God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home
—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…
Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.
All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.
“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.
“A season of rest,” he repeated.
“What does that mean?”
“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.
Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.
“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.
“What, Stuart?”
“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”
She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:
I finally watched George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead. I wish I hadn’t. Holy cow, was this movie bad. Thrilless horror, laughless black comedy, toothless satire, pointless sociopolitical ruminations, directionless plotting, unlikable characters that make the Cloverfield gang seem deep, laughable dialogue filled with puns (fucking PUNS!), special effects that make you wonder why they couldn’t just hire Tom Savini and his squibs, a documentary conceit that adds nothing but an extra level of cheesy phoniness to the already cheesy and phony script, freshman-year baloney about the media and the camera eye and blah blah blah that you’ve heard a billion times before in much better movies…I’m honestly at a loss to try to describe just how many things Romero got wrong in making this movie, from doing a mockumentary without improvised dialogue on down. And that ending! Just coming right out and saying what Night had the balls to simply imply. Awful, stupid, shockingly tedious, not scary at all. Don’t buy it, don’t rent it, don’t watch it, don’t sully your feelings about the other Dead movies with it. Just…don’t.
PS: Post-movie conversation that was a million times more entertaining than anything in this nothing-to-say movie:
THE MISSUS (arrives home): What did I miss?
SEAN: I watched a terrible, terrible movie.
THE MISSUS: Oh yeah? What?
SEAN: Diary of the Dead.
THE MISSUS: Diarrhea of the Dead? Why would you think that’d be any good?
‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’
—–
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.
—–
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.
—–
This peculiar linking-together of opposites — knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism — is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society. The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
This book beggars review. It’s an account of the great young cartoonist Anders Nilsen’s relationship with his fiancee Cheryl Weaver, through a series of varyingly told vignettes about the trips they took together or apart. Postcards they sent to each other are reproduced; a long letter from Nilsen to his little sister recounting a disastrous camping trip the couple took is printed in its handwritten entirety; there’s a three-page interlude about the couple getting stranded in a New Jersey parking lot on Christmas and, one infers, getting engaged shortly thereafter; there’s a photo essay about their trip to the Angouleme festival in France and a humor comic about their ill-fated first attempt to get there. Then we discover from Nilsen’s illustrated journal that Cheryl has been diagnosed with cancer, and the true meaning of the book’s metaphorical title, cribbed from J.R.R. Tolkien, becomes all too apparent. The comic that concludes the volume, perhaps the loveliest Nilsen has ever drawn, offers the final proof that the titular request has been met in the heartbreaking negative.
On the strictly technical side of things, Nilsen is one of his generation’s finest cartoonists, so part of what is so impressive about the book is how much of his comics’ pointillist emotional power comes through even via mostly non-comics media. By selecting a rigid parameter for the material, “stories about problematic travel experiences” (a theme he reveals in an afterword to have planned to develop even prior to Cheryl’s illness and death), Nilsen paradoxically conveys a sense of the totality of the couple’s relationship: thoughtful, humorous, shot through with both the thrill of adventure and discovery and the longing for the comforts of home, and one another. While Nilsen’s companion Ignatz series The End deals more in the gargantuan, even frightening feeling of grief and desperation engendered by having his and Cheryl’s life together suddenly yanked away, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow‘s mood is gentler–more focused on love and how it changes when the loved one is gone–but no less profoundly moving.
Personally, the way I deal with death is to focus on the fact that the life I shared with that person was a good one, a happy one, and that while it is now over, that goodness and happiness remains in my memory. But what happens when that shared life was, by any reasonable standard, far too brief? What to do then? I don’t know. Recent events have forced me to confront this question and I still don’t know. Reading this book has helped, though, and I hope you’ll forgive me if really all I have to say about it is “thank you.”
A big reason I wanted to go to Comic-Con International in San Diego this year was solely for the Bowie sketchbook. While I’d hoped to get some superhero artists in the book for the first time, a combination of work duties keeping me away from their official signings and the fact that most of them charge an arm and a leg and have months-long wait-lists for commissions put the kibosh on that. But I did manage to round up a small but elite squad of altcomix luminaries to put their stamp on the wild-eyed boy from Freecloud. Let’s see how they did, shall we?
Mark Todd: Pirate Bowie makes a comeback! Whoever’s in charge of marketing Bowie’s iconography, please pay attention to how many hip young artists gravitate to this one-off look.
Jaime Hernandez: Ah yes, the one you’ve been waiting for.
Mario Hernandez: All three cartooning Hernandez Brothers are in my book! I’ll tell you this–from my position on the opposite side of the table, looking at this upside-down, it was really, really difficult to figure out what Mario was drawing until he finally flipped it over to draw the head.
Johnny Ryan: Lesser men of my acquaintance have been too timid to approach Johnny for their sketchbooks, given his usual MO. Look what you’re missing, wimps!
Jim Woodring: Another freaking giant of comics, another relentless self-deprecator. Man, you created Frank and your Bowie looks just fine. Go easy on yourself.
Jordan Crane: One of my oldest acquaintances in comics and the guy directly responsible in many ways for my involvement in them, Jordan represented two firsts for the sketchbook: He was the first to draw Bowie’s pre-stardom Mod look, and the first to shit-talk other sketches. Which ones? That’s a secret I’ll take to my grave.
Nuclear bombs can accomplish a lot of things, but exploding so hard that magic exists isn’t one of them.
* My bud Rick Marshall at MTV’s Splash Page talks with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator (and Xeric Foundation founder) Peter Laird about the possibility of new live-action/CGI Turtles movies. I don’t really care about that all that much, but I was interested in what Laird had to say about the original TMNT movie, quite the post-Burton-Batman cultural touchstone for yours truly. I haven’t watched it in ages but I remember it being a good-looking film for what it was, in terms of things like lighting and the costumes, and Laird echoes that.
* Also at Splash Page, Mike Mignola lets loose with a steady stream of guffawing backhanded compliments for Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy movies.
* Last week’s “Confessional” installment of Tom Spurgeon’s regular reader-participation feature Five for Friday, featuring twenty-five questions total from five different categories about nearly every comics-related topic under the sun (and some non-comics stuff too), was a real doozy to answer. Or so I thought, because I am an ignoramus and didn’t read the part that said you were only supposed to answer one question from each of the five five-question categories. Oh well, you can read all my answers here. And I don’t even feel so bad, because in misreading the topic I’m in the company of such comics luminaries as Paul Pope, Brandon Graham, and Richard Starkings.
* Douglas Wolk annotates Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins’s Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge #2. Kolins is easily the comics pro with whose name mine most often gets mixed up–our first names are monosyllabic and begin with an S, our last names sound exactly alike, and in many company email systems my address starts with “sco,” adding to the confusion. However, only one of us drew Weather Wizard blowing up someone’s torso with a miniature tornado.
* Ian Garrick Mason at Sans Everything notes the similarity between the United States’ current justifications for torture and those of the original Man of Steel, Josef Stalin.
* Finally (and with a little help from yours truly), Aeron Alfrey at Monster Brains reveals the origin of this evocative image…
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Kaela Graham, Sophie Crumb, Nate Neal, Ray Fenwick, Olivier Schrauwen, Dash Shaw, Tom Kaczynski, Al Columbia, Jon Vermilyea, Derek Van Gieson, Killoffer, Sara Edward-Corbett, David B., Paul Hornschemeier, writers/artists
I’m not a big underground comics person, particularly today’s derivatives thereof. Too much of it feels like schtick to me: using “th’ ” instead of “the,” bigfoot characters smiling and waving at you and saying “hiya!”, funny animals fuckin’…I dunno, maybe this is how people who are sick of superheroes feel about capes and masks and punching–that it’s just going through the motions while not really saying anything about anything. It’s mostly not for me, though there are those who can make it work by blowing it out into the ionosphere of savagery (Rory Hayes) or through trailblazing and raw, restless chops (Crumb). Its imitators have an even tougher go of it with me–there aren’t a lot of Marc Bells out there, you know?
Last time out with Mome, I thought I was starting to detect and undergroundward drift, and the recent announcement that Gilbert Shelton seemed to confirm that suspicion. So I was all frowny-faced when I read the first comics contribution to this issue, from Nate Neal, “Whadda grade ‘A’ maroon I been! All that pissin’ and moanin’ I do about the world goin’ to shit…” says title character Tender Henderson. It’s enough to send you screaming for your Big Brother and the Holding Company record. But suddenly Neal shifts gears to a finely observed relationship comic, and even if you’ve seen this sort of thing before, we’re clearly back in the far less hammy, frequently more rewarding territory of contemporary artcomix.
That’s where I’d prefer Mome to stay, and for the most part that’s where it is here. For the first time in a while there are a number of comics included that fail to make much of an impression one way or another, but the winners are real doozies. David B. contributes yet another rhapsodic blend of history and fantasy with his tale of sex, violence, and religious zealotry “The Drum Who Fell in Love.” Olivier Schrauwen, Al Columbia, and Dash Shaw all discomfited me mightily with their astute use of silent, nightmarish strangeness. Kaczynski is really on a roll with his examinations of modern life’s nuisances-cum-perils, focusing this time on the pervasiveness of noise. Killoffer and Jon Vermilyea each serve up a different blend of gross-out humor and disturbing violence, both capping them off with killer, laugh-out-loud final panels. And let’s be honest with ourselves, any place you can get new work from David B. and Killoffer between one set of covers is the kind of place you want to be.
* This is the best idea the comics blogosphere as such has had in ages: Sandy Bilus at I Love Rob Liefeld tells the story of Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman in eleven panels, one per issue so far. It works! (Via Douglas Wolk.)
* G.I. Joe movie producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura opens his mouth and a veritable ocean of stupid pours out. Jiminy Christmas, they take my favorite toy line from when I was a kid, cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander, and the movie is still going to royally eat it. (Via Topless Robot, who, for their sins, compile some of the choicest idiocy.)
* Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk apparently talked to DC Comics about doing a limited series. He’s also friends with David “Kabuki” Mack. That’s all I got.
* Eve Tushnet writes on abortion in horror, and discovers a surprisingly underutilized approach thereto. Worth a read even if (as is likely) you disagree with where Eve’s coming from on the issue, since her approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive (which is something I could stand to see more of in horror writing, as a matter of fact).
* Rich Juzwiak and Gabe Delahaye chat about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s anti-facist proto-torture-porn, er, classic?, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom.
* This week’s installment of Awesome Movie Poster Friday over at Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl is all about VHS box art, and needless to say, it’s de-gorgeous.
I meant to link to this yesterday, and you’ve probably seen it already anyway, but the wonderful publisher (and occasional patron of none other than Sean T. Collins) Top Shelf is having a terrific end-of-summer sale, wherein many of their books are marked down significantly and some are reduced to just three bucks! Click here and shop.
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College is the time in everyone’s life when maximum personal freedom meets minimum personal responsibility. Classes and grades notwithstanding, there’s really nothing to stop you from doing pretty much whatever you want, whenever you want, in a parentless, highly sexed world where you are generally rewarded for following your bliss. I mean, at least this was how it was when you were a film studies major. It also seems to be how it is for the art students who populate Wet Moon, Ross Campbell’s languid goth soap opera. As is the case with those heady times before you’ve picked a major, or perhaps toward the end of your four years when you’ve basically completed all your requirements and have maybe four hours of classes every seven days, the kids in Wet Moon seem to neither know nor care where they’re going, simply soaking in the atmosphere of aimlessness. I can’t remember the last time I read a comic this visually (and aurally–the dialogue is spot-on) ambitious while having so little an idea of where that ambition was eventually going to take me. I don’t know how you’d feel about it, but I’m loving the experience. For one thing, it allows Campbell’s art to shine almost as an end in itself. It’s not just that his line is lovely or that his character designs are each unique and memorable or that his characters are basically all super-sexy in this delightfully slatternly way, though all these things are true; he also makes very smart choices in terms of choreography, body language, and pacing that really stick. When lead character Chloe accidentally mispronounces a pair of words in the middle of an argument, the look of self-irritation on her face is pricelessly accurate. There’s a great sex scene where the interplay of insecurity and self-confidence among young people is conveyed deftly and appealingly, but Campbell can also deflate his characters’ romantic presentations, as when he transforms Chloe’s memory of getting dumped by her beautiful ex-boyfriend Vincent into an over-the-top parody of goth sentimentality. And then there are random-ass scenes like some sort of reverie/dream sequence/I don’t know what involving a character drinking orange juice out of the carton, wandering into the street, and rolling one eye up into her head. What a weird, addictive series this is.
* Related: John Harrison, director of the upcoming Barker adaptation Book of Blood, refers to the film as more character-driven than splatteriffic. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* Matthew Perpetua links to an old Hard Copy story on that time the FBI mistook part of the video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Down in It” for a snuff film. That never happened to Stabbing Westward.
* Douglas Wolk annotates Grant Morrison and Dough Mahnke’s event comic/Supermen team-up/Watchmen fanfic Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1.
* My experience with RPGs is limited to one lovely, beery summer between freshman and sophomore year in college, but I still found Bruce Baugh’s look at early D&D guidebooks fascinating as an examination of how imagination and play can be given structure and stricture of varying efficacy.
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Given the standard weakness of comics adaptations of non-City of Glass prose material and the standard cheesiness of American horror-comic art, any project that entails adapting a prose horror novel would normally already have two strikes against it. But Clive Barker has gotten lucky on that score a few times during his career, from the impressively atmospheric Books of Blood-based anthology series Tapping the Vein back in the day to this little number based on Barker’s first all-ages book. While you can see the rough edges in the edits quite frequently–most notably during the beginning and ending, which are rushed enough to feel like they happen how they do because they must, not because that’s what springs from the events that befall the characters and emotions they experience as those events take place–it’s a surprisingly evocative, beautifully illustrated little graphic novel about a childhood lost.
The story concerns a schoolkid named Harvey Swick who, bored to tears by a dreary February, is approached by a magical being with a beyond-ear-to-ear grin, named Rictus. (Already a good sign, right?) Rictus offers Harvey a vacation to a place called the Holiday House, whose mysterious proprietor Mister Hood offers “special” children an eternity of carefree carousing, with each day in the place comprising all four seasons of the year. (Every morning is springtime, while it’s Halloween every evening and Christmas every night.) Needless to say things aren’t what they seem, and before long Harvey and the friends he makes at Holiday House try to escape this lotus-eating interval to return to the outside world, which turns out to be tougher than it looks.
While the book tends now to be compared to Harry Potter, it has a lot more in common with other stories of childhood voyage and return to a dangerous land of fantasy: Oz, Wonderland, Never-Never Land, and Barker’s own Abarat. The idea of the haunted house–since that’s obviously what we’re dealing with–also hits notes resonant with everything from Hansel & Gretel to The Shining, not to mention Candyman director Bernard Rose’s Paperhouse, a more-or-less contemporary product of the British dark fantasy scene, iirc. Aside from the obviously truncated start and finish to the story, Oprisko does a solid job of preserving as much of Barker’s weird whimsy as possible, making sure to include moments that stand out from the fairy-tale norm–Harvey’s phone calls home to his parents to make sure they’re okay with his vacation, for example.
The real star of the adaptation, though, is Gabriel Hernandez and his absolutely lovely art. It appears to have been done in pencil, then given a soft bath in muted color washes by Sulaco Studios. The contrast between Hernandez’s off-kilter, frequently angular character designs and Sulaco’s gauzy palette is pretty much perfect for Barker’s kids’ fantasy work, which itself introduces elements of the horrific into a storytelling mode we’re frequently quite cozy with. Hernandez is as attentive to detail as he is to design–for example, quietly filling the Holiday House with everything a boy could wish for, from suits of armor to Egyptian sarcophagi to preserved pterodactyls, despite this never being referred to in the dialogue. It’s the art that will keep me coming back to this one, and makes it worth at least a first look.
* To the extent that you care about the blend of enthusiasm and unease this blog occasionally displays for displays of hypermasculinity, you are advised to download and listen to Matthew Perpetua’s best-of mix for mock-cock-rock geniuses the Electric Six. You probably are familiar with their songs “Gay Bar” and “Danger! High Voltage,” but that truly is just the tip of the iceberg for their oeuvre of awesomely accurate lampoons of macho insecurity. The mix even includes songs from their not-yet-released fifth album Flashy, so go and enjoy the sound of the future.
* Tom Spurgeon has done another of his always-worth-reading slush-pile review marathons. This one includes his takes on the rewardingly bizarre Water Baby by Ross Campbell, some Johnny Ryan minicomics, the latest MOME, and, in a review that contains compliments so awesomely backhanded they’ll make your face ache, Comic Foundry.
* Chuck Palahniuk says his first more or less openly horror novel Lullaby is headed to the big screen. Chuck Palahniuk is not the most reliable source of information regarding movie versions of his books, but hey. (Via Bloody Disgusting.)
* Aaron “Chief Galen Tyrol” Douglas says Battlestar Galactica‘s final episodes won’t start airing till April, rather than the originally announced January start date. (Via AICN.) SciFi Channel says au contraire–the January start date is on as planned.
* Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age of Horror continues his series of essays critiquing–even “debunking,” in Curt’s words–Freud’s seminal essay “The Uncanny,” one of the core texts for scholars of horror. This time out he argues that the supernatural isn’t scary because of how it indicates the return of the repressed, but that the return of the repressed is scary because it indicates the presence of the supernatural. Total protonic reversal!
* CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts has been taken a lengthy, YouTube-enhanced look at each of Coney Island’s three haunted-house rides. View at your own risk!
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I’ve had this book for a long long time, acquiring it through Sequential Swap because hey, Lorenzo Mattotti, right? One of the great comics artists in the world! But I’ve put off reading it for just as long because the great comics art inside it is, if I’m being honest, not for me. I don’t see people in Mattotti’s blocky, quasi-cubist painted figures, I see blocks. With its tactile layers of color covering every inch, I have a hard time finding an “in” to any given panel. My eye just bounces right off the surface.
The funny thing is that the story almost overcomes this. It stars one Lieutenant Absinthe, an officer in the navy of a South American archipelagic country whose battleship is sent on a mission to investigate the mysterious island of Saint Agatha, where ships seem to go missing with alarming regularity. In an arc that should be familiar to fans of everything from The Lord of the Flies to Lost to The Shining, Absinthe–heh, here I was going to say “slowly” out of sheer force of habit, but it happens almost overnight–goes native, and ends up helping the supernatural (?) forces present on the island destroy his comrades. On the back cover, a blurb from Mattotti indicates that his inspiration was the films of Tarkovsky and Herzog and the hypnotic power of their environments; in essence, Mattotti’s project was to craft a story that does what his art fails to do with me, which is suck one in. He works so hard at it that he almost pulls it off–the story’s climax in particular is vividly done–and the countless similar stories you’ve read or seen do some of the work for him, but ultimately I keep running into that wall of visual information over and over again and finding no way to join Lieutenant Absinthe as he’s pulled in.
Since Tom mentioned it: I realized the other day that Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time anthology of idiosyncratic comics might be the most influential book of the latter half of this decade*. Since it came out, we’ve seen the release or impending release of collections of Fletcher Hanks (two! the first of which was a runaway hit and Eisner winner), Herbie, Rory Hayes, Ogden Whitney, Boody Rogers, additional early superhero stuff in Supermen!…all of these were featured in Art Out of Time and all of these projects have been rapturously received. That book spawned a cottage industry, and the way it’s reclaimed forgotten areas of comics’ past is unprecedented, at least as long as I’ve been paying attention to these things.
They can’t all be winners, but this collection of “19 comic strip poems” originally published on Tom Neely’s blog boasts some very strong work, including among them some of my favorite comics of the year. Constructed by juxtaposing a simple sentence against a four-panel strip’s worth of largely abstract imagery, these comics are a veritable catalogue of Neely’s visual preoccupations: Tall houses with crooked chimneys, Gottfredson-style white gloves, deep-black, viscous blots of ink, lone trees, holes, the severing of heads or hands. At times they’re used to strike a harrowing tone of confusion and despair–“Seething Rage” is a memorable portrait of a literally beaten man, while “House of Cards” plays off one of my personal favorite tropes for utter senselessness, roadkill. Given my own predilections it’s probably no surprise that the book’s more hopeful moments–“New,” touting the power of hope in the form of a newborn; “R.R.I.P.”, a declaration of ars gratia artis inspired by painter Robert Rauschenberg–leave me cold, leaning a little further toward the mushiness that is an occupational hazard of “comic poetry.” Still, “O.K.,” a full-color strip that overwhelms with the beauty of its palm-trees-at-sunset vista while the text celebrates the acceptance of a proposal, proves that Neely has the illustrative chops to give even his most (understandably!) sentimental inclinations real punch.
Rick Altergott, Gabrielle Bell, Jonathan Bennett, Blanquet, Blex Bolex, Conrad Botes, Shary Boyle, Mat Brinkman, John Brodowski, Ivan Brunetti, C.F., Chris Cilla, Jacob Ciocci, Dan Clowes, Martin Cendreda, Joe Daly, Kim Deitch, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Leif Goldberg, Matt Groening, John Hankiewicz, Sammy Harkham, Eric Haven, David Heatley, Tim Hensley, Jaime Hernandez, Walt Holcombe, Kevin Huizenga, J. Bradley Johnson, Ben Jones, Ben Katchor, Ted May, Geoff McFetridge, Jesse McManus, James McShane, Jerry Moriarty, Anders Nilsen, John Pham, Pshaw, Aapo Rapi, Ron Rege Jr., Xavier Robel, Helge Reumann, Ruppert & Mulot, Johnny Ryan, Richard Sala, Souther Salazar, Frank Santoro, Seth, Shoboshobo, Josh Simmons, Anna Sommer, Will Sweeney, Matthew Thurber, Adrian Tomine, C. Tyler, Chris Ware, and Dan Zettwoch.
Stupid Publisher Tricks: Too Many Awesome Anthology Contributors
* Speaking of absurdly stuffed packages of comicsy delights, Grant Morrison has a lengthy interview up with IGN’s Dan Phillips, and it’s as good as you’ve come to expect from the guy. It’s more or less equally split between Morrison’s trademark close reading of superhero tropes and metacommentary on the making of a modern superhero story, but I thought there were a couple of points particularly worth pointing out. First, here’s a bone that many hardcore DC fans will be glad to have been thrown:
IGN Comics: I don’t want to spend too much time on this topic, because you’ve addressed it elsewhere, but there have obviously been some discrepancies between parts of FinalCcrisis – mainly, the death of Orion – and Countdown and Death of the New Gods. At what point did you realize this would become an issue, and do you think it will affect any other aspects of your story?
Morrison: There were a couple of discrepancies which affected the early issues of Final Crisis and which came about because of the way the two books were being written out of order and to different deadlines.
Ultimately, it comes down to me as the last guy in the chain to fix it all, which is what I’m going to do. I’m actually going to make all the discrepancies work and tie in, and I’ve got a plan to fix it. To me, it was just like, “Oh guys, don’t worry about it.” Sometimes human error just creeps into the system. But I also realize that a lot of readers have a genuine emotional investment in the strict coherence of these patchwork fictional universes, so it seemed only fair that I should use the Crisis to clean up any lingering problems.
IGN Comics: That’s interesting, because Crises have always sort of been used to clean up continuity problems.
Morrison: Yeah, they always did that sort of thing with Crises, didn’t they? And I didn’t want to make this any kind of continuity reboot, which it’s not. But I did realize, well, why not set time and space right ? I can easily provide a reason for why things played out differently in different books.
That soon leads into this:
Remember also that, despite my inexplicable reputation among certain fans as a ‘difficult’ writer, I’m actually one of the most successful people in the comics business and have been for a long time. I wrote what’s still the highest-selling original graphic novel ever, I wrote DC’s biggest selling book for years with JLA, I wrote Marvel’s most popular X-title.
It is easy to forget that for all of Morrison’s well-deserved rep as being one of superherodom’s most idiosyncratic and artful writers, his stories tend to be rigorously titled to whatever he sees as being the demands of the zeitgeist. His lengthy pitches almost always include an explanation of why his ideas, besides being strong on the merits, will sell like the Dickens. Anyway, the whole interview is juicy like this. Give yourself half an hour before Obama’s speech tonight and dig in. (Via Kevin Melrose.)
* I’ve often thought that furries are an underserved demographic in the soft-drink market, haven’t you? (Via Andrew Sullivan.)
* Finally, Tom Spurgeon gives you a present in the form of this incredible gallery of art as we all wish a very happy 91st birthday to the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. Here is my favorite thing he ever drew.
