Read: The Waste Lands–“Bridge and City,” parts 16-22

Hey, it’s still pretty good! Actually, it’s getting better as it goes. Already several of yesterday’s predictions regarding fun genre tropes have already come to pass. It’s tough to argue with the idea of a future civilization of mad urban warriors ritualistically killing someone every time the drumbeat from ZZ Top’s “Velcro Fly” is played on the city’s PA system, you know? It reminded me (I think I’ve mentioned this before) of the way the Eloi just calmly walked right into the Morlock’s lair and to their own deaths every time the air-raid sirens were switched on in The Time Machine, without a clue as to the meaning behind the sirens. In this case, though, the Pubes (the drumbeat-killers) believe the drums to be the work of demons, a non-trivial possibility in this world. Of course, it’s just the savvier Grays, who it seems should really have wiped these Pube clowns out by now.

While Eddie and Susannah deal with that, Jake continues his descent into the Grays’ labyrinth, in a journey that’s like a nightmare, child-abusing version of The Goonies. Gasher, his captor, is like the Pubes we meet an extremely believable villain. You don’t doubt for a second that he’s bad news through and through, but there’s a weight to his cartoonishness, expressed best through his gutter slang and his resigned, almost curious attitude toward both death and youth, that actually makes you feel that he arrived at his current evil state via a lifetime of conscious choices and victimizing circumstance, as opposed to just being conjured up to play the heavy by Steve-o.

Here are three things I want to see as this section progresses:

1) A talking train

2) Gasher getting killed

3) Oy surviving

Again, here’s hoping.

And here are two quotes I wanted to call out.

At some point the sound of the drums began. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and for Jake it was the final straw. He gave up hope and thought alike, and allowed himself to descend wholly into the nightmare.

Very Clive Barker!

He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble.

Sound like anyone we know? I’ll give you a hint:

There was a clown in the stormdrain. The light in there was far from good, but it was good enough so that George Denbrough was sure of what he was seeing It was a clown, like in the circus or on TV. In fact he looked like a cross between Bozo and Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her? — George was never really sure of the gender) horn on Howdy Doody Saturday mornings — Buffalo Bill was just about the only one who could understand Clarabell, and that always cracked George up. The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth. If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald before Bozo or Clarabell.

Of course, that gentleman’s name was Mr. Robert Gray, not Winston, and it took a lot more than a shot from a Ruger to do away with him. Still, wheels within wheels, man.

Today Heidi MacDonald–

Okay, wait. First I want to pause and reflect, because opening a post with those three words made me realize I really am back to blogging about comics. How about that? Alright, I’m all set now.

Today Heidi MacDonald replied to all the reactions, mostly hostile, to her post of the other day calling for a greater emphasis on storytelling and character in comics. Even if I’m still unsold on her argument, it helps clarify her stance on various artists and comics. She mentions my response specifically:

I’m especially sad that someone like Sean Collins think that I said this:

A conception of comics that invalidates Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset” or Anders Nilsen’s The End or John Hankiewicz’s Asthma is not a useful one to me, or probably to comics.

I haven’t read ASTHMA, but I’ve gone on record many times with my respect and enjoyment of Huizenga and Nilsen. But that’s because both of them do just was I was trying to encourage — they FILTER THEIR IDEAS THROUGH MADE UP CHARACTERS AND SITUATIONS. Nilsen can get a little haiku at times, but he also knows how to use thematic and story elements to construct a greater whole (DOGS AND WATER.) Huizenga is even more of a yarn spinner, although his concerns are philosophical.

I apologize for overstating Heidi’s objection to guys like Nilsen and Kevin H. My main point is that I like the times when Anders “gets a little haiku” just as much, actually probably more, than the more straightforward things, which is why I mentioned The End and not D&W or even Big Questions. Ditto Kevin H.’s real formalist freakouts, which again is why I called out “The Sunset” (my favorite short story in the history of comics) rather than “Jeepers Jacobs.” And Asthma is almost pure abstraction, though to be clearer I could have specifically mentioned that book’s “Jazz” as opposed to “Martha Gregory.” Point being, I don’t see any of that as requiring any kind of corrective measure in terms of demanding that they start liking more traditional comics more. But at the same time, nor do I see Usagi Yojimbo needing to read a little more like PaperRad. They can each do their own thing, and I’m hesitant to extrapolate any paradigms to fight against from either approach, which is where Heidi’s piece lost me.

But what it all boils down to for me is the part of the new post where Heidi boils it all down for herself:

What I don’t like is the trend of valuing expressionism, formalism and “comica verité” for their own sake at the expense of what I would call “mainstream fiction”, or formally conventional but narratively complex stories such as Love & Rockets, Exit Wounds, Ode to Kirihito, Ice Haven (Shock!!) or American Born Chinese.

Simply put, I am totally fine with that trend! I might be less okay with it if I really thought it were being done “at the expense of” other kinds of books, but I don’t think it is at all. This is what I was getting at when I said my problem with Heidi’s original piece was “more fundamental” than debating the applicability of specific examples she cited, or even attempting to determine whether comics were at this kind of crisis point. Even if they were, to me, it wouldn’t really be a crisis.

“It was like ‘Jaws.'”

–Charter boat Capt. Robert Hill, quoted in “‘It was like ‘Jaws” — 844-pound shark caught; Catch off Florida Panhandle shatters record in decades-old contest,” AP, MSNBC.com. Photo by William Hatfield/AP.

It certainly serves the shark right for living in the ocean and being hungry.

Eve Tushnet reviews two slasher movies! Terror Train and Black Christmas, to be precise, with her take on the latter uniquely Tushnetian.

Final Girl’s Stacie Ponder ponders Hellraiser.

Rob Humanick continues his 31 Days of Zombie! blogathon with a look at Lucio Fulci’s wildly overrated (by Rob and others) Zombi 2. Even if you, like me, believe there’s nothing to this film other than the astonishingly grotesque zombie effects and their spectacular presentation, it’s a review worth reading for its thoughts on that aspect.

Not Coming to a Theater Near You’s Teddy Blanks continues that site’s 31 Days of Horror blogathon with a look at Brian DePalma’s wildly underrated Body Double. Quote of the day:

Body Double, though, is in its own universe, a sublimely ridiculous piece of schooled filmmaking that embraces the sheen and excess of cheap 80s Hollywood as a flashy new avant-garde.

That is exactly right.

Over at the Horror Roundtable, everybody hates these taffy/toffee Halloween candies in orange-and-black wrappers that I’ve never seen before in my life.

On a note related to that asinine Nikki Finke quote about torture porn from the other day, here’s a Jon Hastings post decrying another attempt to apply a “would you play it for your parents?” standard to art, this time to music. Shit, with a lot of music, not being able to comfortably play it for your parents is the whole point.

Read: The Waste Lands–“Bridge and City,” parts 1-15

At first I was upset that I had to skip a day of this series, because that kind of lessens the integrity of the blogathon concept. Then I realized that the day I ended up skipping was unlucky Day 13, and it became clear that this was ka.

This was a pretty crackerjack section. Dig this killer opening sentence:

They came upon the downed airplane three days later.

Better yet, the airplane turns out to be a Nazi fighter, the swastika covered up by a picture of a fist gripping a lightning bolt. And it was piloted, back in the day, by an outlaw warlord the size of Andre the Giant. But besides just being a giant-cyborg-bear bit of coolness, it sparks a conversation between the characters that casts Roland’s world in a different light. Up until now I’d been assuming that this is our world in the distant future, but Eddie speculates that the plane could have literally flown right into this world from our own, during its World War II heyday, via a portal similar to the ones that he, Susannah, and Jake used. I don’t think that explains all the recognizable technology present in Roland’s world, but maybe things really aren’t just as simple as my ancient-ruin theory.

The centerpiece of the early part of this section is the group’s long conversation about riddles. Clearly this is going to be important later in the book, but even though this was maybe telegraphing that, it was interesting and entertaining enough in itself to merit the page space. If you’ve ever read The Hobbit, this read like an explanation of why Bilbo and Gollum took it all so seriously down there in the cave.

Next up is more world-building, or world-explaining, via some clumsy mutated white bees and their fucked-up hive. Once upon a time there was a nuclear apocalypse, and everything you see in Roland-world is what made it through the other side. The ancient-ruin theory makes a comeback.

Then there’s the passage of the bridge. This might have been the weakest point of this section, actually. I found King’s descriptions of the construction of the roads leading to the bridge and of the bridge itself difficult to follow and visualize; in this regard, Tolkien he ain’t. Also, there was pretty much a one-to-one correspondence between Eddie, his fear of heights, and Jake with Larry Underwood, his claustrophobia, and Rita Blakemoor. Been there, done that. However, having Jake fall in an attempt to save his animal companion sharpened things up a bit. I’m obviously a sucker for animals in peril, so there’s that, but the addition of the detail of Oy holding on for dear life by biting the shit out of Jake’s hand was vivid enough to shake me from the stupor induced by the Stand-induced déjà vu.

Finally there’s the syphilitic pirate guy with a grenade who pwns the whole gang. This made me happy for a variety of reasons, not least being that a syphilitic pirate guy with a grenade pwned the whole gang. That doesn’t happen nearly often enough in fiction these days. It also brings up happy associations with The Road Warrior and Escape from New York. King’s invented patois for the pirate is vivid and convincing and fun rather than jarring to read, a whole lot more so than your average sci-fi/fantasy made-up dialect. (Bruce Baugh mentioned this as well, and he’s right. Be warned, though, that that post is a little too spoilery for my tastes in terms of events in the revised Gunslinger that apparently become important by The Dark Tower itself.) But my favorite aspect was how he shows up right after the big climax of the attempt to cross the bridge, with virtually no respite between the heart-pounding stuff. Having them turn back around to keep going and see a crazy urban warrior with a hand grenade was pretty much the last thing I expected.

I have a feeling that the book could get very good from this point forward, as our heroes navigate the ruined city of Lud. I expect some evocative post-apocalyptic landscapes, ragged bands of bloodthirsty outlaws, endless dystopian warfare between two sides who no longer remember what they’re fighting about, striking and entertaining anachronisms like ZZ Top records used as a weapon of war, heroic pets, evil anthropomorphized trains, and other genre-tastic delights. Here’s hoping.

Now this is how you spend a weekend.

I could not have been happier with how my David Bowie sketchbook turned out at MoCCA. Did I try to go two for two at SPX? You’d better believe it! And here are the results.

Mark Burrier: Mark got REALLY excited about the prospect of drawing Bowie. He gunned right for the Thin White Duke era, which is my favorite Bowie look as well. I’ve found that most artists who already know and love Bowie go for the Station to Station look. I also see some of his recent nattily attired vibe, circa Heathen and Reality, in this one.

Josh Cotter: Josh knew exactly what he wanted to draw–the cover for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars–and was extremely painstaking about doing it.

Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing: Eleanor (the dreamer on the left) and Drew (the dreamer on the right) are married, so they tag-teamed this sketch. Drew was the first artist to search high and low through my photo reference for a Labyrinth shot, but he wasn’t the last. For some reason, books about Bowie tend not to have big Labyrinth photos. Go figure.

Kim Dietch: Bowie sings Perry Como! In an alternate universe, this really could have happened to David instead of to Rod Stewart. Dietch is a southpaw and as such is the only artist to sketch on a left-hand page in my book.

Nicholas Gurewitch: Another Labyrinthine sketch, with a Ziggymullet twist, from the Perry Bible Fellowship auteur. It looks like it could have come straight from the strip.

John Hankiewicz: I could see this bifurcated Bowie wandering around one of the dreamscapes in a John Hankiewicz comic really easily.

Andy Hartzell: The reason I ask people to draw David Bowie is that I really dug my friends’ themed sketchbooks, but they tend to be based on obscure superheroes they love, like Lockjaw, Nova, or Matter-Eater Lad. The only superhero I love is Batman, which would be kind of played-out to ask comics artists to sketch, so I went with Bowie. I explained all this to Hartzell, and the next thing I knew I had this awesome mash-up.

Gilbert Hernandez: I was absurdly starstruck as I watched Beto draw, as much as I was by Charles Burns. Gilbert didn’t need photo reference, and even knew which eye had the dilated pupil–and that Bowie’s still angry at the kid who roughed him up and caused the condition decades ago. I’m still pretty stunned I got to watch Gilbert Hernandez draw.

Kevin Huizenga: Kevin seemed to want to get this exactly right–he sketched and erased at least two rough versions before nailing this one. I really love the powder blue–I know exactly which outfit this is modeled after–and the paraphrased quote from “Moonage Daydream.” That actually sounds like the name of a Kevin H. comic, now that I think about it.

Paul Karasik: Karasik was a very good sport about drawing Bowie for me despite professing an active dislike for him and for popular music in general. We spent most of the time he was sketching debating whether Bowie was worth a damn, which was fun, if a little intimidating. Note: This is a mash-up between Bowie and Stardust (not Ziggy), the godlike super-“hero” from the comics of Fletcher Hanks, a collection of which called I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets Karasik edited.

Matt Kindt: Old Bowie dreams of young Bowie. It’s like Gandalf blowing glam smoke rings.

Roger Langridge: Langridge kicks it caricature-style. There’s a bit of vaudeville in both Langridge and Bowie, so this is fitting, I think.

Jeff Lemire: I knew Jeff would create something memorable the first time I saw some of his strangely haunting superhero-sketch commissions. And again, I love the powder blue.

Ted May: Kevin Huizenga suggested that I seek out Ted May for a sketch because he’s a huge Bowie fan. He definitely took the sketch very seriously. This profile shot is on the cover of Low, my favorite Bowie album.

Brian Ralph: The ever-popular pirate look makes a comeback. I don’t know if it’s just because Brian’s drawn monkeys in his comics, but between the lanky limbs and the tail-like mic cord, there’s something simian about this Bowie.

Finally, here’s one that’s somewhat NSFW if your boss happens to be paying enough attention:

Tom Neely: In color! Tom is one of only three artists from whom I have original art–a drawing of the Creature from the Black Lagoon I won on a contest on his website–so it was a pleasure to get his take on Bowie.

For the original set of sketches, click here, or peruse the whole shebang as a Flickr set.

He personally convinced Sylvester Stallone NOT to change the tile of John Rambo to Rambo: To Hell and Back.

This is what John Rambo looks like, by the way.

Even while I was at SPX and offline for pretty much 48 hours, I still heard quite a bit about Heidi MacDonald’s essay decrying a perceived lack of respect for traditional character and storytelling values among today’s young cartoonists. Most objections to it have focused whether her arguments are supported by any valid examples of young cartoonists who actively dislike such comics, or whether she ignored many genre-based works that are respected and admired these days, but my problem with it is more fundamental. Simply put, why should storytelling and character be paramount concerns? That’s like calling pop music a failure unless it’s Tommy or one of Ghostface Killah’s cocaine-deal narratives. It’s imposing a narrative fiction or film model onto an artform that can just as easily incorporate the influences of poetry, fine art, music, freakin’ dancing.

Many of the new comics that have meant the most to me over the past three years–a time during which I’ve also read and loved any number of books by authors primarily concerned with story, from Gipi and Jason to Bryan Lee O’Malley and Becky Cloonan to Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison to Minetaro Mochizuki and Ai Yazawa to Nick Bertozzi and Jordan Crane–have been primarily concerned with mood, emotion, and rhythm rather than telling gripping yarns. That seems perfectly fine to me. A conception of comics that invalidates Kevin Huizenga’s “The Sunset” or Anders Nilsen’s The End or John Hankiewicz’s Asthma is not a useful one to me, or probably to comics.

Today will probably be a skip day as I am out and about at SPX. Thank you for your patience.

Read: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Town and Ka-tet“

Nothing beats the catharsis you feel when characters do exactly what they should do. In this case that thing is answer by proxy the prayers of a million angry Lost critics and just sit around and compare notes. (Lost‘s creators are fond of citing their storytelling debt to King, with whom they’ve formed a mutual admiration society; maybe the bard of Bangor should point this passage out to them and say “how about you have Jack, Locke, and Juliet just sit down and explain shit to each other for about 45 minutes?”)

The menace of Charlie the Choo-Choo/Blaine the Mono continues to grow. I’m still concerned it’ll be much ado about nothing, but for now I’m content to enjoy the strength of the images conjured in that storybook. Using Underworld’s “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”, which was the song that played during the withdrawal hallucination sequence in Trainspotting if you recall, as my mental soundtrack for all things locomotive in this book is certainly helping.

Two other notes:

1) I think I realized why Susannah and Eddie just don’t work as foils for Roland, even while the mere hints and suggestions we’ve received about his former companions like Alain and Cuthbert are so fascinating–it’s because the former feel like real people and the latter like mythic archetypes. That sort of thing can frequently work in the real-feeling characters’ favor, but not in this dark fairy-tale world.

2) For a second there, when Roland was upbraiding himself for mistaking Eddie’s free will for his ka, I thought I’d suddenly and finally figured out how the Presbyterians reconcile predestination and free will. You’ve got a path (predestination/ka) laid out for you and you’re gonna travel it one way or another, but you can still choose to do so or not. But this falls apart when applied to the Presbyterians, because while it seems conceivable that someone’s ka could draw them into a quest like Roland’s against their will, I’m pretty sure no one’s supposed to go to Heaven thinking “man, this is bullshit!”

I waged a campaign this year against horribly violent horror movies and especially torture porn. I really shamed the Hollywood execs making money on these movies. I do believe that no Hollywood player should earn a dime from a film he’s ashamed to show in his own home. Then other journalists started doing the story. I’m not saying I’m solely responsible, but it’s been gratifying to see that those movies have gone from doing very well at the box office to doing almost no business.

—L.A. Weekly‘s Nikki Finke in Elle Magazine

Obviously it’s a gloriously idiotic quote for any number of reasons, but I think one that’s likely to be overlooked is her ghastly standard for which projects Hollywood execs should greenlight. By the “ashamed to show in his own home” rubric, I’m guessing a lot of now-classic movies wouldn’t have made the grade.

(Via Glenn Kenny, via Matt Zoller Seitz)

Today I will be going to the Small Press Expo with a small coterie of my friends and former co-workers. A bunch of new Bowie sketches and perhaps some sort of con report may follow. If you’ll be there, look for me.

Read: The Waste Lands–“Town and Ka-tet,” parts 1-15

After a long, long time, the Dark Tower series once again starts feeling like how I, based on The Gunslinger, imagined the Dark Tower series would feel. The group (now a fivesome with the addition of Jake and his newfound pet billy-bumbler Oy) enters a run-down old town at a crossroads, meets its elderly but decent inhabitants, and bam! We’re back to the batwing saloon doors and archaic speech of the Clint/Conan mash-up that was the first book. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, I think that’s pretty swell.

I like all this business with the evil choo-choo train, too. I do hope that the pay-off is worth the build-up, though. I worry that this note is being hit a little too hard and too often, and that I’m gonna end up disappointed.

And I liked hearing the dimly remembered oral history of how Road Warrior-style anarchy beset the city of Lud and its surroundings; more of that sort of thing and less of Eddie and Henry playing one-on-one, please. It seems like the impression I got that Roland’s world is seriously on its way out was accurate, and not just because of the mystical spacetime-breakdown stuff–we’ve learned that every major population center/bastion of civilization has been destroyed, that their inhabitants have been scattered and left to fend for themselves in completely isolated communities with no real means of interacting with one another, and that no one on any side of the myriad conflicts is having much luck reproducing. It’s not just Mad Max, it’s also a bit of Children of Men, but with Clive Owen’s adventure maybe 30 or 40 years back in the rear-view mirror. It’s a sad, dying world and I want to see more of it in that light.

Read: The Waste Lands–“Door and Demon”

Compared to yesterday’s reading, this section was kind of by the numbers. The Dean Brothers remain a whole lot less interesting than a post-apocalyptic cowboy shooting at giant cybernetic bears, and the bit in the haunted house with Jake was like a less frightening version of the house on Niebold Street from It, or the Marsten house from ‘Salem’s Lot, or the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, or or or. But I did like this passage an awful lot:

She put a hand on the back of his neck, pressing his head against her thigh, and said bitterly to Roland, “Sometimes I hate you, big white man.”

Roland placed the heels of his hands against his forehead and pressed hard. “Sometimes I hate myself.”

That’s the appeal of the gunslinger–a guy so driven to do the right thing and fulfill his quest that he becomes loathsome even to himself.

In other news, I detected some thematic allusions to other King books–the constant injunctions for the characters to “stand” and the notion that life is a wheel that keeps coming around to the same place again are awfully familiar. Meanwhile, Susannah-Detta’s I’ve got you/you’ve got me sex duel with the demon was pretty much the ritual of Chüd from It.

One final note: They really have to stop putting the illustrations before the passages they illustrate. The damn book keeps spoiling itself!

There are other ways to treat comics as a commodity rather than an art besides viewing them as product. Probably the most prevalent these days is to implicitly (or explicity) equate–or supplant–quality with popularity. Here’s an example of that mindset from a letter to Tom Spurgeon from Winston Rowntree:

Your web site is focused primarily on print comics that Nobody Reads. There are thousands, like myself, who think of comics primarily as an online medium and we read online comics almost exclusively…We see the internet as the Future of comics, and are aware of emerging business models that support this theory by proving that online comics can succeed by selling merchandise and advertising associated with a freely-distributed webcomic. This is, in fact, The Future. Pretentious Art Comix from Drawn & Quarterly that 130 people buy are not the future. They are The Problem. Your website seems to ignore The Future…Granted, The Future of comics has not arrived yet, but you’ll look really smart if you get on the bandwagon now before it fills.

Rowntree goes on to offer a mea culpa about his belligerence and manages to note the “high quality” of many online comics, but that last is clearly an afterthought. The point is that online comics get big ratings, and that they can make money, and that they are therefore (love the caps!) The Future. As I’ve frequently alluded to, you often see similar argumentation deployed in favor of manga or OEL. While not quite as vociferous, the enthusiasm shown when anyone signs a deal with a major New York publishing house, especially while still young enough to get carded at bars, even if it’s to adapt some YA widget-factory novel series or something, is a related phenomenon. These cool, comparatively new, comparatively popular forms of comics, or at least their partisans, are here, they’re hip, and they’re banging their shoe on the table, so be warned, pervert-suit enthusiasts and sad-sack arthouse navel-gazers: They will bury you.

Curiously, however, audience size and financial success are not seen as points in favor of, say, superhero comics when Civil War sells more copies than anyone thought the Direct Market capable of moving anymore. And rightly so, because that’s a crazy reason to get excited about a comic, let alone its entire genre or format. It’s one thing, as an industry watcher, to be happy that this art form is finding a sizable audience beyond the strictures of the superhero industry, or that genres other than “extraordinary protagonist solves problems through violence” are at long last thriving, or that these new audiences are making it possible for creators to earn a decent living doing what they enjoy, or that this influx of cash and caché is persuading the arbiters of taste to treat comics with the seriousness it deserves. Long-time readers of ADDTF, from back during its first iteration as a comics blog, will likely remember me doing just that every time I saw those lovely rows and rows of tankubon trades at Borders or spotted a graphic-novel trend piece in any publication with the words New York in the title. But as readers or as critics or especially as creators, the second Drawn & Quarterly is dismissed as “The Problem” because Skibber Bee Bye is read by fewer people than Diesel Sweeties, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I’ve said this recently and so have others, but for serious: You just cannot care about keeping up with the Joneses if you want to make good comics, or want other people to make them. You can’t. Naruto‘s Bookscan rankings, or the Flight kids getting a book deal during their sophomore year in animation school, or Penny Arcade‘s readership mounting a credible third-party presidential campaign or whatever–these phenomena may or may not involve good comics, but they don’t replace good comics, or the need to apply all the usual standards in deciding whether they’re good comics (and therefore good for comics in the way that really matters) or not in the first place.

For the record, count me as one who does not object to the interrogation to which [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was reportedly subjected, including waterboarding. This is not because I take the use of waterboarding lightly (although I have a hard time concluding that a technique, however terrifying, to which CIA officers are willing to subject themselves experimentally can properly be counted as torture). It’s because I take the threat posed by KSM seriously….when the moral trade-off comes down to KSM waterboarded in order to extract actionable intelligence, or some mother’s child murdered, it’s not a tough call.

–Brett Stephens, “So Be It?: The dangers of defining torture down,” the Wall Street Journal

Who needs Eli Roth?

Mrs. Voorhees is the perfect mother: Not only will she kill for her son, she’ll die for him.

–Betsy Palmer, aka Friday the 13th‘s Mrs. Pamela Voorhees, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film

Read: The Waste Lands–the rest of “Key and Rose”

I don’t know if it’s my buddy Bill’s encouraging words or what, but to paraphrase Gibby Haynes and Ministry, all of a sudden I find myself in love with this book–something about this section really ding a ding danged my dang a long ling long. I liked Jake’s moment of clarity in the vacant lot as the true workings of the world were revealed to him. I like that someone or something knocked his ass out with a brick (surely given Jack Mort’s number on Odetta back in the day, that’s no coincidence), and that the action picks back up with this mystery unsolved. I like the fragment of the poem about the Turtle. I like Jake going home and pwning his dad with his eyes apparently literally on fire. I like that the French teacher was nice to him. I LOVE that he got an A+ on his crazy English essay. I like that he kind of made up with his mom and dad and it wasn’t that kind of irrevocable years-in-the-making blow-out that you see with some frequency in King’s work (cf. Frannie and her dad vs. her mom in The Stand, Eddie vs. his wife and Eddie vs. his mom in It, etc.). I really REALLY loved the Charlie the Choo-Choo story and the frightening suddenness with which you realize “whoa, this has gotten weird, hasn’t it?” (cf. Beverly Marsh’s coffee date with Mrs. Kersh in It). I like that that section meshed so well with the haunting, driving song “Moss” from Gus Gus’ latest album Forever which I’ve been listening to all day. I like that the voices of Jake’s bifurcated memory (with which I had so much trouble) are now bickering like annoying monsters in a children’s story:

Quit! he screamed at them. Just quit! You were gone all day, be gone again!

I would if he’d just admit I’m dead, one of the voices said.

I would if he’d just take a for God’s sake look around and admit I’m clearly alive, the other snapped back.

And I fucking ADORED this:

Ned Dameron FTW!

I’m back, back in the Dark Tower groove. (For now. No promises!)

…I think it’s not only excellent that DC is publishing a line for teen female readers, it’s doubly excellent that there’s a teen female writer involved in the line as well. So my instinct is to write something that would, in effect, praise all involved–in essence, give them a tickertape parade and the key to the city.

—Jeff Lester, on DC’s Minx line in general and Mike Carey, Louise Carey, and Aaron Alexavitch’s Confessions of a Blabbermouth in particular.

I think this is an instinct worth fighting against. I’m saying this without having read any Minx books, so that’s not a dig against them or the line at all. What I mean is twofold:

First, consciously gearing your entertainment product toward a particular demographic is a value-neutral act. This may be less apparent in comics because the art form in North America has been so completely dominated for so long by products geared toward men in their teens, 20s, and 30s, with that age bracket edging upward year in and year out, which makes it look like a comic geared toward any other group is half-act of charity, half-revolutionary declaration. But it is in fact still the case. It’s not remarkable that there are books and movies and TV shows geared toward women and men and teens and tweens and gay people and black people and whatever else, and it really shouldn’t be that remarkable that the same is true in comics. What would be remarkable is if they were good comics, regardless of the target demographic.

Second, involving a member of the target demographic in the creation of entertainment product for that demographic is also value-neutral. It can be good, it can lend authenticity to the work, it can lead to writing with an ear for the attitudes and dialogue inherent to that demographic, but it could just as easily do none of those things. John Kerry and John McCain are Vietnam veterans and by most accounts behaved admirably during that war, but I doubt either of them would make better Vietnam movies than Francis Ford Coppola or Stanley Kubrick. So having a teenage girl co-write a comic about teenage girls for teenage girls is unremarkable. What would be remarkable is if it were a good comic, regardless of who wrote it.

You’ll notice that I’m using the word “product” here. I use it to refer to art that is intended to serve a demographic first and foremost, before any other concerns, possibly even before any other ideas about the work form in the heads of the creators at all. Again, I’m not doing this to slag on the Minx line, with which I’m not terribly familiar other than to say that Jim Rugg drew one and I love Jim Rugg and that book looked really lovely when I flipped through it. In that same piece, Jeff puts it thusly:

DC’s Minx line openly promotes itself as being for female teen readers and I think that’s good: OGNs aimed at teen females is a market that’s worth tapping into; the more teens, females, and female teens we get reading comics the better; and if a teen who wanders into a shop looking for the next Minx book ends up picking up, say, Jaime Hernandez’s Locas, then, really, the whole thing is worth it. But by creating a book line with such a clearly defined target audience and a clearly defined goal, you’re one step closer to creating books that are more product than art. And while I don’t have a particular problem with that–I don’t mind picking up a Minx book knowing it’s unlikely I’m going to read some intense work of raw personal vision, the next Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner–I do think the closer a work comes to being product, the higher the expectation becomes that the product be of professional standards.

What’s interesting and maybe troubling about this formulation is that making great comics is an ancillary concern at best. These comics are supposed to be worthwhile 1) because teen females are an underserved market; 2) because introducing women and teenagers to the industry is good for the bottom line; 3) because maybe they’ll eventually lead those women and teenagers to pick up comics that are great. But the possibility of being a work of Diary of a Teenage Girl-level passion and genius isn’t even entertained.

Mind you, the only reason I’m focusing on this particular demographic is because I noticed Jeff’s post; the same things can be said for any number of “new mainstream” efforts to provide competent genre-based entertainment for the non-superhero, non-art comics, non-manga comics readers out there, or the theoretical ones that might manifest were such comics made available. I don’t doubt for a second that there are tons of great romance comics and young-adult comics and action comics and detective comics (as opposed to Action Comics and Detective Comics, which happen to be pretty good themselves these days) floating around in some cartoonists’ heads out there quite independent of whether a targeted line or a company that specializes in getting its books optioned by Hollywood exists to publish them, or that some of those comics do indeed end up at some of those outlets. I just want to see things proceed in that order. Anything else strikes me as a desire to create the comics equivalent of a sitcom that NBC aired after Friends or an action movie you might half-watch on a cross country flight. What’s really strange about it is that in some quarters this is seen as some sort of triumph for comics. It’s like, I can see where Kim Thompson was coming from when he perjoratively said “more crap is what we need,” but it’s weird to me that people are excited to create it, or to champion its creation.

I was just about ready to abandon the Blogslinger project today, because I just haven’t been enjoying the books (aside from The Gunslinger), and there are plenty of other books in the sea. So kudos to my old pal Bill DeFranza for unwittingly writing in at just the right moment and saying enough intriguing and encouraging things about the rest of the series to keep me going. Perhaps not at the same clip–I might as well get over the idea that I’ll finish all seven books by October 31st–but at least for the moment, I’m gonna keep on trucking.