These are sort of more what I anticipated when I got a package full of Michael DeForge comics in the mail–arty, xeroxy, at times consciously illegible transmissions from an alien design aesthetic. That’s almost all there is to Sloe Black, a small zine showcasing a series of vaguely humanoid shapes constructed with twisting, dripping, rope-like lines, and triangles and dots repeated with an almost schizophrenic intensity. These aren’t comics or narrative images, not by a longshot–they’re a visual braindump, they’re what you sort of imagined abstract painting was supposed to be about. It’s sort of like getting a sense of what DeForge’s “sound” is before you hear it applied to a song structure.
You get more of that sort of thing in Gags. Though the art is slightly less far out, it’s still drawing on that same basic melty, drippy, metal-illustration-influenced visual vocabulary, with a series of portraits of monstrous, faceless figures made of goo and teeth. But they’re juxtaposed with a series of well-chosen non sequiturs from everyday dude-life. “You don’t understand–playing drums is my life” reads the all-caps caption for a beast with a mouth growing out the side of its head and a knife with which he’s exposing his own ribcage; “Fuckin’ Carlos man–dude scares off so much pussy” says a beast whose body sits atop its head rather than the other way around. Besides having a flair for the zine-culture grotesque, DeForge has a great comedic ear for what happens in the company of bros.
One would have to assume that because of the overwhelming popularity of the iPad Marvel App, there are people who have it who may never have ventured into a comic shop or perhaps lost interest in comics many years ago and are curious as to what’s been happening in our fantastic universe. The hope is that we capitalize on that and the high profile of Iron Man, get readers interested in this single story and from there, if they want to purchase more or purchase that issue, they are directed to comic shops. So it’s a sales and marketing test and just one of a few we have coming up.
* I thought it boded ill that the Jonathan Hickman/Dale Eaglesham run on Fantastic Four was so quickly reduced to the just-plain Jonathan Hickman run on Fantastic Four, but now I see Captain America‘s Steve Epting will be the new regular FF artist and all is forgiven.
* Gorgeous dance music, glass half empty edition: “Dancing on My Own” live, by Robyn. Man is she magnetic, man does she sell the longing. America, if La Roux can get onto Top 40 radio, if Katy Perry and Ke$ha can have big hits by crassly recycling the years-old melodic progression of “Love at First Sight” by Kylie Minogue, then surely we can make this a hit. The middle-school girls of America are waiting to be knocked on their asses by this song when their summer crushes spurn them for someone else. Let’s make this happen.
[Al Columbia:] My dad, for some reason, didn’t have the sense that a child shouldn’t see horror movies. He took me to see a lot of horror movies when I was a kid, or I’d get to see them on TV or HBO. He didn’t seem to have that filter: “Oh yeah, maybe he shouldn’t watch that. It could be disturbing.” So I was exposed to a lot of very disturbing images at a young age, which later in life came back in a strange way to haunt me, which I would never have expected.
[Nicole Rudick:] In what way did they haunt you?
Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head.
Images from those films?
I believe they had to have been, or the movies had to have influenced something. They were unwanted images. They weren’t fantasies but constant terrifyingly violent images or ideas piercing into my everyday life. I’d be watching TV and the next thing you know the newscaster . . . I would imagine, without warning, something bad happening to the people on TV or to somebody I knew. I couldn’t really look at someone without them immediately becoming dismembered or in some way murdered in my head.
Does that still happen?
No, not anymore. But it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.
That’s certainly how Pim & Francie felt. Anyway, like I said on Robot 6 one of the most striking things about the rest of the interview is how drawing comics only makes things worse for Columbia. This reminds me a lot of what Josh Cotter said about what was going on behind Driven by Lemons. My two favorite comics of 2009 were both the products of mental illnesses that were exacerbated rather than ameliorated by their creation. Jeez.
* My blog chum and former classmate Eve Tushnet has been profiled by The New York Times! Eve and I have a lot of pop-cultural overlap but virtually zero sociopolitical overlap. Haha–to cope with our mutual freshman year, she became a Catholic, while I started drinking.
* Real-Life Horror: Megadittos to Atrios and Andrew Sullivan on the installation of torture as a Republican Party platform plank.
* Mike Barthel on “the retro valley.” Thank you for coming up with the perfect phrase for the exact musical phenomenon my wife and I were discussing not 24 hours ago.
You could be forgiven for thinking Michael DeForge’s solo anthology series would be, and I’m using this word in its value-neutral sense, a mess. In terms of the vibe DeForge’s work gives off in single illustrative images, or in his dense and frequently deliberately illegible all-font/logo-design installment in Frank Santoro’s Cold Heat Special series, or in his xeroxed minicomics, or even on the covers of these very comics, the operative word is “noise.” And it’s a sort of noise that owes more to both the toner-smeared world of zine culture and the fine-arty fine-lined zaniness of Canadian art-toonists like Marc Bell or Keith Jones, than to the chunky, punky, living, breathing environments of the Fort Thunderites. Throw in those noxious, acidic greens on the slick covers, and it might present the kind of surface your eye would bounce right off and move on.
Don’t let it! Because as it turns out, DeForge’s actual comics, as contained in these two issues, are straightforward, funny, and sharp as a knife. Inside, he wields a precise line to create character designs that read like a slightly more avant-garde version of what you might see on a post-millennial Nickelodeon cartoon. The storytelling and punchlines are always crystal-clear even as the material bounces back and forth between long-form, surreal horror stories and laser-precise gag strips. In the latter category, which mostly crops up in the first issue, DeForge uses anthropomorphized dogs and the superheroes of the Justice League to skewer the foibles of college students and their immediately post-graduation counterparts with laser precision. (Dog #1: “Lately, I don’t even know if I enjoy walks.” Dog #2: “You’re overthinking it. Did you finish The Wire yet?”; Green Lantern: “Things have been crazy for me lately”. Batman: “Is that why we’re spending League money on art school?!” Green Lantern: “We all voted on that, Bruce! We all voted!“)
The longer stories fruitfully work that horror-comedy sweet spot a lot of young cartoonists are mining these days, a great thrill to me because the comedy tends to actually be funny, and the horror black as midnight. In issue #1, a cartoon conscience rebels against God after being sent to dissuade yet another comics artist from suicide, only to be sentenced to a Hell inhabited by cartoon characters and their creators. What starts as a lampoon of art-comics culture every bit as successful as the college stuff veers into nightmarish action-horror territory as our hero narrowly, and I mean very narrowly, escapes evisceration and ritual sacrifice at the hands of two former funny-animal characters whose appearances have devolved into monstrous deformation and shadow. In issue #2, virtually all the page space is devoted to a long and no-fucking-around nasty horror story about a little kid who manages to domesticate a large spider whose brethren are simultaneously ushering in a quite lethal and disgusting plague-style demise for his uncaring family and abusive classmates. Imagine Skyscrapers of the Midwest weaponized and you’re almost there.
With these two issues–cogent in conception, confident in execution, and surely just an early step in a promising stylistic evolution–DeForge has landed himself on my must-watch list. Give ’em a shot, see if he lands on yours.
Iron Man 2 entertained me from beginning to end. Who knew that what I was looking for in a superhero movie was wall-to-wall banter, occasionally interrupted by games of Rock’em Sock’em Robots?
To me it was a fine second act that picked up where the first film left off in the sense that it presupposed you were fond of these characters and the Iron Man concept. That way, it could have Tony and Pepper and Rhodey take their BFF chops-busting patter just a little too far, make it a little too manic, as their collective situation took a turn for the worse. It could make Tony’s cockiness, like at the Senate hearing, seem like it clearly has the potential to be destructive for him, even if in the moment you enjoy his triumph over his rivals. It could make the quest of rogue nations and unscrupulous scientists to produce Iron Men of their own feel totally logical, difficult to pull off but dangerous should they succeed, not just to the country but to Stark personally.
With that foundation, you just trot out a suite of funny performances from actors who make their every appearance on screen feel like a pissing contest with the other characters, an attempt to impress them with their intelligence and wit and charm, even though the situation is such that that usually doesn’t cut it. Robert Downey Jr. pulled off pushing Stark’s charm offensive into purely offensive territory, and then dialing it back down in a way where you’d forgive him. Sam Rockwell played Justin Hammer like the scrapped pilot episode of Tony Startk, before it was recast and recut and became a huge hit; I enjoyed how he was always nervously projecting alpha-male vibes even though he was constantly two steps behind of everyone he dealt with. Don Cheadle has Terrence Howard’s easy familiarity with Tony built in, but I bought the way he was constantly on the lookout for a way both to take care of his friend and best him in some way or other–a friendly rivalry where both the friendship and the rivalry were intact. I’d actually forgotten how effective and adorable Gwyneth Paltrow is in the girl friday role, and thought it was funny that she brought that same skill set of quietly but firmly dismissing idiocy in favor of getting the job done to her new role as CEO. Mickey Rourke was scary and convincingly single-minded–I dug how he mostly avoided giving a Hannibal Lecture and never deviated from a simple goal of revenge, which as we learn was sort of justified to boot. The two iffiest performances are the proto-Avengers turns from Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson, but in both cases what you might see as weaknesses I ended up digging: Nick Fury feels like he dropped in from a whole ‘nother movie, which I guess is how the world’s top spy would feel in a superhero world like this one, and even if it wasn’t intentional, maybe emotionless and dead behind the eyes is precisely how an experienced double-agent spy-assassin like the Black Widow would be.
Normally I’d argue that as with any superhero story, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is the fight sequences. In this case, the movie is so much more a battle of wits than a battle of emotion that I think that’s actually less true than it usually is, but as it turns out the fights were fun and as well choreographed as you’re likely to see in a superhero movie. They took advantage of their environments, they utilized the unique capabilities of the armor suits involved, and with the exception of the flying chase (which was way too darkly lit, probably to hide the CGI work) their stages and stakes were easy to understand. I mean, you have to hand it to a fight scene where a key beat is having your limo driver run a dude over and pin him to a chainlink fence.
Most importantly, I never felt like my intelligence was being insulted, and trust me, after going to see freaking Clash of the Titans in the freaking theater, I definitely needed that from my summer action blockbuster. If anything, I felt like the stupidity of the cool-guy trappings Stark surrounds himself with was being winked at–that gloriously tasteless AC/DC stripperobics routine at the beginning, for example, felt like the movie was Steely Danning the G4 generation. And the addition of characters never felt like superhero-sequelitis to me; the various combinations of players moved the plot forward rather than weighing it down or making it scatterbrained. A delight! I hope you enjoy it if you see it.
* It’s only one book right now. It’s a major movie character people will recognize, and it comes from a run of comics that’s both quite good and seems appealing to fans of those movies. It’s going onto the very zeitgeisty iPad, Dirk Deppey be damned. And of course it can bask in the awestruck adulation that’s always generated whenever DC or Marvel is the first to do a particular thing–y’know, like kicking off your link roundup with words like “gamechanger.”
* More importantly, if you buy the comic for the iPad in its three chapter-long chunks for $2 a pop, it ends up costing you $1 more than the $4.99 print version. In other words, it’s a way to get people who don’t want or can’t go to a comic shop, or to whom the very idea of buying print comics at a comic shop is totally irrelevant, to buy the book without incentivizing the people who do go to the shops every Wednesday to pick up the print version to ditch the shop and buy it online instead. That’s a pretty neat way to square the circle. It doesn’t answer how they’ll competitively but not destructively price a book that doesn’t contain 66 story pages, and it certainly doesn’t mitigate against the already overpriced monthly pamphlet format in the first place, but still, it seems smart.
* Anyway, if you wanna get a picture of what’s at stake with the dawn of day-and-date digital release, here are some recent pieces to read:
* Finally, to reiterate something I allude to above, Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man run has been really good, and it makes me happy to be able to fully get behind a comic that will be making a big popcultural splash again–just like I was able to do when Ed Brubaker’s Death of Captain America storyline hit big.
* Tom Spurgeon talks to the great retailer, convention organizer, and too-infrequent-these-days blogger Chris Butcher about various and sundry things. One thing I’ve always meant to say about Chris is that he and I tussled now and then in the earlier days of the comics blogosphere, but a couple years back I bumped into him in the Chicago airport as we both waited to transfer onto the same flight to San Diego, and he simply could not have been friendlier during the time we talked and ate lunch together, especially considering he was with a few people and I was all alone. Chris is an opinionated guy, and any opinionated person who puts his opinions on public display over the course of years is going to get in arguments with other opinionated people from time to time, by the very definition of being opinionated. But it’s the opinions that matter to a fellow like Chris, not scoring cool points on his own behalf nor kicking other people in the teeth, and I think that’s a good indicator of why his TCAF show is the success that it is. Dude cares about good comics.
* I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and said it long before The Sopranos, because that’s how fucking awesome I am): Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” is basically Joy Division’s “Transmission” in terms of structure and sentiment, and both are incredible songs.
* My big problem with M.I.A. in that infamous Lynn Hirschberg profile, in terms of the thing that made me think less of her as a person, didn’t involve saying provocative and simplistic things about politics, which is par for the pop-star course a lot of the time, nor whether she did or didn’t order or eat fancy french fries, which I think anyone who either has enough money or is being taken out to lunch on the New York Times’ expense account might want to do–it was the part where she called Lady Gaga ugly. That’s just straight-up middle-school Mean Girls nastiness. Moreover, I think it comes from M.I.A.’s envy of Gaga’s career as the superstar arty weirdo of pop, which Gaga carved out for herself through talent and ambition and which M.I.A. has only been able to come within shouting distance of thanks to the commercials for Pineapple Express. I listen to a lot of musicians who have behaved abominably toward people–David Bowie’s entire career is littered with close friends and collaborators who suddenly found themselves summarily cut off–so it’s not a dealbreaker, but I think it’s a lot more revealing about M.I.A.’s personality and maturity than all the stuff about the Tamil Tigers and truffle fries.
* Check out “Mario’s Ladder,” a little video about Mario by Cory Godbey. Henry Benjamin Kammer’s piano arrangements of the Super Mario Bros. theme music and Star music sound gorgeous in this video, which also captures the sort of transcendent feeling that the Mario games have increasingly and delightfully tapped into now and then.
Bodhisattva / Black Cow / Rikki Don’t Lose That Number / Reelin’ In the Years / Hey Nineteen / Black Friday / The Caves of Altamira / Any Major Dude Will Tell You / Sign In Stranger / Pretzel Logic / I Got the News / Bad Sneakers / My Old School / Babylon Sisters / Your Gold Teeth / Peg / Josie
Steely Dan were simultaneously the apotheosis of the smooth, slick ’70s radio sound now known as yacht rock and the most vicious satirists of the sorts of people who listened to and made it–themselves included! Has there ever been another act like that? Maybe if LCD Soundsystem had found a way to make an entire career out of songs as scathing as “Losing My Edge”? Anyway, that’s just one of the ironic contrasts that makes the Dan so compelling and compulsively listenable to me. You’ve also got the fact that songwriters and core (and by the end, only) bandmembers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created a “jazz-rock” sound wherein the improvisatory, beauty-from-mistakes heart of jazz was entirely replaced by obsessive studio tinkering. You’ve got them recruiting an army of ace session guys and genuine virtuosos, from Skunk Baxter to Michael McDonald to Wayne Shorter, to support one of the most sardonic singing voices in rock history. You’ve got them devolving into precisely the sort of coked-up abusive solipsistic rich California bohemian assholes they made a career out of skewering. There’s a lot going on–but if you want to just kick back and enjoy the wordplay, the absurd musical proficiency, the summertime grooves, and the sick licks, go right ahead.
This is a collection of some, but by no means all, of my favorite Steely Dan songs from their initial 1972-1980 run. Believe me, it was a bitch to cut it down this far–“Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” “Throw Back the Little Ones,” “Parker’s Band,” and “Deacon Blues” were all in the playlist at one point, and I could just as easily have included “Home at Last,” “Aja” (so yes, basically the entirety of Aja), “Doctor Wu,” “Do It Again,” “Dirty Work,” “Midnite Cruiser,” “Kings,” “Show Biz Kids,” “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” “Night by Night,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “The Royal Scam”…really, these guys wrote just a ton of solid, hook-laden songs about their proto-hipster demimonde and the criminal underworld with which it occasionally intertwined. Enjoy.
Wally Gropius is more than just the main character of Tim Hensley’s elaborate and arch parody of ’60s teen-comedy and child-billionaire comics–he’s more like the language it’s told in, or better yet the font it uses. Hensley arranges him in poses whose pantomime exaggeration recall the primary mode of body language in any given Archie comic, but always in some bizarrely off-model and angular variation thereof. His pipe-like arms and legs, his clasping, grasping, pointing hands, even his squinting eyes and trapjawed mouth and flattened cranium (his hair color says “Archie Andrews” but his skull says “Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein”) all conspire to make him as much a pictogram as a person. Watching him and his equally gangly, geometric cohorts stretch and sprint and smash their way across Hensley’s brighly colored backgrounds and block-lettered sound effects is like reading your favorite poem–or even, as we see in a panel that became my Rosetta Stone for the book, Wally Gropius itself–as translated into a language with a totally different alphabet. What you know is in there, somewhere, but to use a frequently repeated line from the book, you just can’t quite put your finger on it.
Hensley pulls off a similar switcheroo with the writing itself. Instead of the instantly dated “hip” slang used by the middle-aged men who wrote the comics that Wally Gropius uses as a springboard, he subs in a nonsense patter that apes the self-assured argot of the plutocracy. Whether it’s Wally’s oblique strategies for his beloved Jillian Banks’s recording session (“You really almost had it there, but it’s still kind of teal. Can you sing it with a bit more cadmium?”), Wally and Thaddeus’s simultaneously ratcheted-up and abstracted fight over dating (“But, Dad, I wanna be a lothario speedwagon. Troubadours don’t submit to picture brides. They engage in felching with awestruck camel toe.” “Again with the CAMEL TOE! My own son!”), or the frequent direct references to finance and industry (“Petroleum is the seat of the soul,” “What good is Mammon if one can’t purchase reliable athmosphereic conditions?” “Wally, will you please clean your room? There are far too many denominations about.”), I can’t help but hear echoes of the ouroborosian discourse, cocksure and utterly divorced from reality, that led the economy off a cliff.
And wonder of wonders, the book finds its own way to be really funny amid all these highfalutin hijinks, and often in a direct, even lowbrow way. Obviously anyone who’s read this stuff has gotten a kick out of the sound effects, from the slamming bank-vault door that goes “TRUMP!” to Wally vomiting up a bellyful of money with a “HEAR$T!” The thing is filled with eyeball kicks like that, my favorites being the library bookshelf filled top to bottom with Tom Clancy, the baseball-stadium jumbotron sponsored by Summer’s Eve, and the Buddhist monk lighting himself on fire next to a placard that reads “U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA.” There’s a diarrhea joke, there’s a cameo from an ’80s pop-culture icon, and there’s an incest sequence that is one of the most shocking, hilarious, perfectly paced things you’ll read all year.
“Well, Mom, what does it say?” asks Wally over a memorable shot of a disemboweled bird from whose entrails his mother hopes to divine the future. (Of course, we never get the answer.) I think you can figure out what Wally Gropius is saying, provided you keep in mind the combination of confidence and impenetrability that Hensley hits on so memorably in both writing and art. The tale’s in the telling.
I think that there’s a whole school of story-tellers presently working who are fascinated by the aesthetics of the weird and supernatural, the fantastic and unseen, but utterly bored with whole people and tight narrative. The Sixth Sense ruined it up for everybody. We’re all sitting around waiting on some undisclosed secret. You don’t need a great protagonist. But you do need a twist.
* I’m very sad that Rue McClanahan died. She’s my favorite Golden Girl because the episodes where something sad or touching happens to her just tear my heart right out.
* A pair of bloggers tackle two of the three major recent altcomix releases that begin with the letter W: Tucker Stone on Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft and Christopher Allen on Wally Gropius. I don’t think I agree with Chris’s take on Gropius, which I feel is only superficially superficial; Tucker’s piece is more or less on the futility of having a take on a book like Weathercraft. Both books are doozies and both pieces are worth thinking about.
“Somebody’s Calling Me” was written in the middle of the night, and usually I’m pretty purposeful about my grand theft, like stealing the guitar sound from [Robert] Fripp for “All I Want” and stuff like that. “Somebody’s Calling Me” was written in my sleep, and the original was just the piano and the beat and the singing. And that was it, because I was on Xanax and asleep, and that’s what I did in the middle of the night. But then when I was working on it, putting in the little synth sounds and stuff like that, I was totally like, “Ha ha, this sounds like ‘Nightclubbing.’ Let’s put some crazy synth sounds on it.” Once you find out it sounds like that, you just have to allow yourself to use what you like, or else you’re trying to hide it–and that’s usually a way to make a boring song. I’d rather have a song I like that sounds like another song, than a song that I’m hoping nobody notices sounds like another song that I’m not that into.
There are pros and cons to be found in this one. Let’s start with the pros. As Alan Moore understood when constructing the punchline for his big shaggy-dog joke at the superhero genre’s expense, the giant-monster horror/sci-fi subgenre is ripe for comedic exploitation, not in the sense of creating funny-looking Mighty Morphin Power Rangers-style creatures, but in the sense of “How the hell does something of that size and disposition appear out of nowhere, anyway?” Cartoonist Jorge Diaz milks the most out of that “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition giant monsters!” idea by piling one on top of another in this brief teaser for his longer Monstrosity anthology: an irradiated meteor creates one giant monster, our military response to that giant monster attracts two more giant monsters from outer space, our military response to those giant monsters unleashes another giant monster from a parallel dimension, and we deliberately unleash still another giant monster to combat the first three. Meanwhile, those giant monsters are, in turn, a “Squirrelzilla,” two massive alien environmentalists, a skeletal fish-god, and a giant hummingbird summoned by two tiny, elderly Japanese former-schoolgirls. It’s all cockamamie, but no more cockamamie than, well, any giant-monster movie or comic you’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, the story is presented in recap by a harried news anchorman in a deadpan recitation that further emphasizes the ridiculousness of it all–as does the material’s presentation in this tiny minicomic, which shrinks each TV-monitor panel down to a meticulous-looking grid and serves as an ideal showcase for Diaz’s tight, cartoony line and design work.
The cons, by now, might be obvious to you–most so, “Squirrelzilla” and two giant alien environmentalists just aren’t that funny a pair of gags. Nor is the plot’s resolution, which involves luring the beasts to a Monster Island-type destination with sonic rhythms that cause them to hump each other. It’s broad stuff, overly so. But by contrast, the design for the giant hummingbird is both funny and strong–its tail twirls off behind it in strands, casting off stars and hearts and other beautiful illustrative super-kawaii filigrees. So too is the design of the diminutive, antennae’d Japanese ladies who summon him, all stooped shoulders and wrinkled, benevolent faces. The image of a giant fish skeleton wreaking havoc manages to be both amusing and genuinely weird. There’s also a great throwaway panel of a herd of elephants dancing in line thanks to that sonic frequency thing. In essence, the more Diaz tries to nail down very specific ideas and images rather than playing to the cheap seats, the better he both looks and reads.
* Screw the UPS guys and their shorts: Tom Spurgeon’s epic annual guide to the San Diego Comic-Con is the #1 sign that summer’s here. If you’re a long-time reader like I am, it’s fun (if a little daunting) to note the changes he’s made to it following the dawn of the Con’s Six-Month-Out Sellout Era. At any rate it’s the next best thing to going to the show. I do, however, miss the joke about being the Jerome to Paul Pope’s Morris Day.
* I’m about a week late to CollegeHumor’s video list of unanswered Lost questions. As you might expect from the sort of mentality that would lead one to create such a list, it’s a fairly even mix of fair, unfair, picayune, “hey, good point,” “dude, they totally answered that,” “c’mon man, use context clues,” and “jeez, would you prefer them to have used midichlorians?” Spoilery, duh.
* Guillermo del Toro is no longer directing the two Hobbit movies due to its ongoing MGM-related delays playing havoc with his schedule. I’m pretty glad about this, since I thought both Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth were bad in just the sort of unimaginatively dingy way that would be really problematic for The Hobbit. (Click the links for my reviews if you want.) But del Toro’s still co-writing the movie with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, which I guess I’m okay with since Tolkien’s original should mitigate against del Toro’s tendency toward lackadaisical plotting. What I really wonder is how much of his art direction will survive into the final product–as you might have guessed, I think his creature work is overrated. Jackson says he’ll step in to direct the movies himself if push comes to shove (via The One Ring), but only then, and he sounds less than thrilled by the idea. Neill Blomkamp, call your agent.
* Here’s the new trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
I know Michael Cera comes in for a lot of criticism just for being Michael Cera, but it’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s flat-affect Ramona Flowers that’s throwing me for a bit of a loop here. Oh well, it’s just a trailer, I’m sure it’ll be at least pretty good. (Via Shaggy Erwin.)
* Deadspin’s “Dead Wrestler of the Week” series by its anonymous wrestling reporter is just plain magnificent. A couple of the earliest installments are a bit rough, but the pieces on Andre the Giant, the Junkyard Dog, and Miss Elizabeth are bleakly insightful elegies, exploring the strange and shady world of pro wrestling and their iconic roles in it. Even a piece on a borderline jobber like Dino Bravo is memorable for what it reveals about how wrestling changed in our lifetimes. And dig this passage from the article on the Ultimate Warrior Is Dead rumor:
As an insurgent, the Ultimate Warrior was irrepressible, but as a champion he was dull. The eccentricity that once made him stand out made him seem dark and bizarre in comparison to the shining light of Hulkamania. When Hogan rallied his little Hulkamaniacs to his cause, it seemed a joyous army; when the Warrior spoke to his “little warriors,” he seemed to be preaching to a cult. If Hogan was the wrestling Billy Graham (the evangelist, that is, not the actual wrestler), the Warrior was Jim Jones.
Although that little jpg might get the idea across, you really need to hold the cardstock covers of Closed Caption Comics member Mr. Freibert’s latest horror-comic throwback to see how beautifully screenprinted those colors are. It seriously looks like he sat there and did it by hand with pastel colored pencils. The thinness and shakiness and uniform weight of his linework only further reemphasizes that Mr. Cellar’s Attic was an act of drawing, something that came out of the tip of a pencil or pen held by a person. Which, now that I think of it, is maybe how Freibert is able to reclaim the hoary EC Comics/Edgar Allen Poe/”Colour Out of Space” proto-body-horror tropes he’s working with out of the realm of cliche and make them feel like a force to be reckoned with again. In addition to the cool, clever wordplay of the title, Freibert’s pacing keeps things feeling fresh and lively and present, if you will. There’s an uneasy sense of discovery as Freibert’s guilty-conscienced narrator recounts his ill-fated decision to rent out his attic room to an elderly grotesque, whose personal hygiene and mysterious conduct gets worse and worse until the story culminates with the narrator’s inspection of the room he rented…and the smaller room he built inside it. That’s a great, weird image, and what is found inside that room doesn’t disappoint either. The thing ends with a gorgeously colored shot that all but demands Vincent Price be resurrected to provide his trademark cackle as its soundtrack. If you want a comic that utilizes the tools of today’s artcomix aesthetic to evoke the sensation you got when you were a kid looking at the awesomely hideous masks in the grown-up section of the Halloween store, you know where to look.
You know how on The Sopranos, it was always the penultimate episode of the season that had the big climax? This is the penultimate issue of Big Questions.
I know I’ve got Lost on the brain this week, and it’s largely with that show in mind that I re-read all 14 issues of Nilsen’s anthropomorphized allegorical avian opus to date. Much more so than do the Vertigo-type series with which you’ll see the occasional facile comparison, Big Questions serves up a similarly intoxicating, dread-tinged cocktail. Flawed characters are buffeted by forces beyond their comprehension, who in turn have just as little control over their own destinies. Violence is ever-present, shocking and exciting when it erupts, devastating in its aftermath. Story seeds planted years ago (Big Questions has been running since 1998!) suddenly blossom, entangle, and collide, in this issue most of all. Of course the “big questions”–about the limits of our understanding, about the point of being here at all–are asked, if rarely answered. An overall high-quality visual presentation makes it all the more inviting, while individual images, like the one that graces this issue’s cover and the constituent parts of the harrowing sequence that precedes it, burn with the fire of the surreal and stick in the memory, giving your thoughts on the overall series something to coalesce around like coral. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Only instead of an attractive multinational cast, this one has birds.
My hunch is that when the fifteenth and final issue arrives, Big Questions will be looked at like Black Hole or the Jimmy Corrigan issues of Acme Novelty Library, both for the magnitude of the undertaking and the magnificence of its execution from top to bottom. I read a lot of good comics; this is a great comic.
* Have you pitched in to the Comics Comics fundraiser yet? I snagged myself three issues of Comics Comics, The Art of Hipgnosis and Overspray for a song. I mean, the shipping’s even free. Make sure to buy stuff today, because a lot of the offers are over as of midnight!
* There are three things I’ve written recently that have generated some fun discussion so I wanted to make sure to call them all out again, in case you’d like to chip in your two cents:
* On Robot 6 I asked what comics arguments people would like to here more often, in place of the ones we’re all sick of. My suggestion was “Why do superhero comics so dominate the online discussion of comics?” And I’m talking even well-rounded readers/writers who are perfectly capable of talking about other things just as often.
* Also on Robot 6, I asked whether you need to like a character to like the comic about him or her. This stems from Dan Clowes’s Wilson and the focus on the titular jerk’s unlikability. In the comments I start wondering if maybe Wilson’s better seen in the context of comic character-constructions like Laurel & Hardy or Tim & Eric as opposed to your basic fully-fledged well-rounded psychologically complex literary character.
* Finally, here’s a working link to my third post on the Lost finale, which I flubbed yesterday. The discussion is still going strong, which isn’t surprising if the way my own thoughts on the episode fluctuate from day to day and hour to hour is at all indicative of a broader reaction.
* Tom Spurgeon disagrees with Tom Brevoort about the potential risks of the four-dollar monthly comic. Looking at the post in question, I think the Hindenburg comparison is cutting those sentiments a little slack, actually.
* Matt Zoller Seitz and Ali Arikan talk John Williams and his music for the Star Wars prequels, which they consider his masterpiece, with “Duel of the Fates” at the tippy-top. “Duel” is definitely dude at the top of his game decades into his career, if you ask me. To paraphrase Christopher Moltisanti, FUCK Carl Orff, Johnny Williams just took him to composing school.
* It’s only when superhero comics are described by truly disinterested outsiders, as opposed to self-conscious fans or ex-fans, that you realize how truly ridiculous they can be.
I’ll tell you what, I wish I could find a link at which you could buy this comic, because if you enjoy the rough-edged alt-art-horror comics I talk about on this blog all the time? Dude, run, don’t walk.
Stechschulte’s art is rough in the extreme, a scribbled mess of thick blacks that nonetheless coheres into something palpable and easy to parse. It reminds me a bit of when I was a kid and I’d scribble one continuous line on a page for a long time, and then go back and highlight the figures and shapes I’d unwittingly drawn in the process. It’s not that manic, but that’s the general idea. It’s a great way to convey claustrophobia and barely contained desperation, which is what our main character experiences as he anticipates and then experiences what is apparently a monthly encounter with a sinister, supernatural visitor–a doppelganger carved from shadow itself. It’s a cool little story, a dark fairy tale or a lost piece of Poe, distinguished by a strong fight sequence, complicating details like the place a body gets stuffed, and a convincing air of inevitability and despair. I wish someone would put together an anthology of horror comics like this. I’d read the shit out of it, and if you care about horror in comics, you would too.
* In less than twelve hours, my post on the Lost finale became the most commented-on post in the history of this blog by a comfortable margin. There are over 50 posts in there, and I claim about one-fiftieth of the credit: The regular crew of Lost watchers who’ve been good enough to do their thing in those Lost thoughts threads week in and week out have created a conversation about the show a million times better than anything I’d ever hoped to find online. Thank you so much, all you participants–and if you haven’t joined in, what better time than now?
* I’ve linked to these posts in the aforementioned thread, but I was pretty taken by some of the thoughts on the episode and the series offered up by Todd VanDerWerff, Alan Sepinwall, and Rob Bricken.
* In the sense that last night saw the conclusion of a serialized genre drama I’d been heavily emotionally invested in for almost six years, I couldn’t help but think of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the future installments of which I’ll be waiting for with the proverbial bated breath. Turns out I’m not alone: this is spoilery for the series so be warned, but the GRRM fan site The Tower of the Hand is asking its readers if they’d be okay with a certain loose end remaining forever untied.
