* My pal Kevin Mahadeo got himself a nice little get: An interview with Grant Morrison about the fairly momentous events of Final Crisis #6 on the day FC #6 was released. I particularly liked this exchange:

On the soap box side of things, for me, there’s been a long [stretch] of comics trying to be about the streets and about realism and dealing with the Bush Administration. We wanted to follow more popular culture, which is going in a more psychedelic direction, to use the want of a better word. I think things are starting to get a bit crazier again and people are enjoying stuff a little bit more—the fantastical and demanding of the imagination. I think that’s what we’re trying to do. Final Crisis #7 is almost inventing a new style. We had widescreen comics and decompression and super-compression. This is channel-zapping comics.

For every comic and series you tackle, you always ask questions about what the character means and where the character can go. Is that what you’re seeing in Final Crisis, where can comics go?

MORRISON: Yeah. In particular with superhero comics. Once you’ve seen “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight,” why bother doing realistic superheroes because now the movies can do them better than anyone. I kind of feel that what it does is free up comics to be a little bit wilder. We’ve got great artists who can sit there with their pencils and draw anything. They’re not limited by budgets. We shouldn’t be following the storytelling techniques of Hollywood because they can do it really well. Comics can do all kinds of other things. They can be really crazy and wild and can really stretch the imagination and be really progressive.

* Speaking of the comics one assumes Morrison was speaking of, there’s been a lot of talk on this blog and elsewhere about the tone-deafness of Secret Invasion and Dark Reign, specifically how rapacious asshole and obviously batshit-crazy evil serial killer Norman Osborn was appointed King Shit of SHIELD Mountain by Barack “Change We Can Believe In” Obama in his first act as the Marvel America’s President. For me at least, this undercut the quick cash-in Spider-Man thing they did for the rubes where Barry gives Spidey dap. However, somebody or other told me that if the solicits for Thunderbolts are any indication, Obama’s role in that infamous Osborn decision–its actual depiction limited, if I recall, to coloring the hand of the otherwise off-panel President brown–is going to be or has already been retconned, and that upcoming storyarcs will feature Obama’s attempt to thwart his predecessor’s decision to put the Green Goblin in charge of stuff while GG will attempt to assassinate Obama. For what it’s worth.

* Some top-notch comics people have posted their Top Comics of 2008 lists. Here’s Frank Santoro’s. Here’s Douglas Wolk’s.

* Speaking of Top Whatever of 2008 Lists from top-notch people, Jason Adams–my favorite horror blogger, when he blogs horror–lists his top horror movies and top indelible (mostly horrific) movie moments.

* Maybe the Watchmen mess will get resolved today? (Sorry, Frank.)

* Gossip Girl prequel series? Sure, I’ll eat it. And while we’re on the subject, X-Men movie written by Josh Schwartz? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Radiohead re-releases featuring extra discs compiling all those b-sides and EP tracks I never bought except Airbag/How Am I Driving? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Murder saves lives! Learn how one lucky bird owes its continued existence in part to my Matt Wiegle-designed mini-anthology (available for purchase for the low low price of $3!) in this comic by Sarah Louise Wahrhaftig.

* Chris Mautner shelf porn! Oh, built-in bookshelf walls, how I love thee.

* Quotes of the day:

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani.”

—Judge Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of U.S. military commissions.

“Waterboarding is torture.”

—Eric Holder, Attorney General-designate.

* J.R.R. Tolkien continues to do his best Tupac Shakur impression: Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, “a volume of rare Norse epic poetry,” will be released in May. The Children of Hurin was excellent, fwiw.

* Battlestar Galactica returns on Friday and will run an extra 3 1/2 minutes, so a lot of websites are saying to adjust your DVRs, but in my experience they usually pick up on this sort of thing automatically. I dunno, it’s publicity, I guess. Also, that prequel webisode series The Face of the Enemy has wrapped up and I rather liked it. Not for the squeamish, mind you. Or for, I dunno, Rick Warren.

* The hardcover collection of Marvel’s adaptation of The Stand, which I believe will contain some supplemental items courtesy of yours truly, will only be available in comic shops.

* Via everywhere, part one: Samuel L. Jackson says he and Marvel Studios have not come to a salary agreement regarding his returning as Nick Fury, the character basically drawn for him to eventually play, in subsequent Marvel movies like Iron Man 2 and The Avengers. You have to imagine the possibility of a likeness lawsuit is a possible bargaining chip here, no?

* Via everywhere, part two: Warner Bros. and Fox appear close to a settlement over the rights to distribute Watchmen.

* Via everywhere, part three: Covered, a new blog launched by comics artist and animator Robert Goodin and featuring various artists doing cover versions of their favorite comics covers. Here’s Jeffrey Brown doing Mike Zeck’s Secret Wars.

* Pat Johnson is the new head honcho at big-deal literary comics publishing imprint Pantheon. (Via Heidi Macdonald.)

* The Spanish first-person zombie movie [REC] was just alright for me, dawg, but if you’re into it, you can finally legally purchase a playable DVD version of it via Amazon.ca as of January 27th.

* When good movies happen to good posters: Jason Adams reports that The Broken, which spawned the memorable poster below, was actually pretty good. Nice to know.

* Speaking of good posters, this little number for the upcoming Crank 2 is just about as ridiculous and wonderful as one imagines the film itself will be. (Hat tip: Adam Tracey.)

* Marc-Oliver Frisch takes another swing at the “how to read and review event comics” piñata.

* Oooh, look, someone mapped the Star Wars galaxy! My Rebel Alliance insignia tattoo is glowing. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Finally, here’s Kate Winslet flashing her underwear. Eternal Sunshine indeed.

Over at Top Shelf 2.0 you can now find “A Real Gentle Knife,” a comic based on the song “Rippin Kittin” by Golden Boy and Miss Kittin, written by me, and drawn by my old friend and up-and-coming comics blogger/educator Josiah Leighton. I hope you enjoy it.

* Over at the Cool Kids Table, Ben Morse has posted a series of “collect this heretofore uncollected run of comics puh-leeze!” wishlists from himself, Kiel Phegley, Rickey Purdin, TJ Dietsch, David Paggi, and one Sean T. Collins. Check it out and bug the relevant publishers.

* Get those shopping lists fired up: Douglas Wolk has put together a pretty great list of the major alt/lit/art comics releases coming out in 2009.

* Chris Mautner continues his own series of such roundups, this one focusing on my webcomics publisher, Top Shelf.

* Mautner also weighs in on the big discussion we had here the other week about how to read and review event comics.

* Tom Spurgeon lists 25 great things about being a comics reader.

* Josiah Leighton reprints and examines Katsuhiro Otomo’s pre-Akira short story “Nothing Will Be as It Was.”

* Tim O’Shea talks to Josh Cotter about Skyscrapers of the Midwest, one of my favorite comics of the year.

* Okay, fine, everyone’s got me intrigued about The Winter Men now.

* Stacie Ponder reviews Planet Terror and Death Proof, or as they were once collectively known, Grindhouse.

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror lists the top 10 scariest paintings of all time.

* Dave Kiersh has posted a preview of his upcoming teen-drama comic, Dirtbags, Mallchicks and Motorbikes. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Finally, remember when I said that I thought Watchmen was going to be a real eye-opener for mainstream audiences in terms of a type of superhero imagery they’d be seeing for the first time ever? Apparently Warner Bros. agrees, because they’re using that as the selling point for the commercial they’ve been running during NFL games and 24. (Via Topless Robot.)

Tonight I tried and failed to see Frank Miller’s The Spirit at one of the five total daily showings spread across the three remaining theaters still showing the movie on Long Island–failed because the picture quality was so bad that I got up, got a refund, and left.

When the trailers were shown in seemingly the wrong aspect ratio, I thought “uh-oh,” so I ran downstairs and asked the guy at the concession stand to let someone know to fix it. Then the movie started and while the picture didn’t look so badly accordionned inward anymore, it was still ran waaaaay past the top and bottom borders of the screen–credits disappeared right along with the top third of characters’ heads. The picture was also crooked, which I was subsequently informed was due to the angle of the screen, meaning all the movies they charge people to watch in that particular theater are at least that screwed up. To top it all off, what you could see of the picture was murky, and the surround sound wasn’t working to boot.

I know I was a film studies major, but this was in the era of VHS, so I feel like I’m not hugely particular when it comes to things like picture quality. I still don’t have a hi-def TV or a Blu-Ray player, for example. But I also feel like maybe every third time I go to the movies there’s an enjoyment-destroying, super-obvious problem with something. This time it was the picture being all screwed up. When I saw Doomsday it was the sound not being fully switched on. When I saw Let the Right One In it was the theater being north of 80 degrees. And I’m not even getting into the behavior of my fellow moviegoers. It’s to the point where each time I go to the movies, one of my favorite goddamn activities in the goddamn world, I sit down dreading whatever the hell will ruin it this time.

This is the kind of stupid extrapolation from personal anecdotal evidence that makes blogs so, so awful, but I can’t help it: Surely this sort of thing can’t be good for business? I mean, especially in this case, where the movie theater knowingly has a screen set up so that every single thing they show on it will be tilted to one side like you’re in the hideout of Frank Gorshin’s Riddler. That’s some chutzpah, my friends.

Anyway, I’m really angry that I didn’t get to see The Spirit, because I can’t possibly have a lot of time left to catch it in the theater. The end.

The Comics Journal has posted a preview of my cover-story interview with Brian K. Vaughan from issue #295, which hits stores on Wednesday soon and is already available via the Fantagraphics web store. Click the link and thrill to my scintillating questions in all their conversational, barely comprehensible, transcribed-verbatim glory–not to mention BKV’s thoughts on translating his comics into screenplays, working with franchise characters, union vs. non-union writing gigs, and more.

Rereading all 100 Horror Roundtables at Steven Wintle’s late, lamented The Horror Blog.

* My favorite mafia story, because it’s the story that does the best job of stripping away the Godfather romanticism and revealing mobsters for the shitty little monsters that they are, is the one about how when one of John Gotti’s civilian neighbor John Favara accidentally struck and killed Gotti’s son Frank his car while Frank was riding his bike, Favara was later forced into a mysterious van and was never seen or heard from again. The case is back in the news as prosecutors allege a Gambino soldier dissolved Favara’s body in acid.

* Hey, look, it’s a trailer for George A. Romero’s next zombie movie, which either is or isn’t called Of the Dead. It’s, uh, yeah.

(Via STYD.)

* Jon Hastings ponders film adaptations’ fidelity to their source material, and why it really doesn’t matter. I think Tom Spurgeon had the best take on fanboy complaints about this subject:

what geek culture really means 99 percent of the time [when demanding films be “faithful to the source material”] is “please don’t put us in a position to be mocked or laughed at.”

I think Jon would agree.

* This made me laugh: Harvey Weinstein apparently knows less about the status of Sin City 2 than your average nerdblogger–he literally had no idea Frank Miller had even been thinking of writing the sequel–whereas actress Jaime King says her boy Frank has finished the script for the thing.

* Longtime altcomix figure Bill Kartalopolous returns to blogging with a vengeance, posting three worthwhile stories, noting that Pantheon Publisher Janice Goldklang has been let go–in many ways Pantheon may be the most important comics publisher of the decade, so this strikes me as a major development–and flagging release dates for two massive projects from major creators, David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp (344 pages, June 2, 2009) and R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis According to R. Crumb (204 pages, Fall 2009).

* Will Fox and Warner Bros. settle the Watchmen lawsuit? Maybe, probably, I guess.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch weighs in on that big event-comics discussion from a few days ago.

* I’d like to be watching the complete original 1967-1968 series of The Prisoner online for free like everyone else, but the stupid Flash video is too hiccuppy on my computer.

* As far as reviews of movies I still haven’t seen go, Jeff Lester’s Oedipal take on The Spirit entertained me.

* I love the idea of Frank Santoro and Gary Panter rocking out to “Sweet Leaf.”

* The New York Comic Con panel schedule is up, mostly. (“Most” movie and TV panel information TK, annoyingly.) If you’re interested in seeing Sean T. Collins in his first comic convention panel ever, you’re welcome to come to the Twisted ToyFare Theatre panel on Saturday 2/7 at 5:30pm in room 1A17.

* U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess will decide whether WB can release Watchmen on Inauguration Day, January 20th. Yes we can.

* Missed it: Quentin Tarantino’s World War II action flick Inglorious Basterds comes out on August 21st of this very year.

* Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell are going to be bad guys in Iron Man 2. Sounds good. Still no Mandarin, I guess.

* I get a kick out of how into year-end best-of list-making Dick Hyacinth gets. I’d guess I’ll have my own list ready in a couple weeks.

* Graeme McMillan on Dark Reign:

In a weird way, I can’t help but feel as if Dark Reign is really, really shittily timed. Dark Avengers, the core book for the branding, gets released the day after Obama gets sworn in as President of the United States, and it’s that cognitive dissonance that sticks in my mind. Marvel, for all their faults, are normally more in tune with the cultural zeitgeist than Dark Reign; it feels oddly… wrong, and somewhat DC-ish, to see them plunge into a depressing world of misuse of power at a time when we’re about to bring in a President who made the country believe in Hope and Change again. Maybe they know something we don’t… or maybe this is a sign that they’ve lost their touch.

This really is a problem. It’s not even a political issue, really–it’s that the guy has like an 80% approval rating, meaning that people in this country would have a hard time swallowing the idea that he’d put a mass murderer in charge of the American security apparatus. Seriously, Marvel Barack Obama just named the Green Goblin head of the equivalent of the CIA; Real World Barack Obama just named Leon Panetta. It’s really rather tone-deaf. This kind of thing doesn’t cut it, either.

* Kyle Baker makes the point I’ve tried to make, which is that there’s plenty of the stuff you’ll find in Frank Miller’s Spirit in Will Eisner’s Spirit, along with a lot of other things. Still haven’t seen the damn movie, though. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Battle-damaged He-Man T-shirts? That’s pretty rad.

* Finally, who doesn’t?

I say, I say c’mon lemme hear you tell em, tell em how I feel. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Huh.

Ron Asheton, RIP.

* My latest piece on Marvel’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand is up at Marvel.com–this one’s an interview with writer Robert Aguirre-Sacasa focusing on a look back at the project so far and where it’s headed next.

* There’s lots of good stuff in Tom Spurgeon’s interview with Matt Fraction–the final installment in his Holiday Interview series–but this is probably the juiciest bit:

SPURGEON: One of the more interesting about the art in your Iron Man is Salvador Larocca’s visual references to celebrities–in fact, you’ve worked with a number of strong stylists. Is there any way that you as a writer will respond to or make choices based on stylistic strategies undertaken by an artist with whom you’re working?

FRACTION: I can’t stand that stuff, personally — yanks me out of the story immediately. Not photo referencing, that’s not what bugs me, but using celebrities just… it’s as intrusive as someone standing over your shoulder reading the word balloons with funny voices. Bums me out.

Wow, on the record and everything. But it really does interfere with my enjoyment of the series, which is otherwise quite good. Hmm, Fraction must also love working with Greg Land on Uncanny X-Men, huh?

* Speaking of Spurge, here he reviews early Daredevil and notes how the creators’ uncertainty of what the point of the book was supposed to be gave them a lot of freedom. The funny thing about Daredevil as a character is that most of the great work done with the character, and there’s been a disproportionate amount of that, has been tonally consistent from one creative team to another, so it’s a momentary surprise to recall that it wasn’t always noir and ninjas.

* Don’t know why I’m just getting to this now, but the original Blog@Newsarama crew is back and blogging at Comic Book Resources under the moniker Robot 6. Welcome back!

* And on that note, here’s Robot 6’s Chris Mautner running down Fantagraphics’s Spring/Summer 2009 publishing plans.

* WoW Among the Ruins: Bruce Baugh takes a look at a less-traveled area of World of Warcraft, one that had once been the site of a lot of action, and notes its post-catastrophic ambiance.

* Jog reviews the first issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s supervillain noir Incognito, echoing my sentiments about the comic in two particulars: 1) It feels a bit shopworn, at least at the moment; 2) It’s like Brubaker wanted to see what Wanted would be like if it were written by a good writer.

* Finally, a welcome Real Life Torture Porn update:

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

—CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta. (Via Ezra Klein.)

Greetings to all whose Internet usage declined somewhat during the holiday break. Here are some reviews I posted during that time that you may have missed.

* Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman

* The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner

* ACME Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware

* Twilight directed by Catherine Hardwicke

* Let the Right One In directed by Tomas Alfredson

* ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

* a discussion of event comics crticism centered on Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis and Batman: R.I.P.–check out the comment thread for thoughts from Tom Spurgeon, Tucker Stone, Tim O’Neil, Matthew Perpetua, Marc-Oliver Frisch, Bruce Baugh, Jon Hastings, Kiel Phegley, Ben Morse, Shaggy Erwin, Sean B. and more, I think

The posting of that Spirit review marked the successful completion of one full year of Comics Time comic book reviews going up on this blog every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, without fail. I’m proud to have done what I set out to do a year ago. I had a lot of fun reading that many comics, and perhaps to my surprise I had a lot of fun writing about that many comics, too. I’m certainly a better comics writer than I was when I started, and I think the blog is better overall. For this I’d like to thank all my readers, particularly those who emailed or posted comments. I’d also like to thank all the publishers who generously donated review copies.

In the New Year I don’t think I’ll be reviewing comics with this same level of regularity. Prose books beckon, as do sizable runs of comics that are hard to fit into your schedule when you’ve got to have three reviews up a week. That said, you’ll see some backlog reviews popping up in the regular slots for a little while, and chances are good that if I read a substantial comic, it’s gonna get reviewed here on the blog. (The occasional insubstantial comic will be thrown in for good measure.) I’m going to work my way through the remaining 2008 notables in time to put up a semi-timely Best of 2008 list of some kind as well. But for now, a leisurely re-read of Ed Brubaker’s Captain America run beckons…