There are some promo pictures out now for the fifth season of Lost. I for one am very much looking forward to seeing Elizabeth Mitchell’s performances this season.
Yep, some great performances on the way.
Not to be all “the straight Jason Adams” or anything, but click to embiggen. For, you know, the performances.
* Rest in peace, Bettie Page. She was beautiful!
* I linked to this interview with Hans Rickheit a while ago, but since he’s long been my number-one “altcomix cartoonist who should be a bigger deal,” I really ought to emphasize that he’s apparently doing a graphic novel for Fantagraphics. Outstanding news.
* Doomsday: The Series? When was this announced? Was it announced? (Via Rickey Purdin.)
* The Battlestar Galactica webisodes start today!
* Final Crisis #5 was really good, and you can read annotations thereof by Douglas Wolk and David Uzumeri.
* Ben Morse Rickey Purdin suggests 10 things Hellboy and the BPRD could have done instead of what they did in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
* Quote of the day:
When you do a comic book that seems so easily translatable into film and television, the things film and television does very well begin to expose the comic as unsatisfactory when it comes to aping those elements….Actors have compensating virtues when it comes to suspension of belief. They’re real, they have a natural physicality, they bring an incalculable number of tics and idiosyncrasies to the table. This comic misses all of those things, and seems exposed for it.
—Tom Spurgeon on Boom!’s The Remnant. This passage struck me because it’s exactly what I thought about those first Joss Whedon-scripted issues of the Buffy Season Eight comic book.
* I could read Jon Hastings talk about different kinds of action movie filmmaking all the livelong day. I suppose I do have to say that I think that in both the nu-Bond and Bourne movies, I’m not seeing the lack of sense of spacial integrity/intelligibility that Jon is seeing. I don’t think I ever had a hard time figuring out who was who or what was happening where. Anyway. Where does Rambo fit in your taxonomy, Jon?
Maggots
Brian Chippendale, writer/artist
PictureBox, 2007
344 pages
$21.95
Buy it from PictureBox, pretty cheap in fact
Here’s a hard one to wrap your head around. Maggots is a book that almost prides itself on its insular incomprehensibility. Originally and infamously drawn over the pages of a Japanese book catalog, its panels are meant to be read in a chutes-and-ladders zig-zag that skips, stutters, and shifts direction entirely the second you finally feel like you have a handle on it. In a sense, the first effect you get from reading the book is to learn how to read it. Slowly, your eyes become better at detecting characters’ changes in direction, their movements up or down, how they sit down or stand up or lie down, how they eat or fuck or simply walk up to one another. Eventually these clues enable you to read enough panels in the proper order–or at the very least get some kind of overall sense of what’s happening on a page–so that you can understand what’s going on.
So what’s going on? Well, that’d be kind of difficult to grok even if the book weren’t constructed like a clue someone found in the Orchid Station on Lost. Basically, a bunch of little munchkiny guys run around (literally, a lot of the time) behaving in ways that frequently lead to violent confrontation, whether that involves giants, or rabbits with samurai swords, or people stealing each other’s eyeballs, or the victims of eyeball theft coming back to exact their revenge. The “story” isn’t so much a plot as it is a sense of ever-present danger, the idea that the cute li’l business we’re seeing involving eating raisins and sticking the container somewhere hard for someone else to get to afterwards could at any moment give way to a legion of attacking mice, or some sort of death-mask-wearing sorcerer, or some genuinely unpleasant knifework.
The tension is maintained by Chippendale’s art, which feels like a peak into a hermetically sealed limbo of endless black, occasionally interrupted by secret trapdoors, ladders, and at least one food stand. Panels are tiny, cramped, filled in as much as they can be, careening wildly from one end of the page to the other. Even the white space is busy, showing the text of the catalog underneath. No matter how much our hero Hot Potato and his comrades and enemies run, jump, climb, crawl, and even fly, there doesn’t seem to be any way out for them. Of course, this makes the moments when Chippendale pulls back for a dazzling spread–a field of flowers, the arrival of that sorcerer guy, a massive staircase–all the more impressive. That’s the oldest trick in the book, but there’s a reason for that: It works.
And so, in its weird way, does Maggots. This isn’t going to be launching a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-style wave of imitators anytime soon, even among the most Fort Thunder influenced cats around today–a 344-page experiment in graphic novel form? It’s a miracle this thing ever got published. And it’s certainly a challenging, at times frustrating read, with not a whole lot in terms of immediate satisfaction going for it. But once you get into that groove of letting your eyes weave back and forth across the pages, you just start appreciating the aesthetic qualities of the thing. Those chunky black panels. Chippendale’s Muybridge-like proficiency with breaking physical action down into its constituent beats. The character designs. The humor (“We have a no pants, no service policy.” “Do you have pants back there? I’ll take them.” “Sorry–no pants, no service”). The genuine, if raw, eroticism of all those bizarre sex scenes (I actually think this strange, avant garde comic captures the awkwardness and explosiveness of long-distance relationship reunions as well as any I’ve read). The random, astutely observed moments of quotidian business (there’s a great, two or three panel bit where Hot Potato scoops up a cat who was crawling around the sink that brought a smile of familiarity to my face). Even the sumptuous texture of the cover underneath the dust jacket. This is not a comic for everyone, duh, but if you’ve been interested in it in the past, I think you’ll find it interesting.
* MoCCA will be moving to the Armory at Lexington and 26th this year. As much as that early June weekend in the Puck Building has become a welcome fixture of my summer, I’m glad they’ve moved the festival to a bigger building–it seemed clear this year that the two-floor solution they’d worked out just wasn’t working out for the people on the second floor. It’s also nice to see them shifting to an equally old-timey building instead of convention rooms in a hotel or something.
* Tor.com’s Douglas Cohen continues his series of Robert E. Howard 101 posts with an entry on Solomon Kane.
* Did I say Nick Cave had the T-Shirt of the Week, in my recent return to T-shirt blogging? I stand corrected. Ladies and gents, I give you Mediocore’s The House That Romero Built. (Via Uncrate.)
* Here is a sculpture by Ludovic Levasseur called “Head.” The material it is made out of is nightmares. (Via Monster Brains.)
* Radically shifting gears (you’re welcome), here’s the poster for The Unborn, the upcoming horror movie written and directed by Dark Knight credit-holder/Blade III: Trinity impresario David S. Goyer and starring Odette Yustman’s pooper.
You know what the best thing about this poster is? Okay, fine, second-best thing? Well, you see that creepy ghost kid in the mirror? You know, the one mandated by the Osment Act of 1999, requiring the presence of at least one creepy kid in all supernatural horror movies? He’s a Holocaust victim! The word you’re looking for is “class.” (Via STYD.)
From there on out, Morrison’s rapidly intensifying crunch of information and characters starts making the book exciting in its rush forward. Ex-Monitor Nix Uotan is tossed in a room for being immune to Anti-Life, but his drawings of superhero characters remind us that even the worst revisions can be undone, and hope is possible! Two pages later a man solves a puzzle cube and villains’ skin vaporizes!
Wait – now Libra is killing people and commenting on sexual violence toward superheroines. Lex Luthor is pissed! Ok, now we’re in an evil throne room and dudes are spoiling the next issue of Batman and keeling over stone dead! That’s what you get! Shit! Now Darkseid is God! Oh fuck! Frankenstein’s quoting Milton! Wait! Now time is falling apart! The President of the United States has a gun! A hole in the sky at the hanging! Eyes in the night! Everyone on Earth is pumping their fists! Comics are suddenly flying at us and it’s like an evil version of JLA: World War III transforming into Flex Mentallo and a man has a liquid television cloud for a helmet and LIGHTNING FASTENING HIS JACKET!!
Whew! That’s the stuff right there! I mean, I’m probably setting myself up for a fall here, but now I hope this series continues to spasm inward and issue #6 is like some berserk DCU version of Poison River with scene transitions every panel, like random background characters from Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #136 bursting in screaming “THE METABONDS HAVE UNTETHERED” followed by Guy Gardner in a time vortex going “hhn” then a close-up of Batman’s groin halfway across the globe followed by supervillain heads burning; it’ll be so compressed there won’t even be room for dialogue, just selected alphabetic characters, whisking us back to the primal force of phoneme like a word balloon Lettrism, at which point Kamandi initiates the chiselling phase of Darkseid’s face.
—Jog on Final Crisis #5. I lost it at “hhn.”
You really should read the whole review. It’s pretty much everything I’d say about the book and why it’s so good (even though that Green Lantern trial scene was bobbled pretty badly by Carlos Pacheco).
* Watchmen, Watchmen everywhere: Here’s that San Diego footage you ordered. (Via Tor.)
But even though the relevant image is in the above promo and several other trailers we’ve seen already, it wasn’t until I took a look at this reshuffled trailer (via AICN) that I realized something…
You know that shot of the police and reporters around the body of Dollar Bill, with his cape stuck in the revolving door so he got shot to death? It occurred to me that that’s the first time a lot of superhero-movie viewers are going to see anything even remotely like that. For the most part, superheroes in these movies don’t die, and when the villains die they bite it in the most dramatic fashion possible. I imagine seeing a costumed superhero lying unglamorously, unheroically dead on the ground Law & Order-style will be pretty striking for some people.
* Speaking of Tor (we were a few paragraphs ago), Douglas Cohen has posted a pair of Robert E. Howard 101 articles–one for Conan and one for Kull. Come the New Year, I think I’ll be reading fewer comics and more prose, and for the past several weeks the hunger for pulp has been growing in me, so these were welcome guides.
* Strange Ink’s Sean B. reviews [REC]. Ultimately I think he’s more into it than I ended up being. I did like that ending, definitely, but it’s not something I’ve found myself haunted by since watching it.
* Speaking of Sean B., he spotted Nick Cave in our T-Shirt of the Week:
* Whoa, dig Dustin Harbin’s Godfather comic.
* Finally, compare and contrast:
DD: Here’s the conundrum on this one. And this is reflective of the world that we live in now – the world of collected editions. The R.I.P. story was always meant to play through to the end of Final Crisis – always. The thing is, we had to come up with a very complete story in “Batman R.I.P.” as it existed in its title. The reality is that the “Batman R.I.P.” story does not conclude until Final Crisis #6. There are also issues #682 and #683 of Batman that feed directly into Final Crisis #6, and we’ll have a big finale to the Batman storyline. That’s how it plays out.
But as I said, because we live in the world of collected editions, we needed a conclusion in the Batman series, so that we could collect it properly within Batman, without having to bring in segments of Final Crisis to complete the story.
NRAMA: So – fundamentally, “Batman R.I.P” did not end in Batman #681?
DD: Correct. We have the two parts that we’re in the middle of now, and they lead us into Final Crisis #6 which gives us a definite conclusion to the Batman story. That’s how Grant designed the story from the start, and that’s how the story plays out. So, the people who are looking for the big finale, the stuff that Grant was talking about – he knows how big an ending he has, because he wrote it in Final Crisis #6. That story has been so planned out that it reflects events from the pages of Final Crisis #1 in order to pull it all together.
So the Batman story has been hinted at in Final Crisis #1 – we couldn’t allude to it, because we didn’t want to play our hand too early with that. The fascinating thing about what Grant has done is that he’s telling a major story in the life of Batman while he’s telling a major event across the DC Universe with Final Crisis. And the two are linked.
NRAMA: So Final Crisis #6 is like when you’re driving on, say, I-40 and it merges with another for a while, and you get the road signs telling you that you’re on two highways at the same time…and you follow another highway out other than the one you went in on.
DD: Exactly. And Batman #682 and #683 are reflective of things that took place earlier in Final Crisis as well.
HUMPHREY: All right, settle down. Settle down. Now, before I begin the lesson, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you write your letter home, if you’re not getting your hair cut, unless you’ve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after you’ve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down onto the lower peg for you. Now,–
WYMER: Sir?
HUMPHREY: Yes, Wymer?
WYMER: My younger brother’s going out with Dibble this weekend, sir, but I’m not having my hair cut today, sir.
PUPILS: [chuckling]
WYMER: So, do I move my clothes down, or–
HUMPHREY: I do wish you’d listen, Wymer. It’s perfectly simple. If you’re not getting your hair cut, you don’t have to move your brother’s clothes down to the lower peg. You simply collect his note before lunch, after you’ve done your scripture prep, when you’ve written your letter home, before rest, move your own clothes onto the lower peg, greet the visitors, and report to Mr. Viney that you’ve had your chit signed.
—Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
Hahaha, I kid, I kid. I’m actually enjoying Batman and Final Crisis as much as any superhero comics I can remember so this is no skin off my ass whatsoever, but I’d imagine these kinds of things are frustrating for a lot of readers–my pay Rob Bricken, for example.
Then again, perhaps it’s just an expectations game. Nobody throws their box set of Lost Season Four across the room in anger because it doesn’t wrap up the story–it’s part of an ongoing series. The degree to which the final issue of Batman: R.I.P. was billed as a landmark event probably hurt DC on that score, but with superhero comics in general and Grant Morrison DC superhero comics in particular, the train keeps a-rollin’ all night long, you know? Of course, maybe a better example is if the season finale of Lost Season Four felt more like just another episode. I dunno. I like these comics, I’m not complaining!
Real Stuff
Dennis P. Eichhorn, writer
∆, Rick Altergott, Peter Bagge, Jim Blanchard, Ariel Bordeaux, Rupert Bottenberg, Chester Brown, Ivan Brunetti, Charles Burns, Howard Chackowicz, David Chelsea, Dan Clowes, David Collier, Dave Cooper, Robert L. Crabb, Lloyd Dangle, Julie Doucet, Michael Dougan, Gary Dumm, B.N. Duncan, Gene Fama, Mary Fleener, Drew Friedman, Renée French, Roberta Gregory, Sam Henderson, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Sean M. Hurley, Gerald Jablonski, Peter Kuper, Carol Lay, Jason Lutes, Kent Myers, Bernard Edward Mireault, Carel Moiseiwitsch, Terry Moore, Pat Moriarity, Joe Sacco, Seth, Leslie Sternbergh, Carol Swain, Holly Tuttle, Colin Upton, J.R. Williams, Jim Woodring, Joe Zabel, Mark Zingarelli, artists
Swifty Morales Press, 2004
208 pages
$19.95
Buy it used, and cheap, from Amazon.com
How is Denny Eichhorn not a major cult figure? I’m honestly curious, and maybe some of my older readers can fill me in, since obviously he was a big deal in ’90s altcomix culture. But I can’t remember ever discussing him or his work with any of my friends or peers; the few times I’ve brought him up in the context of being one of three writers who’s made a go of creating alternative comics without drawing them himself, alongside Alan Moore and Harvey Pekar, I’ve gotten funny looks. Heck, I didn’t even really know what I was talking about, not until I read this collection. And shit the bed, I sort of feel like I need to physically pass it around to all of my friends until they’re all on my wavelength. To quote The Big Lebowski, “I won’t say ‘a hero,’ ’cause what’s a hero?”–but Denny Eichhorn is a goddamn inspiration.
I think the great trick of this collection of some of Eichhorn’s sex/drugs/violence-soaked autobio strips–drawn by the above host of collaborators, all of whom seem perfectly at home with their material, which is really a testament to them and Eichhorn both–is editor and publisher Caleb Wright’s chronological arrangement of them. That way, we get to know Eichhorn as a child first, and by the time his most outré misadventures head our way, it’s too late to detach ourselves from him. So sure, it’s funny to watch Peter Bagge draw Eichhorn getting so freaked out by his first Mad magazine he pukes, or Pat Moriarty showing a mix-up at a pharmacy that leads to young Denny being sold a pack of condoms for a science project, or early-vintage Dave Cooper (already a dazzlingly slick illustrator) presenting the story of how the cops broke the crazy next-door neighbor’s dick free of the glass bottle it was struck in. (There will be blood.) Even in the first serious bouts of violence we see, teen- and college-age Eichhorn is in the right; when a double-page Joe Zabel/Gary Dumm spread shows us exactly what happens when Eichhorn smashes a glass bottle into the face of his attacker, or J.R. Williams shows the toe of Eichhorn’s boot literally splattered with the remains of his assailant’s eyeball, you almost can’t help but cheer even as you recoil, laugh with triumph even as you shake your head with disbelief. It’s like the autobiographical comics equivalent of the climax of Rambo.
So when you finally start seeing hints of how Eichhorn’s tendency toward illicit behavior can bring out the worst in other people, and vice versa, it becomes a lot harder to write him off. Yes, there’s a way of looking at things where tipping off the part-time prostitute who’s hosted a week-long gangbang of the entire freshman class of Eichhorn’s university that the cops were on to her was the right thing to do–but this more or less ensured a continued life of abusive neglect for the baby she plies with cola and calls “Shithead” when she’s not fingercuffing the football team. There’s no reason to believe that the string of sex workers with whom Eichhorn has off-the-books dalliances are anything but the carefree lust-for-life types they (and Eichhorn!) appear to be–until one turns out to be the accomplice of a pair of serial sex murderers (and a serial killer in her own right), and another sticks a gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger mere hours after sticking Denny’s cock in her mouth and pulling his. That last strip may contain the most memorable cartooning in the entire anthology, which is really saying something amid the Saccos and Colliers and Chelseas and Woodrings and Doucets: Carel Moiseiwitsch’s deep blacks and deranged linework evoke Rory Hayes as the soon-to-be-suicidal woman literally attacks Eichhorn’s genitals, and caps things off with the post-orgasmic entreaty “REMEMBER ME!”–no narrative caption set-up, no establishing shots, just the woman’s demonic face.
This is not to say that it’s all eye-gouging and self-destruction. A lot of Eichhorn’s doping, drinking, and fucking are perfectly delightful for everyone involved, and a lot more are embarrassing but hella funny in hindsight. You’ve gotta love a book that includes a story about a dominatrix that ends with the sentence “Then it hit me: I shoulda pissed on his head!” and whose genuine, if off-kilter, father-son bonding strip involves giving your dad weed. It’s the gestalt of the thing that makes it so memorable, and enough to put you off comics about the awkward night Brooklyn Hipster had that one time forever. It fits right in with Boy’s Club, the Manly Movie Mamajamas, and other vicarious portraits of the less savory side of masculinity pushed to its illogical conclusion. If I could get 20 copies of this I’d give them away as stocking stuffers.
1) Jenny stages a guerrilla fashion show at the funeral; models dance on the coffin
2) Rufus returns home from comforting the bereaved and strums a sensitive ballad on his acoustic guitar nevermind, that actually happened
2) Wallace Shawn kisses the bride to the tune of the Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire”
3) While snuggling with the unconscious Chuck, Blair whacks him off
Fantagraphics has posted a preview of The Comics Journal #295, featuring a cover interview with Brian K. Vaughan conducted by yours truly. I hope you purchase and enjoy it.
* A judge in Australia has ruled that Tijuana bible-style imagery involving the Simpsons kids constitutes child pornography. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) In light of the Christopher Handey case here in the States, it’s important to note and loudly decry these kinds of rulings–particularly since even in the comics commentariat there are prominent, impassioned, and woefully misguided voices who applaud such decisions and say they feel oppressed by those of us who rightly recognize them not just as the first step toward potential legal action against everything from A Child’s Life to A Contract with God to Blankets, but as bad, freedom-curtailing rulings in their own right.
* The live action film adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s excellent We3–a comic that had no small impact on my becoming a vegetarian–will be helmed by Kung Fu Panda director John Stevenson, according to produce/wheeler-dealer Don Murphy.
* A trailer has leaked for McG’s post-apocalyptic continuation of the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation, and for now you can still see it here. I had less than no interest in Terminator 3: This One Has Tits and even less interest in anything else McG has ever directed, but the second you throw Christian Bale and some Mad Max imagery into the fairly entertaining Terminator mythos, you’ve got my attention, I’ll admit.
* And if you’re willing to jump through some iTunes hoops, here’s the San Diego Comic Con Watchmen footage.
* Good reviews of good comics part one: Jog reviews Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal.
* Good reviews of good comics part two: Tom Spurgeon reviews Brian Ralph’s Daybreak.
The other day I praised Marvel for how together it is in terms of getting all its books on the same page for its meta-story-driving events. But as you might glean from posts like Marc-Oliver Frisch’s regarding the preview solicits for Dark Reign, the next big overarching plotline–or even, perhaps, from Marvel’s October sales chart–there are a couple of massive potential pitfalls to this storytelling model. First of all, as I alluded to earlier, the big story could be (and, for the most part, has been) stupid. Secondly, I think that as exciting as having one giant unified meta-story can be for fans, the problem lies where the rubber hits the road–when you need to take a million different characters and storylines and filter them through that giant unified meta-story.* Not every superhero concept, writer, or artist is a good fit with Skrulls doing the Cylon thing. And even when there’s not a direct Secret Invasion crossover going on, virtually everything Marvel publishes now reflects the Brian Michael Bendis brand of superheroics, i.e. superheroes as seen through the lens of crime, black ops, and/or the military-industrial complex. That’s gonna work fine with some characters and creators but less so with others. Even ones that do lend themselves to that tone are being potentially cut off from exploring other fruitful avenues. For example, right now New Avengers is prepping for a storyline involving the magical supervillain Dormammu, Doctor Strange’s archnemesis. This could be a psychedelic freakout like Promethea or Seven Soldiers: Zatanna, it could be Lovecraftian, it could be an old-school Ditko magic rumble, the narrative could be fractured and fractalled and messed with in a way appropriate to magic, but instead, I imagine will read like all the other down-and-dirty superhero comics Bendis has written, only with magic. I’m not sure that’s a great idea. It’s worth noting that Bendis, a Sean T. Collins fave who has written a solid shelf’s worth of very good superhero comics I’m happy to own, has already done a “down-and-dirty” magic story, Daredevil: Decalogue. That “magic via crime” spin led to some genuinely frightening, weird, and memorable comics. But the shock of the new is gone, replaced by the sense that it’s one way or the highway, and I think Marvel’s suffering for it.
* In a way, Marvel theoretically has a leg up on DC in this regard, for the same reason that Marvel’s Universe has always felt like a more cohesive, common-sense grouping than DC’s: Virtually every important Marvel character and concept was created by the same dozen or so guys–Golden/Silver Agers like Simon, Everett, Kirby, Lee, Ditko, and Romita Sr., plus a few later folks like Wein, Claremont, Miller, Bendis and so forth. By contrast, you could come up with at least that many names integral to the creation of the Big Seven Justice Leaguers alone! But that’s not to say that every character in the Marvel Universe can comfortably fit in the same story; when you look at it that way, I wonder if Marvel isn’t now experiencing in micro (characters from a recognizably uniform universe nonetheless suffering when forced into line up and march in unison) what the DCU has long exhibited in macro (characters from a huge number of writers, artists, and even companies pooled into the same sprawling universe and looking kind of weird next to each other oftentimes).
* Bettie Page is in a coma. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Page a while back and it’s one of the high points of my professional life. Not only was in-her-prime Bettie a contender for the title of “sexiest woman in human history,” but her sexiness was almost antithetical to the antiseptic, angry, emaciated “sexiness” that is today’s norm. I wish her nothing but health and happiness.
* They’re gonna make a Bourne sequel based on a non-Bourne Robert Ludlum novel, The Parsifal Mosaic. Based on the description, there are a couple of ways they could go with this, depending on what aspects of the set-up they choose to emphasize.
* Speaking of Bourne, Jon Hastings responds to my lengthy post comparing the Bourne and nu-Bond series. I find that even while I agree with many of his specific observations, the conclusions he draws from them–that the action scenes are hard to parse, that there’s no sense of space in them–are more or less the opposite of mine. But it’s a free country, no matter what those dastardly CIA types are up to. (Also, Rambo is my favorite movie of any kind so far this year, Jon.)
* This riff on the technologically ensured inescapability of bad news about the economy reminded me a lot of the bit in World War Z about “Land Warrior” communications link-ups between the soldiers and the effect that has on morale when your fellow soldiers start getting eaten by zombies. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
* Speaking of Coates, he spots and participates in an ongoing multiblog debate regarding the use of torture in…World of Warcraft. I noticed this back when Bruce Baugh blogged about it–the deliberate slaughter of non-combatants, as well–but to me it just scanned as “well, yeah, you’re playing a member of an evil death cult.” Some players seem to hold that point of view as well, but others are upset about it on moral, storytelling, and/or gameplay grounds varyingly. Bruce?
* I think it’s pretty amusing that Rich Johnston is treating the fact that writers of event tie-in titles must conform to the wishes of the writer of the main event like it’s news, especially when his specific contentions regarding the difficulty therein are being expressly rejected. But at least he’s running the correction, which is more than he did with me when I was administrator of Wizard’s message board and he wrongfully accused us of banning him, then promised a retraction when I busted my hump figuring out why he couldn’t access the board and fixing the problem for him, a retraction he never issued.
Kramers Ergot 6
Sammy Harkham, editor
Alvin Buenaventura, assistant editor
Carlos Gonzales, Shary Boyle, Matthew Thurber, Jason T. Miles, Andrew J. Wright, Sammy Harkham, Fabio Viscogliosi, C.F., Dan Zettwoch, Mark Smeets, Marc Bell, Bald Eagles, Chris C. Cilla, Martin Cendreda, Paper Rad, Jerry Moriarty, Gary Panter, Suihô Tagawa, Vanessa Davis, Souther Salazar, James McShane, Shary Boyle, Jeff Ladouceur, Ron Regé Jr., Elvis Studio (Helge Reumann & Xavier Robel), Tom Gauld, John Porcellino, writers/artists
Chris Ware, Tim Hensley, Paul Karasik, contributors
Buenaventura Press/Avodah Books, 2006
336 pages
$34.95
Can I just say how much I love how this volume of Sammy Harkham’s landmark anthology series opens? Credits pages in big, no-nonsense, all-caps letters alternate with splash page pin-ups and blown-up panels from the strips to come. It’s like the book has an opening credit sequence. I coincidentally paged through it at the same time as listening to “Speed of Life,” the opening track on David Bowie’s album Low, and it was as delightful a comics-reading experience as I’ve had all year.
That said, this may be the least immediately impactful post-volume-four Kramers. In some ways that’s to be expected: The previous volumes, particularly 4, were so groundbreaking that at a certain point you kind of just have to stand there and say “wow, we’re standing on the ground we broke a while ago, how about that?” As a matter of fact, I think this is the farthest-out volume, least “alt,” most “art/underground” collection of the three–there’s a degree to which it takes for granted that you’re willing to slug it out there on the borderland between comics and fine art and tugs you deep into the realm of the non-narrative and non sequitur.
For the most part, that’s a fine decision. There’s rough stuff to ponder from Bald Eagles, whose self-pitying, society excoriating autobio strip is transformed into something of a sci-fi fantasia by art so maniacally detailed it makes Geof Darrow look like John Porcellino, and from Chris Cilla, who serves up a sordid, coprophilia-tinged story of undercover cops gone very very bad. There’s stunning color work to be found in the rainbow psychedelia of Shary Boyle’s series of disturbingly sexualized 18th-century illustration riffs, in the green-on-pink shimmerings of Matthew Thurber’s goofball saga of a high school overtaken by a Mayan human-sacrifice cult, and in the lush pastels of World War II-era manga-ka Suihô Tagawa’s deceptively adorable funny-animal war propaganda. There’s the de rigeur contribution from the reliably hilarious Paper Rad, a literal interpretation of “Kramer’s Ergot” that made this Seinfeld fan laugh out loud. Competing takes on minimalism–C.F.’s explosively dynamic sci-fantasy and John Porcellino’s suburban haiku–bookend the collection. This is all exciting work, bursting with visual vitality and a certain distaste for the rules. It’s mostly loud and it’ll get you funny looks when you read it on the train (trust me), but it’s also very intelligent, rarely if ever shock for shock’s sake.
However, I do feel like there’s a higher quotient of work here that doesn’t quite, uh, work. I’ve seen enough of the oft-anthologized donkey strips of Fabio Viscogliosi and Fervler & Razzle strips of Souther Salazar to last me for quite some time. Bald Eagles and Jason T. Miles aside, most of the autobio work here–from James McShane, Vanessa Davis, and Ron Regé Jr.–works any better here than it does in the other anthologies you might have seen it in lately. Marc Bell’s stream-of-consciousness illustration/text combos just make me wish he was making more of his hysterically funny, rewardingly weird comic strips instead. I think the formal strength of Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo strips reprinted here is diluted somewhat by being surrounded by so much similar material, so much illogic’n’markmaking. On the flipside, the more straightforward strips–Tom Gauld’s latest “two lonely coworkers in a weird environment” strip, Harkham’s tale of discontent in the shtetl, an emo little thing from Martin Cendreda, another story of mild hijinks in a midwestern church that occasionally uses diagrams from Dan Zettwoch–feel drowned out by the visual cacophony of your Bells and Elvis Studios and the monumental fine-art splash pages of your Boyles and Jerry Moriartys.
But I tend to be quite forgiving to anthologies that serve up a selection of inconsistent but thrilling-at-its-best work, and in that sense Kramers Ergot 6 is no exception. Indeed, the entire Kramers project seems to me to be one of juxtaposition, a when-worlds-collide affair. Not all those worlds are going to be equally interesting, but that’s fine when the ones that are are so rich and rewarding of your comics-thinking time and attention.
* Is it just me, or does the new, numerically enhanced trailer for the Friday the 13th remake (via Jason Adams) deliberately evoke this YouTube montage of every killing from the entire series?
* A collection of David B.’s dream comics? Where did this come from?
* Another thing about the end of Secret Invasion: So now Iron Man, title character of the hugely popular and effervescent film starring Robert Downey Jr., is not just a privacy-invading, gulag-running tyrant, but an incompetent one to boot, who is now staggering out of office in ignominy? That’s one way to play it, I guess. I’m not one to assert real-world allegories, but if you had to pick one real-world political figure with that basic career trajectory…let’s just say it’s not a person with whom I’d align the lead character in Marvel Studios’ main movie franchise.
* That being said, whatever problems I may have with the multi-year Civil War/Initiative/World War Hulk/Secret Invasion/Dark Reign uber-event as a story or as a vehicle for likable characters whose core concepts remain intact, I’m impressed as hell by it as an editorial/organizational/marketing mechanism. If you’re the kind of person who’s interested in the status quo of a shared corporate superhero universe in and of itself, I’d imagine it’s rather exciting to see all the ducks in a row on such a consistent basis.
* Hey, look, a new Doves album is on the way. I like this band a great deal. (Via Pfork.)
* Apparently I also like this band:
* Now here’s something that College Sean T. Collins would have paid money to see: A French prankster played Mario Kart in real traffic. This is the result. Just wait till you see the banana peels. (Via Topless Robot.)
* Look at the cover for Antony & the Johnson’s upcoming album The Crying Light. (Via Ryan Catbird.)
My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down
David Heatley, writer/artist
Pantheon, September 2008
128 pages, hardcover
$24.95
The prospect of reviewing these intensely autobiographical comics by David Heatley is a daunting one because there seems to be no way to do so without reviewing David Heatley. Oddly, I’ve never really felt that way about his work before when I’ve encountered it. I thought his surreal “Overpeck” serial in MOME was powerful–as good as his dream comics might have been had he not labeled them “dream comics” and thus neutered their disquieting illogic. I’m also on the record as a great admirer of his “Sex History” strip as it appeared in Kramers Ergot 5 (the 48-panel grids were a brilliant way to convey such an overwhelming amount of uncomfortable information), and a defender of the “Portrait of My Mom” and “Portrait of My Dad” strips that appeared in Ivan Brunetti’s second Anthology of Graphic Fiction (they displayed Heatley’s underappreciated sense of humor and comedic build-up within each sub-strip). In none of these cases did I feel like I was evaluating Heatley as a person.
But My Brain put me in that uncomfortable position, perhaps–almost certainly, in fact–because my reaction to it was so viscerally negative. There are plenty of comics I’ve read that left me thinking “that should have been done differently”; this is the first I’ve read in a long time that made me think “this shouldn’t have been done at all” (and wasn’t written by Jeph Loeb). The primary culprit? “Race History,” a black-and-white (no pun intended) companion piece to “Sex History,” detailing Heatley’s relationships, however slight, with various black people he’s known. I’m trying to think of how to put this…there’s probably a way to take this idea and not make it just as dehumanizing and racist as it seems it would be, just as dehumanizing and racist as the behavior and mentality one assumes it’s designed to expose and excoriate, but boy howdy did Heatley not find that way! There’s something almost literally nauseating in this interminable onslaught of alternating bigotry and white liberal guilt. The point where my disgust for the strip became insurmountable was a scene where young David is sleeping over at a friend’s house, and the kid’s mother helps take care of David’s stomachache. “Try laying on yo belly. It should settle yo stomach down,” she says, in dialect reminiscent of late-’70s Marvel Comics street toughs, before David thinks “I forgot she’s a doctor.” And blam! It struck me how disgraceful it is to take this human being, who has a family, who worked the crazy hours and racked up the crazy student loans and god knows what else that all doctors do, reduced to a “blackcent”-spouting cameo in some guy’s ungodly long (seriously, at one point I closed the book and saw how many more black-trimmed pages of the strip I had left and my draw literally dropped) narcissistic display of how he’s spent his entire life looking at black people as being black before people.
I think the grossest thing about the strip, the part that prevents me from saying “well, he’s just cataloguing his own faults, he’s aware of how awful this is” is that even when his relationships with black people are healthy, mutually enjoyable ones, Heatley still seems to view them as trophies to prove his enlightenment. Every positive interaction with a stranger, every move to a black neighborhood that goes well, every friendship, every professor who helped him–it’s all the same as when he joined the Free Mumia movement, or the truly insufferable album (and sometimes movie/tv) reviews peppered throughout the strip where he proves how able he is to appreciate African-American culture. His review of the series The Wire has got to be the ne plus ultra of the genre:
One of the greatest works of art I’ve experienced in any medium. It unfolds with the kind of masterful pacing, sense of truth, reality, and tragic inevitability usually found in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. It’s certainly the only TV show to alter my race conscious. I notice certain young black men who would have been invisible to me before, hidden behind the screen of my own ignorance and fear. I’d like to think I know something of their stories now. Awareness and compassion by themselves don’t change the world, but they’re a start. Speaking of which, did you know it’s Barack Obama’s favorite show, too?
This right next to a strip where he reacts to some jerky lady on the subway smacking him with her purse by coming home and beating a chair with his umbrella while shouting “YOU FUCKING NIGGER BITCH!” This incident just happened, too!
What I’m trying to say is that Heatley has loads more work to do on himself before he’s able to tackle this subject with anything remotely approaching insight or a worthwhile perspective. By contrast, when the original “Sex History” strip ends, you think to yourself, “Well, he’s aware that he’s behaved pretty ridiculously, and he’s trying much harder to be better about it.” Meanwhile, it’s not a “Woman History” strip where every female human he’s ever met is reduced to their primary and secondary sex characteristics, but a strip about his sex life–that’s a naturally proscriptive framework that I don’t think says anything untoward about how he views the people with whom he was sexually involved, male or female. You might have specific problems with how the focus is almost always on his pleasure rather than theirs, but that aside, the way he depicts sex–a combination of embarrassment, fun, awkwardness, beauty, predation, squalor, pleasure, depression, eroticism–maps pretty neatly to the way I imagine most of us have experienced it over the course of our lives. But “Race History”…I’m sorry, but if the word “nigger” occurs to you in anger, maybe it’s not your place to talk about which members of the Wu-Tang Clan had the best solo records?
This sort of retrospective inability to see that personal flaws require more than mere acknowledgment to be overcome gradually starts to bleed out into the other strips I once reacted more favorably to. The version of “Sex History” that appears here has been famously self-censored, placing neon pink bars across any images of penetration or ejaculation, and most erect penises in general. (It’s sort of like Greedo shooting first, only here, no one shoots at all.) A one-page epilogue added to the strip seems to reveal the rationale: Heatley has decided that his use of pornography qualifies as sex addiction, and through the help of a 12-step program he no longer uses porn or masturbates. Presumably, he’s neutering the strip to bring it in line with his newfound enlightenment. Now, this defeats the purpose of the strip, which is to be “apocalyptically revealing” as I once put it, and it’s sexist and hypocritical in an MPAA way, since you still see plenty of bush and titties. But worst of all, the 12-step higher-power imagery that pops up here and elsewhere–in the “Self-Portrait” strips that decorate the covers, the end of “Race History,” and the birth of Heatley’s second child in “Family History”–lends the whole affair a scent of sanctimony. Heatley has opened his life to God, God is literally cradling him in the palm of his hand, and however racist and sexually messed-up he may be, everything’s okay. But everything’s not okay! The first step is admitting you have a problem, but that’s only the first step! I know, I know, you can argue that Heatley is aware of all of this, that every moment of oblivious self-contradiction or narcissism or bigotry is committed to paper with full knowledge of exactly what it means. That’s fine, that’s fair, that’s probably actually true. That’s good enough for David Heatley the person, but it’s not good enough for David Heatley the artist. I need more.
* There’s a good chance that the excellent Batman #682, which runs through about two-thirds of Batman’s career in the space of 22 story pages, will get overlooked because DC created the impression that Grant Morrison’s Batman run ended with last week’s (!) #681. Douglas Wolk annotates the issue so that maybe that won’t happen.
* I saw this Steven Grant essay about how bad comics stunk in 2008 linked here and there, and I’m sorry but it just seems patently ridiculous to me. Aside from his cockamamie Comic Foundry-style conflation of celebrity with artistic success, anyone who argues that only two Best Of-worthy comics were made in 2008 simply either was not paying attention or has horrible taste.
* Viggo Mortensen talks to AICN about possibly being involved with The Hobbit 2: Imladris Boogaloo or whatever it’s going to be called, revealing the existence of a neat-sounding outtake from the original LotR films that showed Aragorn and Arwen back when they first met. (Via TORN.)
* Ta-Nehisi Coates on season five of The Wire (SPOILERS AHOY):
I thought [the notion that The Wire avoided agitprop] was less true in Season Five, when a clear ideology did emerge, but it wasn’t left or right. The ideology was nihilism. Now, nihilism was always at work in The Wire, but at the end, I felt like it just became too much. It felt like a desire to show futility of systems became the author of plot, not character. I thought that the press angle was poorly done–and saying “Yeah well it’s reporters who are objecting” is a weak, ad-hominem defense.
I thought the serial killer turn–particularly the way Freeman embraced it–was hastily executed. I most disliked the ease with which Marlo took over the city’s drug trade. I even hated the manner of Omar’s death–not that he was killed by Kinard, but that he was basically brought back into the plot, simply to be killed. He really served no major plot point. It all felt deeply cynical.
Oh, MAN, is all that refreshing to hear from somebody else, particularly because my past attempts to point out very specific plot-based flaws in the show, including three of the ones Coates notes, were greeted with sneering derision. As I’ve said before, it’s no coincidence that most of the writing about The Wire you see online these days comes from political bloggers, so it’s nice to see one–a liberal who grew up in inner-city Baltimore, no less–basically tell me I’m not crazy. However, I do disagree with Coates’s contention that the show, and season five specifically, was nihilistic. Nihilists believe in nothing, but it seems pretty clear that David Simon believes in David Simon, and in David Simon-esque figures generally.
* Finally, rest in peace, Paul Benedict. You were just as God made you, sir.
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Here is my thought regarding Secret Invasion #8:
The first official act of the Marvel Universe’s President Barack Obama is to name Norman “The Green Goblin” Osborn the leader of the Avengers.
Way to tap the zeitgeist!
Wow.
The degree to which I’ve connected with this song over the past few days has frightened and depressed me.
* Here’s two minutes of footage from the Lost season five premiere.
Lost is a good television show. (Via AICN.)
* Jog reviews Powr Mastrs Vol. 2. I’m not sold on the idea that this comic is “friendly”–I find it really skin-crawlingly creepy. Not that I’m complaining!
* Amazing Spider-Man: Sins Past author J. Michael Straczynski calls his screenplay adaptation of Max Brooks’s World War Z a Bourne Identity-style thriller. So, you know, there’s that.
* If you have an iPhone you can download the comic-book adaptation of Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always, by Kris Oprisko and Gabriel Hernandez. I rather liked it, especially Hernandez’s art.
* Meet the coconut crab, a former resident of Guam that is moving to my nightmares as of tonight. (“Thanks,” Sam Costello.)
* Austin English asks Tom Neely 20 Questions about his comics and his process.
* Speaking of Tom, he participated in a Giant Robot art show for which he drew portraits of his favorite writers and artists on post-it notes. Here’s but a few, and there are much more at the link:
Three great tastes that taste great together. If you had told Sean T. Collins of 1992 that one day Weiland would join Guns n’ Roses and cover Nirvana, he’d have given you the flannel off his back.
