* Recently on Robot 6: Ming Doyle sure can draw;

* the astonishing cartoons of Abner Dean;

* and Hickman and Bendis bust Guggenheim’s chops, sorta.

* Here’s a fine Tucker Stone piece on Taiyo Matsumoto’s Blue Spring, with really excellently selected art. You should be able to “get” the comic just by looking at this review, let alone reading it.

* Sylvester Stallone says Rambo V isn’t happening, but a bunch of other things indicate otherwise, including a producer who gives a summary of the story in its “Rambo kills his way through Juarez” iteration.

* Kristin Thompson talks about Paul Wegener and Karl Boese’s Der Golem, one of the few German Expressionist horror classics I haven’t seen.

* Kevin Guhl’s list of The Top 10 Cryptozoological Creatures That Have Yet to Be Exploited in Film and Television for Topless Robot does a great job of capturing the mix of plausibility and absurdity, familiarity and terrifying unfamiliarity, that makes cryptids so fascinating to me. 50-foot alligators swimming around the Congo basin, you know?

* Real Life Horror: Glenn Greenwald provides a round-up of the ways American citizens’ rights are being eroded should they be accused of terrorism. The John Walker Lindh example he quotes from Digby is really instructive, I think. It’s very scary and strange that this is happening even as, or even though, the wars in whose name this stuff is being done slip further off the radar and the attempted attacks on us get more and more amateurish. What would happen if things really flared up again?

* I think this Alan Sepinwall interview with Lost honchos Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (spoilers for this week’s episode abound, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t read this) marks the precise moment at which “fan backlash over the final episodes of our series” went from being something the pair anticipated and studied and prepared for via other shows like The Sopranos and Seinfeld and Battlestar Galactica to something they’re currently experiencing and have realized they will continue to experience for the rest of their lives. Even though you’re bound to find some of their answers frustrating, and there are a couple of turns of phrase I’m sure they wish they could take back, I actually think they’re handling themselves much better than the characteristically uncharitable representatives of Lost fandom who show up in the comments are giving them credit for. Of course, I don’t share their complaints about the show right now, either. (Via Todd VanDerWerff.)

* Very stimulating discussion of last night’s episode in this week’s Lost thoughts thread, including some stuff that made me change my mind about something I wrote in the post itself. Join in!

* Hey look, Josh Cotter got himself a new website. (Via Chris Pitzer.)

* Frank Santoro and the Silver Surfer are a great fit. (Via Tom Spurgeon, even though this popped up in my RSS reader last week and I guess I just totally whiffed on it.)

* Jesse Hamm explains Frank Frazetta’s technique, the kind of stuff that makes his work stand out even amid a sea of imitators. (Also via Tom.)

* Siege wrapped up today. The thing that bothers me about the series is that it really should have taken the commonly understood definition of its title as the blueprint for its action. What happened was a bunch of villains and army guys breezed in and attacked Asgard, zapping at things and messing things up; then a bunch of heroes breezed in and attacked the villains, zapping at things and messing things up; then a big giant strong villain knocked the city out of the sky, then a big giant strong hero knocked the big giant strong villain out of the sky and then threw him into the sun. So that’s one way to go about this. The other way would be to take, say, the Helm’s Deep sequence in Peter Jackson’s film of The Two Towers and model your four-issue fight scene after that. So instead of fighter jets and Ares and Moonstone and the U-Foes basically walking right up to the Asgardians of their choice and zapping at them, as though they may as well have been fighting in a soccer field instead of a giant fortified city of the gods, actually map out those fortifications like you’re a Dungeon Master, then methodically show the characters attempting to break through those fortifications and hold what they’ve taken against both the defending Asgardians and the cavalry of Avengers who show up afterwards. Instead of a bunch of splash pages and double-page spreads where you have a lot of characters punching and stabbing and zapping lasers in all directions, with really no sense of where any of them are in relation to one another and certainly no sense of what would happen to the fortunes of the overall battle were this or that character to win or lose each particular fight–you know, do the opposite of that. A rigorously choreographed four-issue battle could have been the mintest thing ever. “Remember when Ares took the Rainbow Bridge? Remember when Iron Man and Bucky dislodged Venom and his HAMMER troops from the tower? Remember when Hawkeye hit just the right cornerstone for that fortress to collapse right on top of Norman Osborn?” Bendis did this once, in the breakout sequence from the first few issues of New Avengers, and there’s no reason it would have had to eat up more real estate than the action we got, so you’d still have plenty of room to hit whatever beats you wanted about Norman losing it and the Avengers getting the band back together and so on. It would have been cool.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

* I’d like to get this part out of the way so that I never, ever have to think about it again: I’d imagine that episode is really going to upset the portion of the audience that wants SERIOUS ANSWERS. Of course, the answer to anything supernatural is ultimately “because magic.” But for people to whom this show is a code to be cracked or a puzzle to be solved, any explanation for its various supernatural phenomena that uses phrases like “life, death, rebirth, the source, the heart of the Island” can’t possibly be good enough, because it doesn’t allow you to put the puzzle down, secure in the knowledge that you’ve solved it. Not to get on one of my nerd-culture hobbyhorses again, but to me that’s a way in which the preference for worldbuilding has trumped storytelling. People don’t want ideas, they want rules. Oh well, more’s the pity for them.

* Me? I was a little thrown at first, when the lady from The West Wing showed up in a Jesus Christ Superstar costume and started speaking in American-accented Latin. But once she murdered a woman who’d just given birth, bang, I was right back into it and never left. I think this struck just the right mythic, grandiose, creation-legend tone while still remaining in the show’s usual wheelhouse (rimshot!) of family neuroses, unabashed genre staples, and brutal violence. I really enjoyed it.

* I liked the Lord of the Flies allusions, in part because they called to mind what I thought the show would be about back in the day, with Jack as Ralph and Locke as Jack.

* Titus Welliver, man. He sold it. That cocked-head “it’s not fair!” rage, all the worse because he’s right, it really isn’t fair.

* Fucking magnets; how do they work?

* So the Man in Black really is pure evil, because he’s not a man at all.

* This explains how Jacob can be seen as the good guy despite all his murderous manipulation, and how the MIB can be seen as the bad guy despite not really seeming all that bad compared to Jacob (prior to the last episode, that is) and seeming like he really does legitimately just want to be free of Jacob and the Island–that’s not really him plaintively pleading to be let go, that’s the plea of the dead man he’s wearing.

* Wow, that’s creepy, putting it like that.

* What’s at the heart of the Island? Murder! Violence, always violence on this show. Regardless of how things pan out, I think the creators may have already told us which man they believe is right.

* Recently on Robot 6:

* Lady Gaga goes to Michael DeForge and company’s Prison for Bitches;

* and Tom Spurgeon, Tim O’Neil, and Charles Hatfield’s smart pieces on superhero movies get lumped in with an absurd Iron Man 2/Rocky IV mash-up video.

* If you read only one obituary for Frank Frazetta, make it Tom Spurgeon’s. (Well, make it two and read Zak Smith’s too. But definitely read Tom’s.) The piece contextualizes Frazetta for me in a way I clearly, sorely needed: I had no idea he started doing fantasy illustrations as late in his career as he did, and assumed he was around doing pulp stuff in pulp’s late glory days.

* Frazetta is an artist whose work never really clicked for me. I think that given my interests and enthusiasms, most people would be shocked to learn how little fantasy, particularly fantasy of the guys-with-swords variety, I’ve actually read aside from Tolkien. That aesthetic of shirtless men and topless women meatily coiling around one another while fighting giant crocodile-ape-bats was always alien to me. It didn’t help that (I’m guessing; I don’t recall for sure) my first exposure to Frazetta probably came right alongside my first exposure to his imitators, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell and Olivia and suchlike, all of whom I’m pretty sure I encountered for the first time in a comic shop in my mid-teens. Though now I see how his trailblazing and chops and personal interests elevate his work above theirs, it wasn’t possible for me then, nor was it something I would have been interested in trying.

* Moreover, having now read every actual Robert E. Howard Conan story and totally loved them, I feel as though Frazetta’s take on the character is akin to what the Rolling Stones’ ubiquitous radio staples are to the Rolling Stones’ overall oeuvre: An immediately appealing but ultimately distorting and misleading lens through which to gauge the reality of the whole, and one past which few people are ever interested in looking, to the long-term detriment of the work’s hidden strengths. In much the same way that it took a trusted friend’s enthusiastic and specific endorsement of that four-album run from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main Street to get me to stop going “Sure, ‘Start Me Up’ is fun, but that’s as much of that as I need” and expose myself to songs like “Jigsaw Puzzle” or “I Just Want to See His Face” or “Midnight Mile,” I came to Conan in spite of Frazetta’s horn-helmed bodybuilders, weird-in-the-Weird-Tales-sense rainbow-in-an-oil-slick colors, and action-in-a-void compositions, not because of them.

* That said, I could always intuitively understand what Tom describes about Frazetta’s role in nascent nerd culture, how his work provided a look at a world that promised, well, promise–a world of danger and excitement, where being a grown-up seemed potentially worth it, where even the horror and death was still head and shoulders above the dreary apocalypse that this world’s button-pushers in suits and uniforms were prepared to unleash on us all. Plus, that slippy mishmash of fantasy and science fiction and horror and heroics in which Frazetta specialized was to become hugely influential on things that did mean something to me, from the He-Man cartoons and action figures of my childhood to the “new action” artcomics of today.

* Frank Quitely Joker? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Wow, this is an exceedingly lovely new style of art from Dave Kiersh.

* In the third Ghostbusters movie, the gang will reunite to do battle with Bill Murray’s cosmic-level disinterest in the third Ghostbusters movie.

* Jeez: George A. Romero wants to continue spinning new zombie movies out of Diary of the Dead, his worst zombie movie. Except for perhaps Survival of the Dead, which itself spins out of Diary itself and am told is even worse.

* Matthew Yglesias’s take on Barack Obama’s recent anti-iPod/iPad/XBox/PlayStation applause line strikes me as basically correct in terms of the racial messaging at play. I confess I never paid much attention to his “put away the XBox” bits in the past because they so weren’t directed at me, since I have neither an XBox nor kids from which it would distract me.

* Cloverfield prequel! Doomsday is coming! Here’s the trailer for the J.J. Abrams alien-rampage movie Super 8. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, please don’t forget to check out last week’s Lost thoughts before joining me and the gang again after tonight’s episode!

I love the first Burton Batman movie; I think it’s a great movie, a for-the-ages movie. I think the second one’s alright but sort of a warning sign on the road to Burton’s Hot Topic hackdom today; it also always bothered me that it took Batman’s two primary sane antagonists and made them crazy. Schumacher’s Batman movies are very dumb. I think all the X-Men movies are rarely less than okay and rarely more than good, I think I like the third one best in terms of the visuals and that hotsy-totsy scene with Jean Grey and Wolverine, but I have no desire to re-watch any of them. I thought the first two Spider-Man movies were absolutely miserable, utterly self-serious twaddle, though there were some good Doctor Octopus fight scenes in the second one like that one on the side of the building; I liked my airplane viewing of the third one, especially the jazz dance, but don’t care if I never see that one again. I enjoy the Daredevil movie despite its leaden leads, it’s got good fight scenes that get what superhero fight scenes are supposed to be about. I haven’t seen the Fantastic Four movies or Ghost Rider or Elektra or the Punisher movies or the Blade movies. I never saw any of the ersatz superhero things that a lot of guys slightly younger than me watched back in the day, your Meteor Mans and Blankmans and so on. I remember enjoying Darkman a TON as a kid, it was sort of the grimngritty superhero comic come to lurid life, but I haven’t seen it in ages. Batman Begins is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I like Iron Man and Incredible Hulk and (despite its inert Batman) The Dark Knight and have seen them all more than once. I haven’t seen Iron Man 2 yet. I enjoyed Watchmen as a sort of The Warriors for superhero movies; I saw it twice in the theater (one time for free) but don’t have the DVD yet because the studio seemed intent on ripping me off. I have no desire to see Kick-Ass. Superman Returns is dull as dishwater, Ang Lee’s Hulk seems to have no idea why it’s a movie about the Hulk. The Incredibles struck me as not very funny and not very exciting and not very interesting–talk about a beneficiary from the low bar set by other superhero movies. Unbreakable‘s a great time, my second favorite superhero movie after Batman. I love Zod, Ursa, and Non from Superman II, but beyond that those Superman movies sure are lame from what I can recall. I haven’t seen Steel.

* Above you’ll find the image I meant to put at the top of my review of Henry & Glenn Forever this morning. Attentiondeficitdisorderly regrets the error.

* This was a blast: Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, Brian Hibbs, Abhay Khosla, Douglas Wolk, David Uzumeri, Chris Eckert and I discuss Daniel Clowes’s Wilson. I tried to go to bat for the thing; let me know how I did.

* Today on Robot 6: a quick look at several recent pieces on superheroes and race.

* Tom Spurgeon joins Matt Zoller Seitz in kicking superhero movies around, more or less, and like Seitz he does so from the position of someone who’d like to see something that even remotely approximates Jack Kirby on his worst day. Where Spurge diverges from Seitz, if I’m reading him correctly, is in saying that the tendency of the better superhero movies to be seen (even rightly seen) as such based on the strength of a single strong performance or small number of visually memorable moments is a feature, not a bug. This despite the fact that I believe Spurgeon has much less use for superheroes overall than does Seitz, though my hoped-for Sean/Spurge/Seitz slumber party has yet to materialize for me to gauge this first-hand. Spurgeon docks points for Seitz’s theoretical wider range for the genre, which Tom sees as crazytalk given not just Hollywood’s tried-and-true template for making money from superheroes, but the shallowness of the genre itself.

* I particularly liked this bit:

I think Iron Man 2‘s step back from record opening box office and the mediocre US box-office performance for Kick-Ass indicate the end of the genre’s initial, immense grace period, a new act in their development that was probably instigated by the 1-2 punch of the first Iron Man movie and Dark Knight. Those two movies were immense pleasures for their respective, gigantic audiences; it’s hard to imagine success for too many movies that don’t provide at least a rough equivalent of their thrills — or movies that don’t seem to work that way not being viewed as something most people can see six months later at home.

In other words, we’ve reached Peak Nerd. My personal spin on this is that given the failure of Watchmen to convincingly carve out a space in the superhero movie genre akin to what The Godfather did for gangster movies–a failure of both interest and ability on Zack Snyder’s part–The Dark Knight and Iron Man 1 are going to be seen to be as good as it gets–the perfect excuse not to go see some movie you’re interested in but suspect will offer you diminishing returns by comparison. (For what it’s worth, no, I haven’t seen Iron Man 2 yet, but it’s family circumstances that are to blame, not a lack of interest–though given the choice I’d probably first go see an entirely different movie about an iron person, the restored Metropolis.)

* This news is both exciting and depressing: Did you have any idea that the Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section in The Believer is now up to its fifth installment? I didn’t remember that the first had come out!

* I already linked to this, but you really should take whatever amount of time it takes you to read Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Brian Hibbs. Even aside from the subjective but/and/and-therefore fascinating portrait it paints of comics retail circa 2010, I just think that in general, more people should agree to do interviews in which the stated goal of one of the participants is to cordially poke holes in the positions of the other. This is particularly true in comics, where that virtually never happens. Good on Brian and Tom both for doing this.

* Grant Morrison, Batman, interview, you know the drill. I have to say, I re-read the last six issues of Batman and Robin this morning for an assignment, and they are simply delightful–a buoyantly, brightly dark series of mysteries filled with weird villains and exciting action scenes. It’s the ongoing Batman comic you always wanted to read if you ever were interested in reading an ongoing Batman comic.

* Zak Smith’s alphabetical rundown of the D&D Monster Manual is over. Heartbreaking.

* I’m always up for someone pointing out how poorly written Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis was. The flamethrower thing amazes me with its awfulness every time I think about it.

* Bizarro Supergirl? Sure, I’ll eat it. I really do believe that Bizarro is a top-ten-of-all-time idea from the superhero genre.

* A John Williams blog-a-thon? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via The House Next Door.)

* I have no idea what these hugely impractical giant robot-monster things from something called Mazinga Z are, but they’re gorgeous.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates slaps President Obama around a bit for being a luddite scold at a recent commencement speech. Hey Mr. President, maybe if you weren’t so busy trying to find a “sensible middle ground” on fucking Miranda rights, we wouldn’t need to be entertained or distracted or diverted so much!

* Joe Strummer from The Clash (age 28) and Robert Fripp from King Crimson (age 35) in conversation, 1981. Wow.

I think that Chris Sims’s piece on “the racial politics of regressive storytelling”–by which he means the way that resurrecting the original versions of characters like Green Lantern, the Atom, the Legion of Super-Heroes and so on has the unintended but unavoidable effect of re-whitening these franchises–ignores a lot of important details and thus badly misdiagnoses the source of this problem. But I’ll start by pointing out its strengths: Yeah, you know what, it is weird that concepts like the Flash and the Legion are so nostalgic despite being literally about forward motion and the future, as Sims points out on his own blog (though I like Geoff Johns’s takes on those characters anyway). Also, this isn’t exactly news, but it is indeed silly the way so many ethnic characters have nationality-or-stereotype-based powers (though as Sims notes, that’s true of plenty of nominally “white” European characters as well–Banshee, anyone?). And in general, it’s certainly not healthy for the superhero genre to be so inward-looking; as Sims notes, we’re a long way from Frank Miller and Alan Moore, whose successes stemmed in part from bringing in outside influences and from their restless desire to do things that hadn’t been done with these characters and concepts before. Finally, Sims is quite right to point out the grotesque undercurrent of majoritarian whinging you occasionally detect from fans, marginalizing non-white characters like John Stewart as “Black Lantern” and bitching about Idris Elba and Michael Clarke Duncan getting cast in movies and so on.

But while Sims’s central argument can’t really be denied–obviously, replacing (say) the Asian-American Atom or African-American Firestorm with their Caucasian forerunners does indeed make the DC line-up that much whiter–I think blaming it, as he does, on blinkered and compulsive nostalgia-mongering is misleading.

First of all, I’ve always thought the “legacy” concept, by which older characters are replaced by younger ones who inherit their basic costume-and-power-set concept, is one of the weirdest and lamest things about superhero comics. If Lost introduced a new doctor character with short hair and daddy issues and called him Jack, would it be “galling” or “regressive” for the audience, or subsequent writers, to want to bring the original guy back? Perhaps once upon a time, in its original form, when then-defunct Golden Age characters were replaced by Silver Age characters who were like totally different things, giving an old character’s name to a new one was the sort of forward-thinking freshmaker that Douglas Wolk has argued it is. But that’s very different from the “legacy” concept we know today–as I’ve said before, they’re all about new characters’ compulsion to live up to their forebears, no more forward-thinking than my college buddy’s dad naming him William Howard Taft V.

Secondly, I’m frankly not convinced that very many of these characters are such great losses beyond the surface value of their, uh, surfaces. Ryan Choi and Jason Rusch, the most recent Atom and Firestorm, are the stars of canceled series with no evident fanbase. At any rate, they’re still around and useable, and in fact they’ve both starred in big-deal event comics lately (Ryan in Cry for Justice, Jason in the ongoing Brightest Day where he shares the Firestorm powers with his white forerunner Ronnie Raymond). I also think it’s a stretch for Sims to rope newer Flash Wally West into the argument because his wife is…Korean-American, I guess, though you’d never know it from looking at any of the pictures I’ve ever seen of her. Ditto newer Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who apparently and hilariously was retconned into being Latino. If you have to cite Yolanda Montez to shore up your argument, you’re grasping. (“Who?” Exactly.) As for the Legion, even semi-seriously citing that green skins/blue skins/black skins line is indicative of how goofy this is. And the less said Sims’s likening of the creation of an alternate Earth for more recent iterations of old superhero concepts to “the unintentional building of a cosmic-scale meta-textual ghetto,” the better.

In a nutshell, I think Sims’s argument is DC-based by necessity, since that’s the universe where the most prominent non-white characters have tended to be revamps of preexisting superhero mantles previously held by white dudes. If you look at most of the better, longest-lasting, most prominent superheroes who aren’t white–Storm, Luke Cage, Black Panther–they’re their own thing, not substitutes for previous characters. To filter it through a more familiar lens, I think it’s widely accepted that superheroines are considered lame is that so many of them are obvious, borderline creepy knock-off versions of the male characters like She-Hulk, Spider-Woman. (I think Supergirl and Batgirl clicked because they’re more like sidekicks.) Again, the ones who really work–Wonder Woman, Jean Grey, the Invisible Woman, Storm again–tend to be their own thing.

Moreover, and contra the likes of the DC characters mentioned above, the big Marvel non-white characters are associated with influential, acclaimed runs by important creators: Storm’s from the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne X-Men, Luke Cage was rescued from obscurity by peak-of-his-powers Brian Michael Bendis for Alias and then placed at the forefront of the company-defining New Avengers, Black Panther is a goddamn Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four castmember. I know plenty of ’90s-era comics readers who are fond of Kyle or Wally and his wife Linda, and there are any number of superhero blogs who could tell you how much they enjoyed the low-double-digit runs of the recent Blue Beetle or Firestorm comics, but we’re clearly on a different level here.

Now, I know that the “one true versions” of Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), the Flash (Barry Allen), the Atom (Ray Palmer) et al who have recently been resurrected were all themselves replacements for earlier superheroes with those names. But there were many other variables in play here. For starters, the previous holders of those titles were, for the most part, predecessors in name only: The concepts for the original Green Lantern and Atom were very different, for example. They’d also been pretty much out of commission for quite some time before their publishers decided to reinvigorate their IP by coming up with new characters for those monikers. As Franklin Harris notes, this means the earlier versions didn’t have to be killed off or otherwise forcibly marginalized to make room for their replacements, which isn’t true for guys like Hal and Barry and Ray; I’d imagine that Harris is right to say that this is the source of a lot of lingering desire to bring back the previous versions.

This is getting into personal preference now, but of the suite of non-white heroes currently flying around the DCU, I’m not surprised to discover that my favorites–though not originals like Storm and Cage and the Panther–tend not to follow the usual model of copycatting a previous template as closely as their shunted-to-the-side counterparts. African-American Green Lantern John Stewart works for the same reason that white Green Lantern Guy Gardner works: They fit in as fellow members of the Green Lantern Corps, a concept that can allow for multiple people with the same power set, rather than as direct replacements for a slain Hal Jordan as was the apparently Mexican-American Kyle Rayner. Steel shares a name with some previous DC hero I don’t have the first clue about, but he’s also a can’t-miss combination of Iron Man with Superman’s cape, Thor’s hammer, and an iconic African-American legend’s name (John Henry Irons = AWESOME secret identity), all of which I’m reasonably sure didn’t apply to the last guy. Jaime Reyes is a direct replacement of the previous, murdered Blue Beetle, yeah, but he’s so different in identity (suburban teenager vs. grown-man billionaire inventor) and power set (magic alien artifact vs. basic eccentric tech stuff) that he feels less like a sub and more like what Hal Jordan was to Alan Scott. Plus, he’s in a very popular cartoon series, which is really the bottom line: The characters with the most purchase in the minds of fans and in pop-culture at large tend to be the ones who win out in the end, which is why the Green Lantern who originated the modern concept and starred in decades of stories and Super Friends beats the Green Lantern who gave us “women in refrigerators,” the crab mask, and relative obscurity.

My point is that if you don’t like the whitening of the DCU as it’s playing out through the return of Silver Age whitebread heroes, don’t blame Geoff Johns’s Rebirth comics or the fans who buy them–blame the people who thought the best way to diversify the DCU was to stick new guys in the old guys’ laundry.

* The unearthed/uncut version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is playing in New York City!

* Rickey Purdin reveals the comics he’s gotten over the past few weeks. I think a purchase pattern that involves Wilson, G.I. Joe, Girl Fuck, Hellboy, Mome, Orc Stain, Invincible, FCHS, and Grickle is a pretty delightful one. Comics, Rickey is your audience.

* A He-Man & the Masters of the Universe art show featuring Matt Furie, Nick Gazin, Brandon Graham, Corey Lewis, Angie Wang, and that Adrian Riemann guy who did those awesome Hipsters of the Universe fashion illos a while back? Floating World, you have made me burn with desire.

* Mike Mignola talks to Kiel Phegley about Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain and the Mignola/Arcudi Hellboy/BPRD folklore/pulp divide. A regular interview series about the Mignolaverse is a real mitzvah.

* Jesse Moynihan’s GWC has wrapped up at Arthur magazine’s comics site. Cosmic absurdism. Read the whole thing.

* I think you will nevertheless enjoy Douglas Wolk’s interview with Grant Morrison about Batman if you enjoy Grant Morrison interviews about Batman.

* Speaking of Douglas and Techland, it was quite fortuitous that his piece on how the common-sense-defying policies of the Big Two comics publishers regarding same-day digital delivery of their products came out on the exact same day as Tom Spurgeon’s lengthy, meaty interview with retailer Brian Hibbs, in which Hibbs expresses as his overriding, number-one wish regarding digital comics that the Big Two publishers avoid same-day digital delivery. Simply put, I think that if Marvel and DC ever really get involved in digital comics, Brian doesn’t have a prayer of his wish coming true. In the wake of the iPad I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you see moves in that direction this year, in fact. And not a moment too soon. You just can’t expect publishers to throw money away forever, not when there’s a demonstrated demand for doing things a certain way that’s already being met by pirates. And I agree with Douglas that, contra Brian, it’s very much the “gotta read it by Wednesday afternoon!” crowd that will fire digital sales, not civilians looking for perennials. They’ll be part of it, but once they’re provided with an easy way to follow things as they come out, that’s what they’ll do, same as they do with TV shows and movies and music and whatever else.

I just got very, very upset–like, I had to fast-forward–by a commercial for (I think) AT&T wireless because it was using the song “From the Morning” by Nick Drake. I just couldn’t bear to hear a song like that in a commercial. Then I realized that this must be exactly how all the people who already listened to Nick Drake before that Volkswagon commercial that used “Pink Moon” came out–which is how I first heard of Nick Drake.

* Against nerd-culture hegemony: Parts one, two, three, four, five, etc., etc….

* Seriously, read Matt Zoller Seitz’s anti-superhero-movie piece in Salon. It’s no secret what an admirer of Seitz’s I am, but I hope you’ll believe me any way that it’s a cut above the screeds you’ve seen along these lines from, I don’t know, Roger Ebert or Ron Rosenbaum, or a Comics Journal message board user in 2002, or whatever. It’s the kind of thing where you can disagree with several of his specific assessments of superhero movies–I love Burton’s Batman and hate Spider-Man 2, just for example–and still agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion. For me, the prosecution could present the Fantastic Four movies as Exhibit A in The People vs. Superhero Movies and rest their case immediately–you have access to the definitive work of one of the greatest visual thinkers in any medium of the entire 20th century, and that’s what you come up with? Anyway, I talk a bit more about Seitz’s piece on Robot 6. Suffice it to say I’ve been thinking and chatting a lot about the goonish conservatism of nerd culture for the past few days–ever since Wilson came out, I believe–so this piece was a nice bit of synchronicity.

* Elsewhere on Robot 6: Sexy superhero art from Canadian cartoonists. Here’s Jillian Tamaki’s Catwoman:

* Comic-Con’s David Glanzer talks to Kiel Phegley about the Con’s big decision on location. I was struck to see him publicly batting down at least one claim made by L.A. Inc’s Michael Krouse in that Jeremy-Piven-in-Entourage interview yesterday. Also, to hear Glanzer tell it (and contra Krouse and Chris Butcher), San Diego’s offer was a fine one, although of course that’s what he’d say.

* Actual, honest-to-God new reader Curt Purcell says Blackest Night was plenty new-reader friendly, thank you very much, for whatever its other faults.

* Tom Neely is the best there is at what he does.

* Despite its lack of anything from The Wizard of Oz (flying monkeys!!!), this list of disturbing moments in kids’ movies from Topless Robot’s Ethan Kaye has a strong blend of iconic horrors (Willy Wonka’s tunnel is the predictable and deserving #1, you’ve got the Child Catcher and Bambi’s mom) with offbeat and personal choices (the clown nightmare instead of Large Marge in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, also-ran animated features like Scruffy and The Black Cauldron, which reminds me I wanna reread the Prydain Chronicles).

In addition to the usual enlightening back-and-forth, in this week’s Lost thoughts comment thread you fan find a couple of observations from me regarding last night’s episode that occurred to me since I wrote the original post last night. They’re on the meatier side, and normally I’d have created a second full-fledged post for them, but I didn’t want to derail the discussion. Check them out, and please weigh in if you’d like.

* San Diego Daze Part One: Sure, I guess contacting the Comic-Con organization for an explanation of their exhibitor badge rate hike is one way of exploring the story, Tom, or should I say Mr. Fancy-Pants.

* San Diego Daze Part Two: Los Angeles’ chief spokesman in its effort to win Comic-Con away from San Diego, Michael Krouse, really does come across like something out of The Player in this interview with Kiel Phegley.

* San Diego Daze Part Three: In no uncertain terms, Chris Butcher stomps all over the idea that San Diego has been a good host to the Con.

* Rich Juzwiak liked the Nightmare on Elm Street remake–for bringing some gravitas to Freddy, of all things–but for me the money quote in his review is this:

Some time during, oh, the fourth Saw flick or so, this much should have been clear to even the most ardent horror defender: we’re the ones who are really being tortured. We slog through so much garbage and for what? To find that rare diamond in a rough like back in the VHS days? To see just how far cinema will go to freak us out and make us squirm? To actually freak out and squirm? Because being smarter than garbage beats being dumber than art? I don’t know really what the point is (probably a little from each of the presented scenarios), but I know that I’m a gleeful masochist.

“Because being smarter than garbage beats being dumber than art”–friends, is that a tagline for all of nerd culture?

* Real Life Horror: It’s like something out of the movies, only not really; we dodged a bullet this time, but for how long?

* This is an extraordinary album cover.

* I…I don’t even know what to say about this. I really don’t. Words fail.

SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS

* The strange thing about episodes at this stage is that you can’t really be shocked by any deaths, because you only have four episodes to go including tonight’s and this show being what it is you know some major characters are going to die, while moreover there are only so many left to kill. It’s not like early on where every death was a stunner because whoa, they killed a main character; it’s not like later where you knew what they were capable of but never were quite sure when or on whom the ax would fall. Now the only question is, like, will Kate’s bullet wound be fatal, or will Sawyer’s charge of the Light Brigade give him the blaze of glory we’ve all be reasonably sure he’s been heading for.

* Turns out the answer in both cases is no, which I’m glad for; I didn’t expect Sawyer or Kate to die this early, not really, but nor did I expect Jin and Sun to die at all. That strikes me as a real gutpunch to the show’s own emotional core. Jin and Sun episodes were as constant as the sunrise.

* What I’m really glad about is the final scene with the castaways, where you finally have them react to loss the way people in the real world react, which is to cry. When Hurley broke down…yeah, that was a toughie.

* I’m glad Sayid was redeemed in the end, via one of the show’s favorite paths to redemption, volunteering to take the brunt of a bomb blast. It was good to have old, calm, expert Sayid back one last time. Plus, “It’s going to be you, Jack.” Nice and cryptic.

* I felt bad for Jin and Sun’s kid. I spent most of that scene figuring Sun would finally say “you have to live for Ji Yeon” and Jin would reluctantly swim to safety. As it turns out they didn’t appear to be thinking about Ji Yeon. Sorry, kid.

* Jack being right about the bomb was a step in the redemption direction for a character that fans and fellow characters alike have written off as a habitual fuck-up, so of course I liked that.

* I figure Lapidus will live to quip another day. Or not, I don’t really care, he was kind of a waste of time all told. It’s nice that he was genre-y, but so what.

* I know that the flashsideways material should feel like an afterthought or an also-ran in an episode like this, but it didn’t. Those right there are your two central characters hashing some major things out. That scene in the hospital hallway at the end, where John laughs at the notion of letting go, is one of my favorites in the whole history of the show.

* I was also very happy, for some reason, to see Jack meet Helen. Somehow that makes Locke’s happiness more real…?

* Did you notice the editing that suggested Jack was dreaming of his flashsideways self?

* Glad to get rid of the miscast dougy scientist Widmorian. (Widmoron?)

* So how long has the MIB’s plan been in effect? Just recently, or was he trying to get other people to kill off the Candidates, or get them to kill each other, all along? Maybe he needed to bump off Jacob first and only then was it worth going after the Candidates. I suppose that makes sense.

* Where was Widmore during the various fracases?

* I wonder if we won’t get the big “here’s the secret history of the Island and Jacob and the MIB” until the “two-part series finale,” i.e. not next episode but the episode after that.

* The San Diego Comic-Con is raising the price of extra exhibitor badges from $75 to $200? That’s a massive year-to-year increase, that’s for sure, though I know so little about the economics of the Big Show that I hardly feel equipped to comment. My first instinct is that yes, this is a way to price out smaller exhibitors to make more room for the big guns given the lack of elbow room the show now has, but I’d be happy to be persuaded otherwise as I find the show a generally admirable organization in terms of its attempts to balance art and commerce and the needs of a wide variety of media and fandoms. (Via Kevin Melrose.)

* Rest in peace to the front-of-Previews comics internet’s greatest troll, Alan Coil.

* Recently on Robot 6: Rollins Loves Danzig, Shaw and Moynihan Love Lost, and He-Man and Tron love men.

* Benjamin Marra barbarian action as you like it!

* Lots of interesting RPG talk in the comments for yesterday’s Carnival, including a special guest appearance from a member of my old war party, cartoonist Davey Oil. Another such august personage, AllTooFlat.com’s Kennyb, weighs in on his tumblr.

* Won’t you please check out last episode’s Lost thoughts thread before rejoining us this evening? Wow, are there only four episodes left of the whole series, or am I miscalculating?

* Ready to have your guts totally ripped out? Read Tim O’Shea’s interview with Driven by Lemons‘ Josh Cotter. I am at a loss for words as to what even to say about it, except this: Josh, if you’re reading this, you stepping away from comics would be a disaster for comics. This is a MUST READ.

* Sylvester Stallone is 99% sure he won’t make a fifth Rambo movie. I’m fine with that. More fine if he was gonna go in the “Rambo vs. genetically engineered soldier-monster” direction he’d mooted, less fine if he was gonna go in the “Rambo vs. Juarez” direction, but basically fine either way because how do you top the last one?

* Dash Shaw and Jesse Moynihan teamed up to do a three-feet-tall comic strip about Lost for the new issue of The Believer? Yes please.

* I’ve got something to say: Go buy Henry & Glenn Forever, the new collection of romantic gag strips starring Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig by Tom Neely and his Igloo Tornado compatriots. Don’t think about it–do it!

* Recently on Robot 6, a pair of links swiped from Comics Comics: Dan Nadel & Paul Gravett’s Jack Kirby art show and the music of the ’60s Spider-Man cartoon. Frank Santoro, if you’re reading this, check the comments to that last post.

* Although it seems as un-spoilery as possible, Kiel Phegley’s interview with Mike Mignola about the next cycle of B.P.R.D. stories is still, you know, an interview about the next cycle of B.P.R.D. stories, so caveat lector.

* Kevin Huizenga appears to be serializing his story “Rumbling” on Jordan Crane’s gorgeous webcomics portal What Things Do–here’s the stuff that’s already been published in Or Else and a minicomic, iirc.

* Here’s a comic by Bill Griffith about Levittown, the town on Long Island where my wife and I now live. (Via JK Parkin.)

* Kate Beaton does Macbeth. Gee, whichever strip shall I choose to illustrate this link?

* Curt Purcell continues his Blackest Night retrospective with a salute to the superheroic state-of-the-art visuals of Ivan Reis and Doug Mahnke and his personal issue-by-issue breakdown of how the event would best be read, collected, and thought about. My superhero-centric readers are really gonna wanna read both.

* Like basically everyone else, Jason Adams thought The Human Centipede was much ado about bullshit, as the aforementioned Bard once put it, I think.

* Jason also reviews the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a cautionary tale of what happens when imaginationless people make a movie about the power of the imagination.

* I’m always game for a genre-trash poster-art gallery. Thanks, Monster Brains!

* The BBC interviews the great choral composer Eric Whitacre about his now-viral “virtual choir” video for his song “Lux Arumque.” I could not love Whitacre’s music more.

* Your quote of the day:

“It’s so funny because when the economy first started collapsing, everyone was freaking out and asking when comics would be hit, but now that things have really taken a toll on sales, no one is saying shit about it.”

–a friend of mine on Marvel’s month-to-month sales analysis for March 2010.

* Jiminy Christmas, this is an absolutely epic Playing D&D with Porn Stars posts on the myriad ways to “railroad” your players, i.e. to leave them with little or no choice but to do exactly what you want them to do. Seriously, I saved it for last so you can immediately go and read the whole thing yourself (after listening to the Whitacre interview of course).

Zak’s thesis, which I take it is derived from a considerable body of thought and writing on RPGs, is that between a full-fledegd railroad and its opposite, a “sandbox” in which anything the players want to do goes, there are infinite gradations. Thinking back on my one glorious D&D campaign, I’m not sure how to characterize it using Zak’s terminology, because what my DM–the great Bill DeFranza, who I’m told is now professionally writing RPG material so look out, suckers–did was, over the course of months and I think even years (before I joined the campaign), deceive the players as to what was going on via a non-player character who was secretly a total bastard. Essentially, our ragtag group hooked up at some point with a mindflayer named Oolitek who, despite what we knew of his race’s proclivities, seemed to be a stand-up guy. In addition to helping us out of jams and giving us advice, he would actually say emotionally involving and moving things to us about issues in our characters’ lives. Seriously, I loved this dude. Alas, it turned out he was manipulating us all along to slowly eliminate major monsters, magic users, and power centers so that he and his cohorts could apocalyptically blot out the sun and unleash the Underdark upon the surface world, which is precisely what ended up happening. Now, were we steered toward this conclusion? Without a doubt. Once we took down the last major obstacle for Oolitek’s plot–a beholder, iirc–could we have stopped it no matter what we did? I sort of think not; I had some sort of disintegrator ray-gun I stole from an off-world spaceship that had crashed (leading to a lot of confusion for my medieval-level mind), and even though I missed when I blasted the big doomsday device Oolitek’s pals had constructed, I sort of doubt Bill would have let me gum up the works in the end. But none of us minded, because it was such a great story, and moreover one that was totally contingent on our group’s desire to Do Good in the wake of a variety of lousy personal choices each of us had made in the past. Plus, we could have avoided it all along if we’d, you know, never trusted a fucking mindflayer.

Anyway. Personally, I think you can apply many of Zak’s lessons about railroading directly to fiction writing. Sure, your characters don’t have the autonomy that real-live player characters in a role-playing game have–but wouldn’t you like it to feel like they do?