* On Robot 6 today I put up a big round-up of Batman-related news that included the departure of Grant Morrison from Batman and Robin after issue #18 and this pretty sweet Frank Quitely cover.

* Here’s an interesting piece by Chris Butcher on the ground-level science-fiction manga series Twin Spica and how its cover is alienating its logical audience.

* I like the message of Douglas Wolk’s guide to Comic-Con for Techland: Do a little smart preparation and go in with reasonable expectations and the show will exceed them. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Real Life Horror Headline of the Day: “Giant human-wounding plant invades Canada”.

* This image made me chuckle.

* So did this one.

* Straight-out racist, this Ghostbusters t-shirt is, simple and plain.

I have no brief with Drake. I’m led to understand he’s like Bizarro Lady Gaga: Like hers, his first album Thank Me Later (ha!) was recorded under the largely fictional conceit that he was already a huge star, but the Bizarro element is that in his case his reaction was to complain about fame’s dark side and downside rather than dress and act like a post-millennial Ziggy Stardust. That sounds funny to me, but I’m not sure if I’m laughing with him, if you know what I mean. As for his music, Thank Me Later‘s first two singles rely on dreary but relentless vocal hooks of the sort you hear without trying, without even wanting to. In today’s pop climate, that’s wisdom: If you want people to remember your music from the 10-second snippet they hear flipping around the radio or playing on someone’s cellphone, making it annoying is at least as effective as making it catchy. (He does get off one of the better lines in the wonderfully goofy “BedRock,” however. “I thought I recognized her…”)

But here’s the thing: “Karaoke” is the main reason I know any of that stuff. After discovering it through the mighty Fluxblog–well, it’s the sort of song that makes you hit up the artist’s wikipedia page. Drake performs this paean to a relationship that ended when his incipient stardom became too much for his beloved to bear against a loping drum beat and gently cooing synths (courtesy of Francis Starlite), his sung vocals echoing around and through them, his rap bouncing insistently up and down on the beat. The overall effect is to carve out a vulnerable, twilit space for his autobiographically direct lyrics. It could have seemed like the sociopathic emotional exhibitionism of reality TV or the dull narcissism of a bad autobio comic (to swipe Fluxblog’s comparisons), but instead it comes across like a quiet late-night conversation, when you’re too tired to be anything but totally honest.

In fact it reminds me of nothing so much as late-’90s Everything But the Girl, who pretty much perfected that blend of cool electronica and frank small-hours desire and regret. Listen to a track like “Good Cop Bad Cop” or “Before Today”: What’s striking is the exhausted need in Tracey Thorn’s voice, buttressed by blue Ben Watt production that sends the subliminal message “It’s okay, you can say this, I can hear this.” What I got from EBTG is what I get from “Karaoke,” right down to Drake’s Thorn-ian use of evocative everyday imagery (“You put the tea in the kettle and light it / Put your hand on the metal and feel it / But do you even feel it?”) and the way his description of his plight can be interpreted as a defense of and an attack on both involved parties (“I was only trying to get ahead, but the spotlight made you nervous”). My best guess is that the side of Drake that will become inescapable this year won’t be this side, but I’m happy to have found it at all.

* Here’s a pretty quick and easy indicator of how tough a row Kenneth Branagh’s Thor movie has to hoe in terms of pleasing nerds: Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken dings the costumes worn by Thor, Odin, and Loki below for being too weird, while Comics Comics’ Dan Nadel dings them for being not weird enough. In terms of the history of Good Superhero Comics, that’s much more Dan’s territory than Rob’s, so advantage Dan if you have to pit them head-to-head; that said, I sympathize with Branagh and company for the tricky task at hand. You don’t just want to go straight-up Lord of the Rings faux-historical Viking warrior with them, but if you really went all-out Kirby/Simonson, you’d probably get a reaction akin to the one Speed Racer got.

* Speaking of the PictureBox empire, this is pretty funny: The site’s now hosting King Chubbo, that extremely filthy webcomic by Ken Sohn about him and his wife’s gross sex/fantasy life.

* Hey, look, Paul Chadwick has a blog. He says he’s working on a DC series with Harlan Ellison, a Dark Horse graphic novel with Mike Richardson, some Concrete short stories, a Concrete miniseries, a Concrete prose novel, and a kids’ series. (Via Michael May.)

* Alex Kropinak draws my Destructor character arm wrestling a Terminator. This is perhaps my favorite drawing.

Head First

Goldfrapp

Mute, March 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

Goldfrapp are forever associated in my mind with the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City soundtrack albums; Head First sounds like it could be one. Though I’d heard of the group during their downtempo Felt Mountain phase–anyone who was ever compared to Portishead was bound to bleep across my radar screen, however fleetingly–the first time they truly entered my consciousness was the spring of 2003, courtesy of their abrupt left turn into electro-glam on Black Cherry. At the time, I was now two and a half years deep into a Velvet Goldmine/David Bowie/Roxy Music-inspired, electroclash-abetted binge on all sorts of music I’d previously rejected as BULLSHIT, from disco to Depeche Mode. I was simultaneously playing the bejesus out of Vice City in both videogame and CD box-set form, to the point where the Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic” was my ’03 summer jam. Enter Goldfrapp’s publicist, who offered me an all expenses paid trip to London to spend several days hanging out with and attending gigs by the band as the basis for a feature in A&F Quarterly, lacrosse-player/Chelsea-Boy clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch’s “lifestyle publication” (i.e. catalog/magazine/softcore-porn hybrid) and my gig at the time. (Don’t laugh. See those interviews with Clive Barker, Frank Miller, Underworld, the Dandy Warhols, Chuck Palahniuk, and Betty friggin’ Page in my sidebar? Brought to you by the creators of Hollister!)

Now, because we’d already planned interviews with Goldfrapp’s fellow Gorgeous Ladies Of Electro Miss Kittin, Peaches, and Shirley Manson, and because I am very stupid, I turned the offer down. It wasn’t until the 2006 release of Supernature that I finally cottoned to Goldfrapp’s pitch-perfect blend of like a million things I really love–for pete’s sake, they’re basically an Age of Apocalypse version of the Glitter Band fronted by a beautiful woman who make sexy horror-tinged videos that raise uncomfortable animal rights issues. But no matter how heavily I got into the high glam of “Ooh La La” or the underrated Sunday-morning-coming-down follow-up album Seventh Tree, for me Goldfrapp are still connected most closely with the months I spent passing up potentially life-changing British bacchanalias and fake-murdering people to the strains of “Self Control” by Laura Branigan.

That connection is likely why I’m not buying the notion that Head First represents a relatively easy and shallow retreat to the Totally ’80s for a group who’d previous crafted a more groundbreaking fusion of glamorous pop traditions. Sure, we’ve had a decade’s worth of artists reclaiming and/or rehashing New Wave, post-punk, electro, synthpop and the like. These days, La Roux can become an inescapable New York City radio staple and Christina Aguilera can transform herself into Goldfrapp 2: Electric Boogaloo and hardly anyone bats an eyelash. But on Head First, Goldfrapp proper are mining far less surface-cool, and therefore far less shopworn, source material. They’re not making James Murphy’s proverbial Yaz record, they’re recruiting synth (and emotional) tones from “Jump” and “Jump (For My Love),” from “Physical,” from “We Built This City”–such stuff as Vice City’s FM radio stations are made of. And they’re not cloaking it or commenting on it with the alternately ironic and melancholy haze of chillwave any more than they’re falling back on their previous disco-dominatrix poses to make it palatable. No, Head First is utterly naked in its attempt to make bright, happy, confident music from the brightest, happiest, most confident constituent parts it can.

“Rocket,” the album’s kiss-off kick-off track and lead single, makes the case clearly. Over keyboard stabs so perky and insistent you can all but hear Marconi playing “La Bamba” in the background, Alison Goldfrapp bids farewell to a failed affair by lyrically blasting it into space. “You’re never coming back!” she sings, the exclamation point pretty much audible. Even this slight tinge of regret is eschewed entirely by the subsequent two tracks. “I’m a Believer” has a rhythm made for legwarmers to rapidly stomp up and down to, while “Alive” could have been written for “Xanadu”-era Olivia Newton-John. In both cases, the repetitive choruses say everything you need to know: “I’m a believer, I’m a believer, I’m a believer in you now!” “I’m feelin’ alive again! Alive again!”

Head First is a short record, and not everything clicks as hard. I tend to find Goldfrapp’s slower, more minor-key songs toward the bottom of my iTunes anytime I sort by play count, and “Dreaming” and “Hunt” aren’t gonna break that particular curve. Another pair of tracks bucks the record’s concept, if you can call it that, in favor of harkening back to past glories: “Shiny and Warm,” as you can maybe tell from the title, is a shimmeringly staccato cabaret number in the vein of Supernature‘s “Satin Chic,” while the album’s jaunty, piano-driven title track wouldn’t have felt out of place with the pastoral Paul-isms of Seventh Tree. (Yes, alas, “Head First” isn’t the double entendre that memories of lines like “put your dirty angel face between my legs and knicker lace” from “Twist” had led me to hope for.)

But by album’s end the Top 40 transcendentalism is back with a vengeance, and Goldfrapp seems to hunger for a feeling of joy even more intense. There’s a bracing desperation in penultimate track “I Wanna Life” and its chanted plea for liberation in the face of “the longest night I’ve ever known.” When the song’s melody flips upward in the chorus, something really clicks for me–a sense of the rawness, the yearning for a bigger, brighter, better life, that to me has always lurked beneath the ’80s and their neon Nagel-print stereotypes. Put on gaudy enough clothes, consume the things you love conspiculously enough, listen to shiny enough music and perhaps you can usher that life into being through sheer force of will, you know? That’s a beautiful notion, I’ve long thought–beautiful when Bowie and Bolan and Ferry and Eno did it with costumery and three-minute songs for teenagers to neck to, beautiful when everyone from Barry White to Giorgio Moroder wanted people to get dressed up and go out and dance like earthbound angels, beautiful even when drenched in hair spray and shoulder pads and asymmetrical blouses. Indeed, Head First ends with “Voicething,” a wordless, pulsing composition constructed from Goldfrapp’s unearthly vocals that sounds like what you might hear if you were ever able to poke your head above the skyline and smog of Blade Runner. In other words, it sounds like the album cover looks. The message is clear: That life of beauty beyond this one, that Vice City of the soul, is out there, and if you want it badly enough, it’s yours.

* Tom Spurgeon’s Harvey Pekar obituary is masterful. Neil Gaiman, Seth, Denis Kitchen, Alison Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, Dean Haspiel, Diana Schutz, Frank Santoro, R. Fiore, Tim Hodler, Larry Marder, Gerry Shamray, and more all contribute.

* I also liked Eric Reynolds’s piece on Pekar’s importance to alternative comics and to his role in them personally.

* Busy day on Robot 6 today. AdHouse becomes a distribution house, adding Koyama Press and more;

* Jeff Parker’s Atlas is ending for good with issue #5;

* There’s another Grant Morrison Batman one-shot and a David Finch solo Batbook on the horizon;

* and the Black Lanterns are coming back.

* At the risk of once again summoning a grumpy Tim Hodler, Beetljuice-style, I will link to an Alan Moore interview, but only to say this: If you’re going to take the to-my-mind unimaginative and untenable standpoint that there’s something inherently ethically gross about superhero fiction, I actually think that Moore’s concept that they embody the American un-value of Peace Through Superior Firepower is a lot more convincing than the usual accusations of fascism. Moreover, if you ascribe to the viewpoint that Moore’s status as an artist should trump any concerns about whether his stabs at criticism in interviews are or aren’t cockamamie, then I also think it’s pretty easy to see how the way he describes superhero comics here dovetails both with his work in Lost Girls, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and even From Hell–all of them tales of the moral superiority of fucking to fighting–and how a pacifist artist would have experienced the past nine years of real life. So that’s nice. Actually, I think Moore comes off better here than he has in many an interview. The most groan-inducing bits, like a part where it’s argued that comics haven’t produced any work as sophisticated as Watchmen since that book’s release, fairly obviously stem from not necessarily thought-through in-the-moment word choices in the process of a conversation. You’d have to be a TCJ.com contributor (or, y’know, me circa 2003-2004) to wanna make mountains out of those molehills.

* Matt Seneca reviews several recent Big Two comics of note: Fraction & Ba’s Casanova #1, Morrison & Quitely’s Batman & Robin #13, Langridge & Samnee’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger #1, Claremont & Manara’s X-Women #1, and Sturges & McCarthy’s House of Mystery #27. Calling Chris Claremont “one of the more notably feminist writers of superhero comics” is, uh, one way of characterizing the author of the Hellfire Club saga, I guess. Elsewhere, Seneca applauds that show-stopping Frazer Irving Batmobile panel from Batman & Robin #13.

* What happened when Glenn Danzig finally heard about Henry & Glenn Forever? This.

* Ready to lose a couple hours? Complex has teamed up with DJ Cipha Sounds to present The 75 Greatest Tunnel Bangers, the hip-hop tracks that went over biggest at the hugely influential late-’90s NYC club night “Mecca” at the Tunnel. I’ve got a a very weird love-hate relationship with a lot of this music. The late ’90s were the period in my life when I listened to more hip-hop than any time before or since, but most of it was emphatically not from the Bad Boy/Ruff Ryders/Roc-a-Fella trifecta that ruled the Tunnel and my local hip-hop station Hot 97 via those outlets’ mutual mastermind Funkmaster Flex. But with the remove of time it’s much easier to appreciate this stuff, particularly the ear-pummeling hugeness and savagery of the beats constructed by Swizz Beatz, the Hitmen, and so on. It’s an entire subgenre based on BIGNESS–like if late-’90s alternative music consisted of dozens and dozens of awesome songs that sounded like “Army of Me.” The relentless lyrical focus on status, money, and (for lack of a better word) hardness can grate, but in the moment, this stuff’s a lot of fun. (Via Tom Breihan.)

* When my wife told me this morning that Harvey Pekar died I gasped out loud. I think the reason Pekar was so beloved by comics people–aside from the fact that many of his comics were very good–is that he worked a dayjob all his life, didn’t hit homeruns all the time in life or in art, but kept doing it, mostly by himself, year after year after year. So far my favorite eulogies come from Tom Devlin, Roy Edroso, Tom Spurgeon’s twitter account, and, especially, a heartbreaking post by my friend Chris Ward.

* Ed Norton’s out of the Avengers movie, which sucks because he’s a great actor. Marvel was pretty nasty about it, too. Norton’s response is Class City.

* Paul Cornell & Yanick Paquette on a six-issue Knight and Squire miniseries? Sure, I’ll eat it. I think this is the first project to spin out of Grant Morrison’s recent work that I have confidence in.

* Today on Robot 6:

* Marvel pulls its “send us ripped-off covers of unsold event tie-ins in exchange for a variant” stunt again, but this time with their own unsold event tie-ins;

* John Porcellino’s future publishing plans;

* Jordan Crane’s gorgeous zombie print;

* and Gary Groth is a killing machine.

* It’s linked in the Groth post above, but if you haven’t seen it you really wanna check out Gary Groth vs. Noah Berlatsky.

* Is it just me, or are the Harvey Award nominees marginally less ridiculous than the Eisners this year?

* Tommy Carcetti IS Littlefinger!

* Chris Mautner tackles two of the three big recent altcomix releases beginning with ‘W,’ Wilson and Weathercraft. I would again take issue that the failure of the book to enable us to “connect” or “emotionally engage” with Wilson is in fact a failure.

* These N.C. Wyeth King Arthur illustrations are just magic. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Cool stuff from Lane Milburn–no surprise, of course.

* Not Coming to a Theater Near You is kicking off a series of posts on David Lynch’s work from the 1990s. I will probably be avoiding most of it until I finally fucking watch Mulholland Drive. In my defense, I could probably recite Lost Highway to you from memory.

* Zak Smith explains the difference between DC and Marvel, generally speaking. I appreciate his point about how there’s nothing mature about trying to mature-up something that’s immature.

* For example! Here’s a fun list of 10 Crazy Creatures from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe by my pal TJ Dietsch for Topless Robot, which receives bonus points for a comment thread in which at least a half dozen nerds decry the series for its utter failure to be SERIOUS BUSINESS.

* Jason Adams makes it sound like I don’t need to see Predators in the theater after all. I can’t even begin to describe how badly Clash of the Titans soured me on paying whatever it now costs to go see a movie in the city to see the occasional amusing bit in a tired, unimaginative genre special-effects movie.

* I really enjoyed this interview with Sleigh Bells by Ryan Dombal for Pitchfork. It’s hard not to get behind a band consisting of people who were a waiter and a teacher this time last year.

* Rich Juzwiak is shocked, shocked to discover that the fans of a pop star who preaches individuality and self-expression react in large part by trying to act and sound just like her. I’m really disappointed by this review because he’s normally so astute. I mean, busting Lady Gaga’s chops because hyping up your audience constitutes barking orders? That’s really weak tea.

* The new Bryan Ferry album will include contributions from Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay, Jonny Greenwood, Nile Rodgers, David Gilmour, and the Scissor Sisters. This is a real story and not something I dreamed, I swear.

* This piece on how crappy and unrealistic the writing for “World War II” was is really as entertaining as you might have heard. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)

* I never liked M.I.A.

* Oh, brother.

* I wrote this Shadowland parody for Marvel’s What The–?! video series, pretty much, based on an idea by Ben Morse, who has the full story. It’s surprisingly easy to write urban-vigilante interior monologues.

* Fort Thunder reunion! Much more at Tom Spurgeon’s place.

* Here’s a long, fun interview with Jim Woodring by Jason Heller of the Onion A.V. Club:

I had an experience when I was in my 20s. Someone read the I Ching for me. No one had ever done that for me before, and I didn’t know anything about the I Ching. I still don’t very much. But at this one reading, the couplet was, “Dragons wrestle in a meadow / Their blood is black and yellow.” That and the explanation that accompanied it made me realize something about a conflict that had been raging inside me ever since the age of reason. I had never, ever identified it before, or had it identified for me. I’d never seen it before. All of a sudden I realized there were these two aspects of myself that were completely unintegrated, and that that was the source of virtually all of my trouble. It was a huge, eye-opening experience for me. That interests me a lot, the question of people being at war with themselves.

(Via Tom Spurgeon.)

* Chris Ware writes an essay on book design for GQ:

As far as real book designers go, I’ve only met a few, but they strike me as thoughtful, well turned-out, and desperately cutthroat people. What surprises me the most is how shamelessly art directors rip each other off; a clever cover will sometimes be imitated as quickly as two or three months after originally appearing. Book designers, you should know, have to be ready to create something new, exciting, and original almost every day in order to eat, and a certain degree of burnout smokes out the weaker specimens; I can’t imagine coming up with cover after cover without at some point resorting to an out-of-breath take, intentional or not, on someone else’s great idea. This urge toward ever-freshness brings the profession perilously close to that of fashion, and the worst examples of such greet us at the grocery store checkout among the tabloids, gum, and ring pops.

(Via Tom Devlin.)

* Lex Luthor faces off against Death of the Endless from Sandman, written by Paul Cornell? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Jason has a blog! (Via Fantagraphics.)

* Paul Pope draws the Beatles.

* Here’s a fun new Fight or Run comic from Kevin Huizenga. Shoulda ran!

* I’m glad to see Matthew Fox of Lost get an Emmy nomination. He was pretty fabulous.

* More comics-blog posts should begin with the sentence “Have you been fretting about what to get Sean T. Collins for his birthday?” I accept cash, of course.

* 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.