* Today on Robot 6: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as potential action-movie gamechanger. I love the word “gamechanger.” Gamechanger gamechanger gamechanger. If everyone stopped saying “throw under the bus” and started saying “gamechanger” I’d be so much happier. And it’s a shame, because “throw under the bus” is such an effective turn of phrase. I guess that’s why everyone says it. Wow, this has nothing to do with Scott Pilgrim and action movies anymore, does it.

* Whoa, Frazer Irving on Batman and Robin #13.

* Geoff Grogan has changed the title of his upcoming comic about a blue-skinned superwoman from Mystique to Fandancer. Probably a smart move. The Mouse sees all, Geoff!

* The ever more blog-prolific Josh Simmons has started a new blog for The White Rhinoceros, “a racially-oriented psychedelic fantasy comic currently being serialized in Mome.” Well, this should prove to be not at all troubling in any way!

* Jesse Moynihan is deploys his trademark blend of heady mysticism, two-fisted combat, and take-this-job-and-shove-it dialogue in “New Age Fights,” a new strip for Vice, which under the watchful mustache of Nick Gazin has definitely become a keep-your-eye-on-it destination for comics.

* Matt Seneca is now reviewing comics for Newsarama, so please adjust your “reading Newsarama” levels accordingly.

* The Mindless Ones are going through all the Bat-villains alphabetically, belatedly making up for the unfortunate omission of Amygdala but otherwise gloriously geeky fun.

* Real Life Horror: “Albert Fentress, the former Poughkeepsie schoolteacher who killed and cannibalized a Town of Poughkeepsie teenager in 1979, will remain locked in a mental hospital for at least two more years, a Dutchess County prosecutor said.” I think they should count themselves extremely lucky this person was caught only one murder deep into his career as a killer.

* Real Life Horror 2: When you see the lengths to which the British Conservatives are going to address their country’s use of torture–and I don’t know enough about British politics to judge how sincere or legit this effort is or will be, I just know it’s a million times better than what we’ve seen here in the States–it’s hard not to resent the Obama Administration, to say nothing of American conservatives.

* Semi-Real Life Horror: I like cryptozoology, I like Flash artist Francis Manapul, so I see little reason I wouldn’t like Beast Legends, a Canadian cryptozoology TV show that utilizes Manapul to illustrate mythological and cryptozoological creatures. (That’s Manapul on the left.)

* Zak Smith has the best ideas. If you have ideas, you should compare them to Zak Smith’s first to make sure they’re worth extracting from your own brain.

* I recently watched Ken Burns’s The Civil War and started reading a bit more about the conflict, and one of the things that struck me hard and immediately is that Ulysses S. Grant is a fucking monster of a general, a fine writer, and a person to be studied and celebrated. That simplifies it, of course, but it’s certainly closer to the truth as we can understand it than the narrative even a Yankee like me was fed, where Grant was a drunk fuck-up who lucked into beating a reluctant warrior-poet who was in every way save his eventual defeat Grant’s moral and tactical superior. Moreover, it seems pretty clear to me that the “Lee > Grant” bubbe meise is the product of a concerted century-long effort to delegitimize both the cause and effect of the War, the ramifications of which are still at work in fairly obvious ways today. With all that in mind I’m happy to see Grant moving up in the rankings of the best and worst presidents. His presidency was a mess in a lot of ways, but I think the opprobrium directed toward him was never commensurate with his administration’s sins and had more to do with psychological payback.

* Meanwhile, the godawful atrocious comment thread at the aforelinked Matthew Yglesias post on Grant reminds me to point you to this brief, interesting discussion of comment-thread culture. I’ve never had a lot of comments here, but I’ve tended to really enjoy them; this reached its apex during the Lost discussions of this past final season. I’m super-proud to have in some way inspired the level of discourse in those threads. I’m not sure what exactly I did to shape it here, but back when I was a mod on the Wizard board–which wasn’t the ADDTF comments, to be sure, but was hella civil compared to comparable outlets–we rained hard on troublemakers and dickheads, with the result that the community quickly became self-policing. That’s an approach I’d love to see replicated pretty much everywhere.

* I straight-up loved Madballs.

* Oh dear: “I asked all I met at WETA when ‘The Hobbit’ starts shooting. Reply? ‘You tell us.'” —Sir Ian McKellen. A far cry from his previous optimism…

* Look, PictureBox got a fancy new website and a fancy new blog!

* Another day, another fantastic interview with Wally Gropius author Tim Hensley, this one conducted by Chris Mautner and focusing on Hensley’s personal life and background, painfully so.

* Bookmarked for when I have half an hour (!) to kill: Anders Nilsen interviewed by Royal Jelly.

* This week I was struck by how two of the best single-issue superhero comics of the year a) came out on the same day, and b) were about their ostensible hero’s arch-enemies. Douglas Wolk takes a look at them, or the writing at least: Action Comics #890 by Paul Cornell and Pete Woods, starring Lex Luthor, and Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 by Matt Fraction and Carmine DiGiandomenico, starring the Mandarin.

* Nitsuh Abebe tackles CocoRosie and the reaction thereto. Apparently I know a lot less about this band than I thought and there are all sorts of obviously controversial issues at work here about which I feel unprepared to speak, but a big part of the column gets at something I was saying about the band a while ago, which is that on a basic level it really isn’t that hard to figure out why their music might not appeal to a lot of people.

* Which point is germane to comics thusly: Lately I’ve talked a bit about how I’m bummed there isn’t more discussion of alternative comics online. Should I really be all that baffled? Perhaps whoever coined the very term was right, and the reason these things are called “alternative comics” is because they represent an alternative to mainstream/popular taste. The bookstore boom, the sudden explosion of coverage of graphic novels in the mainstream press, the manga boom, the webcomics boom, and the parallel rise in critical fortunes of massively popular hip-hop and pop in the music-crit field has, I think, given the impression that quality and popularity automatically overlap more than they do. Fringe culture is exactly that.

* I don’t like leading with Real Life Horror items, but this piece on the New York Times’ treatment of waterboarding blew my fucking mind:

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement. “When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.”

That’s totally, mind-meltingly insane, right? Just an abject capitulation of any possible concept of journalistic ethics to outright barbarism, right? Like we’re living in some awful nightmare? It’s not just me? (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Anyway.

* Today on Robot 6: It’s Kevin Huizenga’s new book, The Wild Kingdom!;

* Dennis Culver finishes his gallery of Batman rogues;

* Michael DeForge draws Scott Pilgrim;

* and Jeff Parker, Gabriel Hardman, and–and this is key–the Hulk on Hulk? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* I really dig the left-field questions J. Caleb Mozzocco asks Wally Gropius genius Tim Hensley in his Newsarama interview. (Via Alvin Buenaventura.)

* Neat, a Noel Freibert interview (by Nick Gazin of Vice) and a Noel Freibert comic.

* If there’s one thing Hollywood cinema has taught us over the past several years, it’s that collectively it’s better at making trailers than it is at making actual films. So this is meaningless as a gauge of whether or not the movie will be any good, but yes, the trailer for Let Me In, the remake of Let the Right One In by Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves, is pretty good. (Via Jason Adams.)

* The RZA filtering his favorite old kung-fu movies through scratchy old soul samples, Marvel Comics, the drug trade, and inside jokes involving his Staten Island neighborhood to create a new sound for hip hop? An artistic triumph. The RZA paying tribute to his favorite old kung-fu movies by shooting a straightforward tribute to them in what looks like a bunch of people’s backyards? Maybe, maybe not. Still and all, here’s the trailer for Wu-Tang vs. the Golden Phoenix. (Via Topless Robot.)

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan’s contribution to the Covered blog was fortuitously timed, eh?

* The best thing about anything that puts Tim and Eric content in front of doctrinaire nerds, like Rich Shivener’s list of 8 Great Cinco Products for Topless Robot, is the ensuing comment-thread ragegasm. Well, that and the excuse to watch “It’s Not Jackie Chan” again.

* I probably should have mentioned this before, but Bowie Loves Beyonce is a going concern again.

* This very prog cover for Kanye West’s latest single, which samples King Crimson’s “20th Century Schizoid Man,” is officially the first Kanye West anything I care about. (Via Mike Barthel.)

* Over the past couple of days the entire Internet posted this compilation of The 100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time and it made me laugh really, really hard. “I don’t give a tuppenny fuck about your moral conundrum, you meatheaded shitsack.” (Via the Missus.)

* If I could make something sound like Sloane made “Money City Maniacs” sound, I’m not sure I’d ever stop making things sound like that. (Via Nate Patrin.)

* Recently on Robot 6: So Wonder Woman is getting a new look and new origin. More reactions here. Best headline here.

* From the ridiculous to the sublime: Kevin Huizenga makes minicomics from scrap paper and uses them as sketchbooks.

* Matt Seneca on a variety of comics of interest, from those strange Silber Media ultra-minis to the Frazer Irving issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne (which I thought was hamstrung somewhat by how hard it was to tell Bruce apart from his equally jut-jawed, furrow-browed puritan antagonist).

* I read Paul Cornell and Pete Woods’s Action Comics #890 today and it was very entertaining. Here’s an interview with Cornell about it, conducted by my indefatigable, inescapable pal Kiel Phegley. It’s good that Cornell’s in DC’s bullpen in case, you know, certain things don’t work out.

* One other quick Superman note: I’ve been a supporter of the New Krypton material over the past couple of years, and I certainly enjoyed reading it as it came out, but I have to say the ending kind of smushed it all for me. That’s a lot of time to devote to a story in which the combined efforts of every character in the DCU who wears an S on their chest fails to save 100,000 people.

* In the interest of equal time, wow, that was a lot of talking in Avengers #2.

* Real Life Horror: Here and here you can find a pretty breathtaking look at how abjectly the four widest-circulation newspapers abandoned the plain-truth description of waterboarding as torture once the United States started doing it.

* Well holy smokes, look at this mash-up of Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese movies. Here you have over seven minutes of scenes from basically the best movies ever made by my two favorite directors of all time. I could do a little dance, this made me so happy. SPOILERY AS ALL GET-OUT for GoodFellas, The Departed and probably lots and lots more besides. (Via everyone.)

Kubrick vs Scorsese from Leandro Copperfield on Vimeo.

Half exhausted from staying up so late on a work night, half delirious from the ambien I took to smooth my transition into beddy-bye once I got home (right, that’s the ticket), I discovered at the midnight screening of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse I went to last night that the movie flies right by. I’m reasonably sure this is actually true and not merely a product of my two-in-the-morning brain, and I’m reasonably sure it’s a compliment as well.

The two earlier installments of the series, Twilight and New Moon, were distinguished by their weird, physics-defying property of requiring a lot of time to do not so much. Both earlier films were dominated, after all, by sequences of Kristen Stewart’s Bella getting to know a hot boy who’s secretly a monster, sequences that took up what felt like over half of each film’s running time. In Eclipse, there’s not, like, a new hot mummy or Frankenstein or zombie or ghost kid for her to meet/stare at/be stared at by, so that portion of the narrative is gone.

The other really odd thing about the each of the first two movies is the detachment of the final-reel climax from, basically, the whole rest of the film. In Twilight you have a few scattered scenes involving the vampire trio who end up serving as ersatz antagonists, but their initial confrontation with the Cullen vampire family, their rogue member’s decision to hunt and kill Bella, his attempt to do so, and his death at the hands of the Cullens all takes place within approximately 20 minutes toward the end of the movie. New Moon is slightly better in this regard–Robert Pattinson’s Edward does at least mention, in passing, the idea of baiting the ruling super-vampire council the Volturi to should he ever want to kill himself, which is where things end up. But Edward’s first-reel fake-breakup with Bella and her loooooong subsequent getting-to-know-you stuff with Taylor Lautner’s teen wolf Jacob mean that once again, the showdown with the sinister vampire antagonists comes out of nowhere and is wrapped up rapidly. Eclipse breaks that pattern too. Pretty much from the jump, you and the characters know that Victoria–the female vampire from the initial film’s trio, now played by Bryce Dallas Howard in a bad wig and out for vengeance for the death of her mate at the Cullens’ hands–is breeding an army of powerful, out-of-control “newborn” vampires to storm Bella’s hometown, overwhelm the Cullens and the werewolf tribe, and murder Bella. So the Cullens and werewolves train to fight the newborns, the newborns attack and are defeated, and the inevitable Edward-Jacob team-up dispatches Victoria. The end!

So,yeah, Eclipse has a rather welcome sense of direction. Credit genre-vet director David Slade, perhaps? Certainly the 30 Days of Night helmer has fun with the sort of shattered crystal statue effect deployed here (for the first time in the series so far, because why the heck not) for what happens when you dismember a vampire, and with the series’ second conspicuous murder of a child while our heroes stand by and do nothing, and with a memorably nasty flashback of the werewolf tribe’s first encounters with “the cold ones.” Alas, two other key flashbacks aren’t as much fun: Our glimpses of the origins for Rosalie Cullen (Nikki Reed) and Jasper Cullen (Jackson Rathbone) explain why the former’s such an asshole and give the latter something to do other than look like a constipated Harpo Marx, but Rosalie’s “birth” is sexually violent in a way that brings author Stephenie Meyer’s sexual politics uncomfortably to the fore, while Jasper’s Civil War roots can be compared all too directly and unfavorably to True Blood. (Even if I kind of like the idea that there were small armies of vampires running amok in the South, just ‘cuz I can hear Shelby Foote describing this in my head. “Vampahs were fairly common throughout the Confederacy at this pahticuluh tahm…”)

But who cares about frou-frou shit like plot momentum and horror and decent vampire effects–what about the sturm und drang of young love? Eclipse is both the best and the worst of the series in that regard. The Bella-Jacob storyline, starring Kristen Stewart at her loveliest and Taylor Lautner at his most shirtless (apologies to Mike Nelson, Patrick Swayze, and Road House), is where the real emotional heat is. Jacob’s in that familiar, gut-churning position where he’s formed a powerful bond of love with someone…who just happens to love someone else even more. It’s a common enough situation for teenagers, whose hearts are bigger than their brains (apologies to Clark Griswold, Cousin Eddie, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacations) and often their consciences; it can feel good to have that second person to love, to use that person’s love for you, even as it feels horrendously painful for them, and by extension for you. In much the same way that it’s kind of gutsy for this series to go to bat for true teenage love, it’s also doing something here that you really don’t see very often, and good for it.

But the goodwill it engenders here is all but undone by the increasingly icky Bella-Edward relationship. It doesn’t help that Robert Pattinson is starting to suffer from diminishing returns–maybe it was just me or maybe it was how he was shot or made up, but in this movie he started looking less beautiful and more pouty and pasty, his face an immobile rubber mask. But the real problem is the bizarre message is sent by Edward and Bella’s quid-pro-quo relationship here. Edward wants to get married, Bella wants to become a vampire and to fuck Edward, so they essentially make an even exchange that once the former happens, the latter will, too. It’s unpleasantly, nakedly transactional, and it’s a perfect reflection of the simultaneous, stupid prudery and prurience of the faith-based abstinence movement. Save sex for your true love, it’s deeply wrong to have sex outside of marriage–so once you fall in love, get married in a hurry so you can fuck your brains out! It’s the first time the benightedness of Meyer’s ideas really knocked me out of the swoony broody young-love material. (Meanwhile, Bella’s entertaining quartet of human friends, particularly series MVPs Anna Kendrick and Michael Welch, were all but absent–we really could have used a healthy dose of their realistically hormonal hijinx.)

Given my wife’s Twatlight membership, I knew I was gonna be seeing this movie in the theater, one way or the other. And as was the case with New Moon, going at a time when going is an event unto itself was the way to go. The only way to go, I’d say. When you’re seeing this movie in the sort of audience where Jacob’s potentially fatal wounding and subsequent reversion from wolf to human form is greeted primarily with a collective moan of realization that holy shit he’s naked, you’re sort of borrowing eyes that look right past all the problems. They’re fun eyes to borrow, and necessary ones to boot.

* New Ignatz books at long last!

* This month, Partyka’s Guest Artist is…Partyka’s Matt Wiegle, who in addition to daily sketches is posting his sumptuous illustrations for Barnes & Noble’s Sparknotes series. This one’s from Huckleberry Finn.

* “Fired HEROES Writer-Producer Jeph Loeb To Run Marvel Entertainment’s TV Division!!” I’d say “‘Nuff said,” but at the link, AICN’s Hercules makes an interesting point regarding the relative creative roles of Loeb and Tim Kring on that show, too.

* Today on Robot 6: Octopus Pie‘s Meredith Gran proves it’s a different world than where you come from, yes it is now, yeah.

* Real Life Horror: An American torture conviction, of sorts.

* Forget the colorforms gimmick aspect: I’d take either half of the cover for Superman: The Man of Steel #30 as-is and be perfectly happy. Wouldn’t you?

* Matthew Cheney takes a long stroll through the glorious Rambo: First Blood Part II for The House Next Door. More on that to come…

* Quote of the day #1:

I don’t have much of a use for Hot Topic, but I like that it exists.

This is because it democratizes punk by commodifying it. If you’re a thirteen year old from the suburbs, you don’t need to run the gauntlet of gate keepers to invest in a subculture; you just need to convince your mom to drop $20 on a t-shirt for you. Liberating!

Amen, except for the part about not having much use for Hot Topic–I started shopping there as an adult. (Via Nate Patrin.)

* Quote of the day #2:

Without reaching to the Soviet bloc for examples, one case of such an artificial and untenable code is the American demand that all politicians be monogamous and drug-free. The press both creates this untenable expectation and exploits violations in order to entrench its power over the political system.

The demand that political journalists either not hold, or never express, their own political opinions is another such artificial and untenable code. Politically interested actors who attempt to enforce this code by revealing the private convictions of reporters do not have the moral goal of ensuring that political reporters have no political opinions; such a goal would be absurd. Rather, they aim to aggrandise their power over journalistic organisations by exacerbating the hypocrisy of those organisations’ official codes of conduct, and then exploiting evidence of that hypocrisy when useful.

A while back I realized why the press focuses so much on “hypocrisy,” and “flip-flopping.” In the “he said/he said” framework that the establishment media deems the only acceptable way to convey news, it’s verboten to discuss whether what either side “said” is factually accurate, let alone practically desirable, let alone morally sound. No, the only standard to which any political actor can be held is the standard he sets for himself. Thus, the gravest sin a politician can commit is “flip-flopping” from a previously articulated position, even if this is the result of a perfectly rational evolution of opinion rather than some craven cave-in to the prevailing political winds. In the eyes of the establishment press, you’re much better off holding and sticking with a completely odious position than you are ever changing your mind one way or the other. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Which leads me to, of all things, the buried lede of this Carnival: Night Business/Gangsta Rap Posse‘s Benjamin Marra and No Trivia/Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader’s Brandon Sodeberg talk Rambo: First Blood Part II for The House Next Door as well. If you read Marra and watch the kinds of movies I do and care about the sort of movie action and violence I care about, you’ve probably already clicked over. But I want to talk about this line from Ben:

In comics, there’s a lot of evidence of devaluing entertainment and fun, especially within the current indie and underground spheres, instead focusing on a tone of pseudo-artistic seriousness and pretension.

Ben says this sort of thing all the time, like in every interview he does. And I eat up all of his comics and all of his interviews with a spoon. Yet at the same time, when I see bloggers say stuff like that, dismiss huge swathes of alternative comics by reducing them to an easily mocked stereotype, I pretty much flip out. What’s up? Well, here’s the part where I’d take a page from Tom Spurgeon and say it’s okay for an artist to say things we wouldn’t accept from a critic if those things are obviously said in service the sort of art they make. In terms of his personal satisfaction as a comics reader or his utility as a critic, I think he’s shooting himself in the foot by writing off alternative comics, but that’s not the issue. Po-faced trash is what gets Ben fired up as a creator, and he’s excellent at making it himself, so it’s hard to hold his biases against him.

But wait! I’ve done exactly that when I’ve seen other artists pull similar stunts–cf. my reaction every time Alan Moore lambastes Hollywood filmmaking in one breath while saying he doesn’t watch any of it with the next, or dismisses superhero comics as a creatively bankrupt regurgitation of other people’s ideas. What’s the difference? Well, it’s specific to Moore. Here’s a guy who’s made his career out of drawing sophisticated adult ideas from pop, pulp, trash, and kids’ stuff, whether we’re talking about Marvelman, Watchmen, Lost Girls, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, even From Hell to an extent. That makes it extra-frustrating when he dismisses today’s pop/pulp/trash out of hand, or acts as though he has a principled objection to working with other people’s ideas.

So what’s the difference between me saying this and people making fun of John Kerry? I like to think that in my case, first of all, the “hypocrisy” angle isn’t nearly as important as whether or not good or crap art is made as a result. I’d be perfectly happy to attack or defend Moore as an artist rather than as a person who did one thing but said another. Moreover, it’s not just the hypocrisy that rankles, it’s the fact that Alan Moore, of all people, oughta know better, right? We expect more from him because he’s displayed such a nuanced understanding of how much is really going on under the surface of storybooks and Victorian adventure novels and Captain Marvel knock-offs and Ripperology and on and on and on. So in the end the comparison with Marra’s oft-articulated viewpoint on literary comics isn’t even the right one to make–it’d be more apt if Marra was making Night Business while dismissing Rambo, not dismissing, I dunno, Asterios Polyp.

* Oh yeah: Benjamin Marra drew a picture of Sylvester Stallone in Cobra.

* Joe Quesada talks digital royalties with Kiel Phegley. Kiel swings by the comments of my related post on Robot 6 to explain why he asked what he asked and didn’t ask what he didn’t ask. Warning: horrifying fanboy entitlement ahead!

* Also on Robot 6 today: Tom Brevoort vs. Wizard.

* My chum Jason Adams saw Neil Marshall’s Centurion last night–JEALS–and begins his review thusly:

I went into Centurion last night with my friend Sean’s Manly Movie Mamajama series on my brain, and ended up judging it by those exacting standards. As such, it’s pretty successful.

SOLD!

* I was travelling today so I haven’t had a chance to sink my teeth into Jog’s interview with Bryan Lee O’Malley…raincheck!

* Ditto (for the most part) Matt Seneca’s look at Josh Cotter’s masterpiece Driven by Lemons. I still think it’s a little hard to believe that my two favorite comics of last year, this and Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie, were both the products of debilitating mental illness.

* I got a kick out of this Cracked list of 5 ridiculous things guns do in movies that they don’t do in real life. I wonder how many untold millions of dollars have been thrown away on the great silencer scam. (Via Jason Aaron.)

* Wait, Jeffrey Brown is illustrating that Paul Is Undead Beatles-zombie book?

* Really digging the look of the cover for Geoff Grogan’s next project, Mystique. No, not that Mystique. Well, not quite.

* I cannot in any way endorse the writing attached to i09’s gallery of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe concept art by Earl Norem — it’s frankly shameful — but I sure as shit can endorse the gallery itself. (Via Kiel Phegley.)

* I can’t post Rickey Purdin’s Matt Furie/Boy’s Club fanart on this blog because I need to keep it a vomit-free zone for the Missus, but it’s somethin’ special.

* The great Brian Chippendale on Marvel’s new Avengers line. Nobody does it better. Read it all the way through to the end–it’s worth it.

* A graphic novel by Nathan Fox? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Oooh, this book Birchfield Close by Jon McNaught looks lovely. (Via Kevin Huizenga.)

* Al Hirschfeld. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Just a rumor, but I’d be quite thrilled if Peter Jackson were to direct the two Hobbit movies himself.

* Today on Robot 6: What’s up with Marvel’s digital-royalties plan? For more, see Heidi MacDonald.

* Matt Maxwell waxes ecstatic about Escape from New York. It’s like one of his con reports, but from deep inside the prison colony of a dystopian future.

* Rough chuckles ahead for the I Hit It with My Axe gang. I really wonder what the heck could make something like that seem like a good idea to the participants.

* Kayfabe is dead.

* VICTORY! WE HAVE VICTORY!

😉 In all seriousness, now that day-and-date digital is happening with both big companies to one degree or another, I’d like to hear what Dirk makes of it. Do you think it’s just a frogmarch to the death of the DM at this point?

* Always up for new Noel Freibert comics.

* Your quote of the day comes from Tom Spurgeon on the presence of non-genre mass media stuff at Comic-Con:

For me, a movie like Avatar and a television show like Glee have the same amount of crossover interest with comics: none. Your comics may have vampires and werewolves in them but my comics have aging local talk show hosts and southern California post-punk culture in them. I don’t understand why your interests are more legitimate in terms of seeing them represented by offerings in other art forms than mine are.

* More music should sound like Goldfrapp. Actually it’s quite easy to construct a mindset wherein Goldfrapp is the logical conclusion/fulfilled promise of the Glitter Band, electroclash, and Doctor and the Medics doing “Spirit in the Sky,” and I would encourage you to do so.

* Gamechanger part deux: DC Comics unveils its own digital-comics plan. This includes an app for the iPad and iPhone, plus digital comics available through comiXology and PlayStation and eventually the DC website to boot. The 26-issue biweekly series Justice League: Generation Lost is going day-and-date immediately (y’know, if you’ve been wondering whether we’d see moves toward that sort of thing by the end of the year or anything). The company is also publicly announcing the existence of creator royalties for digital sales, though of course no figures. (Kudos to Matt Maxwell for being the first person I saw to notice all this.)

* My colleague Kiel Phegley talks to Co-Publisher Jim Lee and digital honcho John Rood about the move, and my colleague Kevin Melrose has the best reaction roundup I’ve seen.

* Today at Robot 6: Megan Kelso talks turkey about the New York Times Funny Pages.

* MK Reed interviews Tom Neely on the Henry Rollins/Glenn Danzig slashfiction minicomic Henry & Glenn Forever for the Beat. Hilarious and heartbreaking money quote:

 In 3 weeks we sold more HG4Evers than I’ve sold of The Blot in 3 years. I’m really happy for this books success, but it has caused some conflicting emotions about success and art.

But Tom announces on his blog that the second printing will include 12 new strips, so that’s good news. I think.

* Here’s a fine piece by J.D. on David Lynch’s underrated, supremely disturbing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

* Lost “news” I’m posting today because I wasn’t sure, I figure some other people might not be either: Today I did some googling and learned that that epilogue featuring So-and-So and Such-and-Such will indeed be on the Lost Season Six DVD set, not just the Complete Series set.

* I really gotta watch Dick Tracy again sometime soon.

* Jeet Heer discusses Dan Nadel’s new mostly action-oriented anthology Art in Time and makes the following very-worth-discussing point:

But Dan wants to shake up our sense of history. I’ve taken the issue up with him during a panel in TCAF and he’s made the point elsewhere as well but in essence he’s challenging the view of old fogeys like me who see a major epistemological break between the world of commercial comic books and the world of the undergrounds. For Dan, it is all comics, and the formal properties that unite Marsh and Sharon Rudahl (for example) outweigh the social, cultural and economic divide.

[…]

Still, and this might be a testimony to my age and the extent that I was formed intellectually in the 1980s when the divide between commercial comics and the alternative press was especially large, I’m not sure I fully buy the argument Dan is making in Art In Time. It seems to me that the undergrounds did represent a fundamental break with the past. I’m not sure if I can define it in words, but the best underground comics (Crumb, Deitch, Spiegelman, Justin Green) cut deeper into human experience than any of the commercial cartoonists, no matter how good they were, ever did. The experience of reading an underground comic is different from reading a commercial comic book. Even with the best commercial comics, you have to make allowances or read between the lines to find the spark of individuality.

Man, there’s some heavy stuff going on in there. I think it’s pretty clear that from a critical-consensus standpoint, Heer has lost this particular argument. In large part, the task of the ’00s in both critical and comics-making terms was reclaiming commercial and genre comics as subjects worthy of investigation and capable of holding their own with the art/lit/underground end of things. Obviously, in his dual role as both critic and publisher, Nadel arguably represents the apotheosis of that viewpoint.

* This argument of course has parallels with poptimism vs. rockism in music criticism; nowadays you couldn’t possibly say that “the best underground music cut deeper into human experience than any of the commercial musicians” without being laughed off of Tumblr, and rightly so, because that’s a ridiculous statement. (I understand that the music and comics industries of the mid-20th century aren’t directly analogous, but that’s why we have analogies.) And of course this isn’t very different from the critics who fought for the legitimacy of rock and roll, or jazz, or from the Cahiers crowd taking Hollywood seriously as art, and on and on and on.

* (It’s worth considering, of course, that the reason people like Nadel, or me, can treat genre and commercial comics seriously is because the previous generation of critics fought so hard against genre and commercial comics to make room for alt/art/lit/underground books in the discussion. With that work done, we can go back and fill in the gaps. Nadel’s compatriot Tim Hodler said as much at SPX a while back.)

* All that being said, what I worry about as the next generation of critics comes up is that the availability of genre/commercial comics to them in terms of something that’s seen as okay to talk about seriously is once again crowding out the conversational space for nongenre/noncommercial comics. Pop quiz: Can you name more than one critic who writes mostly, or even often, and well about alternative comics who wasn’t already doing so three years ago? I think there’s a fairly large generation gap in terms of who’s talking about what, especially in internet terms.

* (NB: It’s entirely possible I’m an insulated idiot who’s missing out on someone totally obvious and awesome, so it’s worth noting that this is not a rhetorical question. If I’m being stupid, help me be less stupid.)

* Related, in some way: Stereogum assembled a fascinating artists’ roundtable on art-pop duo CocoRosie’s latest album Grey Oceans, the gist of which is essentially that dude-ism is preventing people from taking the band as seriously as they should be taken. To a certain extent I think this is seeing hoofprints and thinking “zebra”: The woman with the mustache’s voice is certainly an acquired taste, and I’m sure that’s what turns a lot of people off of the band. (Also, the indie-rock press is always super-excited to throw accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia/classism at itself, which is oddly hilarious to me.) But what CocoRosie does is not soooooooo weird that it’s not within the boundaries established by countless other weirdos in the indie-rock world, and moreover no one’s making the argument that the masses are unfairly ignoring the band–they’re saying this is being done by critics, who in theory ought to be able to handle ’em. Indeed it’s weird to me that the consensus hasn’t lined up in their favor beyond the usual “naw, this isn’t for me” responses anything gets. I think there’s something to that, and I wanna say that the one commenter who explodes with rage and flings around phrases like “these sisters stink like bullshit” is an indication that the roundtable hit a nerve. (No, not in the comic-convention-panel “if people hate it, then good, we’re doing something right” way…it’s just clear all sorts of baggage and preexisting resentment is being brought to the table, as is the case nine times out of ten when a critic substitutes anger for insight.)

* Also related, maybe? James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem on artists and age:

Pitchfork: Okay, you’re old. How do you think your age informs your music?

JM: I think it’s a huge part of it. I’ve kind of been thinking about this a lot lately. Because for a while I was really angry. ‘Cause I was like, “What the fuck? We should suck. We should be being wiped off the stage by kids every night.” I just didn’t get it. I spent years saying that and being kind of wound up. Like, where the fuck are the kids? Then I started thinking that energy that used to be kids– early rock and then punk, what was really going on was that there was no marketing to kids.

If you made advertisements, you made them to 40- or 50-year-olds. Because they had money, they had jobs. You didn’t advertise to kids. The only thing that was targeted to kids was like, funny hair products and rock’n’roll. So you had this one thing to navigate, and that was where all your energy was.

But now kids buy shit. They really buy shit. Kids buy designer stuff. So you’re being constantly pounded by marketing. And if you want to be a rebel, well, there’s rebel clothing companies. There’s rebel stick-on tattoos. You can get a rebel skateboard. You just pick your rebel mode and there’s a whole online shopping network that you can be a part of. So kids may look punk or feel punk, but what they’re kind of doing is the same as like, being really swept up in high school sports or something. But when I was a kid, you didn’t know. I was like, “I guess Kraftwerk is punk?” I remember I got Sex Pistols, Kraftwerk’s Computer World and Venom on the same day. And I thought it was all punk. It was just everything that was weird. Everything that wasn’t Bruce Springsteen– who turns out to be a lot punker than I thought at the time.

So I just think it takes a couple decades to kind of clear your brain now. So it makes more sense to me that I could find my footing when I was 30 instead of when I was 19. It seems a little more clear. You know, novelists are older now. Things are happening later in people’s lives. They’re kind of living lives and then creating things about the lives they’ve lived. Rather than being an artiste at an early age and coming out with a ball of fire. That energy has been co-opted because you haven’t immunized yourself yet against media. It’s easier to get swept up things then take a couple of years to get over your, like, indie rock hangover. I’m scraping the fucking Quarterstick Records crust out of my eyes when I’m like, 27. You know, “Why am I playing in 5/7? How is that fun?”

* My chum Kiel Phegley interviews DC Comics co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio for CBR.

* On Robot 6 I pulled out a couple of passages that struck me: One in which DiDio pushes back against the outcry over the death of the Asian-American Atom, Ryan Choi by saying in part “to focus on one book, one issue, is doing a true disservice to the company, the comics and to the industry”;

* and one in which DiDio and Lee discuss their interaction with Vertigo.

* I think it’s worth reading Ben Davis’s piece on Brian Chippendale’s show at the Cinders Gallery for the Village Voice and Kurt Shulenberger’s piece on Super Mario Galaxy 2 for The House Next Door in tandem. I think the Mario games may be the single most underdiscussed work of art of the past 30 years relative to their innovation, influence, and fecundity. (Chippendale link via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Ron Rege Jr. explains how the aptly named Yeast Hoist #15 is both a comic and a beer.

* Anders Nilsen proposes some things to consider.

* Frank Quitely says “Subtext? What subtext?” on the cover for Absolute All-Star Superman.

* Marvel must be quite pleased with the sales for Avengers #1.

* I really dug the way Tucker Stone broke down what’s appealing and unappealing alike about Amazing Spider-Man since it went almost-weekly in his piece on Savage Critics from a couple days ago. It’s certainly worth reminding ourselves of the parade of massively talented artists that’s traipsed in and out of that series over the past couple of years.

* Immune though I am to the ring-a-ding-ding Rat Pack nostalgia that is Darwyn Cooke’s bread and butter, I nonetheless got a lot out of Matt Seneca’s unpacking of Cooke’s work through a single Parker panel.

* Here’s a nice little piece by Shawn Despres in the Japan Times about glo-fi/chillwave, my favorite microgenre since electroclash. (Via Mark Hogan.)