* Tom Spurgeon’s Books of the ’00s holiday interview series continues with Frank Santoro on Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce. His earlier post on the book is worth a revisit too; I like how he differentiated the ways Brinkman and Brian Chippendale depict contiguous space, and how he shares my appreciation for Brinkman’s facility with scale.
* Speaking of Frank–Go, read: “Motorway from Roswell” by Frank Santoro and Bill Boichel. Tell me you don’t want to ride in that car.
* Dig on The Cool Kids Table’s “Our Comics Decade” series, in which Ben, RIckey Purdin, and Kiel Phegley discuss the comics that hit them hardest year by year.
Wow, what a turnaround I made on this book in the space of a few pages. One of the perils of being so hung up about spoilers that you go into a book without even knowing what it’s about is that oftentimes it turns out you’ve got an idea in your head of what it’s about anyway, and that idea can be wrong. My only experience with Tardi was his adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s daylight-noir West Coast Blues, so when I saw a guy in a bowler hat standing there in a graveyard on the cover I figured “okay, a period-piece crime novel, like The Black Diamond Detective Agency or something.” Instead, right from the first page, you just get smacked with this torrent of verbiage from this daffy annoying tall skinny guy as he runs around atop the walls of some crazy little village opening gates for people. What the fuck is this?
It’s an absurdist satire, is what it is, and a pretty terrific one. And good God is it French. Once I realized what was up, my dim memories of Jarry and Ionesco and Beckett flickered one by one back to life. Delusions of grandeur, farcical authority figures, goofily symbolic names, talk talk talk that says nothing, all atop a fundamentally ridiculous premise.
Arthur There, the heir of a long-defunct line of aristocrats, has lost his ancestral estate but gained the legal right to erect walls between the properties of all the people who now live on it and control their comings and goings. Only by “control” I mean “run when they ring a bell for him to open the gate.” A Strangelovian element is injected when the president of France, on the verge of losing his bid for reelection, settles upon the unique legal status of There’s labyrinthine fiefdom as the perfect pretext for setting up a rival government-in-exile. He’d heard of the place thanks to Julie Maillard, the squint-eyed and slatternly daughter of the neurotic There’s chief rival–she once had a watersport-heavy affair with the President, though now her sights are set, for reasons obscure even to her, on There. And some other dudes too. It’s easy to picture it as one of those long-form fourth-season Monty Python episodes, with Eric Idle as There, Michael Palin as the President, and Carol Cleveland as Julie, if that helps.
So like I said, once I figured out what was up–once I realized that the dialogue was overwhelming and annoying on purpose, once I realized that the characters were deliberately ridiculous and their motivations purposefully flimsy and absurd–I was all the way on board. Kudos for that must go to Jean-Claude Forest’s full-bore commitment to writing like that. After a while it feels like the most natural thing in the world to watch There talk to himself on the verge of hysteria for paragraph after paragraph. But the real magic is in watching what Tardi does with Forest’s set-up. The fool’s kingdom of Mornemont is an unforgettable comic-book locale, and the riot of walls and fences and gates that crisscross it provide a perfect visual hook on which to hang the similarly profligate dialogue and nonsensical story. Tardi’s lanky design for There; his recurring motif of vertical stripes everywhere from the gates There opens to the wallpaper of his comically tiny house; his use of tall rectangular panels and layouts that emphasize the page’s verticality; truly masterful rainstorms and snowstorms–it’s seriously a master class on creating a sense not just of place but of a claustrophobic, chaotic, unsustainable state of mind. It isn’t hard to see this on your bookshelf next to Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, or Hans Rickheit: environment and emotion are one and the same here as there. What’s more, the main effect is so clear that the contrasts are all the stronger: Mornemont’s white walls with the President’s black curtains; There’s googly eyes, stovepipe limbs, and funereal suit with Julie’s bovine expressionlessness, swooping curves, and frequently nude white body; the sealed-off snowglobe isolation of Mornemont throughout the book with the sudden border-smashing invasion by the outside world at the book’s climax. It’s a parade of comics effects astutely selected and deftly executed. Killer stuff, and more fun than you remember it from French class.
I’m told this is just a fortuitous coincidence, but on this very snowy Sunday Tom Spurgeon has posted an interview with me about Craig Thompson’s Blankets, the very snowy and very good graphic novel. This is part of a whole series of interviews Tom’s doing with various writers and critics, each one focusing on a particular “book of the decade.” I was surprised how much I enjoyed Blankets after several years away from it–if anything I appreciate it even more. It’s really different than most of what’s out there! Anyway I hope you enjoy the interview.
I can’t find anyplace to buy it–let me know in the comments if you know of one
I’m not going to lie: I checked out the comic Tunde Adebimpe was selling at a table at BKCGF because of his day job. But come for the “Staring at the Sun,” stay for the, bright, fun, and effective painted fight comic. Printed on thick, glossy paper, Adebimpe’s paints really leap off the page as they illustrate his simple set-up, subtitled “A Few Notes on Being and Not Being Myself”: A pink horse guy and a green bird guy (his name’s Myself) square off from the left- and right-hand side of each spread in a boxing match narrated by a strip of playfully metaphorical first-person text running across the bottom. The anthropomorphic fighters are built like characters from an all-ages boxing video game, and indeed the simple two dimensional plane of the action reinforces that feel: Since all they can do is move forward, move back, and punch each other, it’s easy to feel like you’ve got a ringside seat to an all-action button-masher/slobberknocker. When the combatants land a blow, their wounded opponents explode with color at the point of impact; a similarly visually explosive cut to a pair of audience members (“prospective employers, future ex-wives”) manages to convey the roar of the crowd with similar effectiveness. Adebimpe’s writing bounces along with the hardboiled patter of an old-school sports columnist: “That’s when I decided to step in…and Reagan ’84 the poor jerk”; “It was our pan, and we were flashing.” In the end one of the fighters is declared the “WINNAH!” by knockout, which depending on how much you’re willing to play along with the Myself/Not Myself metaphor could Mean Something. But really it’s an exercise in convey action and movement through color and telling a story with a memorable voice–and a successful exercise at that. I hope to see more.
* I’m very excited to be a part of this year’s Best of 2009 critics roundtable episode of the venerable Inkstuds podcast. Tim Hodler, Chris Mautner, host Robin McConnell and I discuss Asterios Polyp, You’ll Never Know, The Photographer, You Are There, Multiforce, 20th Century Boys, Pluto, and George Sprott, and man did it fly by. We could have gone on for hours on a dozen more books. This was a real pleasure–thanks to Robin for the gracious invitation, and thanks to Chris and Tim, two of my favorite critics, for the conversation.
* Forgot to link to it the other day, but Noah Berlatsky followed up his post on the problems with the TCJ.com relaunch with one focusing on Gary Groth’s irksome “welcome” essay. It’s funny: Many of the things Gary says about how hard it is to find critics online–and I mean literally find them, like the logistical process of locating critics–and how shitty nearly everything he managed to find was, he said before in the SPX Critics Roundtable in 2007, to widespread dismay on the panel (and in my case, in the audience). I mean, that’s pretty clearly his fault, not the Internet’s fault. I really figured the reaction to his statements of that sort at the panel, and the subsequent move of the Comics Journal from print to web in the first place, meant that he’d educated himself enough to change his mind. Guess not. It’s a bummer, because Gary is usually a rigorous thinker.
* I was inspired to do this by several recent brouhahas in comics. To wit: This simplifies things to reductio ad absurdum levels, I’m sure, but it seems to me that the vituperative manner in which people are explaining that Marvel’s Girl Comics is a terrible idea is in fact evidence that it’s a great idea. I’m old enough and liberal enough to know that “affirmative action” is not inherently pejorative. All these comment-thread geniuses either deny institutional biases or shrug their shoulders and say whaddayagonnado, and then assert that any effort to redress this–anything other than women just up and writing superhero comics, just like everyone else, right this very moment–is sexism or reverse sexism. But the playing field is not level, and that assertion is ridiculous.
* Also this, from the aforelinked Heidi MacDonald post:
1) We really, really really need to move beyond Power Girl’s breasts, girls. It’s totally a distraction from actual progress. To the point where one prominent female blogger who blogs about those chachas all the time can’t even praise a female cartoonist without comparing her to a female body part. Isn’t it better just to sneak in mentions of female creators as if they were, y’know, NORMAL? Like I just did today elsewhere on this blog?
it looks like Marvel doesn’t know what to do with its Incredible Hercules series. I hate to backseat drive companies because I’ve barely made like sixteen dimes from working in comic books, but at some point it seems that if well-regarded series after well-regarded series is broken on the rocks of a market that won’t respond to them, you should start to look at changing the game board to be more receptive to such series as opposed to picking up a game piece you think might work better.
Look, people who get mad at me for ragging on movies based entirely on their trailers and previews (cough Robin Hood cough) — that’s what trailers and previews are for. They’re made so you can see what a movie’s like, and hopefully, make you want to see it. Bottom line, there’s nothing in any of the Avatar promos that have ever made me want to see it — although, as discussed, the movie’s biggest draw is something that can’t be portrayed over a 30-second TV commercial.
Picking on the kind of people who get butthurt by posts at a site called Topless Robot is some low-hanging fruit, but I’m always game for sticking it to nerds whose low self-esteem and sense of entitlement drives them to paroxysms of rage any time anything they read doesn’t perfectly reflect their own preferences.
Hey, they can’t all be winners. The overall Closed Caption Comics aesthetic, to the extent that one can be pinpointed, has long appealed to me: handmade, rough-hewn, silkscreened, markmaking shit, the ballyhooed stylistic dead-end of Fort Thunder in action, you know the drill. In particular I’ve become a big fan of Lane Milburn’s mix of muscularly drawn monsters and uncomfortable humor, gags that yuk it up until it’s too late and you realize how black things have gotten. That takes a real precise mind and hand to pull off. That’s not what you get in Feeble Minded Funnies, Milburn’s half of this flipbook minicomic, however. Instead he apes the broad humor and colloquial rhythms of the undergrounds: parodic violence, torrents of obscenities, a hapless protagonist called Pukeball making his way through a disapproving world while narration hammers his satirical plight home, all that sort of thing. It actually got to the point (right around the swipe at an outdated grim’n’gritty superhero stereotype) where I wondered if this isn’t actually a parody of underground comix. You’d have to be a lot meaner to make that sort of thing work, though. Actually, has anyone ever done a really nasty parody of the undergrounds? I could use one. Anyway. Milburn draws the bejesus out of it all–someday I want to sit and just watch how he puts the bodies of one of his goons together on the page–but the stories and jokes his awesome drawings inhabit here fall flat.
On the flipside you have Noel Freibert’s My Best Pet, which is the story of a sociopathic child who tortures his pets to death told in a sort of camp faux-EC mode. Longtime readers of this blog can no doubt imagine my reaction. I really hate being so predictable about animal-cruelty gags–apparently this even came up in the humor-comics panel at SPX when I wasn’t even there–but for real: another cat in the fucking microwave? What is it that people get out of drawing cats being blown up in microwaves? Are there people who enjoy…okay, that’s a loaded term. Are there people who get something out of comics in which cats are blown up in microwaves? These are not rhetorical questions at all, by the way. I’m a person with a very high tolerance, a need even, for nihilistic horror, but this I don’t get. Like I’m fond of saying when I come across this sort of material, I’m okay with it when I feel as though the artist is attempting to elucidate something about cruelty. But the whole point of this comic, and it’s actually quite entertaining in this regard, is that it’s just going through the motions. Friebert depicts the asshole kid’s parents’ discussions about his plight without even bothering to put them on panel–it’s just panel after panel of exposition, like they can barely be arsed to show up and play their role in the strip. That’s very funny. And yet we get the cat’s oblivious mewlings as it’s placed in the microwave and its subsequent screams of pain in painstaking detail. I mean, fuck that, right? I’m not the only one?
* Founder of the mighty Fluxblog and friend of ADDTF Matthew Perpetua will be giving a lecture on Wolverine as part of NYC Nerd Nite at Galapagos in Brooklyn this Thursday evening at 8pm. I highly suggest you attend if you are a nerd. Here’s the scoop:
Learn how The X-Men’s Wolverine has evolved over the course of the past four decades and what each version of him says about both the people working with the character and the way audiences respond to variations of the same masculine fantasy. More so than most other superheroes, Wolverine has a particular appeal to insecure young men as demonstrated in overcompensation involved with the character, to subtle aspect such as how large people draw his claws…
If that doesn’t sound like a fine way to spend your Thursday evening then motherfucker I don’t know what to tell you. Buy tickets here.
* Is it just me or are a lot of altcomix heavy hitters doing webcomics lately? After yesterday’s powerhouse Huizenga/Rickheit/Nilsen trifecta, today you’ve got new comics at Vice from Sammy Harkham, Dash Shaw, and Johnny Ryan, plus my favorite installment so far in Nick Bertozzi’s long-running series of bizarre little captioned illustrations.
* Five years and 2,000 pages of MOME! Congratulations to Eric Reynolds, Gary Groth, and the many contributors–that’s a real accomplishment, and MOME has provided me with a lot of enjoyment and food for thought over those years.
* Brandon at Are You a Serious Comic Book Reader? is right, and actually righter than he admits to being, in the aforelinked piece about how constant cliffhanger endings really fuck up the rhythm of 22-page serialized comics. They look lovely and read well but how I wish Sweet Tooth and Daytripper were graphic novels.
* Look at the bait-and-switch shit Marvel used to pull by hinting Wolverine would be in a comic in the ’90s. (Scroll down to the last cover.) Outrageous! Thank you, Cool Kids Table, the people need to KNOW.
* Meanwhile I screwed up my earlier link to the CKT’s Nova cover gallery so here it is again. And here’s the first installment in what augurs to be a lovely series of posts in which the CKT crew recalls comics that meant a lot to them for each year of the decade.
* I don’t care how much Joe Lieberman makes America his Snooki in the Jersey Shore reenactment that is his horrid, horrid life–any day with new webcomics by Kevin Huizenga, Hans Rickheit, and Anders Nilsen is a pretty good day.
* Wow, the writer’s bible for Batman: The Animated Series. I think virtually every week I worked at Wizard, when we’d go out to lunch at the Palisades Mall, I’d go into Best Buy and just stand there and covet the DVD box sets for that show. At one point I think I bought them but returned them the next day because I realized I wouldn’t get a lot of re-watching out of them. But for a long time, that was my favorite ongoing interaction with my favorite superhero.
I have no way of contextualizing this thing. It’s not Powr Mastrs, it’s not even a smaller and stranger but still-quite-obviously-a-minicomic minicomic like Core of Caligula. It’s billed as a “zine,” and there’s a comics sequence, yeah, but it’s mostly illustrations and sketches and doodles and a couple of goofy prose pages and a blown-up xerox of a piece of an issue of USA Today. As such? I still really enjoyed it. C.F. gains more from inscrutability than just about any other working cartoonist; at its best his stuff already has an air of mystery to it, so when stripped even from the relatively loose standards of his “proper” comics, the way he writes out phrases like “MANSION SOFT DRINK” scribbles them out, writes them over again, and follows them up with a stand-alone image of a person walking past a fancy-looking window toward a soda machine, say, takes on a whole new weight. Who the hell is “LUCIO” and why is his name taking up half a page? What does any of it have to do with those rather sexy bondage pin-ups–one of them in full color? Beats me, and that’s quite fine.
The things I could make sense of tickled me, at any rate. The titular strip, set up with a prose introduction by “editor” “Mike Rennet” (does he exist? does it matter?) about the need he felt to discover the big city when he moved to it, follows around a little dude in a memorably C.F.-ian jumpsuit as he walks around the city and just stand around in various places. It’s kind of Pythonesque in its vibe, though I’m finding it difficult to convey. All I know is that I laughed. Same with the second text piece, an editorial from Rennet about how if you live in the city you have to live it up:
Now if you’re reading this thinking I’m standing still in my own poison, mortified by my past and terrified of my future, you’ve got another thing coming. And that thing is my scared, angry fist, smashing through your apartment wall. Your messy, overpriced, uncool, apartment… wall. You’re going to shrivel up; because you don’t know anything about how to work this city, man.
It ends with an exhortation to check out the author’s Facebook page. I got my $3 worth out of this and that’s all the context I need.
I have a friend from college who every time I talk to him we’ll just end up talking about comics and music and movies, and then I’ll hang up and my wife will be like “Did you tell him about our new house?” or “I saw on his girlfriend’s LiveJournal they got a new dog?” and I’ll just have to shrug my shoulders, because there was no way we could fit topics like that into our discussion of Dragon Head or John Romita Jr. or whatever. This massive autobiography is like that: It’s about the joys of pure unabashed obsessive nerdery, the almost physical pleasure of talking and thinking and writing about and working on nothing but the art you enjoy. That makes it an easy book to like. So does Tatsumi’s appealingly simple and direct art, which like a McCloud thesis in action presents Tatsumi and a galaxy of manga-pioneering stars as lovable little caricatures you never get sick of watching and rooting for. And so does the history lesson about the Japanese comics industry that it inevitably teaches. Comics as a mass medium, comics as a legitimate art form, book-format comics, comics in a variety of genres for a variety of age groups and interests–nearly everything the American comics industry is only now achieving, and in some cases may actually never achieve, Japanese comics had already done decades ago. It’s like if we’d fought World War II against Hicksville.
The thing is, much of what makes it such an easy book to like also makes it a hard book to love. Tatsumi’s relentless focus on manga, its omnipresence as the focalizing device for the story, left me scratching my head about whether other aspects of his life really did intrude upon his writing and drawing as perfunctorily as he shows them doing here. I mean, just as an example, was this dude really that uninterested in getting laid throughout his teens and early 20s? There are of course a couple of nods in that direction but they just make the relative absence all the more conspicuous. Early in the book his family plays a larger role, which makes sense because he lives with them. But his brother (and frequent coworker and collaborator)’s illness, his parents’ loveless marriage, his father’s ne’er-do-welling–did they just go away?
What’s more, the book is more about the business of manga, and making a living in it, than it is about the art itself. For every page-long disquisition about the nature of the mature “gekiga” style of comics storytelling Tatsumi helped pioneer, there are dozens about catching a train to drop a manuscript off so that he can collect a paycheck from a publisher before they declare bankruptcy or whatever. That sort of thing is a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong–when I wrote my oral history of Marvel Comics I could have sat in Joe Simon’s apartment and listened to him ramble about him and Jack Kirby fighting with Martin Goodman for hours–but it’s not going to have the impact that really digging into what made young Tatsumi tick as an artist could have had.
Indeed, the book just picks up with li’l Tatsumi already a hardcore manga fan. We never learn what hooked him to begin with, and that’s an absence that’s reflected, in its way, right up until the end: The story cuts off abruptly as Tatsumi, literally swept into a violent protest against the government by a surging crowd, connects the anger of the protesters to the ingredient he’d felt had gone missing from his own work. I assume this was the last moment Tatsumi doubted his career path? Or perhaps it was the last moment he felt blocked as a writer or artist? It’s not clear why after 800-odd pages, this is where it all ends. Like the action kicking off in medias res in terms of Tatsumi’s love of manga, it’s an odd lacuna.
One of the insights we really do get into Tatsumi’s gekiga is that it’s intended as a type of minimalism, a sort of off-kilter spareness traceable to cinema and hardboiled American detective fiction. (Its lack of text made it an easy target for bluenoses, who said that any comics page that was two-thirds wordless or more was automatically immoral.) And the book’s definitely economical in the sense that it’s a no-nonsense flow of images and text smoothly propelling us from one thing to the next as Tatsumi’s career progresses. But the constant narration rarely gives story or reader a moment’s pause. Couple it with the “on this day in history”-type panels featuring highlights from Japan’s cultural and political evolution during this time, and it’s easy to feel like you’re skimming a life rather than drifting through one. (Which reminds me, if this is what passes for A Drifting Life for Tatsumi, whose sole, laser-like focus throughout is drawing manga for a living and who busts his ass day after day and year after year to make it happen, I’d hate to think what he’d make of me!)
I think A Drifting Life is a fine book. (I definitely like it a lot more than the kind of ham-handed violent O. Henry short stories I’ve read by him.) Reading it is a lot like plowing through a long run of a serialized comic in one go: It’s a delicious, I wanna say tactile experience, and the subject matter guarantees it’s time well spent if you love comics enough to read a blog like this one. You’ll recognize a lot of yourself in it. But I suspect that that recognition comes at the expense of revelation.
I’ve posted the latest round of David Bowie sketches I snagged at SPX and Brooklyn on Robot 6. You can see the sketches from all 80 artists in my Flickr set too. That’s Tunde Adebimpe above. Enjoy!
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I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be happy that Dave Stewart didn’t color a Hellboyverse book. But on this New Comics Wednesday, the best colorist in the front of Previews finds himself stranded in Brown Town in the pages of Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Vertigo series debut Daytripper. And he’s left colorist Bjarne Hansen to absolutely kill it in conjunction with artist Peter Snejbjerg in this concluding issue of the gap-filling series of glorified BPRD one-shots. Generally he hews close to Stewart’s long-established palette of full blues, reds, and greens, designed to contrast against the usual washes of black (and if I’m not mistaken derived from Matt Hollingsworth’s work in the initial Hellboy miniseries). But in the issue’s spectacular climax, he adds flourescents that wouldn’t look out of place in Tron; it’s something we’ve never seen before in Mignola World, and the effect is a stunning way to suggest the Otherness of what we’re looking at. Further, Snejbjerg’s art, already a winning riff on Guy Davis’s model that smoothes out some of the rough edges in favor of a wispy vulnerability, is put through a focus-blurring filter, as if poor Johann Kraus’s view of the next world literally can’t be visually comprehended. It’s a lovely, clever, and chilling way to drive home the story by John Arcudi, which is yet another tale of one of our ostensible heroes realizing he’s in way, way over his head but continuing to struggle simply because the alternative is unbearable to contemplate. The quality control for this ever-expanding franchise during the course of this decade is one of contemporary genre comics’ minor miracles, and this issue is a happy example, and by happy I of course mean melancholy and pessimistic as Hell.
* Grant Morrison Batman news galore today: He’s doing a miniseries called The Return of Bruce Wayne that chronicles the character’s battle through the timestream to return to the present day. He’ll be a caveman and a pirate and a cowboy and a Victorian-era guy and a noir private dick, apparently. No complaints. Each issue will be drawn by a different artist–let’s just hope Philip Tan’s off the table. Here’s a USA Today interview with Morrison featuring all of the usual Morrison-interview antics.
* Also, Andy Clarke has been announced as the next Batman & Robin artist after Cameron Stewart. The sample art looks lovely, certainly a better fit than you know who as far as dudes drafted to work on the book with no history of collaboration with Morrison go. There are actually quite a few very impressive artists at DC right now, but they tend to be squirreled away in unlikely places: Clarke had been toiling on the little-read series R.E.B.E.L.S., while today I was once again knocked out by the art of Cafu…who’s doing the Captain Atom back-up stories in the apparently not very popular Superman-less Action Comics (which like the whole Superman line is actually quite enjoyable!).
* More BCGF con reports, from Frank Santoro and Jessica Campbell. This thing was a hit. And the lack of junk stood out even among the likes of SPX and MoCCA.
* Matt Maxwell continues his look back at World of Warcraft with a you-are-there reminiscence about the very, very, very earliest days of the game, back when there was exactly one city to explore. If you were a fan of Bruce Baugh’s writings on the game, you wanna be reading this.
* Speaking of WoW, via Ceri B. comes another WoW trailer, this one for Fall of the Lich King Patch 3.3, that will, provided you have fantasy-geek buttons, hit them like fucking Mjolnir.
* Lily’s annoyed that Rufus loves their family so much. So awesome.
* Chuck Bass knows damn well when his father died. He goes down to Crime Alley and lays flowers on the spot where he was murdered every year. Plus he swore a solemn vow and everything.
* Nate being Common Sense Man is a lot of fun. His reaction shots are becoming a quiet highlight of the show.
* Rufus is a Lady Who Lunches! Hahahahaha
* Chappaquiddick!
* Drama Girl is cute, but that top! Ugh, awful.
* Who refers to Nassau County as a destination? “Take me to the Town of Oyster Bay!” Also there’s not really a Nassau County Sheriff in the traditional sense.
* LOL Dan Humphrey: “Sorry, Vanessa, I’m probably just upset over my sister who I lost my virginity to getting in a car accident. I don’t know what came over me.”
* Haha, Rufus is creepin’! The Ruf is on fire!
* Let’s get as many David Lynch cast members into Gossip Girl as possible. Paging Grace Zabriskie!
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* So I made it to the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival after all! I wrote a lengthy con report for Robot 6. It was a pretty terrific show, and being able to swoop in and out with a round-trip travel time that isn’t a whole lot longer than going to visit my mom when it’s trafficky out made it even better. Read the report, and then also read Heidi MacDonald and Rickey Purdin‘s reports, and check out Heidi’s photo parade. Meanwhile, con organizer challenges Heidi’s characterization of the show as not being the progeny of Jack Kirby. Interestingly, he says the organizers reached out to “mainstream” artists in vain. Jesus, can you imagine if they persuaded John Romita Jr. to show up? He’d be greeted like a god-king.
* I put together an alt-horror update for Robot 6 that tracks recent developments in the worlds of Renee French, Hans Rickheit, Tom Neely, Benjamin Marra, Al Columbia, and Josh Simmons.
* Tucker Stone reviews the decade in comics so we don’t have to. Seriously, his capsule characterization of the fates and fortunes of each of North American comics’ many branches is masterful. Great ending, too. A must-read, dare I say it.
* Matt Maxwell says goodbye to World of Warcraft in part one of what augurs to be a genuinely epic series of posts (if his con reports are any indication). Matt has been playing WoW since it was in alpha, and his history lesson is delightful for an outsider like me.
* Bookmarked for later reading: Jason Adams reviews [REC]2. It’s amazing what a formula these sequels have, huh?
* Real Life Horror: Remember those three prisoners who coordinated their suicides at Guantanamo Bay? Looks like we straight-upfuckingmurdered them. Ever feel like that kid at the end of Stephen King’s “The Jaunt”?
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1) Another “War”! Civil War, Silent War, World War Hulk, War of Kings, The Sinestro Corps War, the “War of Light” meta-story in Green Lantern and Blackest Night, the Invincible War and Viltrumite War in Invincible, and there’s surely more I’m missing.
2) I like J.G. Jones, but, um…
3) This event seems to be patterned after the way Blackest Night, a line-wide event, spun out of Green Lantern‘s Sinestro Corps War, a franchise-based event. The difference, though, is that Sinestro Corps War was hugely popular, whereas I seem to be one of very few people who are following and enjoying the whole New Krypton/World Without a Superman mega-story.
The first few minutes of The Road, director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s relentlessly bleak post-apocalyptic novel, tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the rest of the movie. A handful of stand-alone shots metonymize everything the world is about to lose: pretty pink flowers, a soulful-eyed horse. (Viggo Mortensen really has a way with horses on camera.) It’s manipulative and obvious, I suppose, but it works. Then the mysterious disaster occurs, and before we cut to the opening titles we hear the most memorable lines from the book as Mortensen’s nameless protagonist quickly fills his tub with water while his nameless wife looks on: “Why are you taking a bath?” “I’m not.” Man was I ever stunned and devastated by that line when I first read it; launching the movie with it is super-smart. Finally we get to the main business of a man and his son trudging through the ruined world, and as Mortensen’s narration kicks in, it’s almost difficult to believe how careworn and ground down he sounds. Every line is delivered like he’s been on the receiving end of days’ worth of beatings attempting to extract information he’s told us a thousand times he doesn’t have. We see his craggy, scraggly face, his mouth set with a skull’s teeth, and it’s like if Aragorn were wandering around without hope in a world where Sauron got the Ring back. But then you notice the utterly conventional score by Bad Seeds Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and it’s like ugh, Oscar bait, thanks for playing, goodnight.
Aside from the overscoring and one sequence of bogus suspense involving a then-faceless antagonist that’s shot like something out of a Lifetime movie, there’s nothing bad about The Road. But aside from Mortensen, and a series of holy-shit casting decisions that end up giving us a World Tour of Wonderful Actors from the Great HBO Dramas of the ’00s, there’s nothing about it that feels essential, either. The Tracker-esque ruin and squalor is shifted into that slightly bluish prestige-movie color palette. Charlize Theron’s role is nowhere near as beefed up as rumor had it but nor does it do much but establish that there’s a gorgeous blonde movie star who can also act in the movie (I didn’t buy her fate at all, particularly compared to Mortensen’s reaction to it at the moment and remembrances of it in the future). The moments of horror are kind of expected and bland, except for a couple toward the end that are combined with pathos. And throughout, that score, telling us exactly how to feel at any given moment. I kept imagining the movie without music, like the Coen Brothers’ McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men–everything would have improved like (snap) that.
But this film lacked that film’s confidence, both in itself and in its audience. Which I sort of understand. I mean, the subject matter here is even more brutal, which the film does a good job of establishing through intermittent scenes of the Man’s casualness about exposing the Boy to dead bodies. Life has really broken down, and I appreciate the need to give us some outs to dealing with that now and then. In fact I actually applaud the film’s elision of two of the book’s most difficult scenes, involving a dog and a baby; I spent the movie dreading them, simply unsure if I’d be able to take them, and I fortunately didn’t have to. (This also set up a pretty terrific final couple of shots.) Still, on the level of the look and sound of the thing, I was just getting too much reassurance, reassurance that I was watching a motion picture that would address, in ultimately satisfactory fashion, the big questions. The movie seemed to see its job as one of softening the blow. Even though I’m getting to the point (as I realized throughout the screening) where I sort of feel like something’s gotta give with my whole constant rubbing-my-face-in-life’s-ceaseless-awfulness thing, I don’t think that satisfaction was what I was looking for.
We tend to think of the breakdown of civilization as a rather stark affair. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and before long everything’s a burnt-out husk and people in rags and/or leather underpants are scavenging the wasteland for canned peaches and guzzoline. In keeping with Fort Thunder’s general aesthetic project of information overload, Multiforce imagines the contrary: a replete Ragnarok, a jam-packed apocalypse.
A loosely linked narrative about the warring citizens of a massive mountain redoubt called Citadel City and the even stranger places above and below it, Multiforce‘s serialized strips (they originally appeared in Providence’s visual-noise bible Paper Rodeo) concern themselves primarily with bigness. A giant meets an even bigger giant, who meets an even bigger dragon; little dudes ride around inside the head of a huge dude; skeletal characters dwell in structures and even cities that are shaped like their own skulls, suggesting a preexisting being of almost unimaginable proportions. Half of the book’s narrative juice comes simply from stringing the book’s two protagonists (and the reader) along until the next massive step-up in scale can be revealed. It’s like the comics equivalent of a zoom-out, only suggested through sequential juxtaposition rather than an actual ratcheting back of the viewing plane (that actual technique is seldom if ever used here, to the best of my recollection).
The creatures, which are as gorgeous and inventive and inner-eight-year-old awesome as you’d expect from the product of a man who nowadays makes a living by creating prints of demons and shit, are a constant game of one-upsmanship as well. Brinkman lays this out in an introductory strip, in which we watch a monstrous character who’s super-proud of his awesomely dangerous bionic arm–“I HAVE THE MOST ULTRA ARM IN THE UNIVERSE”–promptly get his clock cleaned by the book’s main, inscrutable antagonist, Battlemax Ace. He’s a battle beast with an axe for one hand and a mace for the other. Yeah, it’s that kinda book. And it’s Battlemax Ace’s unstoppable rampage that brings Citadel City crashing down and provides one of the book’s few genuine narrative and logistical throughlines as he smashes his way through opponent after opponent and level after level. His awesomeness is too powerful to contain.
In many ways these beasties and their navigation of craggy subterranean spaces recalls Brinkman’s landmark collection Teratoid Heights, but that book’s wordless fervor gives way to Brinkman’s loosey-goosey verbal hijinx–his characters bumble around and talk smack like a crudely lettered cross between the Muppets and the stars of a stoner comedy. So the moments of sheer visual poetry stand out in even starker relief–our heroes flying in a sinuous, continuous curve through a Marc Bell riot of a carnival; a dropped head bouncing and rolling down a massive page-tall mountainside; the aforementioned giant skull. But the main takeaway is a set of civilizations so obliviously concerned with their own business and jaded about their potential annihilation that they’re all pretty much fiddling as Citadel City and its environs burn (and explode and implode and collapse and cave in and get smashed by Battlemax Ace and so on). Our heroes even leaven their soaring last-page getaway with a snort of “yea right.” One, two, three, what are they fightin’ for? Don’t ask ’em, they don’t give a damn.
* Now this is a treat, film lovers: The great critic Matt Zoller Seitz elucidates the greatness of the great critics David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, declaring them The Critics of the ’00s on IFC.com. My feelings about Seitz are no secrets, and like many film students I’ll never forget the way Bordwell & Thompson gave me the vocabulary I needed to articulate things I’d always known but could never say about cinema. I may have forgotten many of those words since then, like I’ve lost my French, but I won’t forget that I knew them.
Digression: In writing about film for this blog I’ve noticed that I don’t talk about form the way I do with comics. Like I said, I’ve lost a lot of that vocabulary, which in turn limits my ability to think that way, and that’s really sad. When I first started regularly reviewing comics–probably for The Comics Journal–it took a shot by Milo George at the state of comics criticism to make me realize that I was doing the usual formula: Three or four paragraphs about the writing, one paragraph about the art, a “to be sure” paragraph, and a conclusion. Figuring out that comics are a visual medium ain’t rocket science, so to confer upon myself a rocket-science degree if you will, I tried to fix this the easiest way I could: I began forcing myself to start reviews by talking about the visual aspects of the comics. Eventually it got to the point where I was comfortable and conversant in that area, so now I feel like I don’t have to make myself do that anymore. I’ll start wherever I feel it makes the most sense to start. When I wrote my review of A Serious Man the other day…well, I’m pretty happy with it, but it occurred to me maybe it’s time to start writing about form first. Of course this is harder with movies you’re seeing in the theater, since you don’t have them in front of you to flip through, and until I’m a paid film critic there’s no way I’m taking notes at a movie theater, man.
* That Kentucky library that fired a couple of employees for improvised censorship of Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s Black Dossieris moving relevant graphic novels to the adult section. Which is where a lot of them probably belong, so that’s fine. It just really grinds my gears that a couple of bluenoses took it upon themselves to remove books from a library that they worked for. Barbarians at the gates.
* Someone beat World of Warcraft. Seriously, someone did every single thing there is to do in the game right now. Unlike my esteemed colleague Rob Bricken at Topless Robot, who brought me word of this, I actually am impressed by that. That’s a fucking achievement. But the comment thread is less about what the guy did and more about whether or not we should make fun of him, or anyone. As an example of nerd etiquette in the field, it’s fascinating.
