I have to say that I haven’t seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now–years, probably almost a decade since I’ve really looked at one closely.

—Alan Moore

Does any of this stop him from opining about them, negatively, for paragraph after paragraph? If your answer is “yes” then you haven’t been following Moore’s interviews over the past few years.

His blanket dismissal of superhero comics in this long, fascinating interview with Wired’s Adam Rogers echoes earlier comments he made about his distaste for the Hollywood mode of filmmaking; this time, however, he’s expanded his beef with Tinseltown cinema to include the use of CGI, and indeed the entire medium of film:

One of my big objections to film as a medium is that it’s much too immersive, and I think that it turns us into a population of lazy and unimaginative drones. The absurd lengths that modern cinema and its CGI capabilities will go in order to save the audience the bother of imagining anything themselves is probably having a crippling effect on the mass imagination. You don’t have to do anything. With a comic, you’re having to do quite a lot. Even though you’ve got pictures there for you, you’re having to fill in all the gaps between the panels, you’re having to imagine characters voices. You’re having to do quite a lot of work. Not quite as much work as with a straight unillustrated book, but you’re still going to do quite a lot of work.

I think the amount of work we contribute to our enjoyment of any piece of art is a huge component of that enjoyment. I think that we like the pieces that engage us, that enter into a kind of dialog with us, whereas with film you sit there in your seat and it washes over you. It tells you everything, and you really don’t need to do a great deal of thinking. There are some films that are very, very good and that can engage the viewer in their narrative, in its mysteries, in its kind of misdirections. You can sometimes get films where a lot of it is happening in your head. Those are probably good films, but they’re not made very much anymore.

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them, that everything be easy. And I don’t think that’s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we’re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen’s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O’Brien’s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes, I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because, frankly, I could have gotten someone, a passerby on the street, who could have gotten the same effect if you’d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver’s seat, and I think it’s a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

If you haven’t got any money, you’re going to need lots and lots of imagination. Which is why you’ll get brilliant movies by people working upon a shoestring, like the early John Waters movies. People are pushed into innovation by the restrictions of their budget. The opposite is true if they have $100 million, say, pulling a figure out of the air, to spend upon their film, then they somehow don’t see the need for giving it a decent story or decent storytelling. It seems like those values just go completely out the window. There’s an inverse relationship there.

I wish this weren’t so, but those statements are frankly embarrassing. If your dad started talking in this fashion at Thanksgiving dinner you’d get up to use the bathroom. If a fellow commuter started opining in this way on the train, you’d turn your iPod up. Moore has already copped to not watching much of this stuff–including the very adaptations of his comics that tend to set him off on these jeremiads, not that I think he’s missing much–but even if these statements were offered after he was handcuffed to Harry Knowles for a year, they’re still breathtakingly, willfully ignorant of and dismissive and insulting to everything from the skill required to pull off convincing computer effects, to their utility in telling an engaging and provocative story, to the intelligence or engagement level of the audience for film, to the ability of film to challenge and discomfit as well as dazzle and entertain. (As though the latter two are something to be ashamed of!)

This blog has already hosted some lively debate over Moore’s frequently expressed disdain for aspects of culture he admittedly knows little about anymore, from film to television to superheroes and superhero comics to, if what he says above is to be believed, comics in general. Then as now, I want to make it perfectly clear that not only does Moore have every right to be upset about his shoddy treatment at the hands of his publisher, and his work’s shoddy treatment at the hands of the studios and filmmakers who’ve adapted them, he is in fact right to be upset. I don’t begrudge him that at all–hell, I cheer him on! It’s when he uses this bitterness as a springboard for ill-considered write-offs of entire genres and methods and media that he comes across as a crank, even a fool.

That said, there’s a lot of great stuff in that interview about how he’s approaching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and various other projects, so do read the whole thing.

Given that it’s a slasher movie set in the unlikely environment of mining, it’s appropriate that My Bloody Valentine 3D eventually collapses. Starts off pretty strong, though. You’d have to be pretty square to deny the pleasures of the newspaper-headline opening credits, the laugh-out-loud over-the-top grand guignol gore effects (which start almost right away), and of course the full-frontal nude 3D chase scene, which more than anything else is why I decided to see this movie in the theater. As a manly movie aficionado par excellence, how could I not? All that kind of stuff is what makes MBV3D the perfect manly movie in the early going–it’s designed to make you crack up and cheer at the screen, ogle the sessy ladies and guffaw at the carnage.

But before long it taps that vein of trashy gold dry, and starts alternating between increasingly monotonous chase scenes and kills (which occasionally cross some weird lines–killing a pregnant girl? reserving the worst corpse desecration for the completely innocent bit-part Latina housekeeper? menacing a kid for no good reason and never following up on it?) and gritted-teeth dramatic scenes that I promise you the audience is not there to see. Folks, I’ve sat through enough manly movies to know which ones will end up making a roomful of drunk dudes start nodding off, and after about the first third of this movie, enter sandman. Meanwhile, the film’s engaging whodunit storyline, which at first seemed like a promising crossbreeding of the silmilar elements from Scream with a straightforward, non-ironic modern slasher vibe, ends up resorting to a Jeph Loeb-style twist-cum-cheat that leaves you feeling like you wasted your time in trying to figure it out. And the less said about the sequel-whoring ending, the better. (Least scary psychopath ever?)

Finally, I suppose this goes without saying, but this movie in no way manages nor even attempts to truly frighten or horrify. I’m sure no one stumbled into My Bloody Valentine 3D expecting the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, let alone The Exorcist, but yeah, this is your basic amusement-park ride horror movie. And hey, there’s a place for that! It’s nothing to apologize for! Now, I may not be the target horror-fan audience for it necessarily–unless you count antecedents like Texas Chain Saw, Psycho, and Peeping Tom, which I don’t think you should, or things like Scream and American Psycho that are as much satires as slashers (slashtires?), this marks a grand total of four slasher films I’ve ever seen; the others were Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, neither of which did I care for or find terribly frightening, and Slumber Party Massacre 2 in a Manly Movie Mamajama-mandated, and that’s truly one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. But I’m certainly open to wall-to-wall slayfests in an action movie format, like Doomsday or Crank or Invasion U.S.A., and I’ve watched that montage of all the kills from Friday the 13th enough to know that I’m open to the idea of slasher flicks as a rip-roarin’ good time at the movies, watching a masked killer hack his way through some naked kids and grizzled old dudes. The thing is that that’s what your movie has to deliver, from start to finish, and this one didn’t. Would it still be fun to watch in a big drunk group, even if it’s naptime after a while? Sure. I’m sure we’d all wake up for the next flick anyway. But I’d kind of like to be kept awake the whole time.

The Bide-A-Wee animal shelter in Wantagh, NY is where The Missus and I adopted our two cats, Lucy and Felix. Felix had actually been there for four years when we brought him home. The staff there were simply extraordinary–they really got to know both of those cats while they were there, and even years later when we would come by for one reason or another, they remembered them and their personalities. And as a no-kill shelter they would frequently rescue “unadoptable” animals from other facilities. It’s just a wonderful shelter, which is why I am so devastated that it’s closing on March 8th due to the terrible economy and a 30% drop in donations since October.

Please donate to Bide-A-Wee, a truly wonderful organization for people who care about animals. I have no idea if enough donations can stave off shuttering the Wantagh facility–I doubt it–but it’s worth a shot, and their other shelters could probably use the help too.

SPOILER WARNING

* I thought that was a pretty bad episode.

* Do you think we had enough shots of Bill Adama looking up at the ailing bones of the Galactica with concern in his eyes, or should they have thrown in another dozen or so?

* I don’t even know how to describe the dropped ball that is having neither Saul nor Ellen discuss the fact that Saul killed Ellen.

* After crawling through vents for hours to keep the ship from jumping away from President Roslin and the loyalist ships, then singlehandedly saving the ship by discovering the systemic rot in its infrastructure, then accepting the job of Chief once more, Galen just up and decides to abandon it?

* And his step-baby?

* The problem with writing dialogue for mystics is that it’s really easy for them to simply sound stupid, which is exactly how Ellen sounded when she said that knocking Caprica Six up is proof that Saul loves her. These people are brilliant machines, but during this moment of crisis they suddenly sound like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

* I’m really unsatisfied with how the Baltar storyline is playing out. If you recall, last half-season we saw Head-Six miraculously manipulate Baltar’s physical body in order to prove the existence of God. Then for a while he sounded like a true believer, as one might expect. Then he had that one scene where he ranted about how God owed the people an apology for shitting on them, and were there any consequences from Head-Six? Doesn’t seem like it, as in this episode Baltar smarmily “agrees” that God may have abandoned his followers in order to get himself off the hook for doing the same, and then a few scenes later Head-Six is back, helping him reassert control of the group and arm them. So all those great, weird speeches he gave about how God loves us because we’re already perfect, and then how God owes us an apology–that was all just really convincing acting? He didn’t believe any of it? None of it was Head-Six instructing him in her sincere convictions? He’s still just a slightly more altruistic version of the old shifty Gaius? I don’t like that at all.

* There’s something un-pull-offable about Roslin offending Caprica Six by suggesting her baby only matters in a prophetic sense as opposed to a personal one–this is the same Caprica Six who shut down the defense system and is responsible for the murder of billions, not to mention that baby whose neck she snapped for no reason in the miniseries. I know all the rebel Cylons have grown and changed since then–and I actually think that aspect of the show works, because it stands to reason they’d only start changing their minds about how the world works when they begin meeting people who aren’t among the seven completely identical types they’ve spent their lives with up until that point, so they’d get new input–but has Roslin really changed that much? I mean, Boomer’s in the clink, but Caprica’s receiving apologies on behalf of the fleet from the President?

* I don’t buy Adama giving Gaius weapons, either. I’m not even sure what Gaius’s argument for why they need the weapons was.

* I wanna see Lee in a flight suit again.

* When Adama pulled a flask of booze out of his uniform I almost started to think that the show was making a point, but the rest of the episode just made it seem like “character drinks booze” is their fallback signifier for “character is upset,” as always.

* The whole tone of the ep was really awkward, don’t you think? Like, trying to be funny at times but not pulling it off, and thereby undercutting the serious stuff? And most of the dialogue about people’s feelings wasn’t clearly delineated enough for us to be able to understand where they were coming from, so combine that with the uncertain dramedy feel and scenes like Caprica’s miscarriage, which could have been knockouts, ended up weightless and incoherent.

* STC news: I have a piece teasing developments in The Stand: American Nightmares, the second arc of Marvel’s big Stephen King adaptation, at Marvel.com.

* I think my favorite reaction to Bowie Loves Beyoncé thus far is Kiel Phegley’s: “Sean, you are going to cause such a disparate group of people to masturbate with this blog.” Here’s hopin’.

(via Loving the Alien: Never before seen pictures of David Bowie)

* They might make a Battlestar Galactica movie that has nothing to do with the Battlestar Galactica series? That is maybe the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

* Speaking of Kiel, he spoke to Bill Sienkiewicz four years ago, and the results have never been seen…until now!

* Vice speaks with Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez, Dan Clowes, Rick Altergott, Johnny Ryan, Matt Furie, and Matthew Thurber about Kramers Ergot 7. In the interview, Clowes reveals he recently had open-heart surgery. Did everyone know this? Sheesh. I’m glad he’s still alive.

* CRwM wonders what we talk about when we talk about Friday the 13th.

* Stacie Ponder presents a quick and dirty guide to POV horror.

* Andrew Sullivan discusses kinder, gentler torture.

* Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Jeffrey Brown drawing Wolverine.

* Finally, I’m putting it at the bottom here so you can avoid LOST SPOILERS if you need to: Todd Van Der Werff does his weekly Lost review thing. It’s interesting to hear his complaints about making Jack the focal character of the episode where the Oceanic Six Five return to the Island: He argues that since Jack has been dead-set in favor of this since the Season Three finale, it leeches some of the drama from the proceedings. But I think that centering the episode on someone who’s completely resigned to returning to the Island, to accepting his fate, is what helped give the episode an appealingly fatalistic air. I think it was a part of that weird, engrossing tonal dissonance I discussed; and though I still don’t swallow the idea that he’d ignore the disappearance of Aaron to get his bone on with Kate (I buy Kate using sex to forget, but Jack had nothing to forget yet!), I definitely recognized and appreciated the grim contentment of their breakfast conversation the next morning as the demeanor of people who’ve just accepted something awful. Focus this episode on someone else and you may have lost that very effective bit.

http://bowielovesbeyonce.tumblr.com

“Nick,” she said, and smiled. She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “I wanted to thank you again. No one wants to die all alone, do they?”

He shook his head violently, and she understood that this was not in agreement with her statement but rather in vehement contradiction of its premise.

“Yes I am,” she contradicted. “But never mind. There’s a dress in that closet, Nick. A white one. You’ll know it because of…” A fit of coughing interrupted her. When she had it under control, she finished, “…because of the lace. It’s the one I wore on the train when we left for our honeymoon. It still fits…or did. I suppose it will be a little big on me now–I’ve lost some weight–but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always loved that dress. John and I went to Lanke Pontchartrain. It was the happiest two weeks of my life. John always made me happy. Will you remember the dress, Nick? It’s the one I want to be buried in. You wouldn’t be too embarrassed to…to dress me, would you?”

He swallowed hard and shook his head, looking at the coverlet. She must have sensed his mixture of sadness and discomfort, because she didn’t mention the dress again. She talked of other things instead–lightly, almost coquettishly. How she had won an elocution contest in high school, had gone on to the Arkansas state finals, and how her half-slip had fallen down and puddled around her shoes just as she reached the ringing climax of Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover.” About her sister, who had gone to Viet Nam as part of a Baptist mission group, and had come back with not one or two but three adopted children. About a camping trip she and John had taken three years ago, and how an ill-tempered moose in rut had forced them up a tree and kept them there all day.

“So we sat up there and spooned,” she said sleepily, “like a couple of high school kids in a balcony. My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was…we were…in love…very much in love…love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought…it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down…bring them low…and make them crawl…we were…so much in love…”

She drowsed off and slept until he wakened her into fresh delirium by moving a curtain or perhaps just by treading on a squeaky board.

“John!” she screamed now, her voice choked with phlegm. “Oh, John, I’ll never get the hang of this dad-ratted stick shift! John, you got to help me! You got to help me…”

Her words trailed off in a long, rattling exhalation he could not hear but sensed all the same. A thin trickle of dark blood issued from one nostril. She fell back on the pillow, and her head snapped back and forth once, twice, there times, as if she had made some kind of vital decision and the answer was negative.

Then she was still.

–Stephen King, The Stand

SPOILERS ON THE MARCH

* The one-two punch of 9/11 and The DaVinci Code really did a number on my longstanding love of arcane conspiracy-theory stuff, but apparently that was nothing a crazy old British lady using a Foucault’s Pendulum to find a hidden magic island in a secret chamber beneath a church decorated with a painting of Doubting Thomas couldn’t fix.

* Speaking of: must be the season of the infodump.

* Recreating the opening of the pilot episode reminded me how brilliant the opening of the pilot episode was. I remember going to a screening of that thing at the San Diego Comic Con simply because Dominic Monaghan was going to be there and The Missus had a crush on him–we had no idea what to expect, and frankly we weren’t expecting much. (“From the creator of Alias“–whoopedy-dee). Then bam, a handsome man in a suit wakes up in the jungle, with no clue where he was or how he got there (at least at first). That, of course, is exactly how the audience felt. Sucked in from the get-go.

* Why do they keep having characters ask Ben questions? Nine times out of ten, he’s lying, as the show itself pointed out tonight. It’s not just a problem for his fellow characters, it’s a problem for the viewers, since every thirty-second q&a with Ben is a total waste of time beyond the “it’s fun to watch Michael Emerson act” factor (which I admit is pretty high).

* There’s something about this episode I can’t quite put my finger on, something about the pacing. I want to say…the pacing felt like a series premiere, but the the material felt like a season finale? Like, it was slightly laconic, easing you into what was going on the way an introductory episode was, but everything that was happening had been built up to for a couple years now the way a finale would be? It was an odd viewing experience. I liked it.

* Interesting color scheme at times, too–unusual for Lost. I really liked that blue light on Jack’s face in the airport bar, for example.

* There was something profoundly fucked up about all of these people, except Desmond, risking the lives of everyone else on that plane in order to save them and their friends, or give their lives a sense of purpose, or whatever. (Hurley at least tried, but dude, the stewardesses are fucked regardless. And Jack, seems like you asked about the other people on the plane a wee bit too late, considering you were already in the air, dickhead.) There’s two ways of looking at this, I suppose: One is that the writers ignored this and want you to ignore it too, except in the very broad “Hurley is good because he cares, Ben is bad because he doesn’t, Jack is basically good but kind of a dick because he only sort of cares” strokes they painted it with. The other is that the writers know it and want you to know it too, that they want to convey that all these people are profoundly damaged and selfish.

* Well, how about this, the show coughs up some mysteries we’ll have to learn about in flashbacks, Season One style! How did Hurley find out about the flight, why was Sayid under arrest, what happened to Ben down by the docks (okay, that one’s not so big a mystery, but they’ll still need to fill in the gap), what happened to Aaron, etc. I dig it.

* I also dig Evangeline Lily’s tore-up-from-the-floor-up performance in this episode. I definitely believed that whatever happened to her and Aaron was rough. That big open-mouthed kiss was sexy, too, though I kind of think the unexplained disappearance of a child would be a mood-killer for me.

* It’s a little wonky to cook up all this pseudoscience with electromagnetism and equations on the one hand, then insist upon something as manifestly unscientific as “recreating the conditions of the original trip to the Island” just by assembling five of the flight’s original 128 passengers, plus a dead guy in another dead guy’s shoes.

* Seems like the “next week on Lost” blew a little too much information, no? Too much for my tastes anyway.

* Also seems like we’re getting some new cast members in the form of Sayid’s handler and “my condolences” guy.

* I don’t care how easy it was to see Frank Lapidus’s return coming, it still put a mile-wide grin on my face.

* Indeed, I found myself chuckling throughout the episode, in honor of a job well done.

…I generally believe that hate and vitriol should be reserved for people who deliberately try to do you harm, not people who try and sometimes fail to entertain you.

—Mark Waid

* STC news: Marvel is reviving its What The–?! title as a series of animated action-figure parodies, and I’m going to be helping to write it. But the main man in charge is the great animator and bon vivant Alex Kropinak, who I believe is the sole responsible party for the video below. The way he makes the “Bruce” non sequitur work for him is just killer.

* I’ve been known to blog about a variety of real-world horror-related topics, from cryptozoology to serial killers. Here are some updates from two of the least pleasant real-world horror subcategories.

* The state of the beast: I can’t decide which passage from this report about the chimpanzee who killed a friend of his owner before being shot to death by police is the more horrifying and heartbreaking–this one…

After a few minutes, the dispatcher asked if the chimp was still with Herold’s friend.

“He’s eating her,” Herold said.

…or this one…

At first, officers did not see the animal, Conklin said. The chimp returned and tried to get into one of the officer’s vehicles. The officer shot him several times at 2-foot range, and all of the shots landed in the animal’s upper torso, Larrabee said. One of its teeth was found near the car.

The wounded chimp fled, and police followed a blood trail to the rear of the house, where the animal had returned to its living quarters and died.

Via Bryan Alexander, who notes that the original link hosts an audio file of the 911 call from which its quotes are taken and which I can’t bear to listen to.

* Real-life torture porn: Army Spc. Brandon Neely offers first-hand testimony regarding prisoner abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan respond to this Charlie Savage New York Times piece on disturbing areas of continuity between Bush and Obama policies regarding the rights of detainees. Both argue against taking the most absolute pessimistic stance regarding the Obama administration’s actions thus far—I’ve learned first-hand that in some cases such pessimism stems from “nyah nyah told you so” agitation by the pro-torture right (in whose case it’s actually optimism), or by “nothing changes” cynics, or by go-along-to-get-along “centrist” D.C. CW mavens who perhaps believe that Obama’s acquiescence in these matters will lessen their own implication in their original Bush-era implementation—but they forcefully encourage vigilance rather than blind trust regarding such issues as rendition, indefinite detention, and state secrets.

* I think people who are upset at how goofy several of the recently released Watchmen clips look and sound are forgetting the fact that there’s a lot of goofy-looking and goofy-sounding shit in the original comic. That was sort of the point, in part. The question is whether Zack Snyder is onto that, or whether he’s bought into the SUPERHEROES IS SERIOUS BUSINESS mentality of the modern fanboy and is blissfully unaware of his own goofiness. U-DECIDE! Click the link for the footage, and keep in mind I’m the guy who defended The Spirit (but still hasn’t seen it–screw you, Loews).

* Speaking of Watchmen, there’s going to be a 3 hour 10 minute DVD director’s cut, which will include 44 minutes of scenes that didn’t make the theatrical cut, 15 minutes of the Tales of the Black Freighter cartoon, and 1 hour 12 minutes of slow motion.

* Tori Amos’s lamely titled upcoming album inspired my pal and ADDTF comment-thread regular Shaggy to create an obviously Photoshopped gag cover that duped Perez Hilton! I love the internet.

* Lord of the Rings cakes! Almost literally unbelievable. (Hat tip: The Missus.)

* Finally: Do you want to see more pictures of Kate Winslet? Sure, we all do!

Via the utterly indispensable Marilyn Loves Kate. If only someone would launch a Bowie Loves Beyoncé blog, I’d never turn my computer off. (Actually, you know what? Stay tuned.)

* It’s been a while!

* Fantagraphics is having a big clearance and closeout sale, and I insist that you purchase Dave Cooper’s outstanding, largely forgotten, and probably last-ever graphic novel Ripple for 1/3rd off cover price.

* All-time ADDTF hero Clive Barker is making the interview rounds big-time in support of today’s DVD release of the still-unseen-by-me Midnight Meat Train. Here’s a long one at Shock Till You Drop, another long one at Dread Central, and a slightly shorter but still interesting one at Fearnet.

* Chris Butcher, Tom Spurgeon, Brian Hibbs, and Tom Spurgeon again react to the news that monopoly direct-market comics distributor Diamond is permanently delisting about 1000 manga volumes from their Previews catalog as part of their recently announced cutbacks of low-selling items. The reason I don’t talk about business issues much anymore is because I am manifestly unqualified to do so, but I just can’t imagine how cutting off 1000 items from North America’s biggest comics publisher from a market entirely in thrall to such decisions is good for the long-term health of the industry. I think Tom raises an important point when he says that the way Diamond is sort of dropping these bombshells out there with little or no explanation of the thought process behind them, leaving it up to interested third parties to explain/excuse/defend these moves, is a strange way to go about making decisions that could effect the shape of the Direct Market forever.

* The cast of Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which already included Sly, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, and Jason Statham, now includes Eric Roberts…and Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is already the greatest movie ever made. Better than Crank, even.

* Michael Kupperman blogs! Look for previews of future Tales Designed to Thrizzle, deleted scenes from Cheers featuring Tobin Bell as SAW, and more.

* Kiel Phegley interviews Sammy Harkham about Kramers Ergot 7. It’s the full transcript of the interview that he conducted for his piece naming KE7 Wizard’s Indie of the Year.

* Josiah Leighton got a review of the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met in his NYCC con report! No, he got an NYCC con report in his review of the Pierre Bonnard show at the Met!

* The Gold In Us is back, pointing out the internal continuity of Grant Morrison’s many DC comics. I’d wondered about those little JLAers myself.

* Dave Ortega talks to Dave Kiersh, a longtime ADDTF fave and faithful chronicler of the teenage wasteland, about his books Dirtbags, Mallchicks & Motorbikes, Never Land, and more, and I really just love a lot of what he says. Honestly, this sounds like I wrote it:

Well, I’m not so much a poetry reader in the traditional sense. I do however enjoy music, of course, which is closely related. My early comics were much shorter and with them, I was more concerned with conveying an emotion; story was not so important to me. Even with my longer stories, I have no aspiration for writing a sort of literary graphic novel. When I think of rock and roll songs I like, sometimes they tell a story. But more often what makes them memorable is that they possess a sort of compact nostalgic thrill. Just like an album has a theme that ties songs together, I wanted to create a book of short stories tied together with a common purpose. That’s what works for me now, rather than to write a long novel. It’s like asking a rock musician to write a song that is an hour long. In that way, it doesn’t make sense for me to make a 100 page novel. It has to be interesting for the reader and in doing so avoid repetition. My new book is five short stories not directly related to one another, but you could also view it as one story through the separate characters….For me, a picture story has to have this perfect balance balance between word and picture: that’s what keeps a child’s interest. I’m not exactly sure what keeps an adult’s interest but its similar to music; how I interpret music. Not like Classical music but like Rock and Roll… something that hits you immediately and hopefully sticks with you.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

* Curt Purcell reviews Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! Not only does he pull some of my favorite images from the book to illustrate the review, but he also articulates something I hadn’t been able to put my finger on, which is that the repetition in some of the images is almost evocative of mental illness.

* ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman’s review of the uncut-edition Friday the 13th DVD doubles as a brief and informative history lesson about the movie and its context in the slasher tradition.

* In another of his terrific posts on (mostly) ’90s superhero comics, Tim O’Neil explains DC and Marvel’s contrasting approaches to character retcons.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch reviews Ed Brubaker & Sean Philips’ Incognito. He feels that the series so far lacks a certain emotional heft that the pair’s previous hardboiled collaborations Sleeper and Criminal had. My feeling is that it’s just gonna take some time to get there since you’re dealing with bastards, but he’s not wrong for the moment.

* I think Beavis and Butt-Head is truly brilliant and just as funny now as it was when I was Beavis and Butt-Head’s age, so seeing a lengthy, thoughtful review of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America by Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Katherine Follett was a real treat. Set your TiVos.

* Chris Butcher and friends (I think?) review Naoki Urasawa’s Monster now that it’s all over and done with. Chris says the review’s spoilery and I’m not even close to having read the whole thing so I’m just bookmarking it for the future, but if you’ve gone through the whole thing, by all means check it out.

* Of all the things to rip off from Alex Ross, you go with the sourceless white glow???

* Odd blogospheric convergence of the day: Andrew Sullivan reads the, oh, let’s call them tea leaves regarding Michael Phelps, millennials, and marijuana through a viewing of the Friday the 13th remake.

* Helena Christensen and Ed Westwick—Gossip Girl‘s Chuck Bass—in a photo shoot inspired by The Graduate? Sure, I’ll eat it.

Delicious. (Hat tip: The Missus.)

* Nine Inch Nails touring—and recording?—with the original line-up of Jane’s Addiction as a farewell to the live incarnation of the NIN brand? Sure, I’ll eat it—and come back for seconds! In all seriousness, whatever became of the NIN/Jane’s style of dark, sexual, vaguely sinister, yet still both extremely thoughtful and hook-oriented school of alternative rock?

* Finally, Frank Santoro is a shy and retiring guy.

Ween – Push Th’ Little Daisies Music Video

Girls in floral-print sundresses and chokers…oh, the early ’90s, how I miss you.

Fans of my David Bowie sketchbook galleries would be well advised to check out my introductory post at the Savage Critics.

* Now it can be told: I’ve joined the Savage Critics! I’m part of a wave of new members that includes Tucker Stone, Dick Hyacinth, David Uzumeri, and Chris Eckert. Should be a pip. Thanks to Brian Hibbs for the opportunity!

* ShockTillYouDrop.com has been speaking to Clive Barker about Hellraiser remake helmer Pascal “Martyrs” Laugier, potential Pinhead redesigns, abandoned plans for a Midnight Meat Train film trilogy, a Hellraiser spanking the censors didn’t want you to see, and more.

* Josh Cotter: killin’ it.

SPOILERS SPOILERS

* Infodump! I thought it was pretty elegantly done for all that, though, because they couched it in compelling material. With Ellen, you had her panic and confusion and desperation upon waking up in the Cylon ship, rapidly replaced by an entirely new personality for that character–the real personality for that character, as it turns out. The frisson of this material, plus getting to see her duke it out intellectually with that candy-colored clown they call the sandman, Dean Stockwell, gave her and Cavil’s part of the infodump some real charge.

* It did feel a bit like Anders’s gunshot-driven revelations could have been better conveyed over a longer period of time, or visually rather than verbally. But I also understand what the show’s temporal and financial limitations are at this point, and once they waited this long their choices were few. As I’ve said a million times, I’m here for the human drama more than I’m here for some complex mythology–after all, when you start watching BSG, the complex mythology doesn’t even exist!–so all things considered I’m really glad they’ve spent this half-season dealing with things like the coup than with mysterious flashbacks to the earth-Cylons’ past or what have you. In a way, they tried to bridge that gap in the Anders segments, having his revelations come as a direct result of the wounds he incurred during the coup, and making the main conflict in his half of the episode be “Starbuck and the Cylons want to find out what the hell’s going on” vs. “Starbuck wants to help the man she loves.” Heh, that’s the main schism of Battlestar Galactica fandom in a nutshell!

* I think the best sign of the success of the infodumps here is that my two favorite BSG bloggers, Todd VanDerWerff and Jim Henley, each preferred a different one of the two approaches.

* VanDerWerff also accurately notes that we fans have wanted to know this information for so long that his episode had a lot of goodwill to coast on in order to reach its goal. Even though the mythology isn’t necessarily my thing, I can certainly confirm that–I was just so excited to hear the story come together in a way that made sense and had some emotional and thematic heft to it that they practically could have gotten away with having a character sit in front of the camera reading it from a book.

* Part of me is a little iffy about the idea that the Cylon nuclear holocaust wasn’t really all the humans’ fault in that they built the Cylons. I know you can trace it back thousands of years or whatever, but I’m with Tigh–the Five Cylons are to blame for the depredations of the Seven Known Models at least as much as humankind is, and I’m bummed about that. You lose some of that Frankenstein’s monster mojo if that’s the case.

* The rot in the bones of the Galactica is maybe the show’s most obvious metaphor to date, but this is the time in the series for obvious metaphors as far as I’m concerned.