As an object, the eighth* Cold Heat Special is I think the best-looking one yet. The vivid blue/pink/yellow screenprinted cover, with its slightly metal Cold Heat logo and geometric designs, was a real eye-catcher on the SPX show floor, and that’s saying something given the visual cacophony of the place. I enjoyed the story, such as it is, as well–as in previous CH Specials, our teenage leading lady Castle faces a frightening challenge, this time a pretty scary-looking bird-man who attacks her at sea. She manages to beat the beast, scoffing at him in retrospect while brushing her teeth in her underwear within the safety of her bathroom. But then some sort of incubus assaults her, leading to a bout of passion that Castle soon discovers was all in her head–she’s adrift and nearly drowning in the ocean we spotted her on in the beginning, and it takes all she can muster to drag herself to shore, shivering and alone. It’s all in the way you tell it, and if you’ve been following Frank Santoro’s work you know how good he is with layouts, picking just the right moment to show to convey the violence, rapture, and terror of whatever’s going on (it’s a little like All Star Superman in that regard); Milburn, meanwhile, is aces with monsters, imbuing them with a convincing, stocky physicality that also lends itself well to believable sex scenes. The combination of the two artists is memorable, and makes me wonder where the parallel (though disjointed) Cold Heat story being told through the Specials will head next.
* Actually, the 6th and 7th never came out, and The Chunky Gnars is kind of like Cold Heat Special #0.
* There’s a teaser trailer for Lost season five popping up here and there around the Internet. But ABC seems intent on preventing people from seeing it, since heaven forbid, so I don’t much feel like tracking it down. I did manage to watch it, though–would you believe it’s cryptic?
* So excited for Fantagraphics’ book of VHS box art Portable Grindhouse. Get crackin’, Covey!
* Watching the full-fledged official teaser trailer (if a teaser can be called full-fledged) for the Friday the 13th remake, I’m definitely thinking this could be fun. I mean, it’s just a giant killing machine in a hockey mask–there’s no risk of dumbing that down, right? In fact, of the Michael/Freddy/Jason troika, I think the Jason concept is the best: like an armed, rampaging Frankenstein monster without the redeeming qualities. That’s tough to get wrong. (Note to self: Jason vs. Rambo?) And lo and behold, no wonder it looks so much like that Texas Chainsaw remake–they’re both directed by Marcus Nispel. (Via STYD.)
* Looks like The Madonna will be the next “Film of Blood” Clive Barker adaptation, after Dread (which is after Midnight Meat Train) and before Pig Blood Blues.
* My old Wizard compadre Alex Kropinak joins the Rowdy Schoolyard sketchblog with this. The creep can roll. Who knew?
* The latest Comics Comics Cage Match is up, in which Frank Santoro, Dan Nadel, and Tim Hodler slug it out over David Heatley’s My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down. (Dan and Tim are for it, Frank is agin it.) The comment thread features guest appearances by Tom Spurgeon, Dash Shaw, Heidi MacDonald, and yours truly, wherein I say the following:
I haven’t taken a look at my copy of the collection yet, though I was kind of gobsmacked to find out about the censoring of “My Sex History.” It seemed to me that the whole point of that strip was to be completely un-censored. It’s the sexual autobio equivalent of a real splatterfest like Dead Alive, where the constant, vulgar spectacle of it all takes a Louisville Slugger to your brain until it’s beaten into a new way of reacting to what you’re seeing. The over-the-top-ness is the point. Isn’t it?
I should also add that I always wished he didn’t label his dream comics as “dream comics.” They’d be much more interesting without that disclaimer.
* Mikey Way gets it. And yes, I know it’s annoying when people put it that way.
* Runaways like Goonies for the superhero-movie era? Sure, I’ll eat it. There’s no reason why Nico or Gert or Karolena can’t be some kid’s first crush object a la my imaginary relationship with Andy. The Scott Pilgrim movie will probably blow this door open anyways.
* My experience with Friday the 13th is entirely limited to watching the “all the kills” montage, so I’m not attuned to whether the upcoming remake/reboot/reimagining/rewhatever whose trailer you can see here represents an affront to the original the way the Texas Chainsaw and Halloween remakes seemed to. Not an affront, that’s not the right word–just a needless modernization, I suppose. This appears to be shot in that same dreary hyperrealist style, to swipe an adjective from CRwM, but I don’t see why you can’t use a franchise whose only goal was to provide jumpscares and the dubious pleasures of gore and T&A and hypocritical moralism to do all of that over again but with the tools of the modern filmmaker at your disposal. (I think most of the other iconic horror films that have been remade thus far had a lot more going on that the Jason movies, you know?)
The nice thing about The Goddess of War is that it feels very comic-booky. For one thing, the subject matter is a little purple–it’s about a valkyrie who was so good at her job that she was made the Goddess of War for all humanity, and when she’s not busy heeding the prayers of the violent and deranged and helping mankind reach ever higher and bloodier levels of slaughter, she’s getting drunk off the blood of virgins, mouthing off to her celestial overlords, or having sex with the famed Apache warlord Cochise, whose tragedy-of-errors war with American frontiersmen occupies about half the book. The stereotypical “New Yorker short story” it isn’t.
Then there’s the presentation, hefty 10″ x 15.5″ pages filled to bursting with Weinstein’s muscular character designs and rough-hewn line. Weinstein’s panel borders frequently slash upward or downward across the page, reinforcing the sense that there’s a massive expanse of comics in front of us and she’s filling every inch of it. And there’s something pulpy about the drab greens she’s using for color. Even when she pauses for several 19th-century-style illustrative etchings, the intensity and starkness of their comparatively fine linework just makes you think of an artist marking the hell out of a page. It’s like the whole comic rolls up its sleeves and gets down and dirty. That price point could still be daunting, of course, especially when you note that this is only “Volume One” of an I don’t know how long series, but I for one didn’t feel gypped–you’ve got fantasy, science fiction, erotica, history, war, humor, and drunk-hipster comics all in one big throbbing package.
* This long interview with the great Charles Burns promoting his contribution to the animated horror-anthology film Fear(s) of the Dark is full of fascinating bits–Burns comparing the narrative economies of film and comics, discussing the difficulties of translating two-dimensional comics to the three-dimensional Dog Boy shorts, revealing that his next project “deals with William Burroughs,” and confirming that Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary are no longer the writers for David Fincher’s Black Hole adaptation. Gaiman gives his side of the story here.
* Here is a two-part (so far) interview with Hobbit director and co-writer Guillermo Del Toro. It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty underwhelmed with the Del Toro I’ve seen so far, but reading him describe his work process with Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens makes me excited about the possibilities for the Hobbit films for the first time in a long time. He also talks about the challenge of differentiating the 13 Dwarves without it being a “the fat one/the skinny one/the blonde one/the one with glasses/the stupid one”-type deal, and compares Smaug to Tony Montana. I guess I’ve got to start reading TheOneRing.net again, huh? Takin’ it back to 2000. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)
* The new Yale University Press-published Ivan Brunetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories Vol. 2 comes out today, and the story selection is full of some real all-time greats. Here’s a video Yale put together in which Brunetti explains his process for assembling the collection.
* They’re making a movie out of Chuck Palahniuk’s uneven horror novel/short-story-collection hybrid Haunted. It sounds like they’re focusing on the framing device, which would have worked as its own short story a lot better than it did as ersatz and unrealistic glue for a bunch of unrelated scary stories. (Via every horror blog.)
* So I guess Daniel Craig turned down the starring role in Thor. Woulda been nice–the guy looks like a Nordic nightmare. Fun fact: The Missus just does not see the appeal in Mr. Craig. Meanwhile I’m practically attracted to him. (Via Splash Page.)
* Speaking of missed opportunities, J.G. Jones is officially off the final issue of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, replaced by Doug Mahnke, who I honestly think would have been better for the project overall. It’s a shame that this kind of meta-story is going to obscure the fact that Final Crisis is a much more compelling comic than Secret Invasion, but maybe quality will out in the long run, I dunno.
* The Dowdle Bros., co-directors of the first-person zombie film/[REC] remake Quarantine and the first-person serial-killer/torture porn film The Poughkeepsie Tapes (did that ever actually get released?) have signed on to be part of some sort of M. Night Shyamalan-produced thriller trilogy with the characteristically humble title of The Night Chronicles. I don’t know what to make of this at all.
* Quote of the day:
BAD BEHAVIOUR ISN’T EXCUSED BY ITS FREQUENCY: IT’S STILL BAD BEHAVIOUR.
I’m not sure there were themes available to anyone that hadn’t already bought in to the basic set-up of Batman comic books, the endless battle between this set of things over here that Batman represents and that list of things over there embodied in the Joker.
Ouch. I think there’s a tendency among superhero writers and fans to oversell the Meaning of each hero and villain at the expense of crafting compelling stories involving them. Obviously this was pointed out by many critics of The Dark Knight (wherein it actually didn’t bother me all that much), but imagine if the next time the Joker’s a big villain in a Batman storyline, neither character articulates his view of the meaning or meaninglessness of life in the process of trying to beat each other up, shoehorning complex ideas into pretty rough metaphorical frameworks (and I say that as someone who thinks Batman and the Joker are the two best characters in superhero comics). I think I might be more interested in that kind of Batman storyline, simply because I’ll feel like more of the work is being left for me to do. After all, people puzzled this stuff out regarding the characters based on literally decades of comics where that kind of thing didn’t happen at all.
* Finally, I have a new hero: this wild-man hedge fund manager who made a fortune betting against the economic collapse, quit, and published this in his farewell letter:
Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won’t see it included in BP’s, “Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions,” television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM’s similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female.
The evil female plant – marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week.
It is simply insane that on my way home tonight I can legally buy a 24-pack of Schlitz but not a nickel bag of weed. Absolutely insane. My worst experience with booze was blacking out for a couple of hours and was eventually being found curled around a toilet on the floor of a dormitory bathroom by someone who’d waited in a five-person deep line to use it, then having to schelp to class the next day and leaving in the middle to shoot out both ends for half an hour. By contrast worst experience with pot was freaking out a bit while smoking half a J and watching an interview with Genesis P-Orridge and Robert Anton Wilson. Feeling good is very, very dangerous in a lot of people’s eyes, and for them, the ability to experience a consequence-free high of any kind–chemical, sexual, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual–must be stamped out at all costs. Fuck those people. Fuck Anti-Life. (Via every political blog.)
* My pal TJ Dietsch provides a peek behind the curtain at our latest Manly Movie Mamajama. If anything I think he undersells how bad Slumber Party Massacre 2 was. Even in pure T&A and gore terms! I’m thinking we should have gone with the first in the series, which seemed to beat its successor out in the former category if Google Images is any indication. But then again, people could have just listened to me and thrown in Body Double…
* Terrence Howard’s expulsion from the warm bosom of Iron Man 2 in favor of Don Cheadle the other day was apparently news to Terrence Howard. It is also neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by BrandtMarvel Studios’ Kevin Feige.
This issue got a lot of attention for (to paraphrase the advertising cliché) killing Pa Kent again, for the first time. I suppose that’s notable, but the Kents were one part of the Superman mythos I never really saw as integral to the whole once they took li’l Kal-El out of the rocketship. (For me the much bigger change to the Superman gestalt came earlier in the arc, when Brainiac revealed that Krypton’s destruction was his doing.) What I took from this issue instead is further appreciation for Geoff Johns’s growth as a writer, and further reinforcement that that growth has been spurred by his close working relationship with Grant Morrison. The multi-page sequence that leads up to Pa Kent’s death is largely silent and rapidly edited, as we follow the separate, desperate actions of Pa, Ma, Superman, Supergirl, Brainiac, Lois Lane, the staff of the Daily Planet, and Brainiac’s missiles, one after the other. It’s the kind of disorienting juxtaposition you find throughout contemporary Morrisonia, if not quite pared down to his level of contextual minimalism (or reliant on his seemingly boundless faith in the intelligence of his audience) then certainly more daring and less ham-fisted than what you’d see in a comparable scene by the vast majority of other popular superhero writers today. The effect both ratchets up the thrill level and heightens the emotional impact–we know we’re seeing something important, but we’re also seeing something exciting. In the context of a superhero comic, it’s basically how death should be done: not by playing to the rafters or the gutters, but by trying to make it pop as brightly as anything else in a superhero comic, if to different effect. In this sense Gary Frank is just the artist for this gig–a kindred spirit to Frank Quitely, replacing Quitely’s Euroisms with a bug-eyed, held-in ferocity that suggests American superhero artists gone slightly psychotic. If you enjoy Superman, this is a run I recommend.
My Bowie book and I attended the Small Press Expo a few weekends ago with visions of Ben Katchor and Joost Swarte dancing in our heads. Alas, they go into the “ones that got away” file, but I was really pleased with the sketches I ended up scoring…
Nate Powell: I really like the idea of Bowie’s singing radiating outward from his mouth like a mutant’s sonic superpower or something.
Tom Scioli: As the artist of Godland and The Myth of 8-Opus, Tom is really the first full-time superhero artist from whom I’ve gotten a Bowie sketch. The best part? When I asked him about it, he actually said “I’ve always wanted to draw David Bowie but the opportunity never presented itself.” Yes, sadly, Bowie is not ACTUALLY a Kirbyesque cosmic entity, though he plays one on stage.
Lilli Carré: Lilli was maybe the most relentlessly (and needlessly) self-effacing artist in my Bowie sketchbook to date, as you can see from the disclaimer she felt it necessary to include. But gosh, look at that hair! She’s my favorite hair artist in comics.
Lauren Weinstein: Lauren was super gung-ho about drawing Bowie, and about the drawing she eventually came up with in particular. “This is the best thing I’ve ever drawn,” she insisted. “No, really, this is the best thing I’ve ever drawn.”
Matt Wiegle: The “I’m Afraid of Americans” video comes to life! I’ve known Matt for a long time so maybe he recalled that I’ve been a huge Nine Inch Nails fan for a long time, and that in fact it was Trent Reznor’s enthusiasm for David Bowie that got me to buy my first Bowie record, Earthling, back in college. Or maybe he’s just awesome.
Dustin Harbin: Dustin seemed to treat drawing in the Bowie sketchbook like some kind of honor. I think he lived up to it!
Jim Rugg: Jim was maybe the most in-demand artist at the show–when I initially approached him to do a Bowie sketch he had a queue of three other sketchbooks to go through first–and I’m really grateful he took the time for me. The most androgynous and sexy Bowie yet? And yet another appearance of the ever-popular “pirate Bowie” look, which actual Bowie sported during a grand total of ONE photo session. (He had pinkeye or something.) I’ve since discovered that much of the Bowie-centric episode of Flight of the Conchords revolves around Bowie’s enthusiasm for eyepatch use, so maybe that explains it.
* The new He-Man/Masters of the Universe movie has been scrapped by Warner Bros. due to personnel shuffling and an inability to find an A-list director willing to take on the project. (Via Beaks at AICN, who seems a lot more skeptical about the supposedly awesome screenplay than others have been, which makes me feel not so bad about this turn of events.)
* Speaking of Barker, the Hellraiser remake might have a new director–Pascal Laugier.
* The Zach Snyder-supervised blockbuster-scale zombie movie Army of the Dead is, um, well, I’m not sure. I guess the point is that it’s still a going concern.
* Despite a post-pilot-episode level of involvement with the show that does not appear to exceed watching the program on his TiVo, Lost co-creator/absentee parent J.J. Abrams is now talking about the possibility of a Lost theatrical movie enabled by the series’ firmly set endpoint, though he does dismiss it as a remote one.
* Missed this when it was first posted because NeilAlien’s syndication feed takes weeks before updating, but I rather like how the ur-comics blogger characterizes M. Night Shyamalan’s recently expressed desire to finally do an Unbreakable sequel.
Neilalien’s a big fan of the film- but for the director who once thought that Unbreakable was taking “so many incredible risks”, this sounds like a bad-idea grasp for safety and former glory after a string of bombs.
Anyone who read Kevin Huizenga’s hilariously accurate description of the plot of a made-up video game in Ganges #2 knew he’d have a heckuva video game comic in him somewhere, and Fight or Run is that comic. The structure, which we’ve seen him take stabs at a few times in the past, is simple: Two little dudes from a selection of about two-dozen entertainingly designed and named characters–a flying Illuminati eye-in-pyramid named Pronouncement, a little Pac-Man ghost/blob hybrid named Bernini, a guy with a hand for a head named Hander, etc.–face off, one of the critters decides whether to Fight or Run, and it’s game time! The appeal of this comic lies in how Huizenga recognizes that the comfortingly familiar and repetitive parametric structure of video games and works based on them–beat this guy, acquire that object, solve a puzzle, beat a level, repeat–enables visual and logical flights of fancy that would make a blockbuster all-ages starter game like (say) Super Mario Bros. look like a work of ostentatious avant-gardism in any other narrative medium. So here, Huizenga again gets to indulge his inner Powr Mastrs superfan with those character names and designs, while devising increasingly baroque and entertaining ways for the characters to battle, to the point where it’s (duh) much less about the fighting and much more about the fun things you can do with lines on paper, paring certain elements back as far as they can go: a Duck vs. Rabbit fight in which the two characters are distinguishable only by where the handful of lines that connote their beak and/or ears fall on their round, one-eyed heads; a logic diagram that shows the Fight or Run concept, for all its internal variations, has only six possible outcomes. Of course, you can then also ring humor out of unexpected variations on these very simple constituent parts, like Huizenga does with McSkulls, a female fighter who beats her opponents by doing girly things like beating them with her purse, hitting them with a rainbow, riding away on a unicorn or a dolphin, or going out with them and then dumping them (the only time a <3 is used in lieu of an F or an R to connote the choice made by the combatants). There's also something being said here about the folly of ambition in the person of Chopper, the character who participates in the greatest number of F/R contests. He tends to lose because of trying to hard to win in showy ways, like self-dividing until he collapses or skating away on replicas of his own head that are easily transmogrified into giant eyeballs by his ocularly-themed opponent. In the final strip, Chopper runs from the sinister Kid Torcher (aka Kid President, aka Kidder/Torturer (so dubbed in front of an American flag background, no less (I think you get the drift))) and ends up winning his fight only by living his entire life and then dying of what must in the Fight or Run world be natural causes. I'd read an entire collection of comics this deceptively simple and sharp if I could.
* From now on, writing about Matt Furie’s brilliantly funny Boy’s Club guarantees you a top slot in the Carnival of Souls. Our first recipient of said largesse: Tom Spurgeon.
* Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the basis for Robert DeNiro’s character Sam “Ace” Rothstein in my favorite Martin Scorsese film Casino, has died. Is this one of the all-time great mobster photos or what?
* In praising the apparently simple pleasures of Quarantine, Horror Hacker’s Grady Hendrix manages to articulate a problem I had with the film it’s based on, [REC], that I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until now:
The original Rec was a low budget affair with one single goal: To make the audience jump. And it worked; it’s a movie that has you springing out of your seat like a Mexican jumping bean.
That was the goal alright, and it definitely worked. I’m not convinced there’s any more to it than that, I guess.
* Also at Horror Hacker, Charles Burns talks about the animated horror-anthology feature Fear(s) of the Dark and David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of Black Hole, which it doesn’t sound like Neil Gaiman is writing anymore. I have to say, gorgeous as Burns’s art is, I don’t want to see a Sin City style digital recreation of it onscreen for the Black Hole movie. That’s a story that can and should stand on its own through a translated tone, not panel-by-panel recreations. (Via Jason Adams.)
* Jog reviews Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s Joker graphic novel. Leaching the subversive, camp, performative aspects out of the Joker and just making him a torture-porn tough guy with a fucked-up face starring in a macho crime caper seems singularly unappealing to me, but maybe I’m missing something?
* Here’s a good-lookin’ trailer for the good-lookin’ vampire film Let the Right One In.
The first four issues of Mark Millar’s John Romita Jr.-drawn creator-owned series leave me with two dominant impressions: 1) JRJR’s work is so pretty! 2) I don’t think I’ve ever read a comic so terrified of homosexuals. It honestly could be entered into a court case as proof positive of the “gay panic” defense. Good guys, bad guys, and neutral characters alike drop homophobic epithets like they were going out of style (which they are!), and the main character spends about twice as much page time tearing himself up for allowing the girl he likes to believe he’s gay than he does recovering from watching people get horribly slaughtered in front of him. So far no actual homosexuals have been sexually assaulted or murdered, which in a Mark Millar comic is saying something, but the uptick in “black characters used as cannon fodder” is significant even in Millar’s racially dubious oeuvre, so it’s sort of a wash.
The story is actually a comparatively subdued variation on Millar’s standard routine of adding ultraviolence and a few nods at “realism” to the superhero genre (cf. Ultimates, Wanted, The Authority, War Heroes). This time out, a middle-school (I think) loser, baffled that no one in the world has ever thrown on a mask and costume and gone out to fight crime, up and does so. The gimmick is that when he does so, he gets his ass kicked in spectacularly bloody fashion, over and over, even when he comes out the victor. That’s kind of a funny idea, and Millar (relatively speaking) undersells it, eschewing his usual trick of having the characters tell the reader exactly how awesome they are and dialing the braggadocio down to believably adolescent-male levels.
What it’s mainly good for is allowing Romita to cut lose with all his quirks: wrinkly clothes and finely delineated hair, fights that are a ballet of blocky bodies twisting through the air and torrents of blood gushing like one of those fancy fountains that can spell out words and make pictures of dolphins in whatnot that they have in Asian commerce centers, cute little details (a t-shirt reading “WHATEVER IT IS, AMAGANSETT”–a pop-culture gag whose idiosyncracy stands out in a comic written by a guy who’s still doing Paris Hilton references). Dean White, the sensational colorist find of the past couple years, gives JRJR’s art a milky warmth unique enough to actually say something about the spectacular art it’s supporting. By the time the ten-year-old little-girl ninja shows up and starts slicing up gangstas while calling them “cunts” you realize what a waste of Romita’s capital-A Art it all is, but only homos would complain, and you’re not a homo, right?
* Remember how the rumor that maybe Paul Andrew Williams was gonna maybe direct a maybe sequel to 28 Days/Weeks Later that was gonna maybe be called 28 Months Later was maybe debunked? The official word from 28…Later producer Andrew Macdonald is that Williams was working on a prequel, but it didn’t work out, and that Days director and Weeks honcho Danny Boyle is developing an idea for a third film. Bring it on says I. Days and Weeks stand up there with Night and Dawn. (Via STYD.)
* No rumor this: Terrence Howard, whose drunken explanation of the Air Force’s bond of brotherhood was just stupidly great in the original Iron Man, has been replaced by Don Cheadle for the role of James “War Machine” Rhodes in Iron Man 2, due to what sounds like a money dispute with attendant “creative differences” issues to me. On the one hand, that sucks. On the other hand, Don Cheadle!
* I’ve heard some good things about Quarantine, the English-language [REC] remake apparently responsible for that film’s suppression on the Stateside DVD market, but Rick Trembles of Motion Picture Purgatory fame (have those things been collected anywhere?) sure wasn’t crazy about it, and the way he describes it makes me wonder if it’ll irk me too.
When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept. And thus he said: “My son, my son, O Absalom my son, would God I had died for thee!”
This is the saddest song I’ve ever heard. The first time I listened to it, I sat down and cried for about ten minutes afterward. There’s a moment deep into the song that you will see coming from far away and that will devastate you nonetheless; it just made me cry sitting here at my desk. Utterly, exquisitely painful and beautiful.
* I’d love to hear more about the specifics if only to determine how best to fight back, but this report of a man named Christopher Handley being prosecuted for the possession of obscene manga is as chilling as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s involvement on his behalf is welcome. Extra disturbing: Handley was literally followed home from the post office by law enforcement after picking up the books in question, which allegedly depict sexual activity involving minors. I have a pretty brightline approach to this particular area–if it’s not an actual photograph it shouldn’t be illegal to possess–and I hope this outlook is upheld.
* Bruce Baugh’s Shift-T is a new blog dedicated to chronicling Bruce’s experiences playing World of Warcraft. I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about why he’s worth reading on this subject even if (like me) you don’t play WoW–why he’s worth reading if the only things you have in common with him is indulging in a hobby, any hobby, and having some desire to think about what you get out of that hobby. But if you’re not sold on those high-falutin’ grounds, he does post on why it’s fun to go into battle with an angry gorilla by your side.
*The minicomics clearinghouse known as Global Hobo has relaunced under new management with a new blog and some of the great USS Catastrophe site’s backstock. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but the decidedly post-apocalyptic treatment given to Venom in the new video game Spider-Man: League of Shadows looks like imaginative fun if this trailer is any indication. It also occurs to me now that superhero-comic-based video games have been a pretty conservative lot in terms of their plotlines, as best I can tell, but the medium lends itself just as readily to more expansive, quasi-Elseworlds narratives like this one.
* If you’d like to feel your own sanity slip a bit, read the repeated pleas of a U.S. military officer on behalf of a captive American citizen and “illegal enemy combatant” who literally was being driven insane by his treatment in a Navy brig in Charleston. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
Or Else #5 is one of Kevin Huizenga’s least showy comics in recent memory, as well as one of his most openly autobiographical; all of that is true despite it mostly being about living in a war-ravaged post-apocalyptic dystopia. The centerpiece story, “Rumbling,” is based on a prose work by writer Giorgio Manganelli, and sees Huizengan everyman Glenn Ganges inserted into a Handmaid’s Tale-esque scenario of warring religious factions as an ambassador from a country “where wars of religion are not waged.” (Amusingly, Ganges later reveals that his homeland fights scientifically rigorous wars of atheism instead. Bill Maher Is Watching You!) I think you can see a little bit of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs (Huizenga’s a fan) sneaking in here, with the strips emphasis on the lavishly constructed uniforms of the various factions’ soldiery and its relatively straightforward pacing and use of genre. The autobio elements slip in through a pair of strips about animal intrusions into the Huizenga/Ganges household–first a turtle in a strip that (I think) openly stars Huizenga rather than his stand-in, then a longer strip about various spiders and wasps that have infested and done battle in Ganges’s house, where the long, lighter-colored hair Ganges is sporting makes him look more like the cartoonist himself than ever. The back-cover photograph of one of the bug battles depicted in the comic adds another real-world/fiction crossover element. The package is rounded out by several strips that focus on picayune details–sentence diagramming, “How Are We Spending Our Tuesday?”, the structure of a conversation between two people represented solely in gibberish, and so on–to such a degree that their meaning is all but lost, like a word repeated into incomprehensibility. Need I mention the effortless cartooning–a loosening line used to connote flashbacks, the military precision with which Huizenga uses grays? It’s not the knockout blow that some previous Or Else issues have been, but as an exercise in Huizenga’s trademark juxtaposition of the quotidian with the universal (and frequently the philosophically troubling), it’s solid; as a unit, though, I’m not sure why it begins and ends where it does and contains what it does.
One obstacle all first-person horror movies must overcome is the need to justify why somebody on the run from horrible life-threatening monsters would continue to keep the goddamn camera running. Usually the (real-world) filmmakers try to do it with two different stock responses: 1) The camera, some angry other character informs us, makes the cameraperson feel safe, removed, like this isn’t real; 2) People, the cameraperson informs us, just “need to know” what happened. In both cases this usually comes across like sophomore-year media-studies bullshit (nowhere more so than George A. Romero’s depressingly awful Diary of the Dead). While a particularly strong film can add emotional resonance that makes these excuses work by setting up the continued use of the camera a sort of life-preserver for characters on the verge of completely losing it (The Blair Witch Project, for example), you usually just need to think about the camera’s presence the same way you think about hearing explosions in space–you suspend your disbelief in favor of the way it enhances the drama.
[REC] is different, and clever as the dickens. Our in-movie filmmakers aren’t pretentious film students with Marshall McLuhan on the brain or vapid exemplars of the YouTube generation. They’re journalists–puff-piece specialists, yeah, but journalists all the same. Reporter Angela and her cameraman Pablo head out on a ride-along with a couple of firemen for their Insomniac-style human-interest show, so at first their filming is justified by their jobs. Next, they end up locked in a quarantined apartment building by the authorities, despite the presence of several ill and injured people who badly need medical attention; now the filming is a matter of evidence-gathering, a public service on behalf of the frightened and ailing people in the building and a rebuke to the security and health officials who deprive them of both freedom and information. As the horrors mount and filming becomes increasingly impractical in real-world terms, the camera is used as a light source. When the light is broken, the characters navigate via its night vision. At every turn, there’s a reason the camera needs to stay on.
I bring all this up because, as my wife pointed out when I described it to her, that’s a lot more thought and effort on behalf of making the subgenre’s central conceit work than most films of its ilk display. So good for directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza and their co-writer Luis Berdejo! But I also mention it because this subterranean current of logic throughout the film is key to the success of its final act, when it hits you with a tidal wave of weird for which you are almost entirely unprepared. All of a sudden, a movie that had been a pretty straightforward, well-acted, effective mash-up of Blair Witch and 28 Days Later or Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead takes a sharp left-turn into Creepyland, somewhere between the farmhouse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the collected works of Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. It blindsides you and discomfits you mightily, picking up on elements from throughout the entire film in terms of astutely utilizing the first-person camerawork and shoddy lighting to suggest as much as it shows, but blasting those elements right into overdrive. I’ve seen scarier neo-zombie movies, but in terms of sheer narrative smarts, this one’s right up there.
