a bit about Tom Brevoort talking a bit about how Marvel’s Avengers movies and Marvel’s Avengers comics help each other out versus the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises.
* Dan Nadel rounds up recent reviews of Yuichi Yokoyama’s excellent Garden, including efforts by ADDXSTC faves Chris Mautner and Douglas Wolk.
* Curt Purcell on religion in A Song of Ice and Fire and Battlestar Galactica. This is spoilery as hell for both series, but if you’re all caught up with them, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to read this. Very astute comparisons.
* When Josh Simmons draws things like this you know they can’t be headed anywhere good.
* Another day, another wondrous Uno Moralez image/gif dump.
* I can’t post an image without ruining the gag, but Axe Cop gets better and better.
* Aeron Alfrey has been spotlighting some real treasures at Monster Brains lately, from some ornate skeletal creatures by Pedro Izique to multiple He-Man and the Masters of the Universe galleries, about which I wrote a bit for Robot 6.
* Finally, this picture of January Jones as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class is truly a joy.
I first heard Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on the local alt-rock station. This is a testament to the radio station (101.9 FM in New York — listen to it for half an hour and chances are you’ll hear something rad, like “Down in It” or the full album version of “Personal Jesus” or Luka Bloom’s cover of “I Need Love” or the by-god lead single from King of Limbs) as much as it is to the song, but it’s the song I’m focusing on here. And despite its being a reasonably big hit on the pop-dance stations, where I’ve also heard it played, you can see how it fits in with the rock narrative: A woman sings her guts out about heartache over live minor-key instrumentation, with a reasonably cryptic metaphor (“rolling in the deep” isn’t as one-to-one the standard “our love is like” formulation) and a sharp edge or two (those chanted high-pitched backing vocals during the chorus, to me the weirdest and therefore best part of the song). The first time I heard it on pop powerhouse Z100 I felt like I should mark the date down in my diary, so unlike everything else on Top 40 stations it was, even the nominally rock- or country-influenced stuff, most of which could conceivably be covered in a “Disney Princesses Live!” stage show. “You gotta hear that Adele song!” I gushed to my wife. “It’s the real deal.”
So I thought until I gave it a second or third front-to-back listen. Then I realized that it was something else besides dark and unique in the landscape and impeccably sung: kinda boring. Verse, bridge, and chorus all basically take a single melodic line and repeat it, revealing nothing new about those notes with each new iteration, and leaving nothing to discover in repeat listens. Adele’s got a terrific blue-eyed soul voice, but in much the same way the Walkmen’s world-weary last-call schtick gets old when that’s all they do, singing every line with voice-cracking intensity leaves the listener with nowhere to go, no emotional arc to follow either upward or downward. You’re just stuck in that same old familiar spot, and you know what familiarity breeds.
By contrast, Jeremih is working with a dramatically inferior instrument. But in his goofball “please grind against me and/or give me oral sex” anthem “Down On Me,” he and his producers work that much harder to keep things interesting. Establishing the basic template for the vocals, a follow-the-bouncing-ball monotone of staccato eighth notes, they quickly work against expectations: Jeremih stops short, letting the final syllable of several lines drop from his mouth like that cigarette that got stuck to Ackroyd’s lip in Ghostbusters. Then they distort his vocals, pitchshifting him way downwards for a repetitive nonsense non sequitur: “BANG BANG BANG BANG.” Then he marvels at his would-be conquest’s body with a weirdly specific comparison (“What, you work at Bally’s? Look at your physique”) delivered in a sleepy mushmouth. Then he heads upward in both energy and register for the autotuned chorus, affecting a weird pseudo-South Asian accent of all things, as anonymous hip-hop “HEY!”s echo in the background. Then 50 Cent returns after a brief cameo in the intro for a verse that returns to the earlier ratatat vocal rhythm before dipping into distortion a couple times to hide cusswords or emphasize how he’s not going to put shit on blast. Then he does exactly that, slowing way down to deliver a few lines about how he’s going to stuff his oversized penis into her potentially too-tight vagina (I am not kidding) as an overdubbed choir of Jeremihs sings “Daaaaaamn….oh-oh-oh aw daaaaaaamn.” Then it’s back to the chorus, only this time it ends with the title phrase done in a chipmunk voice. Then there’s a third verse that sounds more like a middle eight, one that repeats an oddly respectful characterization of the girl’s personality: “Say you independent / get it from your mama.” All the while the music bubbles and tinkles and whizzes along, the beat dropping in and out like someone you momentarily lose sight of at a club only to lock onto again. It is a thoroughly, thoroughly weird song, and as cheesy and gross as its message and mien are, it’s not just an earworm but something I can listen to over and over again and find new things to geek out over. It makes Adele’s respectable pleasure feel shallow indeed.
Garden
Yuichi Yokoyama, writer/artist
PictureBox, May 2011
320 pages
$24.95
Buy it from PictureBox
Buy it from Amazon.com
Meet the non-narrative pageturner. Garden is Yuichi Yokoyama’s third English-language release from PictureBox, and his most viscerally thrilling work to date. It’s the clearest demonstration yet of the innovation that is his masterstroke: fusing visually and thematically abstract material with the breakneck forward momentum, eye-popping spectacle, and pulse-pounding sense of stakes of the rawest plot-driven action storytelling.
Garden has no story to tell, of course, not as such: It simply depicts a large group of sightseers who break into a vast manmade “garden” of enormous natural features combined with artificial and mechanical objects, wander around, and describe and inquire after what they see. With their matter-of-fact pronouncements (“There are many ponds. This one is jagged. There is a giant ball floating in this one. This one is made of stainless steel. We have now arrived at a significantly larger pond.”) doing the heavy lifting of parsing exactly what we’re looking at for us, we’re freed to simply go along for the ride, marveling at each new environment Yokoyama dreams up. As a feat of sheer bizarre imagination it’s tough to top: I can easily picture standing around with other readers comparing favorites — “I liked the hall of bubbles!” “I liked the stack of boats!” “I liked the river of balls!” “I liked the giant book!” “I liked the polaroid carpet-bombing!” “I liked the monkey bars!” Imagine if everything in Walt Disney World were as alien and strange as the giant golfball Spaceship Earth and you’re almost there. Nearly every new area and attraction practically demands to be stolen and used for a setpiece in someone’s weird alt-SFF webcomic. And with a “narrative” through-line that’s 100% pure exploration — lots of little guys walking and climbing and sliding and crawling through doorways and scaling mountains made of glass and so on — echoes of their tactile, discovery-driven adventure can’t help but hit us and excite us as we race along with them to their eventual destination.
In essence, Garden teaches you how to read it. It immerses you in its perambulations and presents you with a new amazing thing with each turn of the page, engrossing you to the point where you hardly even notice that it’s a book-length exploration on Yokoyama’s part of geometric shapes, of the clean line, of costume design (all the little people wear headgear and outfits that make them look like a cross between Jason Voorhees and Carmen Miranda), of his own fascination with the way the natural world and the manmade world shape one another. I felt at the end of the book like I do at the end of a great theme-park vacation: Exhausted, invigorated, and already planning my return.
SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.
* It’s a mug’s game for people who’ve read the books to try to figure out what people who haven’t read them think of the show, but I’ll tell you what, this episode made me wish I were in their shoes more than any so far. Not even for the bigger developments necessarily, but for…well, the bit I keep coming back to is Gregor Clegane grabbing his sword and decapitating his own horse with a single blow. What would a tyro make of that, I wonder? I think I’d have done a comical spit-take with the beer I was drinking.
* And this episode was laden with visual hooks of that sort. The Eyrie: its high-fantasy layout, its mad ruler and her breastfed boy, its three-walled sky cells. Theon Greyjoy’s wiener. Renly and Loras’s foreplay-by-way-of-barbering. Tyrion bashing that tribesman’s face in. The enormous dragon skull. Jory’s knife in the eye. In positing it as the best of the series so far, much of the writing I’ve seen about this episode focuses on either the increased action quotient or the fine new scenes added by the writers, as well they should, but these visual moments of “whoa” were what stuck with me as I went to sleep.
* Moreover, both Gregor’s Godfather impression and the whole Eyrie sequence went a long way to rectifying my main complaint about last week’s otherwise excellent episode, the way completely understandable constraints stripped the spectacle from settings like Vaes Dothrak or the Hand’s tourney. Clearly the Eyrie of the books, with its multiple ascending fortresses connected by precarious stairways and winches and leading to a mountaintop stronghold it takes a full day to reach, wasn’t going to work with the time and the budget available to a television show. But unlike Vaes Dothrak, where the art department realized it couldn’t portray an ad hoc assembly of pillaged architecture and artifacts from all over the world but didn’t do anything to compensate and just saddled us (no pun intended) with a bunch of tents, the Eyrie is different but still suitably spectacular, with its towering arches and soaring dome construction and gorgeous weirwood throne. The tournament, meanwhile, still feels way smaller than the Westerosi Super Bowl it ought to be, but having a giant chop his own horse’s head off after losing to a dude with the most ornate armor you’ve ever seen, then duel with his burned brother nearly to the death, goes a long way toward making the event as memorable to viewers as it’s supposed to be to the in-story spectators.
* The new scenes were well worthwhile. Robert and Cersei’s conversation did the necessary work of simply demonstrating how their marriage works and why hasn’t had the other killed yet, but for my money the best of the bunch was Littlefinger and Varys’s duel of words/dick-measuring contest in the throne room. Just a pleasure to watch Aiden Gillen and Conleth Hill be sleazy with an undercurrent of genuine danger.
* After the stagey Dothraki wedding fight, the battle with the hill tribe, the Clegane duel, and the Stark/Lannister massacre went a long way toward reassuring me that the show can handle action properly. It’s worth noting, too, that both of the major battles ended with shots of the survivors standing (or kneeling) amid a pile of bodies. Action’s a bloody, murderous business in this world, or at least it should be, and those shots reinforce the way swordplay is depicted as people swinging huge sharp chunks of metal at each other in the hope that they’ll cut something off of their opponent.
* This episode once again used the show’s penchant for rapid-fire scene transitions to illustrate just how byzantine the court intrigue can be. In back to back scenes, Varys meets with Ned to warn him that the king is in danger and keep him on the trail of the Lannisters; Varys meets with Illyrio to warn him that the Starks and Lannisters are fighting and that Ned will soon discover Jon Arryn’s secret, complicating their ostensible shared goal of overthrowing Robert with the Targaryens at their own pace; Varys meets with Littlefinger to talk shit and maneuver against one another; a few scenes later, Varys sits in the Small Council, encouraging Robert to have the Targaryens murdered. We don’t have any more of a prayer of untangling the Spider’s web than Ned does.
* Murderers’ Row, from left to right: Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, John Porcellino, Peter Birkemoe, Chris Butcher, Chris Oliveros, and Dan Nadel. That’s five of comics’ best cartoonists, two of its best retailers, two of its best publishers, and two of its best convention organizers (there’s some overlap). This photo comes courtesy of the equally magisterial Tom Devlin’s TCAF photo parade, which along with Robin McConnell’s is one of my favorites so far. Meanwhile, Secret Acres’ Barry & Leon and cartoonist Tom Neely contribute fine prose reports. I’ll tell you what: For me, this is the year that TCAF went from “that sounds really nice for people who live in Canada, but I’m all set with MoCCA and BCGF and SPX down here” to “road trip!”
* Every silver cloud has a dark lining, however, and in this case that’s the seizure by customs officials of the Ryan Standfest-edited black-humor anthology Black Eye and Blaise Larmee’s Xeric-winning graphic novel Young Lions, neither of which is smut.
* Hooray: Jordan Crane’s webcomics emporium What Things Do is revving up again, starting with Kevin Huizenga’s Kramers Ergot 7 contribution “Balloon”. I remember flipping through the printout of the book that Alvin Buenaventura brought to SPX that year and marveling at the colors in this one, mouth agape.
* This actually made me say “whoa”: Flashpoint #5, the final issue of DC’s big summer event comic this year, will be the only comic DC will release the week of August 31. That’s an unusual and gutsy strategy — it has an antecedent in that issue of Blackest Night that DC shipped early with instructions to retailers to sell it during Diamond’s skip week between Christmas and New Year’s in 2009, but this time it’s DC that’s making August 31 a skip week, not the distributor.
* Meanwhile, the cover for the fourth issue makes me think that perhaps making Wonder Woman and Aquaman the villains of an event comic is the best way to get these two iconic but historically underserved characters over with audiences right now.
* Joyce Farmer’s run in The Comics Journal’s Cartoonist’s Diary column has been fascinating. Here’s a post on her career as the owner of a bail bond agency; here’s one on her abortion.
* The Comics Grid’s Roberto Bartual uses Richard McGuire to make an important point, which is that aesthetic coldness does not equal emotional coldness.
* A list of everyone who’s been in Ryan Sands’s zines. As a fan of impressive lists, I am impressed by this list. Speaking of which, you can buy his and Michael DeForge’s smut anthology Thickness #1 now, and get psyched for the just-announced Brandon Graham/Lisa Hanawalt-led line-up for issue #2.
* Everything you need to know about Uno Moralez’s aesthetic project, you can learn from the massive jpeg and animated gif dump he just posted.
* New York sports cartoonist Bill Gallo has died. I do not watch sports, but any time I’d come across one of his comics in the Daily News I’d just sit and appreciate the fact that he filled such a niche with such evocative and comforting cartooning.
* WAT
* Finally, you Game of Thrones folks, including the ones who’ve only just seen the show, oughta get a lot out of this gorgeous infographic guide to character relationships by HauteSlides. Click the link to see it at its full, elegant size.
* Tom Spurgeon talks TCAF. That sounds like an incredible show; the guest list alone is astonishing, I saw publisher and exhibitor after publisher and exhibitor tweeting that they’d sold out of this or that book by the end of the first day, and the free festivals always feel much less like summer camp for comics lifers and more like, well, a festival.
* Benjamin Marra is launching a new webcomic called Zorion the Swordlord, to be written and drawn on an ad-hoc basis during downtime on his commute, as part of a sprawling mythology he’s touched on here and there already called Space Barbarians of the Ultimate Future Dimensions:
The Space Gods then created the SPACE BARBARIANS OF THE ULTIMATE FUTURE DIMENSIONS, warriors in different dimensions of the universe with individual destinies and adventures, existing and operating with no knowledge of each other, in separate realities taking place near the demise of the universe. Each of the SPACE BARBARIANS, through their legion of adventures, is a piece to a puzzle which will stop the PHASER-AXE from completing it’s mission: to reach the HEARTSTAR and shatter all dimensions by cleaving the central sun in two.
I love Benjamin Marra.
* Wow: Various Closed Caption Comics members, with people like CF and Matthew Thurber riding shotgun, enter the “erotic artcomix” sweepstakes with Sock #1.
* Speaking of CCC, Zach Hazard Vaupen’s webcomic Rusted Skin Collection is an endearing combination of funny dick jokes and very weird drawing.
* A trio of noteworthy features from The Comics Journal: Sean Rogers interviews Chester Brown about Paying for It, kicking off a week of PfI programming;
* and Rob Clough lists his Top 25 minicomics of 2011 (and then some). Also noteworthy is this comment in which Rob makes a point I’d never even thought of before, which is that with various comics schools mandating the creation of minicomics as part of the curriculum, the format isn’t going anywhere, the relative ease of Kickstarter-funded book-format projects (not to mention simply publishing to the web) notwithstanding.
* Nick Gazin’s latest comics review round-up for Vice (which happily used the “comics” tag and thus showed up in my jerry-rigged comics-only Vice RSS feed) is also a stealth interview column, featuring brief chats with Gilbert Hernandez (it’s called “The Fritz Film Series,” sez Beto), Johnny Ryan, Michael DeForge, and Benjamin Marra.
* It’s kind of funny to me to report on in-story developments in a Frank comic, superhero-style, but I was pretty excited to hear Jim Woodring say that Frank will be leaving the Unifactor in his next book, The Congress of the Animals.
* Zom of the Mindless Ones continues his series on the Joker with a piece on Grant Morrison’s “super-sane” take on the Clown Prince of Crime.
* Kudos to Kiel Phegley for getting the ever-fascinating Marvel editor Tom Brevoort to confirm a connection between Marvel Studios’ ownership of movie rights to certain Marvel characters and those characters’ attendant higher profiles in Marvel comics. Brevoort characterizes it as an issue of easier coordination with their in-house studio rather than “let’s favor the Avengers over Spidey or the X-Men because we’re not Sony or Fox,” however, but it’s still the most direct explanation yet of a relationship between the two phenomena that I’d long suspected.
* Ben Morse writes about Thor in the context of that weird superhero-comics phenomenon wherein if your first impression of a character comes during an off-model period for that character it skews your understanding of how that character works pretty much for the rest of your life. I was thinking about that the other day in Target when I walked through the action-figure aisle and saw that a series of “classic fight”-type Marvel two-packs come packaged with the comic in which the fight in question took place; what’s a kid who gets the Dark Spider-Man/Dark Wolverine two-pack from his grandma going to think of it all?
* This admittedly awesome page from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns sold for $450,000, making me wish Batman were real and there were a villain that represented income inequality in America whom he could punch repeatedly in the face.
* Emily Carroll profiled; Emily Carroll’s website revamped — now you can find all of her webcomics (including at least one I’d never heard of before) in one place, not to mention quite a bit of her illustration work.
* Jesse Moynihan’s Forming remains dizzyingly complex and lovely.
* Travis Greenwood of the fine t-shirt company Found Item Clothing interviews the guy who played the little kid in the “BULL SHIT” t-shirt in The Jerk — the greatest movie t-shirt ever.
Surely any Rocky Horror-experienced person can recognize and applaud in Lady Gaga the realized desire of many young people to be publicly weird in their underwear.
SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.
I’m struck once again by how Game of Thrones: The Show is establishing its aesthetic identity by what it does, for want of a better word, “wrong.” Episode Three’s breakneck scene transitions felt off versus what we’re accustomed to from television, yet complimented the byzantine complexity of this world’s alliances and rivalries. This week’s episode was one long violation of “show, don’t tell,” with character after character telling other characters lengthy stories about the past or filling them in on information about the present. Yet the conversations never felt boring or superfluous, because they told us so much not just about their ostensible topics, but about how this world works. The society of the Seven Kingdoms is held together by the stories its people, particularly people in positions of influence and power, tell each other. The victories and defeats of the past, the valor and ignominy of the competing Houses, the traditions that dictate the positions of men relative to women and the highborn relative to the smallfolk and knights relative to men at arms — in the absence of widespread literacy and with political power a precarious held-at-swordpoint thing, these stories are the glue that binds everything. Telling the right story at the right time can move the world in the storyteller’s desired direction.
SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.
—
* This was my favorite of the three episodes, and before this I preferred the second episode to the first. I could certainly get used to the series getting better and better with each episode.
* The funny thing is that it was the best episode yet not despite the rapid-fire scene-to-scene transitions and abundance of new character introductions, but because of it. The swiftness with which the episode bounced from place to place and character to character and moment to moment could easily have gotten disorienting or obnoxious; instead it felt like the show finding its aesthetic voice as television art — an editing choice that served to underscore the can’t-tell-the-players-without-a-scorecard complexity of the show’s world and the byzantine plots and counterplots, alliances and conspiracies and doublecrosses that drive the narrative. It felt like its own thing rather than an illustrated version of the book, perhaps for the first time.
* In many cases it actually was its own thing, since so many of the scenes were brand-new material invented by the writers. And now I’m starting to understand why so many critics who saw episodes in advance said that the new scenes were probably their favorites: They were the first time I could just sorta sit back, relax, and enjoy the show, rather than comparing each moment to its prose counterpart. For some reason GoT is much, much harder for me to deal with in this regard than my other much-beloved epic-fantasy adaptation, The Lord of the Rings — perhaps because so much more of GoT‘s story arises from intrigue and character development than the grandeur/danger/action/spectacle of LotR, so it demands more attention to detail? But in the new scenes, we move away from the familiar material and swivel around to see existing relationships from a new angle, and the freshness of it makes it much easier to simply enjoy. It helped that the scenes were good, of course, and character-revealing to boot: Benjen ladling on the Stark self-righteousness to Tyrion, who could be the best friend the Watch has; both Robert and Ned hectoring Jaime, demonstrating that others have a hand in constructing his insufferable persona; Robert making himself more or less unbearable, to either the visible dismay or studiously cultivated indifference of his underlings.
* And as with Episode One, there were new characters galore: Renly, Viserys, Littlefinger, Grandmaester Pycelle, Barristan the Bold (never named, unless I’m mistaken), Lancel Lannister, Syrio Forel, Old Nan, Rakharo, Lord Commander Mormont, Maester Aemon, Ser Alliser Thorne (also never named), Yoren, Pyp and Green and all the other members of Jon’s class at the Wall. Yet because we were coming to these newbies through the eyes of characters we already knew, it never took on that stop-and-start, receiving-line feel that Episode One was a bit bogged down by.
* You say “mayster,” I say “meister,” let’s call the whole thing off!
* Arya’s first dancing lesson was a balancing act in itself. For quite some time it was “Swordfighting is exotic! Swordfighting is fun!” Then along comes Ned and his aural flashback, and we’re reminded that swordfighting is fucking awful. It’s gutsy of the show to take a big wish-fulfillment moment like plucky tomboy Arya’s chance to follow her dream and root it back in the nightmarish reality of dead butcher’s boys and green young men shitting themselves after having their ribs cracked by a warhammer.
* The moment when Cat stuck her head out the brothel window and yelled “Ned!” was endearingly goofy, almost Britcommy. A little comic relief stemming from the outlandishness of some of these situations — a bug-up-their-ass lord and lady being reunited in a brothel, for example — could go a long way toward leavening the grimness, ultraviolence, and nudity.
* Impressive effects shots at the Wall. I know it probably shouldn’t, but it gives me hope for future effects-heavy moments.
* Over at The Comics Journal, I reviewed Gilbert Hernandez’s Love from the Shadows. I loved this book and think Beto’s arguably doing the work of his career right now.
* Comics is any art you can read.
* Bill Blackbeard has died. Blackbeard was a tireless archivist who saved countless thousands of strips — for all intents and purposes the history of comics — from literal oblivion, and whose combined collection and expertise form the backbone of this the Golden Age of Reprints. A great many people smarter about comics and Blackbeard’s unique and indispensable role in the medium’s history have written obituaries and tributes: Tom Spurgeon, Jeet Heer, Chris Ware, R.C. Harvey (from whom I unwittingly nicked Blackbeard’s nickname), and Dylan Williams, who’s really on fire right now with his longer posts.
* Back in the saddle: Gary Groth absolutely annihilates Jim Shooter’s recent writing on the Jack Kirby vs. Marvel situation back in the ’80s.
* MoCCA and Stumptown crushed Dylan Williams’s soul. It’s not quite as bad as that for the Sparkplug publisher, but it’s close. This line killed me: “There are tons of parties and lots of fun to be had and sense that everyone is getting 10% closer to their goals at each show.”
* Behold, the “teaser cover art” for Tom Neely’s next graphic novel, The Wolf.
* Jonny Negron and Jesse Balmer have a collaborative comic called Demon God Goblin Heaven coming out soon with the astounding cover seen below. Balmer’s posted some stunning interior pages as well.
* Meanwhile, Negron provides the cover for Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge’s new porn anthology, Thickness.
* At Robot 6, Chris Schweizer previews Chris Wright’s graphic novel Blacklung, which has found itself without a publisher.
* Skyscrapers of the Midwest: the play. I can really get behind this trend of theatrical adaptations of great graphic novels.
Skyscrapers of the Midwest video preview from Available Light on Vimeo.
* Zak Smith is redesigning the D&D Fiend Folio, beast by beast.
* Kiel Phegley’s latest “Talk to the Hat” interview with Marvel’s Tom Brevoort is a delightfully wonky affair focused mainly on what makes certain characters “work” as members of the Justice League or the Avengers. If you’ve ever had that kind of conversation yourself, this is worth a gander.
* Chris Mautner lists his six favorite Tokyopop titles. Planetes going out of print is a crime against anyone who’s ever said “I liked Scott Pilgrim; what else should I read?”
* Luba as Batman and Maggie as Robin. Indeed. Indeed.
SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from All Leather Must Be Boiled.
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* Better, I thought.
* The first episode’s biggest problem, it seems in retrospect, wasn’t exposition so much as introductions. I mean, the two go hand in hand to an extent, yeah, but it was simply the need to name each new face that bogged down the dialogue and gave the proceedings an unpolished feel from time to time. Here — with the exception of goggle-eyed mute executioner Sir Ilyn Payne in a scene where stopping everything to tell another character who he was made perfect dramatic sense — that need was gone. Instead of meeting the characters, you’re living with them now, and unsurprisingly the show benefits from familiarity.
* This episode also saw the pilot’s brief flashes of delight blossom into more sustained ones from time to time. Tyrion’s conversation with/interrogation of/lecture to Jon Snow is the strongest example: a self-consciously showy yet controlled performance from Peter Dinklage of a character using his bitterly earned smarts to dismantle another character. I actually laughed out loud in sheer enjoyment, the sort of thing I associate with the great HBO revisionist-genre dramas of yore. Fingers crossed for more of that.
* On the other hand, I think last week I was too easy on Michelle Fairley as Catelyn, if anything. The way the character was rewritten is still the major problem — the fact that she started out as the concerned mama bear makes her post-Bran behavior feel less like the nervous breakdown from which she desperately needed to recover that it was and more like par for the course — but I think there’s still enough wiggle room in there for an actor to do something, anything we wouldn’t see coming. Fairley just alternately tears up and crackles her voice or stiffens up and sounds clipped and posh. Actually, I’m not sure “predictability” is the right rubric here; after all, Sean Bean is playing Ned Stark exactly the way everyone, the show’s creators included, pictured Sean Bean playing Ned Stark ever since the idea first crossed their minds, and he’s a blast to watch. You can see him coming, but beneath that I feel like there’s a big chasm of thought and emotion and conflict. With Fairley’s Catelyn, it’s all on the surface. I was happy to see the savagery of her response to the assassination attempt, it felt like a glimpse of a new, more vital Catelyn, but then bam, back to noble, protective, boring Catelyn, now with Hardy Boys investigation action. Bleh.
* The Dothraki…man, the Dothraki. I wonder if the filmmakers’ idea is that the Dothraki “race” is an assemblage of conquered and assimilated. I’m struggling to come up with any other explanation for the United Colors of Vaes Dothrak casting decision besides laziness. I mean, they have to know that we can see that there’s a bunch of white people and black people and brown people ruled by a Hawaiian — it’s not like they’re trying to sneak it past us. Right?
* The Daenerys/Drogo relationship is not going to get any less problematic for viewers who had a problem with it in the pilot, that’s for sure, whether their objections were based on sexism or Orientalism or both. Even if Dany’s making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation approach is a perfectly realistic way for a young woman sold into a marriage as a form of slavery to deal with her plight, it’s going to be hard for people to get on board with the progression from rape to sex-as-power-play to genuine enjoyment to actual love. In response, for example, USA Today’s Whitney Matheson’s pilot-episode indignation has evolved into condescending sarcasm. As always it bums me out to see people, especially professional-critic people, mistake the depiction of a thing for an endorsement or celebration of that thing, but on the scale of cosmic injustice, “being unnecessarily concerned with potential misogyny/racism in pop culture” doesn’t even register. We’ll all live.
* Moreover, maybe it’s the show’s fault after all. I don’t like to purport to speak for people who haven’t read the books — I’m not a mindreader — but I think Adam Serwer may be right that whatever the nature of the sex/gender (or racial) stuff in the book, and whatever the intentions of the filmmakers, the end result just isn’t getting across to viewers who are new to the story. It’s much tougher for the television show, with its limited screen time and inability to access interior monologues and lengthy ruminations on history and culture, to convey that (say) the Dothraki’s idiosyncracies really aren’t any more or less “civilized” than those of the Westerosi, or that the treatment of women is essentially a war atrocity rather than some grab-your-nuts-and-grunt-like-Tim-Allen, John-Norman-Gor-novel pandering to slavering fanboyism. On HBO itself, shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood have directly addressed the misogyny of their protagonists and the society in which they live without being read by very many people as misogynist themselves. If Game of Thrones, based on a series that upon my current re-reading strikes me as being in large part about misogyny and gender inequality’s detrimental effect on everyone involved, can’t get this across, perhaps it’s on the show, not the viewers. I have enough faith in the strength of the original material to believe that eventually the real point of it all will be hard to miss for everyone who either isn’t dopey or doesn’t have their mind totally made up about the show, but that eventually’s a killer.
* This is less about the show than it is about talking about the show, but I’m really bummed out by Douglas Wolk’s recaps so far. Douglas is one of my favorite critics, because even when he’s writing about something with which I’m totally unfamiliar (this happens frequently with his music criticism) or articulating tastes that diverge dramatically from mine (this happens frequently with his comics criticism), I still feel as though he’s speaking to me in a language I can understand — he roots his writing in clear points of reference within the work being discussed, and thus you can get something out of his criticism even when you disagree with his conclusions or, literally, don’t know what he’s talking about. In both cases, that’s an exceedingly rare gift. And that’s why it’s so disappointing to watch him crack half-hearted jokes and pour snark all over a show that it’s pretty clear he’d be perfectly happy to never watch again, rather than either really engage it for all its faults or simply write about something else. I find myself wondering who the target audience is for this sort of thing: Fans of the show will be turned off by the rimshots in lieu of analysis, while detractors have probably stopped watching and thus have no need to keep reading. I understand that the hit counts must be kept up, but I feel like there’s probably a better way for everyone involved to spend their time and resources. To be fair, it’s not all played for the yuks: The comparison between Joffrey Baratheon and Ziggy Sobotka was fun, and calling Dany and Drogo’s sex life “the quintessence of Orientalist camp” is a perfectly legit critique. But the piece ends with an invitation to finish a dirty limerick rhyming “Targaryen” and “barbarian.” Y’know? And even some of his actual analysis goes astray in really obvious ways: It’s not a function of the fantasy genre’s supposedly inherent elitism that makes Lady’s death more affecting than that of the butcher’s boy, it’s a function of how every human being on earth reacts to the death of animals in fiction.
* Anyway, back to the show. In the books, the Hound comes across instantly as probably the scariest dude going, no matter how bad Sansa’s POV chapter says Sir Ilyn freaks her out. But in the show, we first “meet” him in long shot as he engages in some good-natured ribbing of Tyrion; next he comes across as the slightly less scary mass murderer compared to Sir Ilyn; and even his murder of the butcher’s boy is presented as an awful but all-business act, rather than the act of a guy who kills children and laughs about it. As with Cersei, the Hound got hisself humanized.
* Mark Addy is enjoyably “predictable” in the same way that Sean Bean is: He’s what you thought Robert would be, right down to the flash of ugly, sneering might-makes-right savagery when he mocks Ned for his compunctions about having Daenerys killed.
* I want Iain Glen to read me a bedtime story. So soothing!
* Do you think the final shot is enough of a cliffhanger for people? Do you think people understand what it means?
* 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.
* 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.
* 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:
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.
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!
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* 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.
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.
