Looks like I will have not one but two new minis at MoCCA. Look for a surprise on Saturday afternoon!

* Secret Acres has a blog! At the link you’ll find their plans for MoCCA and the whole rest of the year. (Via Theo Ellsworth.)

* Isaac Moylan has a blog! At the link you’ll find a page from his strange, NSFW superhero-ish comic.

* I’ll tell you what: If this weren’t MoCCA weekend, I’d be sorely tempted to hoof it northward for the Boston Comic Con. Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Michael Golden, Mike Mignola, Eric Powell, Joe Quinones, Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Starlin, Cameron Stewart, Ben Templesmith, and J.H. Williams III could put a real hurting on my Bowie sketchbook.

* I forgot all about the Thirty Days Gallery curated by the Family Bookstore of Sammy Harkham fame. Maybe I’ll check it out this weekend. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are performing there tomorrow!

* Tom Spurgeon has updated his post on the 2010 Eisner nominees with his thoughts on them. Since it perhaps behooves me to elaborate on what I thought rather than chiming in with a douchey one-liner, I’ll say this: You probably don’t need me to tell you how frustrating I find the year-to-year prominence of adequate-to-good front-of-Previews titles versus the actual best comics of the year. That’s the same complaint everyone has about every award show every year–well, the Oscars at least, and the Emmys to an extent; no one’s cared about the Grammys since at least as long ago as Metallica and Guns n’ Roses lost to Jethro Tull.

But I think what’s uniquely flummoxing about this year’s nominees is that it’s pretty easy for all of us to put together a list of Eisner-bait DC/Marvel/Dark Horse books from the year that was, based on the typical Eisner nomination pattern. A few squeaked in there–J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart got individual nods for their Detective Comics stuff, there’s the usual slew of Vertigo books and big-name artists who mostly do covers rather than interiors, The Walking Dead made it in there, Ed Brubaker appears to have joined the “what he does gets nominated” pantheon, etc. But so many of the obvious “Eisner books”–and regardless of their actual merits I think Batman and Robin, Wednesday Comics, Ex Machina, Strange Tales, Invincible Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror are very much “Eisner books”–were passed over in favor of comics regarded as junk even by junk fans, or as popcorn fare at best. It sort of rips the band-aid off of how arbitrary the process is even at the best of times, how non-rigorous the standards being applied are.

Here are some of the books I used for research for the David Bowie bio-comic I did with Isaac Moylan. It’ll be on sale tomorrow at MoCCA at the Partyka table–cheap!

—

Blake, Mark et al, eds. Mojo: David Bowie Special Edition. London: EMAP, 2003.

Bowie, David. Station to Station. EMI, 1976, remastered 1999. Compact disc.

____________. Young Americans. EMI, 1975, remastered 1999. Compact disc.

Buckley, David. Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story. London: Virgin, 1999.

Crowe, Cameron. “Bowie to Tour: ‘No Gimmickry.'” In Rolling Stone, January 15th, 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

______________. “David Bowie: A candid conversation with the actor, rock singer and sexual switch-hitter.” In Playboy, September 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

______________. “David Bowie: Ground Control to Davy Jones.” In Rolling Stone, February 12th, 1976. Retrieved from CameronCrowe.com.

Hoskyns, Barney. Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution. New York: Pocket, 1998.

Paytress, Mark and Steve Pafford. Bowiestyle. London: Ominubs, 2000.

Pegg, Nicholas. The Complete David Bowie. London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2000.

Rock, Mick. Blood and Glitter. London: Vision On, 2001.

Sandford, Christopher. Bowie: Loving the Alien. London: Little Brown, 1996.

Welch, Chris. We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song 1970-1980. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1999.

* Happy 20th Birthday, Twin Peaks.

* Best of luck to Malcolm McLaren as he joins the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle in the Sky.

* Congratulations to this year’s Eisner nominees, apparently selected by pulling names out of a hat. (No offense to the worthy ones–you know who they are.)

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Tom Neely’s Vegan Police t-shirt;

* Siobhan Magnus’s Edward Gorey tattoo;

* and Ty Mattson’s Lost posters.

* More new Dave Kiersh!

* I always look forward to visiting the PictureBox table at MoCCA.

* Todd VanDerWerff’s weekly Lost follow-up keeps things relatively meaty this week, most notably with a fans-vs.-creators concept.

Isaac Moylan and I will be selling copies of our David Bowie bio-comic The Side Effects of the Cocaine at the Partyka table at this weekend’s MoCCA Festival. And I will generally be prowling around, Bowie sketchbook in tow. If you see me, please say hello!

* Calling all Lost commenters: This week’s thread is right here. Sorry for the mental hiccup!

* Congratulations to Matt Maxwell, Gervasio, and Jok on the completion of Strangeways: The Thirsty. This comic was a pleasure to read.

* Matt’s almost always worth reading when he’s writing about comics-related issues at length, and over the past day or so he’s served up a couple of doozies. First, here he is on comics and the iPad. Among many other things he, like many other folks I’ve read, take Joe Quesada to task over his claim that the increased accessibility of digital comics via Marvel’s iPad app will drive more people to comic stores. To me it’s pretty clear that Quesada’s saying this because he has to in order to placate his understandably nervous retailers. Direct Market retailers are vital to comics, don’t get me wrong, and I want them to weather the storm. But with the exceptions we all know and love, they are a reactionary group at the best of times, and I’m sure this vocal constituency has equally strong advocates within Marvel. They have to be the only thing that’s kept Marvel and the rest of the comics companies from jumping into the digital world with the same totality as, say, music companies and iTunes. He’s gotta make the right noises.

* And here’s Matt on Greg Rucka’s departure from DC and Batwoman. I’m positive Rucka’s being honest when he says he’s fired up and ready to go vis a vis getting back into creator-owned work again, and that’s awesome. But as Matt puts it:

Looking at this, it’s clear that Batwoman was his baby (if you’ll pardon the double entendre) and for him to simply walk away, drama or no drama, is not a small deal (even if [he’s] insisting that it’s not a big one).

*Anyway, over at Comics Alliance you can read the entire transcript of Rucka’s WonderCon panel, where this bomb was dropped, to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.

* My Robot 6 colleague Brigid Alverson is all over all the MoCCA announcements and debuts and panels and parties and whatnot. Just click the MoCCA tag and keep scrolling. In terms of stuff that’s caught mine eye, Fantagraphics is packing in a lot of guests and new books.

* Speaking of conventions, it seems pretty clear that the plan behind Wizard’s relentless con expansion is to piggyback off the goodwill and audience interest generated by larger, better comic cons (the rebranding from “Wizard World” to “Comic Con” wasn’t a coincidence), and then to piggyback again off the press generated by those shows among reporters who don’t know any better (this LA Times article being a case in point), all through a series of local con-promoter proxies at minimal cost to Wizard proper. You, dedicated comics fans, are not the target, unless you’re in a market that doesn’t have recourse to those other shows, in which case the hope is that you’ll grin and bear it.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Mike Mignola about the next two Hellboy stories, The Storm and The Fury, which will apparently be to Hellboy what King of Fear is to the B.P.R.D.

* Dan Nadel’s Art in Time is out! Yay!

* Tom Brevoort’s X-Men preferences strike me as eminently reasonable.

* Real-Life Horror: We murdered Iraqis and reporters and Rob Humanick picking up the “Links for the Day” torch that The House Next Door appears to have permanently and regrettably dropped.

* Speaking of THND, founder emeritus Matt Zoller Seitz serves up another of his trademark video essays, this one a 25-minute pondering of Dennis Hopper. Click the link for Seitz’s introduction, then take a little time to watch the video. What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say–he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bull-SHIT, man!

* Your quote of the day:

We are born into structures of law and tradition which were invented by men who were dead long before we were born. All our lives, we struggle against their vast, ubiquitous and posthumous powers.

—Zak Smith, Playing D&D with Porn Stars

* Your entire post of the day: “Proud of Being Ignorant” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I am linking to that post as hard as I possibly can.

SPOILER WARNING

* I like Desmond; I’ve never loved Desmond. Despite a consistently warm and compelling performance from Henry Ian Cusick, one of the seemingly countless casting coups that I think really saved the show’s bacon once things started getting truly baroque, Desmond’s the kind of character I’d call “Internet-beloved” and mean it as a sneer, I’m afraid. He strikes me as what people who hate Jack wanted Jack to be: A hero. Desmond will never let anyone down, which is what makes him much less interesting to me than Jack. I’m glad he’s in love, but that doesn’t really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with umpteen million star-crossed couples; I’m glad he can time-travel and dimension-shift with greater ease than the rest of the cast, but that also doesn’t really move my needle all that much in the context of a show with smoke monsters and psychic children and immortals and people who see dead people. I liked Desmond best in Season Two, when he was the crazy Scotsman in the Hatch injecting himself with drugs, listening to Mama Cass, and trying and failing to escape the Island where he’d lived a hallucinatory hermetic life as the only thing keeping the world from ending.

* So I don’t dread Desmond episodes; I dread the aftermath of Desmond episodes. I’m just not fully on board with the rapturous reception all his episodes get–at least two of them are usually held up as potential “Best. Episode. EVER”s, and I’m not feeling it. My quick, dismissive post last night was just an attempt to dodge the deluge of “OMG!!!!”s I knew was coming; I couldn’t even close my computer down fast enough to avoid a few, and Todd VanDerWerff’s review is probably the apotheosis of the form: “If you did not like “Happily Ever After,” then I’m pretty sure we can’t be Internet friends anymore.” Rats!

* But, you know, I did like the episode. It was fine. In the immortal words of History of the World Part I: “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling…but nice.”

* Aside from my general lack of “DESMOND FTW” vibes, my biggest problem with it–and this is what I was getting at with that one-line post–is that it’s pretty much exactly what I expected. Veteran time-jumper Desmond is the first to figure out that the flashsideways timeline is a bogus existence created by (according to Daniel) the detonation of the nuclear bomb by the Dharma Bums, and now he’s going to try to persuade the castaways to abandon their new, fake lives for the old one. Like, duh, right?

* Admittedly, that first moment when Charlie opens his eyes underwater and smilingly puts his hand on the glass sent a little shockwave for me. It’s one of the show’s most memorable images. But of course, it’s an image from another, earlier episode. Whatever revelatory juice we were supposed to get from the discovery that these aren’t the lives the characters are supposed to be leading was undercut, for me at least, by the fact that that was my assumption from the jump.

* So, unlike the “I want ANSWERS” crowd VanDerWerff rightly rails against in his review, I was perfectly satisfied with the volume of answers we got in this episode. It seemed like a lot to me. Moreover, anytime Lost does one of its big super-science experiments–like throwing some switches and forcing Desmond to quantum leap through the stargate in arguably the cheesiest effects sequence the show’s done so far–I feel like I am getting an “answer” even if you end up just having to shrug your shoulders and roll with pseudoscientificity of it all.

* I also had no beef with spending all that time in the flashsideways universe rather than on the Island. Like I always say, I like these characters, and since the core of who they all are has remained consistent from the main universe to the new one, I never feel, as apparently many people do, that these flashsideways sequences are a waste of time we could be spending on the “real” characters and the answers they seek. These are the real characters too, as far as I’m concerned.

* Specifically, I was thrilled to see Desmond receive not just the approval, but the friendship, of Charles Widmore. I’m a sucker for when grown men are kind and cooperative to each other in fiction, it really hits my buttons, and seeing them smile at each other and warmly hug, their real-reality animosity vaporized, was a treat.

* So too was the part when he got really angry at Desmond for losing Charlie: I thought we were gonna see the old, awful Widmore come out, but his ultimate punishment was just making Desmond tell his wife himself. Chuckle!

* I also really enjoyed the return of Charlie Pace. Is it just me, or has Dominic Monaghan grown as an actor considerably since the start of the show? I find him really convincingly dissolute and puckish; if he were older I could see him going toe to toe with the reigning Manchester junkie-rockstar champ Shaun Ryder. (PS: “You All Everybody” needs to be transported back to about 1994 and released as a single.) It warms the cockles of my heart to see a drugged-up rock star break on through to the other side for real, you know?

* I also got a big kick out of the return of George Minkowski. Poor Fisher Stevens: Everyone was so excited to see him join the cast, but he stuck around for all of an episode before biting it. (Zoe Bell too!) He was so unctuous here he made me uncomfortable through the television screen. Well done!

* Some guy on Twitter spoiled the return of Daniel Faraday for me, so I was kind of left flat by that. (If you’re wondering how any of these return appearances could surprise me to begin with given that they’re all in the opening credits, I cover up the lower third of the screen until the “Guest Starring” section is finished in order to avoid getting spoiled by the show’s own credits.) I mean, I like Jeremy Davies fine in that role, and I liked seeing how he accessed those same mannerisms through the filter of a brilliant musician who’s basically happy rather than a brilliant scientist who’s basically miserable. I just wasn’t bowled over by it, is all.

* Eloise is always fun, isn’t she? A Harry Potter harridan. Perhaps the one aspect of this episode’s mythology advancement that did take me by surprise was that she’s apparently a timecop in this reality as well. I thought the show was clever to present her as this intimidating but ultimately kind lady, only to flip a switch the second she hears Desmond nosing around about something that might trigger his memories of the original reality–boom! out comes the hardass.

* Finally, just because I’m not head-over-heels for Desmond doesn’t mean I wasn’t glad that he managed to score a date with Penny despite an entire reality built on the premise that they’d never met. If I were Penny I would have been blowing my rape whistle and spraying him with mace the whole time, but whatever, good for those two crazy kids.

* So yeah, like VanDerWerff and unlike the ANSWERS!!!!1!! crowd, I had no problem with the flashsideways reality dominating the show, and enjoyed a lot of it. It’s just that at long last, this was a case of the show zigging exactly where I expected it to zig, zagging where I expected it to zag. It’s a bummer is all.

* Over on the Island: This is kind of picayune, but I think casting that dimpy dude from cereal commercials or whatever as one of Widmore’s scientists was the first big casting mistake I can remember the show making in a long time. I’m just not scared of or impressed by a guy who looks like a chipmunk. Casting Debbie from Singles as Dark Tina Fey is fine, though.

* After all these years, Sayid actually is a badass! Sure, it took the Lost equivalent of demonic possession for him to successfully infiltrate anything other than Shannon’s vagina, but give the guy a hand.

* A friend of mine was all psyched up after the episode, saying that it was the show declaring “Alright, it’s on”–but I don’t see it, certainly not any moreso than all the episodes where Jacob or Fake Locke revealed their motives and goals. I mean, Desmond has his quantum leap and returns all beatific and doo; over in the flashsideways timeline it’s pretty clear what he’s up to, but on the Island? First he’s joining the Get-Along Gang with Widmore, then he’s just as pleased to wander off with Sayid after Sayid ices the two Widmorians and (in what I assume was a pretty bad move, aka classic Sayid) lets Zoe run away. That’s intriguing, certainly, but it’s far from “a-ha! Now we know what the endgame will be.”

* So there you have it. My little one-liner was more a response to the response to the episode than to the episode itself, which I liked fine. I’m sorry about that; that’s lame behavior and it’s not the kind of thing I’m glad to have done. But like I always say, I’m always trying to find a way to approach the art I like that maximizes my enjoyment, and kicking against the pricks late last night wasn’t that way. Turns out gettin’ a good night’s sleep and then writing about the episode this morning was, so thank you for your patience!

SPOILERS AHEAD

Well, that was about what I expected.

* Please send Robot 6 your MoCCA plans!

* Speaking of MoCCA and Robot 6, Alex Dueben’s got a pretty crackerjack list of comics-related activities attendees can partake in around the city, including a surprising number of plays and museum exhibits.

*Also on Robot 6: The Avengers/X-Men comics/movie conspiracy theory.

* Some dude named Andrew Lincoln will star as Rick Grimes in Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead for AMC. That’s good to know, but it also gives me occasion to point out the relentlessly nudity-focused coverage of male casting announcements by my compadre Jason Adams.

* Well, how about that: On the list of cartoonists I expected to participate in Robert Goodin’s Covered blog, John Byrne was nowhere to be found. My mistake!

* So that’s what kobolds are!

* I guess watching this video for Kelis’s shamelessly button-pushing dance song “Acapella” is what watching a Fischerspooner video would be like if I were extremely attracted to Casey Spooner. (Via Tom Ewing.)

* Why I put off listening to this for this long I have no idea, but I am pretty much floored by the excellence of Brad Smith’s MOON8, a cover album of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon done in the style of an 8-bit video game soundtrack. Think of how good you think this will be–it’s that good. Since I’ve pretty much been mainlining this album and Super Mario games for the past year or so, this is some serious two-great-tastes shit for me. To be semi-serious for a sec, it’s also a fascinating combination of the nostalgic flavors: The video games of your childhood combined with the music of your adolescence (or whenever) which itself was likely the music of your parents’ adolescence (or whenever)…but screw being serious, it’s 8-bit “Us and Them”! (Via Topless Robot.)

* While you listen, be sure to pop in for one last look at last week’s Lost thoughts thread–and I’ll see you tonight for this week’s!

I can’t remember the last movie I went to see in the theater with expectations as low as those I had for Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans. It’s not even that I had fond memories of the apparently cheesy-but-fun-if-you-were-a-kid-at-the-time original and its Ray Harryhausen special effects (so if you were dreading my impersonation of Harry Knowles explaining how this raped the unforgettable afternoon he spent in the theater with Father Geek, don’t sweat it). When all I had to go by were the trailers and commercials, I was actually pretty excited. Lord of the Rings meets 300? Sure, I’ll eat it.

Then I got wind of the hideous 3D transfer, and the supposedly turgid and stupid movie underneath, and nearly got spooked off. But I’ve got a buddy I wanted to see who likes seeing big dumb shit on the big screen even more than I do, so off I went. By this point, my theory, and my solace, was that having eschewed the bogus 3D version and with expectations resting somewhere in the underworld, I might actually enjoy the thing. Relatively speaking.

And I suppose…I did? I mean, I didn’t wanna walk out or anything. I don’t even think I got bored. But I want to assure you that if you’ve ever seen a fantastical genre action movie, and I mean ever, there is no need for you to see Clash of the Titans. You’ve seen it allllllllll before, over and over.

Indeed, Clash is counting on you having done so. It relies on a kind of popcorn-movie shorthand to convey key plot elements, attach you to its characters, intimidate you at its low points and rally you at its high points. It’s so ersatz it’s almost mind bloggling. Aside from the fond memories you have of the Fellowship of the Ring or the Colonial Marines or whoever the hell else, there is no reason for you to care about any of the film’s anonymous, uninteresting…I wanna say “characters” here but I have to put it in sneer quotes. Nothing that the green young rookie warriors or the grizzled old veterans or the crazy ethnic tagalongs do or say rises above stock poses and cliches you’ve seen and heard a million times before. The casting department scored a bit with some guy named Draco or Drago or something to that effect simply because he’s played by an older, whiter, more unintelligble doppelganger of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but beyond that? Ciphers to a man. And I’m including Sam Worthington, who in the course of his three SFF tentpole films has established himself as the most bizarrely uncharismatic action superstar since–hey, I’m drawing a blank, so maybe he takes the taco! Gemma Arterton distinguishes herself as Io by being extraordinarily attractive, something that (say) Old Veteran Who Makes Quips In The Face Of Danger doesn’t have going for him, but that’s some faint praise right there.

Now, I’ll say this for Clash: Almost anything creature-related is surprisingly well done. Given how overly fluid, artificial, and biologically unconvincing CGI creatures can look–cf. Avatar–it takes some real doing to, say, light giant marauding scorpions so that the desert haze is properly reflected off their carapaces, or convincingly depict the way the heft of a giant snake-woman’s tail drags her dying body off a ledge. I was impressed that Clash pulled it off and found myself looking forward to each, well, clash. True, Medusa herself was kind of unimaginative and the Hades bat-demon things were never on screen long enough to get a good look at, but the witches and Djinns or whatever they were were delightfully creepy and gross, grand nightmare fodder for little kids. I even preferred the eye-in-hand witch things to the Pan’s Labyrinth critter they ripped the look off from.

But it was pretty much all one step forward, two steps back. For each rock-solid monster there was an embarrassingly obvious greenscreen shot–is it really that hard to make people standing around on a moving ship or animal blend in with the background? The battle sequences were generally well put together, a series of intelligible beats that made use of the space in which they took place and had physical consequences that could be readily understood–again, contrast with Avatar. But within those sequences, individual one-on-one fights were a hastily crosscut blur a la Batman Begins. As my friend put it, it was like they didn’t bother to choreograph, they just shot a bunch of people swinging swords in different directions and put it together in post. This works fine when you’re Peter Jackson and Weta and you’ve run out of time to do the warg sequence in The Two Towers, so you wing it, and even though it’s the least meticulously constructed fight in the whole trilogy, it thereby stands out as a quick, nasty, down-and-dirty tussle. This doesn’t work at all if it’s your whole movie, and you’ve really only got a total of three battles to work with. And seriously–three monsters, one of which was basically just the Cave Troll grown to Godzilla size and slapped with some Watcher-in-the-Water tentacles and Cloverfield appendages? I’m glad they kept the movie short by the increasingly overblown standards of today’s self-important popcorn flicks, but with so little actually happening, it didn’t feel like much of an adventure.

If you’ve read my blog for a long time, you know I always say that plot holes can be forgiven if the stuff that surrounds those plot holes is compelling enough. But a few impressively done scorpions does not a movie make, and thus I just sat there shaking my head at the whoppers in this thing. How did the people of Argos find out Perseus was a demigod? Why does Zeus agree to punish humanity for its hubris (a word never used!) but then constantly attempt to help Perseus stop the plot he himself set in motion? Isn’t the hilarious religious zealot figure, who looks like he came straight from an Oberline hackey-sack circle, completely reasonable in his desire to sacrifice one person in lieu of the tens of thousands who would die if the gods carry out their threat to wipe out Argos–to say nothing of the dozen who actually do die on Perseus’s absurd quest, or the hundreds who actually do die when the Kraken attacks, or even the dozens who die after Perseus defeats the Kraken by turning it to a stone statue so fragile that it collapses, raining concrete death upon the citizens he supposedly just saved? Why should we care about Perseus rescuing a character we’ve barely met and have no reason to care about any more than all the cannon fodder who’ve been sacrificed while the important people work out their daddy issues? Are we supposed to cheer for the return of those two ethnic hunter guys whose names we don’t even know and who participated in a grand total of one battle? Why didn’t the Argossians just, you know, leave Argos before the clearly articulated deadline for destruction arrived? Why cast a real actor as Poseidon only to give him one line and–this part I stress–not even make him the person who releases the Kraken? Was I the only person who got the giggles when watching Liam Neeson as Zeus argue with Ralph Fiennes as Hades because they were both in Schindler’s List?

Look, I care about action and violence and monsters onscreen as much as pretty much anyone I know. I’m always happy to see cool stuff like the scorpions or the Kraken or whatever, they go into the old fantasy memory bank to be drawn from at a later date. I got my money’s worth in that regard. But I could have walked over to the office copy machine and photocopied the cover of The Return of the King, put the page back in the paper tray, then photocopied the cover of 300 on top of that and called it a day.

* WonderCon announcement #1: More All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder! Only now it will shrewdly be called Dark Knight: Boy Wonder. I hope it still sells great and baffles and enrages even more people.

* WonderCon announcement #2: Greg Rucka flounces from DC and Batwoman. Did he jump or was he pushed, or as he is insisting, did he simply choose to go where his muse was taking him? I’ve seen a lot of people saying “he just wanted to tell creator-owned stories again because that’s what was getting him fired up,” and that’s largely true, I assume. But at the same time, he’s saying he had a planned wrap-up to his Batwoman material that now he’s not sure when if ever it’ll get done. If it’s all about telling the stories he wants to tell, well, that’s a story he wants to tell, right? You’d think he could wait another six months. Anyway, I hope he does get to do that Batwoman story eventually, and I’ll check out whatever he does with J.H. Williams III on his own as well.

* WonderCon announcement #3: Tom Spurgeon’s epic con report does more con reporting by breakfast than most people’s con reports do all week.

* Big ups to Tom Spurgeon’s thoughtful Best Comics of 2009 list. He’s worth reading on The Photographer and Cockbone alone.

* Speaking of worth reading: David Bordwell on the recently unearthed cut of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch interviews Robert Kirkman on The Walking Dead. That book’s trend-bucking sales success is one of the past decade’s great comics success stories; it warms my heart a bit every time I think of it, for real. Equally impressive to me (and Frisch brings this up) is the way Kirkman paid off that years-long prison interlude. He really went all out.

* I’m always glad to see new Dave Kiersh.

* Recently on Robot 6: Jim Lee fingerpaints on his iPad.

* I laughed pretty hard at this, but I was also a bit scared.

Here’s a fun way to spend the next little while: Watch the story of Marble Hornets.

The rest of the videos are here. Enjoy your evening!

* Douglas Wolk was not nuts about Blackest Night #8. He argues that by reviving various old dead superheroes and supervillains, the series undermines both the DC Universe’s unique “legacy” aspect, by which the mantle of different superbeings is worn by different characters over time, and the dramatic impact of their original deaths. I disagree with all this for a few reasons. (Spoilers ahoy…)

For one thing, very very very few of these characters’ deaths were all that dramatic to begin with. I’ll grant you Martian Manhunter and Osiris, even Maxwell Lord and the Hawks (even though their deaths were pretty icky). But the rest? Aquaman had been turned into Squidbeard the Grey or something when he bought it, Firestorm and Jade and Captain Boomerang were run-of-the-mill sacrificial lambs to juice up an event comic (which frankly was the case with MM and the Hawks too), and the Reverse Flash and Hawk died so long ago I forget how it happened. Gwen Stacy they ain’t. Plus, nearly all the characters who’ve been revived during the last year or so, including everyone in Blackest Night except the Reverse Flash and Hawk, were killed by the same editorial regime that ended up bringing them back. It’s not like some storied classic run was undone by any of this.

Meanwhile, legacies are hardly relevant with many of these characters: There are no younger versions of Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Deadman, Maxwell Lord, Osiris, or Jade for the old versions to replace, while it appears the new and old Firestorms will be combined, and Professor Zoom had already been resurrected to interact with his successor Zoom several months ago. And frankly, God help you care passionately enough about the new Captain Boomerang or the new Hawk to complain that they’ll no longer have the spotlight to themselves.

Which leads me to my core contention, which is that the legacy aspect of the DCU is perhaps the single most overrated concept in superhero comics, not least by the company itself. It reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld’s routine about how sports fans are really just rooting for laundry: Is it really all that exciting to anyone that this or that outfit has been given to some new clown? With the possible exceptions of the various Robin characters and the new Blue Beetle–who can’t maintain a title in today’s market, for whatever that’s worth–has there even been a legacy character worth his or her salt since the Silver Age reinventions of the Flash and Green Lantern anyway? Douglas says this keeps things feeling fresh, like the world moves on, but if you’ve ever read any DC comic dealing with the legacy concept–Justice Society of America is about legacies almost exclusively–you’ll know they’re about anything but keeping things fresh and forward-looking. They’re the most nostalgia-obsessed, most past-fixated comics in their entire stable. As Douglas himself says, in reality “legacies” are about copyright service as much as anything else. So why not bring back the classic dudes and dudettes if you’ve got the chance?

* If you followed all the stuff I wrote about Siege‘s sales levels on Robot 6, you might wanna check out Joe Quesada’s take on the topic in this Robot 6 interview with Kiel Phegley. One angle he introduces that I find interesting is that the company has a variety of smaller but still high-profile series and mini-events going on that perhaps diverted some sales away from the main event. I’m not sure how convinced I am, but it is true that over at DC you’re really only talking about Blackest Night and Batman and Robin.

* Chris Evans is Captain America. Sure, why not.

* Here are Whitney Matheson’s weekly Lost comment-thread catches. There’s a tidbit from a recent producers podcast that struck me.

* Here’s what’s in that extended Nightbreed workprint. Qualified enthusiasm seems to be the order of the day.

* Recently on Robot 6: Rich Koslowski does the Three Little Pigs.

* We Are the LAW is really cookin’ lately. I drew Orko Revealed, Batman of Gondor, and Shaving Captain Caveman, while I really dig my pal Zach Oat’s Boy’s Club/Teen Wolf tribute. Click the links for the big versions!

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Blackest Night gets lots of love from DC, Final Crisis not so much;

* and Tom Brevoort has hisself a Formspring account.

* How did I forget to smack the stupid V countdown clock around?

* A gigantic Jack Kirby art exhibition curated by Dan Nadel and Paul Gravett? Sure, I’ll eat it! Or I would if it weren’t in Italy. Love the dig at that MoCCA Archie show, too.

* New trailer for The Expendables! Good gravy. I’m actually a little upset that my brother is getting married the weekend this and Scott Pilgrim come out.

* I’m not sure if anything fills me with the joy of my film-student days like a good Gregg Toland/Orson Welles deep-focus shot from Citizen Kane. David Bordwell traces the technique’s antecedents and parallels.

* Zak Smith is trash-talkin’ Tolkien a bit too much for my taste in his post on the H section of the D&D Monster Manual, but the Hell Hound entry makes up for it.

* I like the way Todd VanDerWerff has become my “food taster” for the opinions (usually negative) of Lost fandom at large–he bravely samples them and makes me aware of their overall flavor, and I am free to push away from the table.

SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT

* Historically, I’d come to dread Jin/Sun episodes of Lost. They were to me what Kate episodes or “FlashJacks” were to a lot of other people. Yes yes, they’ve had a troubled relationship marred by deceit, we get it. Things necessarily livened up once the flashbacks gave way to flashforwards, the Islanders/Oceanic Six split, and time jumps. But since I knew that this season’s Jin/Sun episode would be showing us what the couple was up to in 2004, flashback style, I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Not even knowing that Jin would end up bound and gagged in a gangster’s kitchen someplace did much to sweeten the pot.

* But whaddyaknow, it was a good episode!

* For one thing, it turns out that Jin ending up bound and gagged in a gangster’s kitchen someplace sweetens the pot quite a bit. The flashsideways couldn’t end with some little epiphany about their relationship, it had to end with how Jin escaped from his plight. The relationship stuff was sort of seeded throughout, and came off the better for it. And hey, it’s still all based on lies, but this time it’s a mutual lie rather than one lying to the other. It’s not quite the breakthrough achieved by Jack, Ben, Locke, or Sawyer, but it beats poor Sayid.

* Also, it wasn’t the worst idea in the world to kick off the Jin/Sun stuff by having Sun take her top off. I’m just sayin’.

* But beyond that, it gave Sun something to do! I wasn’t super-into her heel turn during the flashforwards when she was plotting to kill Ben, but as the Missus always puts it, she’s not a person you wanna fuck with. I like that she’s normally sweet but very dangerous when cornered or pressured. She’s her father’s daughter.

* Another thing the episode had going for it was that it appears we’ll be advancing the main Island mythology ball at a pretty rapid clip at this point, or at the very least eliminating some possibilities as to what the heck’s going on. For example, between Fake Locke’s bug-eyed distress upon finding his camp raided in his absence–and surely all of us thought he’d left on purpose!–and the dick-measuring contest he had with Widmore on the shore of Hydra Island, we can now rest assured that they really aren’t on the same side.

* This raises the question: If Widmore and his people want to stop the Monster, and Ben and his Others worked (after a fashion) for Jacob who also wanted to stop the Monster, then we really were looking at a blue-on-blue conflict, if you will: Two rival teams of “good guys” who were doing horrible stuff all the time to one another and to anyone else who got in the way. “Good guys” really deserves its sneer quotes on this show.

* Also, our Cavalcade of Unreliable Narrators with regards to explaining the Monster/MIB/Fake Locke saw the addition of Charles Widmore. Welcome aboard, Chuck! Now in addition to Richard’s warning that he’d kill everyone on the Island and everyone everyone on the Island cares about, and in addition to Jacob’s characterization of the MIB as a darkness that can’t be allowed to spread past the Island, and in addition to the late Isabella’s warning (via Hurley) that if the MIB escapes “we all go to Hell,” Widmore says that should the MIB get off the Island, Sun and Ji-Yeon and Penny and presumably many more people besides will “cease to exist.” !!! What is this guy, Azathoth?

* And then there’s Fake Locke himself, explaining that he needs all the remaining Candidates to get off the Island. Apparently they have to come willingly, since otherwise he could have just Smoke Monstered Sun’s ass to wherever he needed her to be. Jack and Hurley too, for that matter.

* Kate’s not listed on the wall of the cave “anymore.” She used to be–what changed?

* Great bit with Sayid not feeling anything. I was curious as to how Fake Locke would react to that–was this a surprise to him, or something he’s seen before, or at least expected? Seems like he was unfazed, for whatever that’s worth.

* I’m quite glad Kevin Durand was back again as Martin Keamy. How creepy! I do wish Andrew Divoff had been given more to do as this new, two-eyed, more mild-mannered, easier to kill Mikhail Bakunin, however. And it was also a bit weird to see an Other mixed up with Keamy’s crew–almost a stretch, I’d say.

* Speaking of which, I’m waxing enthusiastic for this episode despite my hunch that Internet naysayers will have a field day with this one. Sun’s loss of English (followed by the now de rigeur fanservice acknowledgement by Frank–could have been Hurley or Miles or even Sawyer too–that this is kind of ridiculous), Jack’s line about the tomato that didn’t know it was supposed to die, Mikhail getting shot in the eye OMG!!!, Jack once again earning someone’s trust for a big plan despite the fact that all his previous plans ended in bloody disaster, a SWAT team led by a geophysicist and that dimpy guy from various commercials taking out a few dozen hardened Others and Castaways with poison darts…a lot of the stuff in this episode could read as clunky or cheesy or forced. I just read it as fun.

* One thing about that Jack/Sun conversation: I think it’s worth pointing out that you can trust people for different reasons. Trusting Jack doesn’t necessarily mean that you have confidence in his ability to successfully execute a plan, it just means that you trust he’s a good person with your best interests at heart. Frankly, I too would take that over a smoke monster wearing the skin of my crazy dead friend.

* Was I disappointed that it was Desmond in the locked room, not Walt? You betcha. I mean, I guess I ought to have known that the guy in the opening credits in every episode would show up by now. Oh well. Still holding out hope that Walt is 108.

* Oh yeah: What the heck can Desmond do to stop the MIB? We’ve seen that he has some rare abilities in terms of weathering time travel of various kinds, and he managed to blow the Hatch without imploding…

* Last night I saw the stage adaptation of The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner. It was great. Here’s my review. But I really want to stress that the show is accompanied by an exhibition of original Gloeckner art and comics pages, which right then and there transforms it into a can’t-miss situation for fans of Gloeckner’s work. I mean, these things are astonishing. The show runs through MoCCA weekend, so get your tickets, and even if you hate the play or think it’s just alright, you’ll have seen Gloeckner originals up close and personal. The blowjob cross-section, for God’s sake. The beach scene!

* Elsewhere on Robot 6: Bill Sienkiewicz draws friendly dictators.

* The Bram Stoker Awards will recognize graphic novels. That’s cool, but only if they look farther afield than the schlocky, not scary horror-comics mainstream. I mean, I’m totally fine with two nominations being eaten up by The Walking Dead and Mike Mignola every year, but I’d rather see The Squirrel Machine instead of Simon Dark or whatever.

* I enjoyed this essay by Oscar Moralde on the challenge of ending a TV series for The House Next Door. I think he’s right that Lost‘s finale, by virtue of the whole construction of the series, will bear more weight than even the finales of The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica, for good or ill.

* They’re remaking Godzilla–yes, again. I’m mildly optimistic. It’s a little-known fact that I freaking LOVED Godzilla as a kid, and I would assume that the hideous Devlin-Emmerich remake provides a pretty convenient “what NOT to do” guide for whoever makes the new one. Cloverfield proved how scary scale can be; I imagine a Hollywood Godzilla is going to be an all-ages summer-tentpole affair rather than a serious horror movie, but summer-tentpole needn’t equal braindead.

* I think I love you, Zak Smith.

* I think I hate you, Ken Bromberg.

* Lost thoughts tonight, of course, but for now why not take one last gander at last week’s?