1) Due to a freelance assignment I reread Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke today. As I did it I had in mind the oft-voiced criticism that the book has no relevance to real life, a line taken not just by reviewers but also by, and perhaps most vociferously by, and maybe originally by, Moore himself. I totally disagree. Even if you haven’t been in one yourself, surely you know someone who’s been locked into a mutually destructive love-hate relationship with someone that brings out the worst qualities in both parties. Perhaps you’ve also known someone who is or was, for lack of a better word, addicted to illness. I think there’s at least as much personally relatable heft to the emotional core of this book as there is to, say, the Gordian Knot thing at the end of Watchmen. It’s also a pretty great Batman story in which both he and the Joker are actually pretty scary, which is harder to pull off than most writers seem to think. And Brian Bolland can draw, boy howdy.

2) Over the past few months I’ve talked occasionally about the un-selfconscious craziness of ’80s action movies like Rambo and Invasion U.S.A.. I wonder: are the slick, gratuitously violent superhero comics of today, like Countdown to Final Crisis or Mark Millar’s Wanted, an equivalent entertainment? I mean, there’s caveats in both cases, to be sure: Countdown has that sprawling “to be continued in the pages of Title X” would-be mega-crossover thing going on, and Wanted thinks it’s Fight Club. But both appear to have that love of bloodshed and lack of self-awareness that characterize the slaughterfests of yore. I guess it just comes down to whether they succeed as entertainment, which, well, compared to Road House? Not so much. (I enjoy Wanted well enough, I guess, though the glib rape references leave a terrible taste in your mouth and like all Mark Millar comics the hero just starts winning at the end because it’s time for the hero to start winning.)

3) So I guess it’s now out there that Spider-Man is going to swap his marriage to Mary Jane for the life of Aunt May courtesy of Marvel’s satanic stand-in Mephisto. I try not to comment on these “how dare they” superhero plot points because there are 40,000,000 other blogs where you can find that if you want and because there are more productive ways to spend one’s blogging-about-comics time and energy, but I’ll make an exception here because Spidey was my first superhero favorite as a little guy and because this is just so colossally wrong-headed that it practically demands scorn and derision, like that “rappin’ John Wayne” song from the ’80s.

For starters, it should be self-evident that having your flagship superhero, your exemplar of heroic values and morality, the guy whose book gave us the phrase “with great power comes great responsiblity,” the most popular fictional character in the world whose name isn’t Harry Potter, literally make a deal with the devil is just a terrible, terrible idea on the face of it. That he does so to scrap the romance at the center of his multi-billion-dollar, zeitgeist-bestriding film trilogy should probably have sent up a few red flags too.

But it’s worse still because, much like all the mystical “avatar of the Spider-God” poppycock writer J. Michael Straczynski has shoehorned into the character’s mythos–including his origin, which with Batman’s and Superman’s was among the most famous and note-perfect origins of any heroic character ever as-is–it runs counter to every core aspect of the character: his roots in science fiction, his role as the Marvel superhero community’s everyman in the city, his nature as not some Chosen One blessed and cursed by the gods but just some loser teenager who got dealt a crazy hand by dumb luck.

The final, fatal, unforgivable flaw, of course, is that it doesn’t even work from a standpoint of emotional realism. Simply put, if you ask any happily married couple to trade away their entire marriage, past present and future, to save the life of a septuagenarian mother figure, no matter how beloved, who probably is just a few years from dying anyway, the answer would be no.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

–Craig Whitlock, “Jordan’s Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA; Foreign Terror Suspects Tell of Torture,” Washington Post

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Becky Cloonan draws Scylla.

Censors don’t read, but they do go to movie theaters.

—Bryan Alexander on the absurdity of protests against the years-old, highly successful His Dark Materials YA fantasy series by Philip Pullman only when its first installment, The Golden Compass, is being made into a motion picture. So you can add “illiterate” to the heap of vituperative adjectives I use to describe the Catholic League. (I went to a Catholic high school, man. Some things you don’t forget.)

At The House Next Door, Ryland Walker Knight reviews The Mist. I’m perplexed by his assertions, which I’ve heard frequently elsewhere, that a) Mrs. Carmody and her religious nuts are scarier than the monsters, and b) the film is more interesting when the survivors interact than when the monsters attack. I think in both cases the answer is quite clearly “no, they’re not” and “no, it’s not,” because of how stock the characters are in both cases. We’ve seen Mrs. Carmody a million times, and nothing interesting is done with her beyond casting Marcia Gay Harden. We’ve seen a disparate group of people thrown together and forced to cooperate to survive a post-apocalyptic world of danger two million times, and usually much more interestingly than this. As I alluded to before, compare this crew and what they do to, for example, the way Ben and Cooper’s behavior and decisions challenge our preconceptions about their competence in Night of the Living Dead, or the warmly multifaceted interpersonal dynamics between Stephen, Peter, Roger, and Francine (including friendship, love, idolization, one-upsmanship, stoicism, panic, foolhardiness…) in the original Dawn of the Dead. Nothing at all like that is going on here; the one big shock is at the end, and as Knight points out, that shock is so sudden it feels like it undercuts the rest of the movie. Arguing that the characters are the best part and that the humans are the scariest part are the sorts of things one is supposed to say about a horror film, but in this case as in many, many others, including many good horror films, they’re not true.

At The Forager, Jon Hastings reviews The Transformers. For the first time he’s made me realize why I’ve been so reluctant to watch it: I was never a big Transformers kid–Star Wars, He-Man, G.I. Joe, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were my action figures/media tie-ins of choice, I think probably because the Transformers were really expensive–but in my experience their shows and their movie were really pretty weird. I remember the leaders of both sides dying and floating three-headed robot tribunals and a giant planet that ate other planets and stuff like that. Michael Bay’s vanilla “hey we’re all having fun here!!!!!!!” blockbuster mentality would never capture that weirdness and seriousness.

In this week’s Horror Roundtable–one of my favorites ever–the group reveals the horror-movie elements that scare the crap out of us but doesn’t faze most other people. My special freak-out fear is shared by at least one other participant, and I’m definitely sympathetic to most of the others. What a lily-livered bunch we turned out to be!

Fear(s) of the Dark, an animated horror anthology film directed by Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire? (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

Apparently it’s premiering at Sundance? Did everyone know about this but me?

* If you’ve ever wanted to see a vomiting Mr. Mxyzptlk get burned and face-stomped to death by an evil Superman, Tim O’Neil has the scans for you. Normally I steer clear of dogpiling on stuff like this, because the material is so self-evidently, almost self-parodically bad, and because I think that since most intelligent readers have already made an informed decision as to whether or not such comics are worth their time and money, the people who stick around to complain about it have similarly made their own decision, for whatever reasons, and living with it is their problem and not mine. Still, this sequence stuck out to me because it seems almost like it was intended not just to exemplify the bizarrely visceral hatred some fanboys of my acquaintance have for Silver Age DC material that doesn’t jibe with current storytelling values, but to embody it. (Via Dirk Deppey.)

* Speaking of comics blogosphere warhorses I try not to ride, in an interview about the end of his series Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan inadvertently articulates why I find the periodic outbreaks of (pseudo)feminist outrage over some dopey superhero image or other hard to take seriously as either criticism or activism:

It felt like comics had never really talked about gender in a sophisticated way. Whenever they talked gender it was always like, ‘Should Catwoman’s boobs be smaller?’ ‘should she be called the Invisible Woman instead of the Invisible Girl?’

(Via JK Parkin.)

* Cartoonist Josh Simmons, the guy behind the shocking, wordless horror graphic novel House, shares some scary, funny memories of Candyman and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as part of Steven Wintle’s “Scarred” series. He’s got good taste, or at least his teenaged self did.

* Hey, look, Paul Pope is drawing Orion from the New Gods!

* Hey, look, Nicholas Gurewitch is drawing some extremely black humor in the Perry Bible Fellowship!

* Hey, look, Tom Neely is drawing more exquisite horror imagery as a means of anti-war protest!

* Hey, look, Madballs are back!

* Inspired by a recent viewing of No Country for Old Men, Rich Juzwiak of FourFour finds something funny on the DVD of Blood Simple.

* Physician Kent Sepkowitz casts a skeptical eye on the movie Awake and its use of “anaesthetic awareness” as a plot device and selling point (more the latter than the former, really).

* Matt Zoller Seitz defends Beowulf against the anti-cinetechnophile crowd. Read the comment thread, too, both for skeptical responses and a discussion of co-screenwriter Neil Gaiman’s comic book work that veers off toward Alan Moore, too.

* It wasn’t until my very Christian in-laws brought it up in the context of a discussion of those “hey look out for this supposed peril of modern-day living that’s probably easily debunked with 15 seconds of googling” email forwards we all get from time to time by way of offering an exception to the rule, but apparently Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials fantasy series and its first volume’s imminent film adaptation, The Golden Compass, are taking flack from the usual suspects for their atheistic author’s atheistic message. I haven’t read the books and didn’t know much about them so this all came as a surprise to me. Here’s the Snopes article on the emails, confirming Pullman and his books’ anti-religious bent; here’s Andrew Sullivan rounding up some pro and con links, including claims that the studio watered all that down anyway and the de rigeur posturing by the shameful, shameless Catholic League; and here’s a SciFi Wire article on producer Deborah Forte’s attempts to dodge the subject.

* So I guess Stephen King recently said some, oh, let’s say “provocative” things about torture, celebrity, Jenna Bush, and Britney Spears in an interview. Carnacki is sympathetic to the Bard of Bangor’s cri de coeur, MSNBC.com’s Courtney Hazlett considerably less so. I’ll say that I’m largely on board with the points King’s trying to make, but that his attempts at pop-culture and political commentary are almost always off-putting and that metonymizing unhealthy trends in either sphere through young women who while emblematic of those trends really bear no responsibility for their perpetuation strikes me as cheap and quietly misogynist.

* I’m having fun discussing the roles of the leading men in film noir in the comment thread below my quickie take on Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick vs. Josh Hartnett in The Black Dahlia, and you might enjoy doing it too.

* Quote of the day:

“Her legs were gnawed to the bone.”

–from “Woman killed by stray dogs in Bulgaria; Briton’s legs were ‘gnawed to the bone’ by wild dogs,” Reuters, MSNBC.com.

* Finally and OT, Matthew Perpetua nails what’s up with the song “Wow” from the great Kylie Minogue’s new album X. This sort of post is why he’s my favorite music writer.

I was pleasantly shocked by how much I enjoyed Beowulf. I’m not a Neil Gaiman fan–nothing against him, just never read much beyond the initial volume or two of The Sandman and the very boring 1602–so my prime wasn’t pumped there. I remember the poem from high school English, of course–we even did a video reenactment of it that involved the music of Pantera and Laibach that was pretty bitchin’–but not, like, super-fondly. Robert Zemeckis’s last CGI foray, The Polar Express, looked sterile and creepy; this looked marginally more lifelike from the commercials and online trailers I saw, but only marginally, and it looked mostly like the kind of video game I’m not interested in playing. Moreover, you’re unlikely to win me over to anything by saying “from the director of Forrest Gump.” Finally, if I want to see Angelina Jolie naked (and let’s be honest, I do), I can see the real thing, nipples and all, simply by googling Gia (and let’s be honest, I have).

But boy howdy, was this ever the right choice for a matinee today. First of all, the commercials don’t do the imagery justice at all. Seeing it in 3D on the big screen enables your eyes to parse the visual information much more easily, so rather than the supercompressed, watching-someone-else-play-Gears of War look of the ads, you get this stunning, gold-hued, you-are-there effect right from the opening shots. It’s like watching the scene from Return of the King where they’re riding between the oliphaunts’ legs for a whole movie.

Secondly, this isn’t just 300 in Viking drag. It’s a monster movie, and a scary one at that, scarier and more outré than anything in The Mist, to use a recent example. Our first look at Grendel is just at a tumorous, shuddering, self-injuring, blood-gushing mass of flesh and gristle. Hell, that’s what he always looks like. To overuse one of my favorite comparison points, he’s Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” writ large, a suppurating wound on legs. Voiced by Crispin Glover’s all too human and vulnerable shrieks, he’s also incredibly disturbing; the audience I was surrounded by gasped and phewed audibly every time he showed up and started shouting. The visual was strong (a lot stronger than he looked on the small screen and the laptop monitor, where the design came across weak and undefined), but it also worked in popcorn-movie terms: His every appearance was boo-scary as shit.

Indeed, on the visual level, nearly everything in the film worked as well as one could hope. Computerized naked Angelina Jolie was about as steamy as the real thing; god knows she got more screen time! The dragon that does battle with Beowulf at the end of the film had real size and weight, and the fire he spewed is easily the gold standard for CGI flames. Throw in his golden color and I feel like the whole thing was a “can you top this?” challenge to Peter Jackson and WETA for the (hopefully) inevitable appearance of Smaug in the Hobbit film(s? ! ). That Jacksonian resonance is also felt, of course, in King Hrothgar, his people, and their mead-hall, the setting of most of the film; that it can be compared comfortably to The Two Towers‘ infamously art-directed-out-the-wazoo Golden Hall of Meduseld in Rohan is a compliment indeed.

The “actors” don’t disappoint either. This is certainly where I expected the film to fall flat, based on, well, everything I know about CGI. And yeah, there are a couple of “naw, I don’t buy it” moments, some involving the skin around the eyes of John Malkovich’s petty courtier Unferth, most involving Robin Wright Penn’s young Queen Wealthlow. To demonstrate her May to Hrothgar’s December, they fill out her patrician cheekbones with baby fat in a way that looks kind of nothing like the young Robin Wright we remember from The Princess Bride. But shit, everyone else! There truly were times, as the characters portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, Brendan Gleeson, and even Wright Penn (playing the queen in the autumn of her years, her Easter Island face in full flower) strode the screen, when I thought they’d scrapped the CG and switched over to live action. Surely the greatest achievement is turning Ray Winstone, an indisputably commanding presence who nonetheless is basically doing the corpulent/dissolute thing in films from Sexy Beast to The Departed, into the computer-generated Gerard Butler. Zemeckis and company earn my undying gratitude simply for creating the Winstone-Gleeson buddy film of my dreams, of course, but it’s more than that. Never once did I question the real-feel of this mead-swilling Leonidas, equal parts genuine prowess and ham-actor bluster.

And that right there is the core of the film, which given its screenwriters’ provenance I should have expected to be on the thoughtful side. Turns out that amid the chest-thumping, bellowing, wench-ravishing, and grappling in the nude (and who’d have thought that when it came to crowning the year’s best naked-guy fight to the death, Eastern Promises would have competition?), Beowulf is an examination of the contrast between real and imagined heroism, and the price the former pays in its transition to the latter. It may have to play fast and lose with the unnamed bard’s tale of the slayer of Grendel, his mother, and the dragon to do it, but who cares? The yarn it spins is all the more engaging for it, right down to its affecting, bravely ambiguous ending (carried by the great Gleeson, much to my delight). In that way the film becomes what it’s about–fudging a good story to make it great, and the potential costs of doing so.

I’m sitting here in Panera Bread, using their wi-fi, and I’ve just realized they’re playing a muzak version of the Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” aka The Sopranos theme song. Amazing.

* Steven Wintle interviews The Blair Witch Project directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick for his “Scarred” series on things that scared the crap out of horror luminaries. Turns out they’re both scared of Bigfoot! Definitely worth a read for Sanchez’s commentary on the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage as a source of horror and an influence on Blair Witch.

* Yesterday, striking horror writers staged an “exorcism” outside Warner Bros. in attempt to drive the demons out of the studios. Good luck with that. I found this report interesting in that it’s at the SciFi Channel’s website, and SciFi is of course one of the networks affected by the strike.

* In the comments below, Matt Wiegle directed my attention to another tale of a hidden temporary autonomous zone, this one a little apartment built in a mall in Providence, Rhode Island. I’m sure there’s a word for little secure private architectural spaces constructed in non-secure public areas, be they outside (treehouses, the jungle boat ride at Disney World) or inside (these secret apartments), but both fascinate me to no end.

* The other day I watched Rian Johnson’s Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s a good movie, but what struck me the most is how Gordon-Levitt’s performance gives lie to the notion that Josh Hartnett was doing anything but being a lousy actor in The Black Dahlia. Clearly it’s possible to be a taciturn cipher pining after an idea of a person while surrounded by people more interesting than oneself and still convey recognizable human emotions, including the gulf of pain that would result from living like that.

* The other other day I watched Darkon, a documentary on live-action role playing directed by Andrew Neel and Luke Meyers. I think it’s just about everything a documentary of this sort should be: fascinating, entertaining, sympathetic without shying away from the dysfunctional aspects of the lives of the participants, funny without being condescending. Even where it took the predicted route of casting “good guys” and “bad guys,” the fact that these “roles” within the documentary framework reflected the adopted roles of the LARPers involved simultaneously undercut and provoked thought on the usual documentary sleight-of-hand. Finally, it just made you feel real good if any significant part of your life is dedicated to your own imagination. Check it out.

Returning to the “secret free space dedicated to something beautiful carved out despite the modern-day surveillance state” beat, a group of clandestine culture warriors secretly established a workplace/crashpad in France’s landmark Panthéon, where for a year, completely unbeknownst to the facility’s security, employees, and visitors, they labored to repair its antique clock. Nicest secret society of pranksters ever? (Via Bruce Baugh.)

The Mist works to remove horror from its recent, needless emphasis on torture and the violent extreme.

—Clarence Carter, Reverse Shot. This of course ignores (SPOILER ALERT) the none-more-black quadruple-murder-attempted-suicide ending (the “gut-punch” “bitterness” of which is elsewhere praised), the gore moneyshots, the burn-victim closeups, and the infanticide. There’s qualified praise for a supposed terrorism subtext, too. But this is to be expected, I guess, because when you go on record about how nihilism in horror is bad and politics in horror is good, but then you find yourself liking a horror movie that’s nihilistic and largely apolitical, you start having to doublethink.

Director Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train has a May 16, 2008 release date. That’s right at the beginning of the summer season, and I don’t know what that means. The film stars Bradley Cooper, one of People‘s Sexiest Men Alive. (Hey, the girl on the elliptical next to mine at the gym was reading it.) He was listed under the “sexiest scars” subheading, which is oddly appropriate.

* Jason Adams has blogged his thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Like me, he thinks that the lack of on-screen canoodling between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Fobes smacks of rainbow-flag cold feet; also like me, he thinks it ranks with your average okay BSG episode. I think that normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but when you’re debuting something as a feature-length movie, selling it as a stand-alone DVD, and using it to tide fans over during a year-long hiatus that is itself under the shadow of a strike that may postpone or even eliminate the series’ final episodes, okay probably isn’t good enough.

* Jason has also blogged his thoughts on The Mist, which he says he “mostly dug.” His main complaint, a pretty fundamental one, is basically that the whole never added up to more than the sum of its parts. That sounds about right to me. Aside from obvious missteps like Mrs. Carmody it’s hard to point to anything disastrous about the film (even she isn’t so); everything works, but nothing works wonders.

* Jon Hastings is Mistblogging too. He liked it quite a bit, except for the ending, which (like me) he wasn’t crazy about not because he objected to it in principle but because he found it tacked on. Amid interesting comparisons to 28 Weeks Later, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and Romero’s Dead movies, he articulates in a roundabout what I think is the core appeal of this story, namely that the monsters aren’t waiting around stalking the humans, but that they’re going about their everyday business of eating each other, stopping only to dine on something more readily available whenever the humans happen to cross their paths. That was what was so scary about the original story, and what also makes even the un-scary movie adaptation compelling (and re-watchable, even to me): Yes, the world of the mist-creatures is infiltrating our own, but the result is more akin to our world being plopped in the middle of theirs. (The novella made this more explicit with its earthquakes and great rifts in the ground, meant to evoke the shifting or perhaps even replacement of our earth’s crust to match theirs.)

* While he’s at it, Jon offers this dead-on observation about “inherent silliness” in genre works by way of musing on big creepy monsters and their discontents:

As for the goofiness issue: different people will bring different standards to the table, and, I’ve noticed, very few people are consistent about it. That is: some people will balk at taking stories about super-powered mutant heroes seriously, but have no problems with stories about the living dead. Other people might be completely down with the whole flying dudes in tights thing, but just can’t believe that anyone over the age of 12 would be interested in stories about a teenage wizard. In generally, I’m pretty accepting of any kind of fantasy element and while I recognize that it’s pretty common for folks to draw a line somewhere or other, I can only just wrap my head around doing that.

Bingo! Jon notes that The Mist takes its monsters dead seriously, which is one of its strengths.

* Jon’s post also got me thinking about The Mist‘s kind of surprisingly (to me at least) lackluster take at the box office. I tend not to think about box-office stuff at all anymore now that I don’t work at Wizard, so the main reason it surprised me is that I read a post on the blog of one of the big horror websites that theorized it could have a $100 million theatrical run. In retrospect I realized that this kind of thing is one of the reasons I’ve learned to ignore the big horror websites in terms of prognostications, criticism, or anything other than news. I think I really got the message around the time they started worrying about what Hostel Part 2‘s failure “meant for our genre.” A) It’s not our genre, that’s goofy; B) It failed because it was bad; C) In the short-term it means fewer shitty Hostel and Saw knockoffs will get greenlit, which is fine; D) in the medium-term it means some good horror movies might have a harder time finding distribution and an audience, but that’s always a crapshoot even in the best of times; E) in the long-term it won’t mean anything, because as we’ve seen time and time and time again, dozens of crappy Exorcist-Omen / slasher / self-reflexive / WB-stars-in-peril / Sixth Sense / J-horror / ’70s-remake movies can come and go and the kinds of people interested in making good horror movies will continue to make them in new and unexpected ways, and now we can just add torture porn to that list. In terms of The Mist, Cloverfield will still make a lot of money, and The Mist will end up with Carrie and The Shining on the perennial “hey, there are a few good Stephen King movies” articles that media websites run at Halloween, and it’ll make up its money on DVD if not in the theatres (and I can’t imagine it cost that much anyway) and we’ll all live happily ever after. The reason to be upset if horror movies don’t find an audience is if they’re good movies and people would enjoy them.

* I found this pan of No Country for Old Men by Fernando F. Croce fascinating insofar as it repeatedly uses the movie’s acknowledged strengths as exhibits for the prosecution. Much like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Croce cites the wholly successful use of Chigurh as a figure of horror as a failure. He does it by calling him “some peevish bad-guy out of Diamonds are Forever,” though, which is a lot (intentionally) funnier than anything Rosenbaum said. Also like Rosenbaum, he cites the Coens’ articulation of a bleak worldview as a failure, and though he faults it for its aesthetic shortcomings rather than its political ones, I of course agree with this argument no more than I agreed with the other one. Finally, and again like Rosenbaum but also reminiscent of the critics who lambasted Children of Men for its proficiency, he continuously cites the Coens’ ridonkulous level of skill as filmmakers as a sign of emotional paucity, which as a student and lover of film is utterly baffling to me; you’d think it’d indicate the opposite. Finally, Croce misuses the words “decimated” and “et al,” which is a dick move of me to point out, but I find that sort of thing funny when it’s done by someone who’s obviously a good writer. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* I liked this Dick Hyacinth post ranking the different types of continuity gaffes. Continuity is a tricky thing. As you might have gathered over the years, I’m a bit of a snob and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics tedious, but I’m also a bit of a nerd and find a lot of continuity-heavy superhero comics delightful. I’ve come to think of continuity as one of the pleasures of superhero comics if used entertainingly. I think complaining about continuity in, I don’t know, Green Lantern is like pointing to a Conan novel and saying “this book requires you to know a lot about Conan.” Well, duh. I mean, hopefully it’s enjoyable on other levels, hopefully it’s not just a wikipedia entry with sequential art illustrations, but the continuity is what it is. Anyway, I think Dick’s post helps draw lines between helpful, fun continuity usage and reductive, byzantine regurgitation.

* Johnny Ryan, the G.G. Allin of humor comics, once called by this writer “the funniest cartoonist on Earth”, is premiering “dozens of new paintings inspired by cult, horror and exploitation films” in an art show called, appropriately enough, HORRORSHOW, debuting this Friday at California’s Secret Headquarters.

Please let there be a book of these coming out from Buenaventura or somebody.

* It feels good to be done with blogging The Dark Tower, for a few reasons. A) As I mentioned, it showed me I can handle really long-term reading-and-blogging projects, which I hadn’t been sure about. I’ve got a couple of biggies in mind now. B) In the meantime I can just enjoy a second breeze through the wonderful World War Z by Max Brooks, which I’m doing in lieu not just of those other two projects but reading the latest Clive Barker and Chuck Palahniuk novels, too. And because it bears repeating, I want to thank my commenters and email interlocutors once again for blogslinging along with me, which is really how I felt about it. Yep, I mean all you guys who encouraged me to stick with it, too. Your sincerity and passion challenged me not just, and not even mostly, to finish the books but to try to analyze and articulate my own less passionate reactions to them as best as I could. Thanks!

* Oh boy.

* Finally, it’s awesome that this is what pregnant Helena Bonham-Carter looks like.

Pix at The Daily Mail, via Jackie Danicki, who advances the absurd notion that HBC doesn’t look smoking hot in that photo.

Ron Moore is blogging.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

I saw Battlestar Galactica: Razor a couple weeks ago, but it aired last night and finally people are talking about it, and a friend of mine asked me what I thought. I thought it was okay. Had its moments.

“Sean–that’s all you got?!?!”

Yeah, that’s pretty much all I got. It wasn’t the most inspiring thing in the world, for good or ill. If it were just a regular episode I’d just shrug my shoulders and say “let’s see what happens next week.” But I’ll try:

* One thing that bothers me is that they didn’t show any physical affection at all between the Pegasus Six and Cain. I thought that was a cop-out. Not just because I want to watch sex scenes between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Forbes, though I do, and often, but because every other couple (Tory and Anders for gods’ sakes!) gets their steamy slap’n’tickle sessions on camera for all to see. Why not the Gina and the Admiral? To paraphrase Law & Order, is it because they’re lesbians? You’d think after all the flack the show is taken for not having any gay characters, when they finally did introduce them they’d go the whole hog with ’em. Especially because they’re women and not guys, which makes the whole thing easier to swallow for the hoi polloi.

* I loved the old-school Cylons. I want more! (And I never watched the old show.)

* My other big beef is that we never get a real reason for Cain to be such a fascist hardass. The attack happens and boom, she’s shooting her XO in the head for not sending troops on a futile suicide run. If the idea is that she was always a nut and the Cylon attack just took off the handcuffs, that should have been better articulated.

* That flashback seems like something Adama should have brought up earlier, huh? This was the same pitfall I thought they narrowly avoided with the whole “Adama triggered the first post-ceasefire hostilities with they Cylons” story because they tied in his guilt about losing his friend Bulldog and that made his silence feasible. No such excuse here.

* I get impatient with fiction drawing out things we’ve already figured out long ago, it’s obviously a pet peeve of mine lately, but for real, were we not supposed to know that Kendra fired the first shots against the unarmed civilians?

* Still, it’s Battlestar Galactica and therefore better than 90% of anything else you could watch. Kendra was a cool character and well-acted. (Her bad skin was sexy!) Adama’s flashback and Kendra’s confrontation with the hybrid were good and creepy. Watching the Pegaus’s descent into collective madness was depressing and frightening. Lee, Kara, and Bill are still endlessly compelling.

In closing, it’s a goddamn crime that we have to wait until February April for more epsiodes of this show, and until god knows when for the end of the series.

Read: The Dark Tower–“Hides”; “Joe Collins of Odd’s Lane”; “Patrick Danville”; “The Sore and the Door (Goodbye, My Dear”); “Mordred”; “The Crimson King and the Dark Tower”; “Epilogue: Susannah in New York”; “Coda: Found”; “Appendix: Robert Browning–‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'”; Author’s Note

Hey, everyone.

Hey, Constant Reader.

There, in the scarlet field of Can’-Ka No Rey, I heard the sound. The Horn of the Eld.

Would you like to know what it sounded like?

Okay.

Listen closely…

Hark thee well, may it do ya fine…

It sounded like this.

—–

I don’t know what I was expecting. Not in terms of the ending itself; I totally expected that one. (God bless you, Bruce B., but like I said, you sure did spoil that sucker.) I mean in terms of the quality of the ending, the whole build-up included. After everything I’ve read and everything I’ve written about it, for some reason my hopes were up. Shoulda known better! But I wanted to believe.

I wanted to believe that the likes of the Three Stephen Kings, the evil stand-up comedian, and a guy with Harry Potter hand grenades couldn’t possibly be the best final bosses King could come up with for his goddamn seven-volume fantasy epic.

I wanted to believe that the successful resolution of the quest of Roland, this great lone warrior who strode the sands of time and space alone even when surrounded by friends, friends he almost inevitably led to their deaths on his behalf, wouldn’t hinge completely on the godlike actions of another character we’d never met until the book’s final chapters–unless you’d read another goddamn Stephen King book first, and if you hadn’t, hey, visit your local bookstore!

I wanted to believe that King would stop belaboring points that were painfully obvious to everyone, perhaps, but his own entranced self. That maybe he wouldn’t spend three full pages unraveling an anagram obvious to every single reader the second he had a character think “hey, why do those words look familiar?” That maybe he wouldn’t draw out the question of why the evil stand-up comedian cut the erasers off the pencils of the idiot-savant deus ex machina when it was plain as day that he could use them to erase things out of existence.

I wanted to believe that Mordred, who as both character and nemesis started lame and hadn’t improved, wouldn’t die the way he lived. But c’mon, you’ve gotta grant me this one. The whole sixth book was building up to this sucker’s birth! He was supposed to fulfill some prophecy (that we’d never heard before, but still)! He was named after the infamous Arthurian patricide! And he totally killed Randall Flagg (in the most bush-league and anticlimactic way possible, but still)! Surely he’d do something really cool and important and unpredictable before it was all over! Surely he’d do more than just run at the gunslinger’s camp in spider form, get shanghai’d by Oy, and get shot to death like a bobcat who smelled the food in their RV? I mean, that would be incredibly stupid and a colossal waste of time for it to play out like that, wouldn’t it?

I wanted to believe I wouldn’t literally be mocked and berated by the author of this series for wanting to read a satisfying ending. I thought maybe that this would be at least as important to the author (whether or not he’d truly deluded himself into thinking he was transcribing this nonsense rather than writing it himself, as he so frequently claimed) as it was to me. Shit, they sure would have been better books if it had been!

I wanted to believe the payoff would make the pain in getting there worthwhile.

Oh well!

I’ll tell you this, though: I actually liked the resolution (“resolution”) to Roland’s storyline just fine, as I predicted I would. It’s a good idea, and it fits. And interestingly, the prose in the section leading up to and following the revelation that Roland’s about to do the time warp again took on the tone of The Gunslinger, which is obviously a treat to me. I guess it’s appropriate considering that he goes directly to Chapter One, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading The Dark Tower Saga it’s not to expect the appropriate, and not to look a gift piece of good writing in the mouth when it comes along. So yeah, that part was just fine. It’s just everything that surrounded it that was either infuriating, insulting, or uninteresting. And need I even list the loose ends forever untied? From Bango Skank to the fate of the Grandfathers, from what Nort told Allie to what happened to Black Thirteen on 9/11, from LaMerk Industries to Rhea of the Cöos, from why the Mejis portion of Roland’s pre-The Gunslinger story was filled out in such detail while the rest was sketched in or ignored completely to the unimaginable battle Roland was supposed to wage at the Tower (please don’t tell me it was this ridiculous skeet-shooting game he played with the lame-ass Crimson King)…I mean, it was like King wasn’t even trying. Wow, is this whole “hey, I’m just the messenger” business a convenient excuse.

As for me? Well, now I’m done, which is a good feeling, let me tell you. It’s also the longest blogathon I’ve ever done, by a long shot. That much at least I’m grateful for. I learned I could read and blog about what I read every day for a long time, which I’d tried in the past and couldn’t keep up. I think I got something out of the exercise of reading every day and picking apart what worked and what didn’t in what I read. I think I was able to articulate certain ideas about genre and storytelling, and pinpoint what both what excites me about them and what leaves me cold. I think I learned a lot about where writers can go wrong, but I also learned that it’s possible to zig where they zagged. And it was a lot of fun interacting with the comment crew. I totally felt like it was a group effort.

Was it worth it? I don’t know. This is certainly the most time I’ve ever spent reading books I didn’t like all that much outside of a classroom environment. I can’t really say I enjoyed it. I can’t really say I’m glad I followed the advice of everyone who encouraged me to stick with it, the books get better, I’d come around. They didn’t and I didn’t. I don’t think the nuggets of goodness scattered throughout the seven volumes were worth the junk I had to wade through to get to them, and not just because of the junk in and of itself–I worry that exposure to that junk will leave me less favorably inclined to the Stephen King books and stories I’d come to know and love and really treasure before I laid eyes on the damned Dark Tower, and that’s a real tragedy, because those books mean a lot to me. Time will tell.

Go, then. There are better books than these.

This week’s Horror Roundtable asks us for our favorite horror novels. Mine might surprise you given my mood of late.

Read: The Dark Tower–“New York Again (Roland Shows ID)”; “Fedic (Two Views)”; “The Thing Under the Castle”; “On Badlands Avenue”; “The Castle of the Crimson King”

Another chunk of the final book in the series, another ad for another Stephen King book that apparently it would have really helped to have read before getting to the climax of a seven-volume fantasy epic. I’m getting kind of tired of that, though I do take comfort from the fact that Roland seems no more anxious to read Insomnia than I do. But in a way, each of these King-centric interludes–the notion that character-King doesn’t always get the messages from Gan right so that’s why so much stuff in all the books that touch on the Tower mythos contradict one another; the idea that the reason there’s just so much shit going on in these books is because it’s basically being dictated to him by God and his usual process of narrowing and editing isn’t in effect; capping off the constant references throughout the series to graffiti artist “Bango Skank” by basically giving up and calling him “the Great Lost Character”; even the fact that King himself is a character in his own magnum opus–embody the problems they purport to explain and describe. There’s nothing wrong with these books that a red pencil couldn’t fix, but try telling that to a guy who thinks this stuff’s being beamed to him by divine intervention.

A few more trims and the strong stuff here would stand out. And there was strong stuff. The scary things under the castle, for example–the creepy doors to historical atrocities, the sound of a mouth full of fangs chewing endlessly behind a flimsy portal, that big giant centipede monster refugee from “The Mist” or “Jerusalem’s Lot.” The use of relentless, non-fatal chilliness, slowly driving Susannah and Roland into desperation. The three goofy Stephen King lookalikes (how great would it be if they were King’s first appearance in the series?) and their unpleasant fate. The Crimson King sitting on a throne of skulls while ordering all his followers to their deaths. I’ll even grant you the meeting between Roland and the heads of the corporation dedicated to facilitating his work in America. There’s almost enough stuff right there for a good book, but what you’ve got is about, I dunno, one-eighth of a gigantic overstuffed monstrosity that is itself one-seventh of an even MORE gigantic overstuffed monstrosity.

I’m also pissed because it felt like Flagg was going to be in the Crimson King’s castle but he wasn’t. Rip-off.