* Life magazine has posted a slideshow of the photos its photographers took at home and in court with cannibal murderer Ed Gein in 1957. If you’re one of this blog’s presumably rather few readers who is unfamiliar with Gein, this slideshow is a fine, eerie way to get acquainted. Without him it’s safe to say we wouldn’t have the horror genre as we know it today. (Via CRwM.)

* Quote of the day: “I adore Superman, and I hope I get the chance to use him”–Action Comics writer Paul Cornell. Wait, what? Aww, who am I kidding, I just enjoyed a year of “Superman” comics starring fucking Mon-El, the Guardian, and Flamebird. Lex Luthor’s a great character and Cornell’s a good writer. It’s just a spit-take-inducing turn of phrase is all, particularly given the reception of that year of “Superman” comics by everyone who isn’t me. (Via Marc-Oliver Frisch, who notes that this probably explains why Marc Guggenheim isn’t writing Action Comics anymore.)

* I wish this Jim Rugg Rambo 3.5 minicomic was gonna play the “Rambo vs. al-Qaeda” storyline straight (note: that doesn’t mean it couldn’t also be satirical), instead of turning it into a big silly goof as is apparently the case. But I’ll still read it regardless.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates has been really magnificent on the topic of Confederate History Month.

Oh boy am I super in love with this techno cover of Sonic Youth’s “Sugar Kane” right now!

* Grant Morrison: The Topless Robot Interview.

* Eli Roth’s dad Sheldon writes on what it feels like to watch your son kill Adolf Hitler. (Via CRwM.)

* Oh my god, Super Mario Galaxy 2, even now I can feel the hold you will exert on my future self. (Via Topless Robot.)

* That’s all there is, there ain’t no more

* Oh man, is this ever a treat: David Bordwell on Martin Scorsese, French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage. Bordwell offers a really astonishingly clear breakdown of Impressionism vs. Expressionism: Expressionism depicts subjectivity in what the camera records, while Impressionism depicts subjectivity in what the camera does. (Montage is a separate beast, done through editing and not really interested in subjectivity, because Communism is incredibly dull.) Extensive analysis of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Bringing Out the Dead follow, as do a few paragraphs on Crank 2: High Voltage. God I love the Internet.

* By all means read Mike Russell’s fine, wide-ranging interview with Paul Pope for AICN. Interesting guy, great cartoonist, lots and lots to talk about.

* Tom Spurgeon weighs in on whether or not comics can be scary in a very novel fashion: He says that in addition to whatever obstacles are inherent in the medium itself, there are institutional and logistical disincentives that prevent most comics and cartoonists and, importantly, readers from even trying.

* Recently at Robot 6: Cameron Stewart’s Batman: The Tattoo (it wasn’t up yet yesterday, sorry), Black Hole: The Photos, and pood: The Motion Picture.

* How does the Lost cast think Lost will end? Their guesses are as good as ours, I guess…

SPOILER ALERT

SPOILER ALERT

* Feels like the homestretch! If this is what all the episodes are like from here on out, we’re in great shape. I think this was my favorite episode of the season so far.

* First of all, it was jam-packed, picking up directly from last episode and then just hitting us over and over again. And I don’t just mean on the revelation front, as I’ll explain. But first those revelations!

* We got a nice explicit ANSWER about the Smoke Monster impersonating Jack and Claire’s dad, and that people need to be dead for him to impersonate them. From that you could infer that he also posed as Yemi, for example, while the Walt who appeared to Locke when he’d been shot and left in that burial pit by Ben must not have been the MIB at all. And I’m gonna go ahead and assume that the whole disappearing-bodies thing was just the MIB trying to throw people off the trail of what was really going on, to better persuade them that these really WERE their dead loved ones come back to life. Once the Ajira flight arrived, his endgame went into play, and he didn’t need to maintain that deception anymore.

* This wasn’t quite a “HEY LOOK AUDIENCE WE’RE GIVING YOU AN ANSWER WE REALLY COULDN’T BE ANY CLEARER” thing like what we’ve gotten about the Whispers and Christian, but Kate and Claire’s conversation on the dock made it pretty clear that all the dire warnings about Claire needing to raise Aaron were really for Claire’s benefit rather than Aaron’s. A nice script-flip there. (Also, it gives me hope that similarly important-in-the-early-seasons questions regarding the other prominent child, Walt, will indeed be addressed. Hope springs eternal!)

* And we even got an explanation as to why the heck Sawyer let Kate escape from that elevator. Which was pretty much the theory I advanced back when we first learned Sawyer was a cop. Of course, there’s a happy medium between “blowing your cover story by arresting a woman at the airport when you’re supposed to be someplace else” and “helping a woman in handcuffs escape airport security,” but okay, fine, whatevs.

* We also got the various flashsideways threads intertwining in dramatic fashion. It was kind of funny seeing how fast all the dominos fell toward one another all at once. Maybe a little too fast at times: Sawyer and Miles got to Sayid’s house like half a minute after Sayid did! But the boom-boom-boom of Claire meeting Desmond meeting Ilana meeting Jack into Jack seeing Locke again was deliciously done. This oughta go a long way toward placating the “they’re a waste of time!” crowd.

* But beyond the mythology signposts and Answers and serious forward movement, I thought this episode was chock full of strong moments between various pairs of characters. To wit:

* I thought the conversation in the well between Sayid and Desmond was beautifully done, emotionally desperate and draining.

* I loved Sawyer’s confrontation with Jack on the boat–Sawyer’s disbelief that this guy could be this stupid, and Jack’s stubborn insistence that it’s not stupid at all, plus an apology for Juliet’s death that echoed Ben’s various apologies for his transgressions over the years.

* Kate’s confrontation with Claire was equally good, particularly the part where Kate basically shouted down Claire’s protestations regarding Fake Locke, like “I’ve wanted to reunite you and your child for three years and you’re gonna trust a smoke monster over me? FUCK that!”

* That opening powwow between Jack and Fake Locke recalled the heat of Jack’s arguments with the real deal back in Seasons One and Two. And that Jin/Sun reunion put an “awww!” in my throat despite myself–plus, it was funny how they kept cutting to that long shot of them running toward one another with the sonic pylon right where they’d end up embracing.

* My favorite of all, though, was one in which the second person was absent–Sawyer crying while watching Jin and Sun’s reunion because Juliet is dead.

* Even in the flashsideways, that was some fun business between Kate and Sawyer, I liked how Nadia had about ten seconds to process her devastation before Sayid had to run out the door, Claire’s revelation to Jack worked…

* All these little micro-capsule payoffs of various character relationships. More like this, please!

* Bonus points for taking advantage of how unnerving Desmond running Locke over was to make his relentlessness toward Claire kind of disturbing. Creepy Desmond is creepy.

* Wow, put her in a suit and neaten up her hairstyle and suddenly I’m an Ilana fan after all! More evidence for my own personal Grand Unified Theory of Lost, which is that the women get hotter as they get cleaner but the men get hotter as they get dirtier?

* If that’s the resolution to the “Sun can only speak Korean because she hit her head” storyline, well, that was a pretty superfluous storyline.

* “It’s him!” I guess her near-death experience triggered a Revelation. Did she remember it when she came to in the hospital bed later on, I wonder?

* So who is it that was shooting at the castaways in the outrigger during last season? Obviously we were being teased by putting this season’s model castaways on a boat, but my new operating theory is that it was Widmore’s goons during some pending spacetime freakout.

* Why can’t the MIB kill Desmond? Wait, I think I just answered my own question, didn’t I–it’s because the MIB can’t kill Desmond, isn’t it?

* I am not gonna feel the least bit bad anymore when Dark Tina Fey bites it.

* Admit it: You expected to see Juliet in that hospital, right?

* Can comics be scary? Josh Simmons, Richard Sala, CRwM, Karswell, Kimberly Lindbergs, and myself attempt to answer the question, courtesy of Curt Purcell.

* Kate Beaton does The Great Gatsby.

* Photographic recreations of Charles Burns’s Black Hole yearbook portraits by Max Oppenheim. I can barely look at this.

* Lost is on tonight. Why not take one last look at last week’s Lost thoughts discussion before joining us again tonight?

* One of the all-time great MCs, Guru of Gang Starr, has died in what sounds like a deeply sad, John and Tom Fogerty-style state of estrangement from both his former creative partner DJ Premier and his own family. Tragic on any number of levels. Guru rapped like he was sitting on a high-backed armchair, calmly but firmly explaining the hard truth to you. Man, the internal rhymes in the first verse of “You Know My Steez” (bonus points for the THX-1138 recreation):

Rest in peace.

* Two big posts on Robot 6 from me today. First, it’s the new batch of MoCCA 2010 sketches in my David Bowie sketchbook!

* And here’s my MoCCA haul!

* Also on the MoCCA beat:

* Tom Spurgeon smacks around that superhero panel featuring Jaime Hernandez, Frank Miller, Dean Haspiel, Paul Pope, and Kyle Baker. I think there were a few problems here: First, you had a few different “one of these things is not like the other” panelists in there, depending on which direction you wanna go in; second of all that’s too many people on a panel for cartoonists of most of their magnitude, all of whom could have easily held down a panel on their own–poor Xaime couldn’t get a word in edgewise; and thirdly, I’d rather hear those particular cartoonists talk about anything but superheroes, and I really like superheroes!

* Rob Clough’s MoCCA con report is indeed as good as Tom says, comprehensive in scope and laser-focused in its observations and recommendations. The show can and should improve.

* Secret Acres was really unhappy with MoCCA this year. Leon and Barry voice a complaint I’ve also heard from a prominent retailer who attended the show: Individual artists have basically been priced out of tables entirely. That shouldn’t happen for all the obvious reasons, but after seeing all the empty space at this year’s show, it seems it also shouldn’t happen for revenue’s sake. The SA guys suggest a sliding scale for table rates, free admission, and a better system for awarding choice locations to earlier purchasers. Plus, they’ve placed an open call for minicomics submissions they can host at their own table next year.

* I’m flat-out amazed by the brutal drubbings Gareb Shamus’s Wizard World comic cons, specifically its Chicago show, are receiving in the local press on the eve of Reed’s rival C2E2 show this weekend — and Wizard’s own Anaheim Comic Con, debuting this weekend as well. I’ve said for a while now that given the stigma attached to Wizard within the industry (especially after the showdown with Reed began), Shamus’s strategy, to the extent one can be discerned, was to first to glom off the positive public awareness of the phrase “Comic Con” (taking a page from Reed’s playbook in fact), and then to take advantage of the credulity and ignorance of local and mainstream coverage of comics to land fluff pieces during all his shows. But it turns out that model couldn’t withstand the very first Wizard/Reed head-to-head match-up. There’s nothing so vapidly fluffy you can’t land it safely into the New York Times‘ comics coverage, so who knows, but that aside, this can’t augur well for the Big Apple/NYCC showdown this fall. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Back to Robot 6: This Mark Millar kerfuffle about Marvel ripping off his vampire mutant storyline is the funniest comics story in I don’t know how long. (Marc-Oliver Frisch has his number, methinks.)

* My pal TJ Dietsch’s account of being seduced by Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges, one of the first alternative comics he ever read, is fascinating to me. That’s really strong material and I’d imagine it could have this effect on a lot of people. Also, I’m glad to hear someone else say that the first issue is the least impressive of the three.

* Geoff Johns answers questions about Brightest Day, The Flash, and Green Lantern. I’m looking forward to it all.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost round-up makes me glad I stopped reading Alan Sepinwall’s coverage of the show a few years back when it became apparent he was waiting to not be entertained, and makes me nervous that something I really want to happen isn’t going to happen.

* Rest in peace, Peter Steele. I can’t pretend to have been a huge Type O Negative fan, but the deluxe edition of Bloody Kisses is really something special–gigantic songs drenched in doomed glamour and leavened with just enough tongue-in-cheek humor to let you know Pete and the gang were in on the joke. Just ask Trent Reznor, whose three tweets on Pete’s passing were exactly the kind of eulogy I was looking for. I mean, really–being a goth is funny! Steele got that, even as he got the power of all the sex’n’death’n’outcast stuff that made the lifestyle appealing in the first place. He knew it went hand in hand. That’s why I love “Christian Woman” so much: It’s a nine-minute, three-part epic about a religious woman masturbating to the crucified Jesus Christ on her wall, and they understand that this is both sad and pathetic and loathsome and touching and funny and angry and sexy and creepy all at once. I saw Type O at Ozzfest one year, and they were super-heavy and super-hilarious, ending the set with a joke as memorable as the songs. Godspeed doesn’t seem to be the right word to use, but oh well.

Here’s the missing line from yesterday’s Carnival of souls:

* I really appreciated Stuart Berman’s review of the newly remastered rereleases of Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, insofar as it saved me some ducats by explaining why it doesn’t really stack up against the infamous 1997 “this goes to 11” in-the-red remastering.

There you have it!

* Things are cookin’ in this week’s Lost thoughts discussion. Check it out!

* Frank Miller isn’t doing Holy Terror, Batman! anymore. Rats!

* J.H. Williams III drawing and writing the new Batwoman ongoing series? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Tom Spurgeon laments the dawn of the $3.99 For Monthly Comics Age. Personally I thought the $2.99 price point was ridiculous, too. A 22-page sliver of a story with virtually zero re-read value on its own? No thanks. As I told Geoff Grogan at MoCCA, a choice between dropping four bones on some random Avengers issue or dropping it on something like Pood is no choice at all. I can’t even get into the spirit of buying stuff from Frank Santoro’s lonboxes, much as I tell myself I’ll give it a shot virtually every time I go to a show. I can’t get past “I’m not getting a whole thing, I’m just getting a part of a thing.”

* Peggy Burns presents maybe my favorite MoCCA photo parade ever. Funny from the very first joke.

* I’d forgotten to keep track since you can’t get a separate RSS feed for it, but Zak Smith’s I Hit It With My Axe is up to its fifth episode. Turns out it really is fun to watch a bunch of weirdo friends jackass around playing D&D in efficiently edited installments–having briefly spent time in such a group of weirdo friends jackassing around, albeit not an efficiently edited one, I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise.

* New Kevin Huizenga comics!

* New John Hankiewicz sketches!

* New Afrodisiac t-shirt!

SPOILERS ON THE WAY SO LOOK OUT

* Now this is podracing!

* Alright, so what did we have in this episode. We had cameos from Michael and, extensively, from Libby. These are the kinds of cameos that I personally really love on this show–not Arzt or whoever, not even various Others types, but the characters who really mattered back in Seasons One and Two, before (I think) the game plan for the remainder of the series was fully firmed up. It’s important to me to feel like those characters and their plights matter as much in the world of the show as they mattered to me as a viewer, you know?

* And even beyond that, I was always awfully fond of Michael, whose downfall was one of the first signs we got, along perhaps with Locke’s devolution from Jungle Wolverine to neurotic button-pusher, that the show was willing to really sully its heroes, however temporarily.

* I also liked Libby. We’ve still got a few more feet of Libby mystery to dig through, of course–we have no idea why she was in the mental hospital in the “real” universe, or whether it was really just coincidence that she bumped into Desmond and gave him a boat. I always assumed she was one of Widmore’s agents, like Abbadon or perhaps Mrs. Hawking. But this gave us some cross-dimensional closure on her and Hurley’s truncated love affair, which was one of the show’s least convincing and therefore somehow most convincing romances. And Cynthia Watros, who should wear sundresses as often as possible, gave a bedraggled, barely-keeping-it-together performance that was touchingly optimistic despite it all. I really wanted things to work out for her here, you know? I’m glad they did, more or less.

* So what else did we have? We had Ilana blowing the fuck up! Hahahaha! I can’t believe they went to the “old dynamite from the Black Rock blowing someone the fuck up unexpectedly” well once again, and that it worked as well as it did. My jaw dropped like a cartoon character’s. Again, I assume we’ll get a little more detail on Ilana at some point, but Ben’s assessment seemed accurate: The Island was done with her. I still wonder if “the Island” is a separate entity, in terms of exerting influence on what happens, from Jacob and the Man in Black, but I take his point. Anyway, good, I wasn’t much of an Ilana fan, and I think giving her this kind of ending gives her more oomph than she otherwise had.

* We had a full-fledged, no messing around, seriously guys on the Internet we’re making this as clear as we possibly can ANSWER! The whispers are dead people stuck on the Island. So it turns out is really is purgatory, for some people at least. Let me know when Lostpedia is finished going through all the whispers’ appearances and figures out who was probably whispering in each one and why. This explanation works fine for me, if you were wondering, though I imagine “ghosts” will be unacceptable to the LOST IS SERIOUS BIZNESS crowd.

* We had Fake Locke tossing Desmond down a well! Hahahahaha! Poor guy. Somehow I think things will work out for him anyway. I know this wasn’t the same well Locke went down couple seasons ago, but given all the tunnels and passageways under the Island, I wonder if Desmond can turn the donkey wheel without being teleported?

* We had Ultimate Richard/Ben/Miles team-up! Can’t wait for the walking-through-the-jungle banter that combo will serve up.

* Crap, I feel like I’m missing some more stuff I was really excited about! Dammit.

* No bad guy in Hurley’s flashsideways, did you notice? Unless you count Chang/Candle/Halliwax.

* Jack’s resignation of the presidency went down a little more smoothly than I’d worried it would with me. I don’t wanna see him turn into the happy wanderer, that’s my concern about a Jack who can let go, but I’m glad they’re directly addressing that failure has consequences, and his change of behavior makes sense.

* The owner of a fried chicken fast-food chain sponsoring the humane society? Yeah, right.

* Desmond’s a GQMF in addition to being a timecop. It was fun watching him traipse around the flashsideways, all blithely bringing people to consciousness and shit–but it was even more fun watching that get flipped on its head when he ran over a man in a wheelchair. He’s being positively Jacobian in his serene weirdness in both worlds.

* Haha, I take a contrarian’s pleasure in watching Desmond a) get tossed down a well, and b) run over a cripple.

* Dr. Linus on perv patrol. Love it.

* I found the swagger of Fake Locke and the silence of Dark Sayid good and sinister in this episode. I particularly like how Sayid’s now all but an extension of Fake Locke, answering only to him, even speaking only to him.

* Basically, what I want to communicate is that a lot happened in this episode! It was all over the place, fast and furious, and at nearly every pre-commercial cliffhanger, since I was watching it via TiVo and fastforwarding through the commercials, I worried that was the end of the show, since they’d packed so much in. They even added an “extra” flashsideways segment, if you will. Last week I expressed skepticism that the Desmond episode meant we’d arrived at the “okay, it’s on now” segment of the season, but I stand corrected, apparently! Edge of your seat stuff.

* My MoCCA report is up at Robot 6. I’d gotten really excited for this show for no discernible reason–it was quite aside from selling my own comics there, honestly–and though I know others might have had different expectations and results, I personally was not disappointed. I had a lovely time.

* Frank Santoro found the show nice, nice, not thrilling, but nice.

* My collaborator Isaac Moylan broke it down in terms of the CCS style vs. Fort Thunder, with extra observations on the Scandinavians and the “new action”eers. (Isaac, “the New Action” was a Bill Kartalopoulos coinage.)

* My chum TJ Dietsch approaches the show from the valuable perspective of a genre-comics reader using the festival as an excuse to dip his toes into the wilder and woolier material.

* Tom Spurgeon had a good post rounding up reaction from afar.

* Strange Tales 2 is a go! Hornschemeier, Gurewitch, Brown, Cloonan, Kupperman, Santoro, presumably many more, all of whom I will likely interview.

* Marvel has dropped Diamond as its book market distributor and signed up with Hachette instead. Another large publisher’s move to a bona-fide book distributor was described to me by someone who would know as akin to “backing the money truck up to the doors and dumping piles of cash in,” so I’d imagine this will do good things for Marvel’s heretofore anemic bookstore sales. Spurge has analysis. Because I am an asshole, I would also like to take this opportunity to say “toldja.”

* Heidi Mac scanned the promo for Charles Burns’s upcoming book X’ed Out. How do you follow up a beast of a book like Black Hole?

* Read Soldier X online for free! Seriously, do it.

* They’ve enlisted the Predators reboot writers to write a new He-Man and the Masters of the Universe screenplay. (Via Jason Adams.) My fellow He-Fan Rob Bricken has further thoughts. There’s no way a live-action He-Man movie captures the wonder of He-Man unless They go back in time and have the Wachowski Brothers do it instead of Speed Racer.

* Paul Cornell, author of the late, lamented Captain Britain and MI-13, will be writing Action Comics. He takes over from Marc Guggenheim, whose run on the Superman title is exactly zero issues long.

* Eve Tushnet on The Lost Boys. That was my first R-rated movie too! Holds up. “I’ll pray…I never need to call you.”

* Whoa, Marc-Oliver Frisch makes this Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange comic sound pretty good. Frazer Irving!

* Real Life Horror: Connecticut’s Roman Catholic bishops want to cover up child rape and they need your help!

* The life lesson I learned during the one (awesome) campaign of D&D I played years ago? Never trust a Mind Flayer.

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat is now Attentiondeficitdisorderly. I figured I’d make it easier for the publishers of the world to use quotes from my reviews as back-cover blurbs–“Attentiondeficitdisorderly” has a nice pithy ring to it, while “Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat” sounds like something someone would say during an Ambien hallucination.

Coverage of Lost, Tom Neely, and Clive Barker will continue as scheduled. Thank you!

Visit the Partyka table at MoCCA tomorrow–underneath the big clock on the back wall opposite the entrance, right across the table from Sparkplug–for not one, not two, but THREE Sean T. Collins minicomics:

SURPRISE ADDITION! HOT OFF THE PRESS! It’s CAGE VARIATIONS VOL. 1, three interlocking tales of unspeakable depravity and unshakeable despair, featuring the art of Matt Rota!

This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll, this is THE SIDE EFFECTS OF THE COCAINE–it’s David Bowie drug abuse, occult imagery, and Nazi dilettantism as you like it, featuring the art of Isaac Moylan!

And of course the classic MURDER, an anthology of space-age adventure, suburban ennui, and serial killing featuring the art of Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, and Josiah Leighton!

Supplies are super-duper limited, so act fast!