* Jeet Heer sings the praises of Todd Hignite’s The Art of Jaime Hernandez. I don’t know why things always get so nasty in Comics Comics comment threads — I think they may have imported bad behavior from their various sparring partners, or maybe it’s just that any site with the word “Comics” in the name brings out the worst in people — but check it out anyway to watch various smart people (eg. Evan Dorkin) try to figure out why no one talked about this and other recent books of note.
* Anyone know if there’s a way to acquire back issues of Desert Island’s house anthology Smoke Signal? Can’t get ’em through the website except for the most recent one. If they’re at the Festival tomorrow then by God I’m grabbing them!
Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is FCHS Vol. 1 by Vito Delsante and Rachel Freire, self-published — a thoughtfully paced, impeccably drawn, admirably horny teen dramedy.
Operating out of the Batcave that is NYC retail mecca Jim Hanely’s Universe, writer Delsante and artist Freire have crafted an adorable, believable high-school soap set circa 1990. It’s got a couple of major things going for it. The first is Delsante’s scripting, a sort of easy-going casual banter that tends toward the economical as most comics writing must but never comes across like the presentation of an array of reactions designed to move the plot from point A to point B. Sex is on the mind of these kids all the time — which is perfectly accurate! And while they discuss it with realistic cussing and matter-of-factness –- and are even occasionally shown nude in the service of the material–it’s neither some porno smutfest nor a depiction of teen sex as some soul-crushing vortex of sordid desire. It’s something young people really like doing –- just like playing in a band or playing football or jackassing around or eating tacos. Hooray for that!
Click here for a full review and purchasing information.
* Here’s more engrossing writing on life after recent developments in World of Warcraft by Bruce Baugh. I think the points he raises here about constructing a player’s early experience to maximize enjoyment in the immediate term and the impact of the story in the medium-to-long term can apply to pretty much any form of narrative storytelling.
* Moreover, as I think I’ve said before, it’s really only after reading Bruce’s posts of late that it’s occurred to me that the “line-wide event” model of superhero comics publishing developed by Marvel and DC over the past half-decade echoes the way WoW is set up. Like, okay, here’s this new expansion pack, and now everyone has to deal with the Lich King, or now everyone has to deal with natural disasters caused by a crazy dragon; here’s this new event, and now everyone has to deal with Captain America fighting Iron Man, or now everyone has to deal with President Obama offering a Cabinet position to the Green Goblin because he shot an alien on live TV. If you figure that there’s some sort of nerd collective unconscious that welcomed both these developments, you can also see why that collective unconscious has rebelled somewhat now that the events aren’t quite so all-encompassing, or indeed jostling up against one another in a way that confuses readers looking for one single direction to march in.
And do click that link — it’s a con report on the RIO Comicon from Jah Furry, and he’s got a lot of terrific photos of what looks like a very vibrant artcomics scene.
* Finally, David Fincher should do a shot-for-shot remake of Fight Club with Justin Timberlake as Tyler, Jesse Eisenberg as the narrator, and Kristen Stewart as Marla.
Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Wu-Massacre by Meth Ghost and Rae (aka Method Man, Ghostface Killah, and Raekwon), released by Def Jam — three men and a mythology.
Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Fandancer by Geoff Grogan, self-published — a visually overwhelming examination of images of femininity through a masculine lens.
…from that stunning cover, perhaps my favorite of the year, on down, it’s definitely a hit….The story, to the extent that there is one–and in the cut-up/collage section, who the hell really knows–isn’t important. What is important is the dazzling art from Grogan, in a variety of styles: primary-color Kirby pastiche, loose and gorgeous red-and-gold-and-blue crayon, the startlingly effective reappropriated collage material which appears to be tweaking all the usual suspects in that arena, from Lichtenstein to Spiegelman to Glamourpuss-era Sim. No matter the style, man oh man does all of it work hella well on the oversized pages Grogan’s working with here, with really stellar paper stock production values to boot–each flip of the page is an eye-popping pleasure….[W]hat emerges most clearly from the deliberately elliptical and allusive storytelling is a sense of struggle, of great inner beauty under traumatic assault from great inner ugliness.
Click here for a full review and purchase information.
Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best albums of 2010. Today’s album is Swim by Caribou, released by Merge–a dance record of muted, haunted psychedelia.
Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010. Today’s comic is Wally Gropius by Tim Hensley, published by Fantagraphics — the first great comic of the Great Recession.
Wally Gropius is more than just the main character of Tim Hensley’s elaborate and arch parody of ’60s teen-comedy and child-billionaire comics–he’s more like the language it’s told in, or better yet the font it uses….Watching him and his equally gangly, geometric cohorts stretch and sprint and smash their way across Hensley’s brightly colored backgrounds and block-lettered sound effects is like reading your favorite poem–or even, as we see in a panel that became my Rosetta Stone for the book, Wally Gropius itself–as translated into a language with a totally different alphabet. What you know is in there, somewhere, but to use a frequently repeated line from the book, you just can’t quite put your finger on it.
Click here for a full review and purchasing information.
* With Boardwalk Empire‘s season finale approaching, HBO is unleashing the kraken with regards to publicity for its next big thing, Game of Thrones. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the network released hi-res versions of all the photos from last week’s Entertainment Weekly spread on the show…
* a preview of a 15-minute making-of featurette they’ll be unveiling prior to the Boardwalk Empire finale next Sunday…
And frankly? It all looks wonderful. In particular, starting that trailer with that particular scene appears to indicate that they know what the books are about, not just what they’re about, if you follow me. As always, they’re just trailers and promo stills and therefore completely unreliable, but. But but but! (Links via Winter Is Coming and Westeros, as usual.)
* Meanwhile, I plan on finding it really weird to watch mainstream pop-culture sites cover the show–even though I myself only discovered the series this year and am far from a GoT OG.
* The enormously engrossing, uncomfortably disconcerting online first-person horror film/ARG Marble Hornets has returned after a seven-month absence for its second season. When I say “uncomfortably disconcerting” I’m really not kidding. Even though I’ve just about exhausted all the information, commentary, and parody available on the project, I still find myself freaking out a little bit when I have to go out in the dark to take out the trash. They’ve hit on a really powerful set of images and techniques. If you’ve got about a movie’s length of time to kill, start here; the latest “entry” is embedded below.
* It’s official: The Hobbit movies will be filmed in 3D. Peter Jackson seems like a filmmaker who was made to make 3D movies. Certainly more so than James Cameron!
* Wow, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had a rough opening night. Like, rough enough that I wonder if someone–the creators, the performers, the audience, the newspapers, Bono, someone–was just joking. Bitter experience and Avatar have taught me that I have no clue whether or not something will be a for-the-ages flop/demonstration of classical hubris; that said, the story of this show has been completely mesmerizing, and not for the reasons one imagines Julie Taymor, Bono, the Edge, and Sony or Marvel or whoever want it to be. On a qualitative level, my appreciation for Taymor’s glam weirdness is offset by my disgust with the leaden pretension of the U2 music I’ve heard from the show, so I don’t know how to feel about it in that regard either.
* Chris Mautner’s Comics College column tackles Hergé. Since all of his Tintin work is in the same format and working basically the same genre and tone, he’s one of the great “where to begin?” artists in comics. Well, here’s where to begin!
* Real Life Horror: Every time I think about it, I am freshly amazed that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large nine years after the 9/11 attacks they orchestrated. (And that we’ll probably never be able to try and convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because the Bush Administration tortured him, but that’s a different matter.) The AP has a fascinating, if somewhat depressing, report on the lucky breaks that have kept al-Zawahiri out of American clutches and/or crosshairs. Here’s hoping that once all the money we save by freezing federal employees’ salaries singlehandedly ends the recession and persuades Republicans to put aside their differences and become good-faith allies of the President, there’ll be enough left over help catch this murderous fuck.
* This is one of those days when I want to link to everything that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. Money quotes:
I’d love to see someone make the argument that private sector managerial experience entitles you to run the NYPD.
What scares me is how this sort of crime-fighting, post-9/11, basically justifies itself. So we’re at war with terror. A war means we need to find and isolate the bad guys. So we send agents provocateurs to areas where bad guys might frequent and, essentially, employ a version of buy-bust theory to smoke them out.Then we announce their neutralization via arrest, thus proving that….we’re at war with terror. Rinse. Repeat.[…]Indeed, I suspect one could declare war against racism and just as easily employ provocateurs to cyclically “prove” the problem of violent white supremacists.
* Rest in peace, Irvin Kershner and Leslie Nielsen. The Empire Strikes Back and The Naked Gun are two of the movies I’ve absorbed completely enough to have a hard time imagining how I would think and speak about certain things without an array of quotes from them at my disposal.
* Finally, as I mentioned earlier, DestructorComics.com is up and running. Matt Wiegle and I will be updating it on Mondays and Thursdays. I can’t wait to share these stories with you!
Matt Wiegle and I have launched DestructorComics.com, a new webcomic site for our Destructor stories. It would not be exaggerating to say that my whole life has led up to this. We hope you enjoy it!
* I feel like this episode had the highest percentage of good-to-strong material yet. Jim’s departure was well staged, right down to Daryl’s unexpected nod of the head. The approach to the CDC was good and creepy, and I appreciated how minimal actual zombie shots were in it — they were more menacing because they were treated as an inevitability, rather than a clear and present danger. Shane’s near-snap may have been played a bit heavily, but the way he got all huffy-puffy was weird enough for that not to matter. And I was particularly struck by Amy’s resurrection, which was, of all things, sensual and beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen zombie fiction treat coming back in that way and I’d love to see more curveballs of that sort.
* But this episode was also a clear illustration of why I probably shouldn’t expect them. Of course Daryl’s the guy who says “I say we kill him now and shoot the dead girl in the head while we’re at it.” Of course the abused wife can’t stop once she starts hitting her dead husband in the head with a pickaxe. Of course we have someone who can’t let go of their dead loved one (cf. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) and someone else whose inevitable death we have to deal with sooner or later while debating whether we do things like that or not (cf. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead). Of course the CDC couldn’t stop it, there’s only one guy left there, he’s breaking down, and the grounds are littered with dead soldiers. I mean, I read The Stand too. And of course when the door finally opens up, everyone’s silhouetted in enough white light to recreate that Golden Girls episode where Sophia goes to Heaven but Sal tells her it’s not her time.
* Point is, if there’s a zombie/post-apocalyptic trope or cliché, they’ll hit it, as hard and as dead-center as they can. If they have time to do some stuff differently, great, but it’s not where their bread is buttered. I don’t know if this is due to a lack of imagination on their part, or one of ambition. That is, are the filmmakers just kind of pedestrian, or do they not trust the audience enough to get up the gumption zig where they’re expected to zag? I was glad to see that Curt Purcell used similar terms to talk about the show’s decision to address the pseudo-science behind the outbreak, something the comic has hardly ever done — in fact, Robert Kirkman has said he will never reveal the origin of the plague. The last thing The Walking Dead wants to do is risk alienating the audience with mystery like Lost or Battlestar Galactica did.
* Fortunately, I’m not too disappointed at this point. I said I was going to do this last week, and sure enough, I seem really to have recalibrated my expectations so that The Walking Dead is for me what The Vampire Diaries is for my wife, say. I went into tonight’s episode thinking “Oh boy, I can’t wait to see some good zombie attacks” — not much more or much less than that. I am at least enjoying the show on that level. When the “more” comes along, great! When the “less” comes along, oh well, it’s only The Walking Dead.
(Note: I originally posted this review on January 18, 2008. This was before I’d read much, if any, of Gilbert’s Fritz material from Love and Rockets. I think the review holds up, which is why I’m re-running it; but with all of Beto’s post-Palomar Palomar-verse work under my belt now, if anything I find Chance in Hell, both its content and its very existence, even more disturbing. On a story level, the “movie” from which the graphic novel is “adapted” turns out to be a “what-if” for its co-star Fritz (whose prostitute character in it doesn’t have a speaking role), featuring a protagonist whose life easily could have been Fritz’s if her mother Maria had been just a bit more heartless or her father Hector just a bit more awful. But that right there’s the thing: Gilbert basically takes the single worst thing ever done by anyone in any of his stories, turns up the volume on it, and builds a new, even more violent and hideous story around it. “Some carry the pit in them for the rest of their lives,” says the book. And later: “There’ve been people who’ve survived, but each has carried with him a distinct odor for the rest of his life. A unique smell that he could never remove. Like mine. Like the smell I carry and must mask with a special cologne of my own design. Is there something you must mask?”)
—
Rough, rough stuff from the creator of Palomar. Hernandez is in the midst of creating graphic novels based on the B-movies that his Palomar-verse character Fritz starred in, but “B-movie” might give you the wrong impression here. This isn’t one of those howlers the bots made fun of on MST3K–it’s the kind of disturbing, unpleasant film starring and shot by unknowns that you might rent on a whim from the horror or European section of your old neighborhood video store, watch, and spend the rest of the evening worried about the mental health of cast and crew. The story concerns Empress, an orphaned toddler abandoned in a sprawling, dog-eat-dog garbage dump and raped so frequently that she doesn’t even seem to notice anymore. A farcical string of bloodily violent incidents leads her to a life as the unofficially adopted daughter of a poetry editor who claims to have come from the same circumstances, and then eventually to a second life as the wife of a young district attorney, but in both cases violence and squalor cling to her like a stench, to use a frequently invoked metaphor.
This is the angriest I can ever recall Gilbert’s art looking. That’s saying something: My wife, for example, finds his books almost difficult to look at–“His characters just look so hard,” she says, and they’ve never been harder than here. Right from the get-go his figures seem dashed off as in a white heat, while several early landscapes and backgrounds in the hellish dump look like the whole world is on fire. His almost supernaturally confident pacing of scenes and the cuts between them evoke in their matter-of-factness the acceptance of everyday brutality by the characters themselves. At times the jumpcuts can be quite funny, as when a scene between Empress and her adopted father consists solely of a pair of panels where they argue over whether a glass is half empty or half full; both Hernandez and his characters know how reductive this exchange is, yet also know it’s quite true to who they are.
But when that metronomic editing slows down, the effect is powerful, particularly because it is often done to draw out scenes of gutwrenching violence or tragedy. (The centerpiece scene in the brothel is as disturbing as the death squad attack in Gilbert’s masterpiece Poison River; there as here a knowing glance is all-important, but here it causes murder rather than prevents it.) The end of the book changes the pacing again, revving up the jumpcuts to suggest unsolved crime and unglued minds, and to be honest I’ve revisited it three or four times today and I’m still not sure what’s going on. Maybe that’s a problem, maybe it’s not. Since I see myself revisiting this book, a gruesome, enraged commentary on just how shitty things can be, many, many times in the future, I’m leaning toward “not a problem at all.”
* Bruce Baugh on The Shattering, the world-changing component of World of Warcraft’s big Cataclysm expansion/event — part one, part two, part three. I’m a sucker for Bruce’s writing on gaming, but I think this is of interest to fans of superhero comics as well because of how directly it speaks to the pleasure of a huge event-driven overhaul of a shared fictional universe, an overhaul that takes care of some housecleaning in addition to opening up story possibilities. Do click on part two at the very least; it’s the photo-driven one, and even I can see how different and much more vivid everything looks now.
* Curt Purcell responds to Tom Spurgeon’s call for good superhero fights. I nominate Superman vs. Batman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Nixon vs. the grandma robot in Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s Hard Boiled–honestly, Frank Miller is fight-scene magic and I could go on–the Immortal Weapons tournament fights in Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja’s Immortal Iron Fist, Daredevil and Elektra vs. Bullseye in Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s Daredevil, pretty much any storyarc-ending fight in Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley’s Invincible (eg. Conquest)…lotsa stuff.
By the end of his post-Palomar Love and Rockets comics, Gilbert often draws his characters like they’re the only people on earth. Their acts are isolated against a blank background, or they parade themselves in front of us and address us directly like B-movie actresses at a convention panel or motivational speakers on an arena stage. They’re larger than life and spotlit as such.
New Tales of Old Palomar reminds us that life goes on around them, and the earth surrounds them. Beto’s contribution to the Igort-edited Ignatz line of international art-comic series, these three issues present a suite of stories from Palomar’s past. They fill in a few notable lacuane–where Tonantzin and Diana came from, what was up with the gang of kids we’d occasionally see who were a few years older than the Pipo/Heraclio group, how Chelo lost her eye. A lot of this turns out to be really fascinating, especially if you’ve spent a month immersing yourself in the Palomar-verse. But to me it’s not what’s told that matters, but how it’s told. Maybe it’s seeing Gilbert work at magazine size again, maybe it’s the creamy off-white paper stock, maybe it’s the thinner, finer line he’s using, but New Tales simply feels different than anything we’ve seen from Beto in years.
Once again characters are rooted in the streets of Palomar and the wilderness beyond, stretching off in all directions. Indeed the wilderness, as much as I hate to use this cliché, is as much a character in these stories as anyone or anything else: It’s vast, almost abstractly so at times, and it houses at least as many mysteries as Fritz’s backstory. Gilbert uses it to bring the strip’s mostly forgotten supernatural and science fiction elements back to the foreground–ghosts and spirits on one hand, and sinister “researchers” on the other. And these in turn tie in to long-abandoned plot threads: Tonantzin’s slow-burning madness, say, or the hinted-at Cold War experiments that seem to have quietly unleashed genuine danger in Palomar’s surroundings, or the way Palomar seems to exist as a spiritual entity quite aside from the people who happen to inhabit it. But these connections are mostly teased out, not hit with the sledgehammer emotional force of the post-Palomar comics’ equivalent sinister or macabre bits. The trick Gilbert pulls here is to persuade us, through visuals and pacing, to put aside our foreknowledge of all that comes later, all the tragedy and horror, all the manic escapades and blackness, and exchange it for a quiet, yellowed air of mystery and menace–and eventual safety, since all’s well that ends well here. The shadow is there, but it’s only that, a shadow of the crystalline moment at hand, hinting at a vast and unknowable world beyond. Beautiful stuff.
(Programming note: As I did with Jaime, I’ll be reviewing Gilbert’s contributions to the final issue of Love and Rockets Vol. 2 and (when I get to them — still a ways to go!) the first three issues of Love and Rockets Vol. 3 on their own. Click here read about the Jaime half of this comic.)
In order to read this story, I had to turn to my massive Luba hardcover, which I believe collects all of the post-Palomar Palomar-verse stories in chronological order. I sorta wish I’d realized this going into my read-through of all Gilbert’s work, since it’s obviously how I prefer to read this stuff. But for the purposes of a review-a-thon like this it wouldn’t have made much sense to consume this material in one giant hardcover. I wouldn’t have been able to do the whole gigantic work justice in one go, especially compared to the more manageable chunks in which I read the rest of Los Bros’ work; besides, no way could I have maintained my schedule by reading the thing in two days.
But flipping through the book to get to the final post-Palomar story (to date, I believe), which remains otherwise uncollected, I discovered that the stories immediately leading up to this one are “Blackouting” and “Doralis.” If those titles don’t mean anything to you I won’t spoil it, but they were the two big audible-gasp, dropped-jaw, cover-gaping-mouth-with-hand moments from High Soft Lisp and Luba in America. “Devastating” just about covers it, though not quite–they’re the big black holes into which their respective storylines drop. Where could Beto possibly go from there?
The answer is “a happy ending,” of course. At long last he returns to Venus, Petra’s daughter and one of the least damaged, most well-adjusted, most self-assured characters in the whole post-Palomar oeuvre. Now a teenager, she’s virtually everything her mother and aunts never got to be. She has a healthy, fun-sounding sex life with her boyfriend, who also happens to be her best friend of many years’ standing. She gets along great with her mother and both her aunts despite their estrangement. Her personal segment of the extended family seems quite secure — Petra has remarried to a guy who sounds swell, Petra herself put on a bunch of marriage-security weight and sounds happy herself, Venus and her kid sister get along. Venus is smart, funny, quick-witted, kind-hearted, a pretty unabashed nerd, beautiful…just a real kick-ass kid. It’s an uplifting note to end on after all this darkness.
Most uplifting at all is Venus’s power to process and contextualize her family’s story healthily. In her interactions with her mother and aunts, we see she’s able to admire their admirable qualities — and for all the horror we’ve been shown, all three sisters have plenty to admire about them, their simple survival not being the least of it — while not letting their bad sides taint her. (If that takes a bit of denial on her part, so be it.) For example, she’s revealed in this final strip to be her Tia Fritz’s number-one fan. She’s seen all of her aunt’s movies–with the possible exception of the surreal faux-porn flick from her pre-movie-star days that’s currently causing a lot of buzz. Venus dismisses it as basically unimportant compared to Fritz’s latest release, which Fritz herself wrote and directed. We the reader can see the symbolic resonance of the clip from the strange pseudo-porn movie — a man emerges from a mist-enshrouded forest to have sex with a nude Fritz, her breasts swollen by pregnancy, only to transform into some sort of beast in the middle of the act, then disappear into the background, leaving Fritz naked, disoriented, and alone. It’s her life as a sexual being, basically…and Venus doesn’t give a fuck, because she prefers the movie where Fritz is the writer-director-star. I get the feeling that Venus is equipped to be a multi-hyphenate for her own life in a way that few of the characters we’ve met have been.
Indeed, in our final glimpse of her, she asks her late family and friends — Grandma Maria, Gato, Sergio, Dolaris — to watch over the three sisters, and then provides these guardian angels’ answers to her prayers herself, same font, same caption style. Writer, director, star. I wish her all the luck in the world.
* Halfway between Chris Cunningham’s clip for Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” and a Tool video, you’ll find this creepy-lovely video for School of Seven Bells’ practically perfect certain-slant-of-light dreampop ballad “I L U.” (Via Pitchfork.)
* The way this excellent Dan Nadel essay on Jack Kirby’s California years for Vice magazine is spread across six hitcount-whoring pages is irritating, to be sure, but don’t let that stop you from reading it. It’s a beautifully written appreciation of Kirby’s art and anti-war humanism. One thing I come back to a lot when thinking about Kirby and about Grant Morrison is Tom Spurgeon’s contention that Kirby’s idea of Anti-Life (essentially, war) is a lot more challenging than Morrison’s (essentially, being a fascist creep). No reasonable person can think up reasons to support Morrisonian Anti-Life. Kirbyan Anti-Life, on the other hand–well, you know.
* More Vice: Nick Gazin interviews Chip Kidd on his new book of superhero pop-culture ephemera, Shazam!, as a part of his latest comics review round-up. I like how he pretty much openly sticks it to Jon Vermilyea and Koren Shadmi, as if that really were the role of the critic after all. (Maybe he’s kidding, I dunno, it’s Vice and the dude says he hates cats so there’s obviously something wrong with him. Also, add the damn comics-only RSS feed already.)
* Here’s a trailer for Moon director Duncan Jones’s new movie Source Code. Two thoughts: 1) Wow, he sure knows what he likes, huh? 2) Inception sure opened some doors, huh? 3) The quality of this film notwithstanding, I wonder how much longer “watching major forms of transportation blow up in trailers” will last as a thing.
I’ve never seen a cartoonist so thoroughly dismantle–discredit–his own artistic preoccupations.
In High Soft Lisp, Gilbert traces the relationship history of Fritz Martinez, the ultimate sex goddess in a career full of them, and in so doing reveals that her every fetish outfit and sexual free-for-all is fruit from the poisoned tree. Lots of characters in this book enjoy the living shit out of Fritz’s sexuality, not least Fritz herself, but to a man and woman they’re revealed to be creepily predatory about it, embracing the worst in themselves and encouraging the worst in Fritz. And here’s the thing: What have we been doing over the hundreds of pages we’ve spent watching Fritz adorably and kinkily fuck her way through the post-Palomar cast of Beto’s comics? What has Beto been doing? What does that say about all of us?
That’s one way of looking at High Soft Lisp. Another way is to expand Beto’s list of targets to include his critics. “Ooh ooh, the criticth are going to dithapprove becauthe I’m naked again!” Fritz says at one point after drunkenly stripping after an apocalyptically awful confrontation with her lifelong misery’s author. “I’m too often naked in my filmth. Criticth write with the finger of God!” “Fuck them,” her girlfriend Pipo responds, and it’s clear this is as much an internal authorial conversation as it is one between two characters. But then! Pipo…ugh, just ugh. Just another victimizer, no matter how complicit Fritz is in her own victimization. Shouldn’t someone be expected to know better? Dammit, where is Gorgo when you need him? And then you realize Beto wonders if maybe the critics have a point.
Certain story developments in this book made me return to Human Diastrophism and Beyond Palomar to review certain characters’ backstories, and in so doing I discovered just how different Gilbert’s art has become–much less dense, much less rooted in three-dimensional space, much more prone to techniques akin to those he uses in his non-narrative work. At this point characters routinely break the fourth wall against vast white spaces, or do their dirty deeds isolated against a blank background as though they’re the only objects on earth. And yet it’s still a single, well-observed bit of portraiture that impressed and crushed me the most here: the shaky half-smile half-grimace of pain on Fritz’s face as her father tells her off once and for all. It’s the most intensely human moment in the whole book, at the moment when Fritz’s humanity receives perhaps the most vicious wound it possibly could. I care about this human being, still a human being underneath all the sex bomb trappings, even as author and audience and characters conspire to keep that trap shut.
* Prophetic dream, tough guys with hearts of gold, character doesn’t live to receive birthday gift from other character, least sympathetic and most sympathetic characters bite it first, racists are always vocally racist even in extreme danger when they’re relying on someone of another race, et cetera. No one’s reinventing the wheel here, is what I’m saying.
* That said, fun episode. The CGI blood remains really lackluster, given what Tom Savini did with a wing and a prayer three and a half decades ago, but it’s still always fun to see people get eaten and blown to smithereens in an emotionally resonant fashion. I actually think Jim’s stint as a captive was well-written, well-acted, and well-shot, maybe the first time since the pilot that the show hit the hat trick. And to the show’s credit I didn’t see Amy’s death coming, despite all the birthday rigamarole (and despite having read the comic!).
* I guess what I’m going to do is watch the show like I would a much more self-serious, less sexy Vampire Diaries. It hits some genre buttons I like having hit, and maybe once in a while I’ll get lucky and it’ll do more than that, but that’ll just have to be a pleasant surprise. The Walking Dead: good enough!
* I wonder what the Vegas oddsmakers are laying on “Merle is the Governor” now, god help us all.
