Did everyone know this was a comedy but me? I actually put off reading Dash Shaw’s, what is it now, second magnum opus and first full-length science-fiction graphic novel because I find the formal experimentation of his SF stuff intimidatingly difficult to parse even in short-story format — surely a 400-page webcomic turned fat hardcover would fuck my shit up, right? But while Shaw’s shorts frequently swap complexity for clarity, at least for me, Bodyworld is a breeze to read. Part of that’s physical — the fun of its vertical layout, kicking back and flipping the pages upward on your lap or desk. But mostly it’s that the thing reads like a quirky indie-movie genre-comedy — think a mid-00s Charlie Kaufman joint, or Duncan Jones’s Moon with more laffs ‘n’ sex. We follow one helluva protagonist, Professor Paulie Panther, a cigarette-smoking, plain white tee-clad schmuck who wouldn’t look out of place hanging out with Ray D. and Doyle in a Jaime Hernandez comic and who has harnessed his prodigious appetite for doing drugs and not doing work into a career as a field-tester for hallucinogenic plants. Basically, he travels around the world smoking anything that looks unusual. For the purposes of Bodyworld that has taken him to Boney Borough, a Thoreau-like enclave whose planners mixed unfettered nature right into the zoning laws as a response to a horrific decades-long Second Civil War that began ravaging the United States, it seems, following the installation of George W. Bush. There he discovers a smokable plant that gives its users a telepathic bond with anyone in their proximity, leading to disastrous romantic entanglements and disentanglements with the local high school’s hot teacher, its prom king, and his girlfriend. But there’s more to the plant that meets the eye, and a Repo Man-style series of surreal/slapstick/science-fictional escalations leads to a funny but still black and potentially apocalyptic ending, like the Broadway version of Little Shop of Horrors.
Bodyworld‘s webcomic incarnation was famous for its vertical scroll, and for my money it’s recreated enjoyably by the vertical flip in the book format. What surprised me about Shaw’s other formal innovations here is how relatively restrained they are. You don’t really need to keep track of his complex, color-coded grid maps of Boney Borough or the school to understand what’s going on where, and the to the extent that he plays with overlaps and repetition and color and so on it’s mostly done to convey the hallucinogenic mind-melding engendered by the drug, quite effectively, at that. Moreover, I’ve often found his character designs hard to parse and hard to like — something about the way they’re constructed from purposely ugly swirls and swoops just gives me prosopagnosia — but his quartet of leads and dozen or so prominent supporting characters are by far his strongest ever in this area; you really can get who they are and what they’re about just by looking at them, which prospect is not at all unpleasant, either. And while some of the yuks fall flat (particularly with the town sheriff late in the game), it’s for the most part a dryly witty, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny comedy, with finely observed humor about high schoolers, teachers, druggies, hoary sci-fi tropes, and the sort of shiftless ne’er-do-wells you enjoy spending an evening with when your buddy brings them along. In short, it’s a prodigiously ambitious cartoonist plying the various tricks of his trade just to tell a good story you can catch some weekend afternoon and then chat about with friends at the diner afterwards.
* Top Shelf has a good 2011 ahead of it, anchored by the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the new Nate Powell, the new Incredible Change-Bots, and the new Ax.
* Today on Robot 6: Is DC Comics a two-man operation? Actually, you could say that the whole Direct Market is a three-man operation: Fully 65 of the 75 bestelling comic books of 2010 were written by Brian Michael Bendis, Geoff Johns, or Grant Morrison. That seems extraordinary to me, but then I’ve never crunched the numbers to see if this is an anomalous situation. (Hat tip: Douglas Wolk.)
I struggled with whether or not to post that roundup of the Right’s use of militaristic and eliminationist rhetoric on Saturday, I really did. I actually deleted it for a little while. Anyone with as abysmal a track record as I have when it comes to writing publicly about politics is behooved to watch his step in the heat of the moment. But when I got the sense that some people who read this blog would get, and in fact were getting, something out of the roundup, I put it back up, and there it is. Right now, though, it seems the fairest characterization of shooter Jared Loughner is that he exposed himself to a hodgepodge of rebellious books as a teenager without much of a throughline beyond “fuck the system” (I knew many liberal Ayn Rand-reading kids in high school and I bet you did too), then subsequently drew from a broad set of conspiratorial and anti-government ideologies more or less clustered on the extreme right — visible from the Tea Party fringe but mostly not in the Tea Party fringe, gold-bug stuff excepted — to formulate a personal, idiosyncratic worldview driven mostly by mental illness. In that light it was unfair of me to imply that Loughner’s actions were of a piece with those of Sharron Angle, Sarah Palin, Joe Manchin and so on, and I apologize. Clearly the potential for political violence has been much on my mind — otherwise that round-up of posts in which I used the exact same description of it seven times over the past year wouldn’t have been possible — and I’m sure that clouded my judgment somewhat.
Meanwhile, Adam Serwer correctly points out that the establishment and even anti-establishment far Right, much as they flirt with eliminationist rhetoric time and time again, stops well short of actually celebrating when their political opponents are murdered. (For the most part; doctors who perform abortions are an exception, and I imagine Julian Assange would be as well.) That’s a big difference between America today and societies that were and are genuinely torn by political violence — heck, it’s a big difference between America today and America stretching from the slave days all the way through the overturning of Jim Crow. And that’s something to be grateful for.
Something else to be grateful for, though, is the real outburst of disgust and opprobrium directed toward violent and eliminationist rhetoric by the Right that arose from this atrocity. It’s long overdue. I still say this, even though it seems unlikely that Loughner was anything but lightly or indirectly influenced by people like Angle or Allen West or that “gather your armies” guy, for a couple of reasons. First, fans of the “Overton window” concept, as are many on the Right, should be able to understand that the rise of violent, eliminationist, and militarized rhetoric and imagery in the Republican mainstream — Senatorial candidates, ex-VP candidates, the most popular talk show hosts, and so on — legitimizes those ideas in such a way that the extreme can shift even further, and in such a way that those on the extreme, particularly the mentally ill who all too often drift in that direction, feel that they’ve got the zeitgeist on their side on some level.
For another, Loughner actually did, in practice, what way too many members of the Tea Party right have nudged-nudged-winked-winked at in speeches and statements. Loughner really did“pursue Second Amendment remedies” for his grievances with the political process. Loughner really did do with bullets what ballots could not. Loughner really did attempt to thwart a government he felt was destructive of his liberties by any means necessary. Ultimately, it’s beside the point whether he was following the proverbial marching orders of these noxious figures or the less direct statements of others, just like, say, making light of rape has nothing to do with whether you actually raped anyone. The point is that when you see the stuff they’re jawing about in action, it’s not patriotic and brave and all-American, it’s not cute or passionate or funny or just red meat for the base, it’s a fucking horror show, and it’s not okay at all. Moreover, to counter the kinds of people who say “Aw c’mon, now you sound like the people who want to ban videogames,” I would say first that I don’t want to ban anything, and second that these aren’t fictional characters in a comic or movie or video game — they’re real people, real leaders or would-be leaders in fact, talking about the potential awesomeness of using violence to eliminate one’s political opponents and advance one’s agenda. Loughner’s actions cast this in stark relief, and will hopefully give people pause before acting as though that sort of rhetoric is appropriate.
Anyway, I gave up straight-up political blogging long ago, much to the relief, I imagine, of everyone who’s ever read my blog. For years now I’ve kept everything filtered through a horror or arts-specific lens, which has meant focusing mainly on human, animal, and civil rights abuses, speech and drug issues, and anything that looks like a page from a near-future dystopian science fiction novel. I may scale back even further, because I’m frankly embarrassed by my own writing on the topic and I can’t imagine anyone comes here looking for my thoughts on the issues of the day, unless it’s New Comics Day and you literally mean “issues.” But I wanted to get this all down in public, in part as a clarification/correction/apology of what I posted yesterday, and in part to explain why it worried me so horribly and why I hope it will now stop.
* Spurge also interviewed my very talented Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson, who comes at comics journalism and criticism from about a 180-degree remove from virtually everyone else I know. If you care about the field, you should read her interview.
* Game of Thrones stuff 2: I really enjoyed this report from a roundtable with George R.R. Martin. Martin tells a great anecdote about an asshole at a Lord of the Rings screening who kept shouting shit like “Giant spiders? Oh, come on!” as an illustration of how some people will just never cotton to fantasy; he speculates that A Storm of Swords will be split over the show’s third and fourth seasons; he notes the difficulty of conveying when a character is lying on television, something I thought would be quite a challenge for the series in terms of one specific plot point later in the books; and so on and so forth. If you’re like me and hungry for any kind of smart discussion of the books you can get, you obviously could do a lot worse than a discussion featuring Martin himself.
* Now Zak Smith is crowdsourcing an entire RPG: Gigacrawler, about a universe in which every available space on planets and in the void is part of one continuous, contiguous structure. In other words, all of existence is one giant dungeon. He and his crew start brainstorming the game’s major features here.
Mould Map #1
Jason Traeger, Daniel Brereton, Aidan Koch, Massimiliano Bomba, Stéphane Prigent, Kitty Clark, Matthew Lock, Lando, CF, Jonathan Chandler, Matthew Thurber, Brenna Murphy, Drew Beckmeyer, Colin Henderson, Leon Salder, writers/artists
Hugh Frost, Leon Sadler, editors
Landfill Editions, December 2010
16 large pages
$12 Buy it from Landfill Buy it from PictureBox Learn more at MouldMap.com
Ingenious idea, meet ingenious execution. In this gorgeously printed, oversized anthology, a posse of prominent and obscure artcomickers create evocative one-page science-fiction strips/images/whatever — not so much to tell a complete story as to convey a mood, an environment, a series of story possibilities that emerge into the past and future of the events depicted on the page. Aidan Koch’s bold all-caps lettering meshes perfectly with her story of a nude, distraught wanderer of the highways who knows that something terrible is growing inside of him. Lando’s similarly perambulatory protagonist is confronted in the final panel by a reptilian counterpart, the ominous of the sudden meeting conveyed by superimposing a massive image of the creature’s head over the panel itself. CF’s contribution features a warrior in freefall and ends with the phrase “ENTERING ENEMY AIRSPACE” — it stops where the story starts, basically. Jonathan Chandler’s soldiers marvel after one of their fellows — “He really did it. He went out alone after the lights.” — whose journey to a cryptic series of what look like cardboard cutouts of robots or aliens remains unexplained. Many more pages are simply wordless images or wordless series of images featuring vaguely science-fictional figures doing vaguely science-fictional things. The tight space constraints offer the participants a welcome opportunity to step away from the typical worldbuilding concerns of alt/artcomix-genre hybrids and instead focus on world-evoking, a sense of what it would be like to be there, even when you don’t know what or how or why “there” is. The comic is printed in a flourescent orange and blue palette, like Cold Heat‘s pink and blue gone radioactive — a post-apocalypse run by a New York Mets memorabilia cargo cult. It’s a fine package and a delightful combination of form and function.
I’m almost impressed by how awful the Alan Moore/Jason Aaron thread on Robot 6 has gotten. Pure sociopathy by the bottom of it. Moore should have known better, Kirby should have known better, Siegel and Shuster should have known better, etc. Forget “truth, justice, and the American way” or “with great power comes great responsibility”—FUCK YOU, PAY ME is the motto of superhero comics fandom. It’s a grotesque agglomeration of moral monsters, vicious little philistines anonymously spewing Randian bile from the safety of screen names like “techjedi.” No wonder Moore wants nothing to do with any of it anymore.
* I whipped up a nice long thumbsucker analyzing Axel Alonso’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Entertainment for Robot 6. I hope you’ll take the time to read it. The nutshell version is there are some big question marks even (perhaps even especially) pertaining to the areas where we have the most information by which to judge him, but also a lot of reason to be optimistic in terms of his approach to creators. One thing I didn’t include because because I’m not sure what its actual import is but which still seems worth noting as a positive for the biz: He’s the second Hispanic Marvel EIC in a row. (Memo to Iron Man editor Alejandro Arbona: Patience, grasshopper.)
* I suppose I shouldn’t’ve been, but even so I was surprised by the dominance of media tie-in titles on the list of 2010’s bestselling graphic novels for the Direct Market (as sold through monopoly distributor Diamond). The Walking Dead, Scott Pilgrim, and Kick-Ass leave a grand total of one slot open on the list, which was taken by a book that got over largely on the strength of a fortuitous “it’s Superman meets Twilight” blurb in the press.
* On the periodical comics end of the list, events still sell–that’s really the only lesson you can draw. Well, that, and books called X-Men #1 trigger some sort of lizard-brain response in the direct Market. One more: The Direct Market is all but a three-man industry at this point, with Brian Bendis, Geoff Johns, and to a lesser extent Grant Morrison dominating.
* Yesterday was the big Game of Thrones presentation at the Television Critics Association press tour. This bums me out because it means that yesterday would have been the day George R.R. Martin made his two big surprise announcements (one surely must have been the release date for A Dance with Dragons, but that pesky plural really has thrown me for a loop beyond that) were it not for his awful-sounding bout of urosepsis over Christmas. It’s also a bit of a bummer because the 15 minutes of footage screened for the assembled critics will likely never air publicly since it used existing film scores as a stopgap soundtrack. The most in-depth summary I’ve seen of the footage is from Chicago TV critic and über-nerd Maureen Ryan. It sounds like it was basically very very good, allowing for some quibbles of the strength of various wigs and Peter Dinklage’s English accent. (Via Westeros.)
* Alright, I really have no excuses for why I didn’t wise up to Zak Smith/Sabbath’s big “Gygaxian Democracy” experiment, but now he’s croudsourcing things a sea monster can do, so you know I’m all over it.
When thinking of CF’s revisionist-fantasy series Powr Mastrs, two things usually spring to my mind: Its psychedelic visual flourishes — both the precision and strength with which his wire-thin pencil line imbues them and the way such visuals feel like a natural part of any fantasist’s vocabulary — and its graphic sexuality — equal parts disturbing and erotic, serving perhaps as a substitute for violence, one that’s actually capable of shocking a modern audience. Unfortunately for me that’s often all I think about when I think about the series. But in re-reading all three volumes in preparation for this review, lots more jumped out besides. For one thing, this is a funny comic! From Subra Ptareo’s would-be monasticism to Jim Bored’s futile attempts to get someone, anyone to free him from his prison to the Sub-Men’s shenanigans, it’s frequently LOLtastic. It’s also a lot less rambly and more focused than I remember it: The overarching plot, about Mosfet Warlock’s weird science and various other characters’ attempts to use it for their own ends and/or seek revenge for having been its unwilling guinea pigs, establishes itself right quick and is a constant presence. And back to the sex for a second: It’s hot stuff! And it’s kinky in a way that feels genuine, which takes guts as well as perviness — the naughty part of this volume feels like it emerges from considered contemplation of dominance and submission and how much fun they can be even as they look fairly awful to outsiders. Meanwhile the specifics of CF’s SFF here — the biomechanics, the spellcraft, the bestiary, the economy, the worldbuilding, the whole nine — feel singular and yet still intelligble. What a pleasure to watch an artist make genre come to him and his interests and obsessions rather than the other way around.
* The Star Wars series hits Blu-Ray in Septmember. It’s not clear if the original versions of the original trilogy will be a part of either the three-disc original-trilogy set or the 9-disc set for the enchilada. My hunch is that they’ll do it to please the nerds (and I include myself in that number), but there’s no predicting George Lucas.
* For some reason, the common desire to wish the sins of America into the cornfield manifested in the bowdlerized Huck Finn now being produced and the bowdlerized Constitution read aloud in Congress today didn’t occur to me until Andrew Sullivan pointed it out.
* Springboarding off Fantagraphics’ Complete Carl Barks announcement, Graeme McMillan asks what it means that Disney is publishing comics starring its characters through publishers other than Marvel. The long and the short of it is that Disney sees Marvel as being not in the comics business, but in the Marvel business. That’s consistent with their approach to many of their other brands: It’s not like they made Jim Henson start building all the puppets for their theme parks or had Pixar do Tangled for them. But it also tells you something about what Marvel’s approach to comics will likely be for the foreseeable future.
* Elsewhere, Graeme and Jeff Lester ponder at length why Axel Alonso got the Editor-in-Chief gig at Marvel over Tom Brevoort, who’s both more visible to the public and more integral to the company now-flagship Avengers franchise and nearly all of its big line-defining crossover events. But I don’t think it’s a mystery at all, frankly: Brevoort has said multiple times that he had no desire to take that job. I also don’t think it’s any mystery what Quesada will be doing, as it’s what he’s already been doing for quite a while.
* DC goes day-and-date digital with its Batman Beyond ongoing series. I note these things because they seem noteworthy, not because I have any idea what they really mean. I also note that I hear a lot of these series have had problems actually coming out day-and-date even when announced as such, particularly at Marvel.
* I haven’t seen Gareth Edwards’s much-lauded first-person giant-monster romance Monsters, but what little I’ve heard about it makes him sound like a pretty good choice to direct the next American Godzilla remake. Then again, wasn’t that basically what Cloverfield was? I mean that as a compliment by the way.
* Lighter-note time! Hahahaha, Tom Ewing reviews “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme for Popular, the blog on which he reviews every UK #1 single ever. A number-one hit that misattributed leadership of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Raphael!
* Three music videos of note today:
* My gosh, what a song “Film Music” by Family Fodder is! (Via Douglas Wolk, through whom I first heard it a while back.)
* Here’s the hugely enjoyable video for master pasticheur Destroyer’s late-period Roxy Music homage “Kaputt.” (Via Ryan Catbird.)
* Finally, this one’s unembeddable so you’ll just have to click through: Wubba wubba wubba, goodbye, God bless, not only in the USA but in the UK too, it’s Hercules & Love Affair’s “My House.” Perhaps only my wife, who hears me sing “Everybody Everybody” on the daily, has any idea just how ready I am for Club MTV/House of Style nostalgia. (Via Pitchfork.)
Crickets #3
Sammy Harkham, writer/artist
self-published, December 2010
52 pages
$8 Buy it from PictureBox
In the past I’ve said the the solo alternative comic-book anthology series works great as an opportunity for developing cartoonists to experiment in front of an audience on a regular basis. That’s certainly true. But it also works great as a showcase for a confident, experienced cartoonist to show off his chops at a manageable but still considerable length — a star turn, if you will. Think the last two issues of Eightball, for example. And think Crickets #3. The bulk of this self-published issue of Sammy Harkham’s solo showcase is occupied by “Blood of the Virgin,” the story of a week in the life of a harried young father and hack in the stable of a fictionalized version of Roger Corman’s American International Pictures who really wants to make films, goddammit. It’s Harkham’s longest and richest exploration yet of his go-to themes: family as a series of unignorable demands on one’s time and emotions, and ethics and morality as a manifestation of how we deal with those demands. It offers him a seamless way to integrate the horror and trash-cinema influences he’s long displayed in comics like “Poor Sailor” and “Black Death” with the literary fiction he’s always championed as editor of Kramers Ergot but which has been overshadowed by that anthology’s artcomix and genre pastiches, not to mention his own. It gives him a shot at an Ignatz Series-style canvas in terms of trim size and two-color printing. It offers us page after page of his deeply pleasurable cartooning, which in its feathery line and dot-eyed clown-nosed character designs and alternately sinuous and bulbous lettering recalls old-timers like Gray and Segar and young turks like Crane and Huizenga while aping none of them. It enables him to sneak in non-narrative, artcomix-influenced visual flourishes completely diagetically — fog enshrouding a neighborhood during the small hours, a mushy plaster cast making a melted nightmare out of someone’s face, frank and kinky depictions of sexuality. It’s basically a just plain terrific alternative comic.
* Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio is joining Jane’s Addiction. Uh, okay, sure. One thing many critics are wrong about is the greatness of Jane’s Addiction up through and including Ritual de lo Habitual, that greatness being very very great. I understand that Perry and Dave’s subsequent self-parodic antics cast a long shadow, but man, before that? Goth Zeppelin.
* Would you like to hear Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” as rendered through the dulcet tones of Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV? I don’t see why you wouldn’t! (Via Cindy Hotpoint.)
* and DC Comics makes a slew of announcements: all ongoing series are $2.99, letters pages are returning, Peter Milligan on Red Lanterns, and Sean Murphy on an American Vampire spin-off. That’s a pair of shots fired in the PR war, hopefully a step in the right direction for the Direct Market on pricing, a sign that Green Lantern is joining Batman as the two core franchises of the DCU, and a sign that American Vampire is joining Fables as the two core franchises of Vertigo.
* The Comics Journal has launched The Panelists, a new group blog featuring Derik Badman, Alex Boney, Isaac Cates, Craig Fischer, Jared Gardner, and Charles Hatfield. That’s a formidable crew.
* From good to bad: Graeme McMillan and the Comics Alliance crew explain what made some of 2010’s worst superhero comics so awful — very little schtick, lots of dragging very bad writing and art choices into the light of day and investigating what went wrong. Well done.
* If you’ve ever wondered what a smart critic with zero experience with any comics or video games would think of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, check out Edward Copeland’s review. He situates the movie in the (500) Days of Summer/Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist sphere, as you might expect, and preferred the rom-com stuff to the fighting and video-game stuff, as you also might expect.
* I’d need to reread the Fourth World saga to be sure — it’s been a few years — but I’m pretty sure that, contra Tim O’Neil, Jack Kirby’s Anti-Life wasn’t fascism, or more accurately it wasn’t just fascism — it was war. I cribbed that from Tom Spurgeon and I think it squares — after all, anti-fascist superhero comics from the World War II generation were a dime a dozen, but the Fourth World Saga stood out for a reason. Regarding Tim’s contention that Morrison’s Anti-Life is less powerful a concept than Kirby’s because it’s imposed rather than embraced, I think that’s probably true, but there certainly are people who want to impose Anti-Life’s real-life equivalent and it’s a valid avenue of exploration.
* Tom Spurgeon’s interview with the comics critic and journalist David Brothers helped me get at something I’ve often found frustrating about Brothers’s work. He’s a fine writer who brings welcome eye-on-the-ball focus and deserved indignation to his commentary on industry ethics, diversity issues, and business practices, but I’ve been frustrated by his tendency to focus so much on superheroes and other fantastic-action genre work and his occasional lapses into his particular character-specific version of “Wolverine would never say that!” But regarding the former, Brothers reveals that he only this year started reading Chris Ware and Los Bros Hernandez — and what a year to start! — and regarding the latter, he owns up to “basic fan entitlement.” In other words he’s young and (like all of us, hopefully) growing as a writer. Read the interview for his smart rejection of “hey, true art takes time!” defenses of late books and for a great bit on superhero comics’ civilian fashions (although I strongly disagree with his contention that “part of being an adult is wearing a shirt that has buttons on it every once in a while”):
The lack of attention paid to fashion in comics is baffling to me. We all pay a certain amount of attention, time, and money on what we wear, but you wouldn’t know it when you look at mainstream comics. Guys still wear Solid Colored T-Shirt and Latex Tight Jeans, with maybe a loose, formless leather jacket on top. Women wear Solid Colored Belly Shirt/Baby-T, Low Rise Jeans, and Visible Thong Straps. Belts, jackets, suspenders, and even something as simple as logos tends to be almost nonexistent, barring the relatively few artists who take the time to do it right.
The visible thong thing really is the post-millennial equivalent of ’70s and ’80s shirtless vest-wearing street toughs and ’90s mullet-based hairstyles.
* Speaking of: I can’t help but be a bit disappointed with the (leaked and/or official depending on what post you’re reading) video for Kanye West’s monster, especially given such recent direct points of comparison as the clips for Scissor Sisters’ “Invisible Light” or West’s own “Runaway.” To the table occupied by the former’s dizzyingly trashy recreation of giallo and other groovy-age staples and the latter’s go-for-baroque parade of sexual, racial, and self-mythological neurosis, “Monster” brings a cornucopia of played-out “sexy dead model” visuals I saw in a fashion magazine, like, ten years ago. Moreover I think the whole sentiment behind “Monster” loses something when removed from the self-loathing draped all over My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; conflicted tracks like “Runaway” contain both sides of Kanye’s macho-asshole schtick in the way that the tough-guy songs just don’t. Finally, once you’ve read Nitsuh Abebe’s suggestion that Nicki Minaj should have been represented by a shapeshifter rather than a pair of good/evil twins, you really can’t unsee it. It’s like (as I’m fond of mentioning) when I learned that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was supposed to be filled by Pete Clemenza until it fell through over a wage dispute with Richard S. Castellano.
* Inspired by discovering that Fred Van Lente is using the Runaways’ arch-nemeses/parents the Pride as the villains in this week’s Iron Man Legacy #10: Are the people like me who are big fans of largely abandoned superhero teams like the Runaways or the Agents of Atlas or the Seven Soldiers of Victory due to the quality of the recent runs that (re)introduced them the equivalent of die-hard devotees of largely abandoned old superhero teams like the Secret Defenders or the Champions or the Suicide Squad or the West Coast Avengers? Is it different because Runaways, Atlas, and Seven Soldiers were varying degrees of genuine critical darling while those earlier books weren’t? Or am I forever doomed to spaz out over the prospect of a Gorilla Man/Nico team-up the same way some people lose they shit any time Hercules and Angel hang out?
* Has the rise of “geek culture” as a cultural force so omnipresent that Patton Oswalt feels the need to ramble on in Wired about how in his day geeks had to walk to the Android’s Dungeon uphill both ways led to an improvement in the comfort and safety of geeky kids from bullying and ridicule? I’d really like to know the answer to that one.
