If you are attending MoCCA this weekend, won’t you please consider buying Murder? It’s a 44-page anthology of comics (some never before seen by anyone anywhere) written by me and drawn by Matt Wiegle, Matt Rota, and Josiah Leighton. Matt Wiegle designed it and put it together, so you know it’s nice-lookin’. It (and I) will be available, along perhaps with another interesting item or two of mine, at the Partyka table. The cover looks like this:
* I’ve frequently talked about how much I loved, and love, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe–the prototype for the genre-mashup “art of enthusiasm” I enjoy so much today. El Mayimbe at Latino Review has a lengthy synopsis of a draft screenplay for a new film adaptation of the franchise by Justin “The New David Goyer” Marks. On the one hand, Mayimbe says:
It’s a hard and edgy PG-13 tinkering on [sic] a [sic] R. The script has ZERO CAMP or CHEESINESS. NO FUCKING ORKO EITHER! The writer takes the MOTU mythology very seriously. Whatever made the cartoon corny is not in here at all. In fact, there is not a single beat of comedic relief [sic] in the script.
Which, you know, barf. God forbid we don’t take a franchise that featured a half-skunk half-man named Stinkor seriously!^ However, it’s possible that to translate the awesome-(in the awe-provoking sense)-to-a-five-year-old quality of the original toys and cartoons to a modern blockbuster audience, you have to jump into the madness of it all with both feet; winks and nods toward admitting the original was goofy may just lead to a a watered-down G.I. Joe-style attempt to flatten the weirdness into a conventional action-flick mold. The screenplay sounds fun enough, ripping off Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (right down to an “in ancient times” prologue nominated by a powerful woman from the film’s present) and the superhero-in-training movies of today just as unabashedly as the old He-Man stuff ripped off Heavy Metal and D&D, which is probably as it should be. And the He-Man world’s po-faced mixture of fantasy and science-fiction is apparently a very big deal to Marks. So we’ll see. (Via AICN.)
* A good day for rants, part one: Ken Lowery bemoans Hollywood’s perennial failure to follow up for-women smashes like Sex and the City with more movies for women. Romantic comedies–which my mother calls “sappy crappies”–don’t count.
* Curt Purcell responds to CRwM’s epic series on torture porn, defending the “High Horrorism” of supernatural horror and arguing that fusty Victorian/Edwardian notions of dread actually date back to prehistoric, even primordial times. It’s a great post, though I want to add two things: 1) I don’t think CRwM went nearly as far in the “supernatural horror sucks because it’s too unrealistic” direction as Aaron Weisbrod’s old Dark But Shining essay on that notion, and good on CRwM for that; 2) the comment thread at Curt’s post is the usual roundelay of pro forma, largely baseless responses to the torture porn issue (they suck; they’re just slasher movies but not as cool; the term “torture porn” is insulting to the horror genre) that Curt and CRwM’s posts on the topic have commendably avoided.
* A good day for rants, part two: Look, I’ve got a lot of problems with the superhero movie wave of the past few years, including (heck, especially!) the supposedly good flicks, let alone the real dreck. Even so, I found Chris Nashawaty’s anti-superhero-movie piece at EW to be perhaps the most sloppily researched and argued genre-entertainment thinkpiece it’s been my misfortune to come across in literally years. You truly have to read it to believe it–it’s so bad I don’t even know where to begin.^^ Fortunately I don’t have to: My pal Zach Oat at Movies Without Pity takes a chainsaw to Nashawatay’s strawman arguments, factual distortions, generally abysmal critical judgment, and sucker-punching of Stan Lee. (The Man is a complicated figure in comics history who has a lot of things to answer for; churning out drab, cookie-cutter ideas during his ’60s-era heyday is most certainly not one of them.)
^ Do no fanboys realize that hating Orko, Snarf, the Ewoks, et cetera because they make fucking He-Man, Thundercats, Star Wars, et cetera too silly is ridiculous beyond comprehension? Have they never watched the rest of He-Man, the Thundercats, Star Wars, et cetera?
^^ Okay, that’s not quite true: Anyone who apparently loves Independence Day forfeits their right to complain about X-Men: The Last Stand. Or, really, anything else.
* Horror triumphalism alert! You’ve got to get a kick out of Bloody Digusting’s take on The Strangers‘ $20 million box office success this past weekend:
Un-freakin-believable! This weekend horror took a huge step forward by taking on not only INDIANA JONES IV, but the highly anticipated SEX AND THE CITY in a three way box office battle. Obviously Rogue Pictures’ The Strangers (review) took the number three slot, but to pull in $20 million opening weekend against two giant blockbusters in the middle of summer is such a wonderful sign. Hopefully this will light a fire under Rogue’s ass to greenlight Hack/Slash, which is now near the top of my list as most anticipated horror films in the works. Hurray for horror!
It’s probably churlish to unpack this point by point, but: a) one horror movie doing very well does not mean “horror took a huge step forward”; b) one stylish, upscale-marketed horror film does not make an adaptation of a splatstick comic book whose heroine has posed for Suicide Girls any more likely; c) hooray for horror indeed. At least B-Sol at the Vault of Horror frames the reason to be excited for The Strangers‘ haul purely in box-office terms, citing it alongside Prom Night and presumably The Happening (though oddly omitting Cloverfield or the holiday-season smash I Am Legend) as signs of a strong financial year for the genre. As always I caution against touting the success of films of various origin, style, tone, content, and intent as some sort of victory for Our Beloved Genre.
* LOST SPOILER WARNING: I sadly forgot to link to this last week, but man oh man, is Lost‘s Harold Perrineau angry about how things went down for him on the show. Maybe slightly less so now, but hoo doggy. For what it’s worth, if I were him I’d be angry too; it’s easy to see how Michael could have become a main focal point of the show upon his return, and that not happening would be disappointing for any actor. However, given the horrendous paternal history of virtually every character on the show, his argument that the severing of Michael from Walt reinforces stereotypes about irresponsible black fathers really doesn’t hold any water. I mean, it’s not like Locke, Ben, Jack, Claire, Aaron, Kate, Sawyer, Sun, Alex, Hurley, and Penelope have great male role models either! (Via The Tail Section.)
* Jog reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Speak of the Devil, a book I haven’t read. I bet it’s good.
* Finally, the guy who directed Catwoman is helming some sort of undersea fantasy epic called Mermaid Island, and its promo art looks like this.
Any chance the film will be half as crazy and awesome? Yeah, I doubt it too.
Kramers Ergot 4
Anders Nilsen, David Lasky & Frank M. Young, Renee French, Lauren Weinstein, Marc Bell, John Hankiewicz, Mat Brinkman, Ron Rege Jr, Sammy Harkham, Jim Drain, Ben Jones, Dave Kiersh, C.F., Stepan Gruber, Joe Grillo, Josh Simmons, David Heatley, Souther Salazar, Genevieve Castree, Allison Cole, Leif Goldberg, Tobias Schalken, Jeffrey Brown, Billy & Laura Grant, Jason T. Miles, Kenny, Andrew Brandou, writers/artists
Sammy Harkham, editor
Avodah Books, June 2003
Pre-order a fancy-sounding hardcover re-release from Amazon.com
For me at least it’s difficult to separate Kramers Ergot 4 from how it came into my life. The book made its debut at the first MoCCA festival, joining Craig Thompson’s Blankets in the “big giant powder-blue books that knocked everyone out” sweepstakes; all three events–Kramers, Blankets, and MoCCA itself–turned out to be milestones in my comics-reading life. In terms of Kramers, even for someone weaned on Highwater and NON such as myself, this was heady stuff. I seem to remember there being passionate, even angry debates on my then-stomping grounds of the Comics Journal message board over whether it should have “wasted” pages on non-comics content like collages, and then other debates about whether those non-comics pages are, in fact, comics. It all seems pretty meaningless now–I don’t even remember what side(s) I was on–but I suppose the point is that the book really introduced me to completely non-narrative comics, a strategy I don’t think I’d given much thought to until then. I feel as though in a very real way it introduced comics to non-narrative comics, at least by virtue of becoming the most high-profile and influential release of that nature to date in the then-young decade. If you look at that contributor list and compare it to people’s 2007 Best Of lists, you can probably see the power it had.
In my defense, it is a powerful book. I would say it is in fact a book designed to overwhelm, from the sheer size of the thing to its small-army contributor list to the “yes, but is it art?” nature of so many of its contents. I mean, the textless Mat Brinkman “monsters clash on the Rainbow Bridge” cover is a statement practically begs comparison to the great Hypgnosis album covers for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, even sharing a rainbow with The Dark Side of the Moon. Now that I think of it–and I promise I hadn’t, not even before my initial pass at this review–Dark Side is a great point of comparison in terms of how KE4 functions as a unit rather than as a collection of individual pieces. (There was little question in my mind as to whether I could approach talking about this anthology the same way I’ve done with MOME.)
See, one thing that struck me in giving the book a cover-to-cover read-through (the first time I’d ever done so) is that there are a surprising number of straightforward narrative strips given the book’s outré reputation. There are humor strips (Cole and Jones), autobio/slice of life (Brown), biography (Lasky & Young), underground-type sex’n’violence (Simmons), ruminative mythology-based storytelling of the kind that’s proven so popular (Nilsen), and just plain storytellin’ (Harkham). Even John Hankiewicz’s contribution has a discernible plot. Sure, they’re sprinkled throughout multimedia collages and Fort Thunder joy-of-markmaking exercises and multiple title pages and so on, but they’re there–sort of like how between the cut-up studio banter and looped analog samples and proto-ambient keyboards and psychedelic freak-outs, you can find unindictable masterpieces of rock-single construction like “Time,” “Money,” and “Us and Them” on Dark Side. Similarly, even these more easily graspable bits are, for the most part, pretty challenging in tone and content. Simmons’ contribution had me ready to put the goddamn book away the second he had a character take scissors to a puppy’s eye, Brown’s series of vignettes about dealing with the homeless, dangerous, or mentally ill is the most socially- and self-critical strip he’s ever done all at once, and Harkham and Nilsen’s contributions, “Poor Sailor” and a pair of Sisyphus strips, will no doubt make their creators’ all-time highlight reel. It’s kind of like creating a pop concept album about the pressures of late 20th-century capitalist society driving you insane until you die.
I’m not making this comparison because it’s cute. (I’m certainly not arguing that they sync up together, Wizard of Oz style.) I’m saying that Kramers Ergot 4 is put together the way it is on purpose, for the disorienting, overwhelming effect it has on the reader, how the narrative work lowers your guard for the nonnarrative, how the nonnarrative gooses your synapses and prepares you to focus on things you’re unaccustomed to focusing on in the narrative–how marks are arranged on the page, figures as symbols rather than as characters, design, the emotional impact of the strips rather than the plot-intellectual one. Instead of being a concept album, it’s a concept anthology. Hence the Dark Side comparison: In both cases there’s a sense of sprawl, of a thing you can’t possibly take in on the first pass and must return to and grab bits of meaning here and there, discovering new things each time. In both cases the material rewards repeat visits (I’m not sure I ever even read the Simmons strip before / I only figured out that the guy was saying “I certainly was in the right” a couple months ago). In both cases, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to appreciate them more.
So, Battlestar Galactica. As I’ve mentioned before in passing, this season’s emphasis on the show’s increasingly baroque mythology–both in the literal, religious sense and in the X-Files metaplot sense–has turned me off a bit, in no small part because it’s attracting the same kind of crazed devotion that Lost does from the some of the same Lost fans of my acquaintance who are also driving with that show too. To me the biggest symbol of this is the new opening sequence, which has shifted from laying out the need-to-know details about the Cylon threat to the equivalent of Lost having a thing at the beginning of every Season Four episode asking “Who’s in the coffin?” And duh, I’m obviously not the only person to connect the Final Five with the Oceanic Six.
That being said, I still find it engrossing, suspenseful, and completely unpredictable. And while the overemphasis on the mysticism, mythology, and Starbuck (Vision-Quest Variant) has obscured this somewhat, it’s still frequently moving and profound. There was a time recently when I was very, very down, and suddenly the sinister appeal of Gaius Baltar’s “God loves you because you are perfect” gospel of absolution from personal responsibility became frighteningly clear. Laura Roslin’s terminal illness storyline is as grueling as such storylines get (favorably reminiscent of similar plotlines from The Sopranos and Deadwood). The Final Four Outta Five are fascinating to watch in action. The Cally episode was heartbreaking. And so on and so on.
Which brings us to this past week’s episode, “Sine Qua Non.” I was thrilled to see Apollo and Tom Zarek back in action–the former has obviously been criminally underused this season, particularly considering how his blockbuster conduct at the Baltar trial set him up to become a strange and powerful new moral center for the show. I was thrilled to see a return to the political machinations, the struggle for a traumatized society to overcome turmoil, that had driven the show through its first three seasons. I liked seeing Romo Lampkin, that weird Shakespearean fool of a character, come back. I liked the kitty-cat. I liked the fistfight between Bill Adama and Sol Tigh. (Of course, I like everything about Sol Tigh.) I liked the clue that Sol’s impregnation of the captive Six afforded us as to the fundamental difference between the Final Five and the main Seven–perhaps even the reason the Five were kept secret in the first place. Certain things were sloppy, like Lampkin’s meltdown (though we’ve seen that sort of thing from this show a lot in the past, including Athena’s meltdown in the previous episode), but still, I thought, good stuff overall.
So I was kind of surprised to see how much people hated this episode. My Tori Amos messageboard friends, Jim Henley and his commenters, the House Next Door’s commenters–“worst episode ever” was thrown around quite a bit, and since this series included “Black Market,” that ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. In some quarters, the episode is seen not just as an isolated incident, nor as the hallmark of a lousy season, but as a sign that the entire show has been a complete waste of time.
This made me think: What is the defining characteristic of “the entire show”?
It’s odd, but I’m discovering that I don’t know the show as well as I know other shows I’ve followed this intently. With the exception of something obvious like “Fragged” (an episode cited as successful by Jim), I don’t really remember episode titles or what happened in them. I don’t even remember what came when! Maybe because Battlestar‘s seasons are so much longer than those of the other shows I’ve caught up with at least in part via DVD (The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, and back in the VHS days, Twin Peaks), they tend to blend together? Maybe it’s just harder to track what each season is “about” plotwise, as opposed to The Sopranos‘s villain-of-the-season structure or Lost‘s mystery-of-the-season structure or The Wire‘s urban-blight-of-the-season structure?
But also now that I’m thinking of it, I would say that what I think this show is “about” thematically is harder to pin down than in those other cases. For me, The Sopranos is about how easy it is to be bad and the excuses people will find to do it; Deadwood (which I haven’t finished yet! one episode to go in Season Two is where I’m at) is about the consequences of choosing to do good despite the ease of doing otherwise; Twin Peaks is about the existence, and corrosive influence, of evil; Lost is about how we react to failure; and after watching the pooch-screwing final season of The Wire, I feel like that show is about being an op-ed piece.
What is BSG about? It used to be easy: It’s about the effect of war and atrocity on society. I still think that’s the case, though the Final Five guessing-game and the mysticism dilute it a bit. But last night’s episode (wonky decision-making by the Adamas and the quorum included!) made me think that maybe it’s cohering back into something even grander, and that now it’s about the end stages of this particular human civilization–that they’re all too far gone to make it work anymore. That notion has been cropping up explicitly in dialogue for the past few episodes, I think, and things like Kara’s mutiny-provoking vision quest, Bill Adama’s dereliction of duty, Tigh frakking the Six, Cally’s meltdown, Tory’s journey to the dark side, Baltar starting a religious movement whose message (”God loves us because we are all perfect”) is essentially a total abdication of personal responsibility, Athena getting paranoid and murdering the Cylon leader, Roslin instituting a Bush II-style pseudo-autocratic way of governing, the Quorum adopting a feel-good interim president despite all the obvious conflicts, even Lee giving a dog to a guy who talks to his dead cat–heck, a cynic like Lampkin losing his shit in the first place–it all points to the show depicting a society in its terminal stage. It’s easy to see how it could all be read as sloppiness, but I’m thinking (hoping?) otherwise. And man, won’t it be impressive if that’s where the series goes?
Whenever the topic of Thor comes up, which in my life is often, I say that any and every Thor comic should be at least as cool as Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” or it’s not worth doing.
“My Thor is very much a ‘Led Zeppelin III’ kind of Thor….It’s very power metal; lots of power chords, huge riffs and epic colossal guitar noises.”
* It was a big week for Grant Morrison comics, with the debut of Final Crisis and new issues of All Star Superman and Batman‘s “Batman: R.I.P.” storyline. Douglas Wolk annotates Final Crisis #1, while Jog reviews All Star Superman and touches on the other two books in passing. And I found myself agreeing with nearly everything Graeme McMillain said in his review of FC #1.
* And now for a pair of interesting reviews of films I liked: Ian Garrick Mason on No Country for Old Men and Rob Humanick on Rambo.
* CRwM at And Now the Screaming Starts finishes off his series of posts on torture porn by addressing the earnest tone and political content of the films.
* There’s
* How big of a T-shirt nerd am I? Big enough to seriously consider ponying up $200+ for a subscription to a series of 13 limited-edition Venture Bros. shirts–available for sale for one week only following the premiere of each new episode from the show’s third season–despite never having seen the show. (It’s next on my Netflix queue after I finish Deadwood.) (Via Topless Robot.)
* Matthew Perpetua, ahem, succinctly reviews Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Giant Size Astonishing X-Men #1.
* Finally, “Dee-Moh-NAY, Dee-Moh-NAY!”
Because I am an idiot, by the time I posted my latest “Why oh why don’t people like Lost the way that I like Lost” screed yesterday I somehow managed to completely forget the whole reason I started writing it, which was this:
I realized yesterday that the constant barrage of Lost-as-game theorizing and “masochistic delirium” and so on we’ve all been subjected to may be preventing me from being able to enjoy those aspects of it–that in some theoretical world where there’s less of that going on to drive me up a wall and interfere with what I find the main attraction of the show to be, I’d be much more into that sort of thing. Am I letting reverse peer pressure blind me to what may well be the genuine pleasures of treating Lost like a puzzle, theorizing madly about it, working myself up into a weekly frenzy? I honestly don’t know. I remember doing more theorizing back in the day, before doing so took on such a manic feel, so maybe there really is something to this.
Anyway, the season finale was last night. So far I’ve enjoyed Mark Coale’s mellow recap. Alan Sepinwall’s relentless naysaying during Season Three is why I stopped reading him on the show, and to the extent that it creeps up in his review of last night’s episode I’m glad did, but I at least discovered this peach of a post in his comment thread. (Via Jim Treacher.)
The Goon Vol. 0: Rough Stuff
Eric Powell, writer/artist
Dark Horse, April 2004
96 pages
$12.95
The Goon Vol. 1: Nothin’ But Misery
Eric Powell, writer/artist
Dark Horse, July 2003
136 pages
$15.95
The Goon Vol. 2: My Murderous Childhood (And Other Greivous Yarns)
Eric Powell, writer/artist
Dark Horse, May 2004
128 pages
$13.95
Originally written on July 26, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal
‘Tis a strange fate that the breakout success story of Dark Horse’s recent attempt to craft a line of horror comics around its flagship title Hellboy turns out to be not so much Hellboy as Hellboy Junior. But such is The Goon, Eric Powell’s ongoing riot of hard-boiled noir tough guys, zombie splatstick, and Warren Comics pastiche. It’s unsurprising that its similarity to Mike Mignola’s endlessly fascinating tales of paranormal fisticuffs are both The Goon’s great strength and, by comparison, its great weakness.
The Goon takes place in what’s becoming a fairly common type of indie-genre-comic city, one that’s a melange of trash conventions thrown into a blender and poured onto the page. This one encompasses down-home hillbilly thugs, Edward G. Robinson-style gangsters, haunted houses of EC vintage, and so forth. (See also Street Angel‘s combination of mad scientists, b-boying ninjas, pirate conquistadors, and skateboarding female teen martial-arts experts.) The titular strongman (think Hellboy with a hat instead of horns, Sin City‘s Marv with a wifebeater instead of a trenchcoat, The Thing as a Tennessee redneck instead of a New York Jew) is the terror of the city’s underworld, serving as a brutal enforcer for the reclusive mob boss Labrazio. But a raging gang war against “the nameless man, the zombie priest” and his undead crime family has made the Goon and his Little Orphan Annie–eyed sidekick Frankie into the city’s unlikely saviors. As they’re all that stands between the city and uncontested zombie dominance, the Goon and his pal are forgiven their (ahem) enthusiasm for their work of roughing up lowlifes, werewolves, evil elves, giant fish people, et cetera, usually conducted with knives, Magnums, shotguns, huge monkeywrenches, talking chainsaws, et cetera.
Et cetera and ad nauseum, I’m afraid. Perhaps I’m simply armchair-editing the book, angling for it to become the type of genre fiction I personally enjoy, but the endless game of can-you-top-this splatter and silliness overpowers what could be a very interesting crime-horror concept. Now, I’m certainly not asking for the humor to be excised completely. There are moments that work hilariously–Frankie’s repeated “KNIFE IN YOUR EYE!” gag is in gloriously bad taste, and the reactions of the people of the Goon’s burned-out burg to his rampages are terrific in that “aieeeeeee!” sort of way. (“Look out!” says one bum in Volume One as the Goon gives the business to an arachnid poker cheat named (you guessed it) Spider. “He’s gone strangle crazy!”)
The problem is that when Powell gets serious, or seriously creepy, he’s clearly at his best. The Goon’s origin story, besides containing a pretty brilliant twist that alters our perception of his present-day behavior, packs a surprisingly emotional wallop. (I’m guessing Vito Andolini Corleone’s start in The Godfather Part II was the inspiration, and in this case the imitation is indeed flattering.) “What have I got to live for?” asks the Goon of his new friend Frankie as they embark on their first (and what seems at the time to be likely their last) gang-enforcer outing. At this point you’ve seen the Goon beat up, chewed up, and thrown up by nearly every monster known to man, and yet this clear-eyed (literally, for this panel only) expression of nihilism makes you feel the characters’ risk. Similar hints at a larger emotional tapestry are intriguing (a gorgeous dame whose romantic overtures the Goon thinks are too good to be true, the long and sordid history of the zombie priest), as is the fact that the hero of this story is himself a brutal criminal who looks good only in comparison to the cannibal zombies that fight with him for territory. Often these flashbacks are drawn in an evocative pencil-heavy style with far greater depth than the increasingly slick Saturday-morning cartoonisms that comprise the remainder of the series, to the flashbacks’ great benefit. But all this is inevitably drowned out by the next beheading, the next disemboweling, the next appearance of a spontaneously combusting orangutan. No, I didn’t make that last one up. Such is The Goon.
Tonight is the two-hour season finale of Lost, preceded by a slightly expanded version of last week’s penultimate episode (technically the first part of the finale). Meanwhile, to hear the critics tell it, this is the best season of Lost since the first, if not ever. Why? The explanation used to be that signing a deal that cemented an endpoint for the series gave the show’s cast and creators a renewed sense of purpose, but you don’t hear that much in the thinkpieces popping up hither and thither today regarding the finale. No, the explanation they give is that this season, with its embrace of the flashforward device that made its debut during the last ep of Season Three, has made it a televised mind game par excellence.
Here’s Juliet Lapidos (whose name makes her sound like she’s a Lost character herself) at Slate:
…only in the current season, which ends Thursday night, has Lost achieved complexity and intricacy worthy of the critical attention it’s been receiving all along….the writers have shaken themselves out of the old formula–and are finally attempting a truly high-wire narrative move.
Here’s Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times:
“Lost,” which concludes its fourth season on ABC on Thursday night, refuses our passive interest while it denies us the satisfaction of ever feeling that we might confidently explain, to the person sitting next to us at dinner, that we have a true grasp of what is going on — of who among the characters is merely bad and who is verifiably satanic. To watch “Lost” is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale. Good dramas confound our expectations, but “Lost,” about a factionalized group of plane crash survivors on a cartographically indeterminate island not anything like Aruba, pushes further, destabilizing the ground on which those expectations might be built. It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium.
Here’s Emily Nussbaum at New York, making the clearest case yet for Lost-as-puzzle in a piece straightforwardly entitled “Why Lost Is the Best Game Show in TV History”:
[The introduction of flashforwards] flipped the Lost game board out fifteen squares in each direction. It expanded the show’s setting from the island to the world. It raised the level of narrative difficulty, both for the writers and for the fans, pivoting elegantly away from “Will these people get off the island?” and complicating the whole notion of “What will happen next?” (And I’m not even getting into the whole time-travel thing.)
But best of all, it made the show’s appeal weirdly clear: that this is as much a game as a story. It’s no surprise I find myself talking about the level of difficulty; it feels very much like we’re leveling up. My husband, who is a video-game critic, pointed out that Lost online commentary often feels less like a response to a story and more like the way fans deconstruct an ARG, an alternative reality game, participating in communal puzzle-solving and focusing obsessively on tiny details.
You say this like it’s a good thing!
Even moreso than the widespread fanboy venom spat at the show during early-mid Season Three, my disconnect from the nerd CW regarding the proper approach to the show has thrown me for a loop this year. Back then, it was easy enough to simply ignore the constant bitching and nitpicking and enjoy Lost for what, to me, it is: a byzantine sci-fi mystery about the choices we make–from romantic to philosophical–when confronted with failure.
But this year is different, because now that I’m no longer seemingly alone in enjoying the show anymore, I’m discovering that the way others are enjoying it may be limiting my ability to do so is well, or at least limiting the ways in which I’m able to do so.
First of all, I simply don’t find the show impossible to follow or explain, because it isn’t! The only thing that makes it so is if you deliberately throw yourself against the rocks of the “unknown unknowns” that make up the show’s mysteries. As I’ve pointed out at length, it’s no more possible to “figure out” “what’s going on” in the show’s mythology now than it was at the end of Season One, when we’d yet to see a Dharma Initiative logo, take a visit to Others Village, time travel with Desmond, meet anyone with the surname “Linus” or “Widmore,” see a four-toed statue, summon the smoke monster, hear the phrase “Oceanic Six,” and on and on and on. There’s tonight’s season finale and two full seasons between us and getting to the ass-end of Lost‘s full complement of everything-you-know-is-wrong revelations.
So the show is incomprehensible only to the extent that you insist upon trying to comprehend it. I choose rather to appreciate it the same way I would any other great show–the performances, the writing, the criminally overlooked cinematography–or any other great science fiction story–eye-opening ideas, fun technology, Frankensteinian terror–or any other great mystery–wondering whodunnit and guessing from time to time but not trying to construct elaborate theories of who what when where why how even though there’s still a full third of the book to go–or any great pulp story–digging the types and tropes and sex and violence.
In other words, I don’t find it to be a high-school grind–but beyond that, I don’t see why that’s pleasurable! It’s not just that people are driving themselves into “masochistic delirium,” it’s that they adamantly feel that that is the best way to experience the show! I’m not a masochist and I’m not feeling delirious. I don’t want to solve a narrative. I want it to unfold–and the genius of Lost, to me, is that it’s all about that unfolding. Why try to jump ahead of it?
UPDATED BECAUSE I’M STUPID AND FORGOT TO INCLUDE THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS POST IN THE POST WHEN I FIRST POSTED IT:
However, I realized yesterday that the constant barrage of Lost-as-game theorizing and “masochistic delirium” and so on we’ve all been subjected to may be preventing me from being able to enjoy those aspects of it–that in some theoretical world where there’s less of that going on to drive me up a wall and interfere with what I find the main attraction of the show to be, I’d be much more into that sort of thing. Am I letting reverse peer pressure blind me to what may well be the genuine pleasures of treating Lost like a puzzle, theorizing madly about it, working myself up into a weekly frenzy? I honestly don’t know. I remember doing more theorizing back in the day, before doing so took on such a manic feel, so maybe there really is something to this.
Today is my fifth blogoversary. (That’s even if you factor in a brief hiatus in 2004-2005, since I blogged for a few months prior to being here and for a few months elsewhere during the hiatus.) Thank you for reading!
* I’ve been reading up on serial killers again in order to get in the right headspace for a project, so I’m catching more such stories in the news. Meet husband and wife serial-killer team Michel Fourniert and Monique Olivier, recently convicted of abducting, raping, and killing a series of virgin girls throughout France and Belgium.
* Matthew Zoller Seitz stops in at the Movie Geeks United podcast to discuss Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series, touching on Indiana Jones, John McClane, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer, Dirty Harry Callahan and other action icons. His segment starts at 42:24. (Via The House Next Door.)
* FourFour’s Rich Juzwiak assembles an awesome continuous mix of songs that sample Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers’ seminal drum break from the song “Ashley’s Roachclip.” (It’s the beat from “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” “Unbelievable,” “Paid in Full,” and “Girl You Know It’s True.”) That, as they say, was a good drum break.
* Hey, look, it’s the trailer for the Chuck Palahniuk “Fight Club with fucking instead of fighting” adaptation Choke! (Via AICN.)
* And here’s a report from the set of the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road from the New York Times. Heh, I wonder what Dan Simmons makes of the director’s claim that this eschatological scenario is “realistic.”
* Here’s a pair of interviews with Lost‘s great Michael Emerson. Pseudospoilerishesque if you want to go into the season finale with no expectations whatsoever, but delightful for fans of how Emerson has become the de facto non-Lindelof/Cuse spokesperson for the show. (Via Whitney Matheson and Jim Treacher.)
* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants defends Hostel from unfavorable comparisons to Inside–which he also liked, but for different reasons than…well, here, read this quote:
just because you put on airs of importance by throwing a bone to some random social or political message,…it doesn’t instantly make your film more worthwhile.
* Check out artist Joe Quniones’s de-O’Malleyified takes on the cast of Scott Pilgrim! (Via David Paggi.)
* Speaking of O’Malley, he brings us your quote of the day:
I did not win a contest and I was never an overnight success. The instant-gratification-American-Idol mindset is so sad, so damaging. Everyone I know who’s successful got that way by hard work, gradual building of an audience, nonstop hustling, plenty of luck.
The ACME Novelty Library #18
Chris Ware, writer/artist
ACME Novelty Library/Drawn & Quarterly, December 2007
56 pages, hardcover
$17.95
Cruelly overlooked by many year-end best-of lists (my own included) due to its late-in-the-game arrival (now a perennial occurrence) and, perhaps, a level of quality we’ve come to take for granted, the latest installment of The ACME Novelty Library is a tough book to review by virtue of the fact that it belongs at or near the top of any such list worth a damn. In trying to express what is so compelling to me about Ware’s work in general or this book in particularly I am, to quote Stephen King on Clive Barker, almost literally tongue-tied. Instead I’m rambling on about year-end best-of lists, and eventually I’ll be enthusing vapidly. (Hey, it could be worse–I could be complaining about the people who find his work cold, emotionless, and boring. Specifically I could be calling those people morons. How lucky for you, then!)
In this particular case I’m kind of floored by how Ware assembles a panoply of snippets of a lonely young woman’s life–some are lengthy flashbacks, others are day-in-the-life moments, still others are seen from the perspective of the old building she lives in–into this sort of long seamless tapestry of ache. Like the tiny diagrammatic panels Ware foisted on an unsuspecting comics world, these narrative building blocks give the material an engaging ebb and flow, and simultaneously ape the way the protagonist’s own life flows without pause one dreary day into the next, occasionally enlivened by reverie or some small humiliation. Now that I think of it, she herself looks back on her life’s more exciting or rewarding times as dreams–temporary and illusory. And in a real way this book could go on forever, or at least as long as our heroine remains stuck in this (seemingly lifelong) rut, this cycle going on and on the same way some of Ware’s pages (the knockout front endpapers, for example) are all but cyclical. This chapter itself doesn’t really end, it just stops, which is perfect.
I don’t know, what should I say? He’s the best colorist, the best letterer? Those things are both true. His line is superhuman, like a machine made it, which is why people think it’s cold, but they’re wrong because he’s using that precision to nail specific and devastating emotions and sense-memories–my god, that moment where the heartbroken heroine sinks into her dormroom bed! “I lay there, facing the fake wood wall shelf…but it might as well have been the blackness of space…” The image has the pull of a black hole. And as it turns out Ware is also quite good at cartooning sex, particularly that delirious brand of first-flush collegiate sex, daily coupling and mutual masturbation and the raw, almost manic hunger to have and give and demonstrate pleasure. Cold schmold! All with the best chops in terms of line and layout of anyone in comics. The funny thing is I don’t really think of comics when I read this, I think of my life and my wife’s life and my friends’ lives and complete strangers’ lives, which of course is what makes it the very best kind of comics there is.
After a bang-up start inspired by the League of Tana Tea Drinkers’ roundtable on the subject, CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts’ has posted two more entries in his “A Defense of Torture Porn” series, and frankly I’m so knocked out by them I don’t know where to begin other than by saying “go read them from start to finish.”
First, he(? just assuming here) advances a five-part definition of the subgenre, calling attention not just to “there’s torture in them” a la my own attempt at playing Webster, but also characterizing their emotional tone, visual style, sociopolitical approach, construction of suspense through paranoia and helplessness, and absence of supernatural actors.
Next, he counters the frequently leveled assertion that torture porn is inherently inartful, crass, and exploitative by rebutting the idea that it’s a subgenre of dreary realism as opposed to the horrifying heights reached by supernatural (or “High”) horror. It’s really so marvelously constructed that you should read it yourself, but just let me call out this passage:
First, let me defend my claim that torture porn is fantasy by focusing on the visual style that has become torture porn’s most distinctive trait. The look of torture porn is not realistic, but hyper-realistic. It is a highly artificial approach that takes the trappings of realism and blows them all out of proportion. The result is a lavish, over-stuffed look – most often taking an archetypal image and stuffing it to the breaking point. This is most apparent in the dungeon settings of the two Hostel flicks and the bathroom set of the first Saw. Both sets are not just dirty, but absolutely coated in grime and slime. One imagines you could get tetanus of the eyeball just from looking at them. But neither represents what (sadly) we know torture looks like. Real torture, when governments undertake it, is conducted not in sewers, but in relatively orderly places that look disconcertingly like hospitals. Why leave a filthy crime scene behind? Mud and crud tends to trap potential clues like hair, foot and fingerprints, and so on. The answer, of course, is that these aren’t “real.” They visually represent the feelings the idea of torture evokes. Men in rubber aprons, faces hid behind monstrous brass and steel facemasks, power tools inexplicably left to rust (despite the fact that they are supposedly the property of an elite club of super rich people) – it all suggests the moral, spiritual, ethical decay of what’s happening. The whole visual approach adopted by Roth and Wan is not realistic some much as it represents the typical strategies of film realism – a little grime here, some busted glass there – and invests it with symbolic purpose. The very fabric of their films’ worlds reflects the mental state and fate of their characters.
Man oh man. Read also for his (accurate) attribution of the look of torture porn to David Fincher’s Se7en, his analysis of the significance of that miscellaneous torture device on the cover of the DVD for Hostel, and much, much more.
What do I make of all this? Well, it’s a much more effective “defense” of torture porn than my own. But to be fair to me, I wasn’t defending the genre, just the term. What CRwM is doing is making the case that the genre’s defining characteristics have the potential for great horror art. My only concern is that in so doing, he perhaps allowed himself to fiddle with his designation and delineation of those defining characteristics so as to reach that conclusion.
Maybe it’s possible that the only torture porn movies are the Hostel and Saw franchises, as he argues. But in a way, what he’s doing is the same kind of definitional sleight-of-hand that so irks me when mainstream critics do the “If It’s a Horror Movie and It’s Good, It Must Be Transcending the Genre” rag–in other words, they define the genre so as to preclude the possibility of good art, so that when good art comes along it’s not part of the genre, it’s something else. You’ve seen this done with “torture porn”-as-pejorative, by the way; CRwM is, in a way, offering the flipside of that. Now, he isn’t saying that torture porn movies are good, just that they can be good–but he’s doing so by reducing the definition to being applicable only to a very, very narrow set of films, which to me is kind of a cheat. If “torture porn” can’t also be used to describe Audition, Turistas, The Passion of the Christ and so on, what good is it? Don’t we on some level instinctively understand that the goals of those films, in terms of the torture content, is largely the same? Would we settle on (or for) a definition of “slasher” that only included Halloween and Sleepaway Camp? Whatever you might say about my definition of torture porn, I think it’s a lot more useful–it’s basically just a film in which the primary fear engine is the immobilization and brutalization of somebody. To me at least, the conceptual richness of those two “-ization”s gives you all the freedom you need to make a more elaborate case for the genre’s inherent interest.
This sort of brings me around (finally!) to Curt Purcell’s provocative response to my monumental horror-image theory/essay. What sticks in Curt’s craw about it is how far I swing the pendulum in the opposite direction of violence and gore in terms of trying to get at the images that “define” horror. Might not seeing ostentatious violence as a sort of Freudian doubling of the monumental horror-image–the actualization of such an image’s potentiality, the yang unconsciously called to mind by the yin–enable us to construct a Grand Unified Theory of Horror?
The answer: yes, it might. But I fear that the drive to do so stems from me overstating my case in my original essay. That essay’s genesis was pretty simple: Over the years I discovered that certain types of images–the Shining twins, the Wicker Man–scared me more than anything else in horror movies. But when I turned to the literature to see what had been said about it, the answer was, basically, nothing. Most horror scholarship focused on gender- and sexuality-based explorations of horror violence and horror monsters, rather than these kinds of images. So I went about cobbling together an explanation for how and why such images did what they did. Again, they were, to me, the scariest images to be found in horror; meanwhile, contra the “transcending the genre” crowd, I believed that a genre should be defined by its best works–in this case, its scariest. Hence, calling the monumental horror-image the “definitive” horror-image, heavily implying if not stating outright that this is as opposed to the violence and gore.
BUT! It’s that “as opposed to” that gets me in trouble. Never did I intend my praise of the monumental horror-image to mean that other kinds of horror images should be excluded, that they didn’t count, that they couldn’t also be super super scary or creative or effective or disturbing or Art with a capital A. The gore and violence that Curt attempts to loop into an expanded conception of what makes horror imagery tick is perfectly valid and requires no such expanded conception, at least as far as I’m concerned, because I was trying to define a very precise set of images, not the genre overall. Those images work best for me for (I think) the reasons described in the essay, but they’re not the only images that work, for me or for anybody else, and I have no ambitions to state otherwise. Similarly, there may be torture porn films that work best, or even just embody certain principles the best, but ironically the less ambitious definition covers more ground and is therefore more useful, I think.
* Steven Wintle has posted the farewell edition of The Horror Roundtable. I stole my entry from My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Buzz McCoy’s contribution to the liner notes of the WaxTrax! box set, but my favorite valedictory has to be T Van, who drops the greatest, and most underutilized, Seinfeld quote of all time.
* Apparently Battlestar Galactica‘s ratings are up, but what really struck me about the Hollywood Reporter article stating as much was this passage about the show’s current direction:
The numbers are also surprising since “Battlestar” has as many fans frustrated with the current season as enthralled. The storylines have turned the show’s longtime shades-of-gray character morality into a muddy and often indecipherable quagmire of interlocking mythology, with a slew of formerly down-to-earth human and cylon characters elevated to quasi-deities pondering their higher purpose.
I don’t think it’s all that indecipherable–I don’t find Lost hard to follow either–but other than that, yeah, that’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Not surprisingly, the focus on mythology seems to have completely energized various BSG fans of my acquaintance who made the transition over to the show via Netflix’d DVDs after hearing “Hey, you like Lost? You’ll like BSG too!” The current Battlestar storyline seems tailor-made to fan the guessing-game flames that mark Lost‘s most ardent fans. (Via Whitney Matheson.)
* I’m fond of saying I didn’t read comics as a kid, and this is basically true. However, around the time that I saw Batman and read The Dark Knight Returns, I was massively into Marvel trading cards. In one of the all-time great acts of cluefulness, my buddy Ryan Penagos at Marvel.com has posted every single Marvel Universe Series I trading card. I found this via Gary Wintle, who writes that he took the cards so seriously, he thought the “joke” cards were canonical. I’d imagine there are a lot of us out there whose ideas of heroic fantasy were shaped in a fairly fundamental way by these cards.
* Quentin Tarantino’s gonna shoot and complete his long-mooted World War II epic Inglorious Bastards in time to premiere it at Cannes next year? I’ll see it when I believe it. (Via AICN.)
* Behold, Watchmen‘s Minutemen! Folks, this is why they didn’t give the modern-day superheroes spandex costumes. (Via AICN again.)
* Speaking of Watchmen, you know the pirate story Tales of the Black Freighter from the comic? A direct-to-DVD animated adaptation by Zack Snyder and company will come out days before the Watchmen theatrical release. Clever. (Via SciFi Wire.)
* Also at SciFi Wire, Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier says his movie is both a reboot of and sequel to Ang Lee’s Hulk film (I guess he does, it’s not a direct quote), sources the movie’s inspiration to the ’70s TV series and the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale graphic novel Hulk: Gray, and promises you won’t have to go 40 minutes into the movie to see the Hulk for the first time.
* Comic Book Resources has a preview of the latest Mike Mignola/John Arcudi-scripted B.P.R.D. miniseries, War on Frogs. The B.P.R.D. banner is basically the best ongoing superhero comic on the stands for the past three years or so–better than Hellboy proper, if you ask me. Bonus points for old-school artist Herb Trimpe’s Guy Davis impersonation.
* My experience with actor-director Sydney Pollack is basically limited to his role as Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut and his black-comic bluebeard cameo in The Sopranos. That being said, I loved Matt Zoller Seitz’s two-paragraph comment-thread obit, not just as a reminder of how great a film writer Seitz is, but for the way it effortlessly implies an ocean of interesting work beneath the surface of every “So-and-So Dead at 73” headline.
* Go, look: New Anders Nilsen comics.
* Go, read (and disagree vehemently at least twice): Tom Spurgeon on this summer’s blockbuster movies.
* The Vault of Horror’s B-Sol reviews Inside, the French horror film I’m clearly the last person in the horror blogosphere to see.
* The humor of recognition: Ten Arcs That Most Superheroes Must Endure Even Though Almost None of Them Should. (Via Matthew Perpetua.)
* Finally, the owls are not what they seem.
* The next best thing to being there: Tom Spurgeon has posted his utterly epic annual guide to attending the San Diego Comic-Con. Updated and hilarious, it will really, really make you wish you could go.
* A different kind of guide: Cryptomundo’s Loren Coleman has complete coverage of a controversial recent Bigfoot-expert conference at which analyst M.K. Davis more or less asserted that the specimen seen in the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage is a) human b) wearing a braid c) the victim of a gunshot to the leg that was inflicted by one of the filmmakers. Yes, seriously.
* B-Sol at Vault of Horror takes a look at the modern zombie movie’s famine years, the 1990s.
* At her blog, actress/eccentrix Bai Ling reviews Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Yes, seriously.
* Curt Purcell takes a whack at the wack notion that the only really scary fiction is about stuff that can actually happen, preparing to argue why supernatural horror is the sine qua non of the genre. The post is also a slight walk-back from his position regarding the overvaluing of fear among horror fans–worth a read if you’ve been following Curt’s thoughts on that matter.
* By the way, I owe Curt a response to his post on my “monumental horror-image” theory.
* Go, look: Mat Brinkman art at the Stairwell Gallery (via Monster Brains.)
Nil: A Land Beyond Belief
James Turner, writer/artist
SLG, April 2005
236 pages
$12.95
When I was in middle school and first got into Monty Python, I assumed that most grown-ups knew all about philosophers, because Python had so many jokes about them. As it turns out the kinds of grown-ups who know all about philosophers first learn about them as kids in middle school who get into Monty Python, so it’s a bit of a self-perpetuating system. Anyway, Nil sort of takes this premise for granted–it’s like the looooooooooooooongest Monty Python philosopher sketch ever, with liberal doses of Brazil thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately it’s not funny, let alone as funny as Python or Gilliam solo. The basic idea is that there exists a dystopian land called Nil that embodies nihilism in its many conflicting forms, where people pilot big wrecking ships that destroy literal outgrowths of belief, and which is at war with a similar antithetical nation called Optima. The people of Nil spend almost all their time one-upping each other as to who best embodies the principles of nihilism, such as they are–except for our hero, Proun Nul, who yearns for something more. Or maybe he just yearns to have sex with the lovely Miss Void, I don’t know. The problem is that the concept never quite seems sure what it wants to be. Is Nilean nihilism a matter of literal, physical warfare against belief as a living thing, or is it the usual matter of debate and argument? If Nil is resolutely anti-capitalist, why is every page covered in ad parodies? If Nil is resolutely anti-totalitarian, why is it such an ersatz Oceania? Is it a model of efficiency, or of incompetence? Maybe some kind of point is being made here of the nonsensical nature of nihilism to begin with, but it feels more like an attempt to cram in every kind of joke available than a coherent choice of satire. It’s kind of baffling and it leaves the jokes without any solid ground to pivot off of, and it’s not as though any of the characters are developed in any sense but the most broad and parodic since they have no constants to play against. By the end of its 236 pages, which seemed a lot longer, I really didn’t care anymore. All told, the five or six minutes of total screen time given to the Nihilists in The Big Lebowski are a more effective satire of that anti-belief system and the excesses of the life of the mind in general.
All of this is compounded by Turner’s art, which is designy and iconic in the extreme. I’m sure there’s a perfect point of comparison out there that I’m totally missing, but what it calls to mind for me is flash animation, or some very old computer program, or Legos…it’s resolutely cold, flat, and artificial. This can occasionally lead to startling images–generally speaking, the bigger the weapon of war, apartment complex, or Nihilist temple, the cooler Turner makes it look through accrued geometric patterns. (Remember those flying bomb ships in Super Mario Bros. 3, with all the propellers and cannons and things? Kinda like that.) But for the most part it’s deliberately unlovely, making empathy or even awe impossible. It kind of substitutes cleverness for the usual kinds of qualities that make art compelling–of which cleverness is one, of course, but not the only one.
In some ways I think it’s exciting that a book like this can get made and published, but it wasn’t for me.
* Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Jackson did an online Q&A about the two upcoming Hobbit movies, and the transcript is here. (Via AICN.) Kristin Thompson runs down some of the highlights–John Howe, Alan Lee, Howard Shore, Andy Serkis, and Ian McKellen are all confirmed for both films, for example–but for my money the most interesting thing (not necessarily good, just interesting) is Del Toro’s comments regarding supplementing the Weta design and effects teams with his own staff.
* B-Sol at Vault of Horror says that The Strangers‘ tendentious “inspired by a true story” claims indicate a studio with something to hide, but isn’t that just the exact same hyperbole used to promote The Texas Chain Saw Massacre back in the day. For me it has more to do with the film’s deliberately old-school promotional campaign rather than trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes (though based on a conversation with my non-horror-fan little sister about the movie, that’s happening too).
* AICN has links to some fun clips from The Incredible Hulk. Looks like a good time to me.
Thor: Ages of Thunder
Matt Fraction, writer
Patrick Zircher, Khari Evans, artists
Marvel, April 2008
36 pages
$3.99
A while ago I linked to a video of crudely animated Thors performing Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and, in a post that got some attention here and there around the Internet, said basically that Thor comics should be at least that metal. If your Thor comic doesn’t evoke Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” there is something wrong with your Thor comic. Needless to say, there’s been a lot wrong with a lot of Thor comics by that standard.
In Thor: Ages of Thunder, writer Matt Fraction takes a big step in the right direction. The action primarily consists of Thor attacking and beheading enormous frost giants, then dragging their heads into Asgard as trophies; between these feats he has sex. With the exception of the two included stories’ introductory pages, everything is done in big two-page spreads. There are shots of Thor’s war hammer Mjolnir dripping with gore. The chorus of the one Zeppelin song that explicitly references Thor, “No Quarter,” is paraphrased. The coming attraction page for the book’s sequel reveals its title to be Thor: Reign of Blood.
But in much the same way that it doesn’t quite get the “No Quarter” chorus right and didn’t quite name its follow-up after the Slayer album, it doesn’t quite gel overall. Mostly this is because of the narration captions in virtually every panel. It’s not that they’re knowingly overwrought–that’s as it should be–it’s just that there are way too many of them and there are way too many words in each. A action comic about gods warring with giants and constructed solely of two-page spreads should flow effortlessly, but the constant jibber-jabber stops both the eye and the brain short when they should be on cruise control. Show us how awesome your Thor is, don’t tell us. Moreover, I just happened to have read a whole lot of mythology-based comics recently, whether we’re talking about short stories in Mome or minicomics by Eleanor Davis and Matt Wiegle or flashbacks in Incredible Hercules, and the captions make this one feel comparatively belabored.
There’s also a disparity between the art in the two stories. Patrick Zircher’s detail-driven art packs genuine power, and the witty coloring by June Chung (dig the red noses she gives everyone–after all, it’s chilly in the realm of the Norse gods!) puts it over the top; Khari Evans’s figures, particularly his women, seem awkwardly proportioned and inconsistently constructed by comparison. (Though his Thor itself is quite strong, and he’s one of the first artists I’ve come across who truly conveys that Thor flies because he throws his hammer so hard the thing pulls him up off the ground with it.)
That being said, it’s all enormously more appropriate to a character based on gods worshipped by the priests who gave us the term “berserkers” than a leisurely rumination on the cyclical nature of existence set within the rural farms and diners of Oklahoma. It’s also entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that a collection of stories of this type (which is surely in the offing given the announced second issue) will make for a satisfyingly loud read, and be priced more efficiently to boot. In much the same way that I’m comforted that most kids’ first exposure to the potentially awesome character of Iron Man will be from Jon Favreau’s movie rather than Mark Millar and J. Michael Straczynski’s comics, I take great solace in the hope that somewhere, some kid is reading this while listening to the copy of Black Sabbath Volume 4 he stole from his older brother rather than reading something that will lead him to form the opinion that “Thor is boring.”
* Well now, here’s a treat: A very, very entertaining interview with Michael Emerson, aka Ben from Lost, by the Daytona Beach News-Journal‘s Tom Iacuzio. It’s full of both spoilers and speculation, so be careful, but the adorable thing is that the speculation comes from Emerson himself rather than the interviewer! Emerson also has some interesting things to say about Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica. And then there’s this wonderful little exchange:
What kind of reaction do you get from fans on the street?
Mostly people react to me with pleasure but in general it’s a kind of guarded pleasure. They are happy to see this face and voice that they know belongs to a character that they enjoy but part of them can’t fully disassociate me from the part I play. So they worry a little bit that I might actually be somewhat dangerous.
Do you ever just shoot them that patented Ben stare?
(pause) I don’t even know what you’re talking about.
Read the whole thing. (Via The Tail Section.)
* Buncha Marvel movie news that has me kind of excited. First, there’s a film adaptation of Runaways on the way, with a screenplay by series writer and Lost ass-kicker Brian K. Vaughan himself. (Via JK Parkin.) Second, displaying an admirable level of cluefulness, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige sez the upcoming movie versions of Captain America and Thor will take place during World War II (entirely) and in Asgard (partially) respectively. Sweet.
* Artist Robert Burden is selling prints of his awesomely over-the-top portraits of action figures! (Via Uncrate.)
* You’ll never not be entertained while reading Rick Marshall talk about Wizard.
* CRwM of And Now the Screaming Starts has some really interesting things to say about torture porn, specifically regarding how the audience is implicated by the events taking place, and whether we who debate the term agree at all on what we’re referring to when we use it. Since a chunk of it is based on an interpretation of my definition of torture porn, I respond and defend myself here.
* Finally, Kali Ma!
