Friday, Dec. 5-Monday, Dec. 8

read: the remainder of Flight to the Ford, two-thirds of Many Meetings

It turns out that despite being snowbound all weekend I didn’t get a lot of reading done. It was comics-organizing time instead. But the resumption of my daily commute brings with it a renewed dedication to reading about history’s most dangerous piece of jewelry.

* “Flight to the Ford”: One of the most suspenseful chapters in the book, it’s noteworthy how Tolkien’s chronicle of Frodo’s journey from Weathertop to Rivendell is different that Peter Jackson’s. (I know I keep talking about the films, but this is really the first opportunity I’ve had to get my thoughts about them down on paper computer-screen.) Frodo has a great deal more agency in his journey here than in the movie. For starters, he’s not a gasping catatonic; for several days after the attack he’s more or less fully functional, aside from the pain and numbness in his left arm. And ultimately it’s Frodo himself who makes the mad dash on horseback away from the Riders and over the Ford of Bruinen. He’s not being carried by Arwen (or by Glorfindel, the Elf who plays the equivalent role in the text), in other words. While it is fair to say that the speed, smarts, and courage of Asfaloth the horse had a lot to do with Frodo’s successful escape, so too is it fair to say that Frodo’s bravery, or more to the point his innate unwillingness to let himself be bullied by these bastards, helped save him. Tolkien refers to it as “hatred”–hatred of these evil creatures, hatred of the fear and pain they have caused him and his companions, and first and foremost, I believe, hatred of the power of will they exert over him. For a hobbit who has lived a comfortable life of his own making, the notion that his thoughts and actions are no longer his own must be anathema. It’s inspiring to see Frodo make his stand–a stand for freedom against the “commanding wish” of totalitarian evil. Good for him!

(In fairness to P.J., though he did elide much of the bravery shown by Frodo in the journey from the Shire to Rivendell, so too did he cut many of the goof-ups: the shortcut through the Old Forest, getting separated from the group in the Barrow-Downs, dancing a jig on the table at the Prancing Pony. On the other hand, later on in the story the decision to enter the Mines of Moria–at first glance a disastrous one–is made by Frodo in defiance of Gandalf’s wishes, not in agreement with them as is the case in the book….)

“The Flight to the Ford” also includes the appearance of the aforementioned Glorfindel, a High Elf who in fact has been reincarnated after having died in combat with a Balrog many thousands of years ago. This fact, which I don’t believe is made clear in LotR proper, always kind of irks me–though the idea that dead Elves carry on a physical existence in the Halls of Mandos (in the Undying Lands of the West) while dead Men’s souls go someplace unrevealed is a fascinating one, the idea that those post-dead Elves can take the trip back to Middle-Earth seems to negate the sacrifice made by other slain Elves in some way. This is particularly so because Glorfindel, aside from his admittedly key role in keeping Frodo and the Ring from the Ringwraiths here at the Ford, is a pretty minor character; it’s not as if Tolkien had Elrond come back. (I feel a lot less gypped by the return of Gandalf–or for that matter that of Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion–for this reason, I think.)

The chapter also has a great weapon in the form of the Witch-King’s blade, featuring a break-away section that worms its way in toward Frodo’s heart; a fair amount of levity–centered around references to the trolls from The Hobbit, much to my lasting delight; and Frodo’s chilling question upon coming to after the attack: “What has happened? Where is the pale king?” Finally, it’s got another terrifically haunting dream from Frodo:

He lay down again and passed into an uneasy dream, in which he walked on the grass in his garden in the Shire, but it seemed faint and dim, less clear than the tall black shadows that stood looking over the hedge.

* “Many Meetings”–This chapter is something of an interlude, between the thriller that was “Flight to the Ford” and the long, totally awesome DefCon 4 meeting in “The Council of Elrond.” As such it mainly gives both the characters and the readers some breathing room before plunging them back into the dire task at hand. Gandalf comes back, and notes that Frodo is already gaining something of an otherworldly quality to him, one that surprisingly sits well on him.

Gandalf also fills Frodo in on the nature of the Ringwraiths, picking up where Strider left off a couple chapters ago. I feel it’s important to explain the technical aspects of the Ringwraiths to the reader. Why, if they’re so badass, couldn’t they bother to look over the side of the road to find Frodo when he was hiding back at the beginning of the book? Why did they cut up empty beds and then once they realized it give up on finding the hobbits in another room? Why do they attack at Weathertop, successfully injure their quarry, and then retreat? Why can they be faced down by one Elf, one Dunadan and four hobbits with torches now, but intimidate the entire Gondorian army later? The power of the Ringwraiths is determined by a great many variables (their proximity to Sauron, the degree to which Sauron is concentrating on them or not, their proximity to the Ring, whether it’s nighttime or daytime out, whether anyone is using the ring, whether they’re all together or not, the nature of the beings they’re attacking, whether or not their physical means of carriage have been disrupted, etc.), so it’s good to explain this stuff once in a while.

It’s also wonderful to see old Bilbo back (I stopped about halfway through his and Frodo’s reunions)–I obviously knew full well it was coming, but still got all excited like a big doofus when the revelation came. I enjoy the brief mention of the sons of Elrond as well, because of its emphasis on the implacability of good’s drive to eradicate evil: “[Arwen’s] brothers, Elladan and Elrohir, were out upon errantry: for they rode often far afield with the Rangers of the North, forgetting never their mother’s torment in the dens of the orcs.”

And the cameo appearance by Gloin (“the Gloin, one of the twelve companions of the great Thorin Oakenshield,” as Frodo puts it!) is a treat as well, with its mentions of Hobbit characters like Beorn, Bard, and Dain Ironfoot. I think I need to start greeting people in the Dwarf style: “Sean T. Collins at your service and your family’s.”

Next up: The big meeting!

Friday, Dec 5

read: At the Sign of the Prancing Pony; Strider; A Knife in the Dark; a few pages of Flight to the Ford

It’s occurring to me that unless I spend my weekends reading around the clock, I’m unlikely to finish all of LotR by the 17th. C’est la vie, I suppose, but I’ll definitely have it done by New Year’s. This annual re-reading streak will die very hard, I can promise you that!

* “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”: A very strong chapter, I think, simply because of how well Tolkien draws the Bree milieu. Though Peter Jackson did as good a job with this as he always does, this is one section where you could feel how truncated things were. I actually found myself thinking of Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of these scenes more often than Jackson’s live-action one, and not simply because Bakshi filmed more of them. Seeing old Barliman Butterbur cowering behind his front desk as the Ringwraiths glided into the Prancing Pony in Jackson’s Fellowship was the one part that managed to awake the irritated purist in me. The innkeeper as Tolkien (and to an extent, Bakshi) depicted him is a funny, doughty, extremely endearing character, moreso even than Bombadil, perhaps. Also memorable here are the squinty Southerner–a very early glimpse of some bad things to come–and, of course, Frodo’s sudden disappearance, a moment that elicits a healthy “oh, shit!” from the reader if ever there was one.

* “Strider”: Tons of great lines in this chapter, mainly from or about Strider. He gets off a great zinger against old Barliman (“a fat inkeeper who only remembers his own name because people shout it at him all day”); has his own personal official poem (“all that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost”); and is a walking illustration of how evil seems fair and feels foul, while good can look foul and feel fair. Barliman, meanwhile, shows that he may be forgetful, but he’s not about to let any of his customers come to harm if he can help it at all. Finally, we meet humans whose greed, or sadism, or both, enables them to quash the innate fear all living things seem to have of the Ringwraiths well enough to actually make deals with them. Would that such people only existed in fantastic fiction! Finally, the “G” rune Gandalf uses to sign his mislaid letter to Frodo is currently a high-ranking candidate for my next tattoo.

* “A Knife in the Dark”: This chapter, particularly its conclusion, is something I’ve actually had nightmares about. I think that the image of the four hobbits and Strider circling their proverbial wagons around the fire while the evil, void-like Ringwraiths creep toward them is one of the most indelible images in the book; again, I found myself *just* a little disappointed with Jackson’s version, mainly because the version my subconscious treated me to was a tough act to follow. It’s interesting to note how human Aragorn appears in this chapter. Clearly he’s not 100% certain of the route he should take; clearly he makes mistakes, and kicks himself for them; clearly he is afraid, and wishes that Gandalf were with them. That, coupled with his dawning respect for the innate toughness of the hobbits, makes his relationship with them a lot less one-sided leader-and-followers than it might seem. By the end of the books many people have this kind of appreciation for the hobbits–as well they should, since those four guys have done stuff that only a handful of beings have successfully pulled off since the dawn of time–which I think is part of what makes it so appealing to readers: Even the high and mighty in Tolkien’s world are willing to acknowledge a bunch of nobodies who stepped up. But we’re a long way from all that at the end of this chapter, that’s for sure.

I’ll talk about “Flight to the Ford” next time, if you don’t mind. With all this snow I should have plenty of time to do so, right?

Thursday, Dec. 4

read: The Old Forest; In the House of Tom Bombadil; Fog on the Barrow-Downs

First, a couple of things I forgot to mention before:

* Is Gandalf a war criminal? In “The Shadow of the Past,” he tells Frodo he “put the fear of fire on” poor old Gollum in order to wring information out of him. Gollum is, of course, a special case in the world of Middle-Earth, where generally one can tell how to treat a particular person based on what kind of life-form he happens to be–be nice to Elves, but chop Orcs’ heads off without benefit of a jury trial, that sort of thing. Gollum isn’t so easy to judge. Though he’s essentially a serial killer, he’s far from wholly evil; even if he was, it’s tough to imagine Gandalf torturing even an Orc for information. Most likely the whole thing was a ruse, and Gandalf had no intention of actually burning Gollum, but Gollum himself didn’t need to know that.

* Frodo’s dremes: The first appears at the end of “A Conspiracy Unmasked,” the last chapter before today’s reading, and like most of its successors it’s eerie and quietly disturbing:

“…he seemed to be looking out of a high window over a dark sea of tangled trees. Down below among the roots there was the sound of creatures crawling and snuffling. He felt sure they would smell him out sooner or later.

Sounds like many of my own dreams, actually. Its ending, with the vain struggle to reach the Sea, sets up a recurring theme in the life of Frodo (one later echoed by Legolas); literarily, it reaches its apotheosis in Tolkien’s haunting poem “The Sea Bell.”

On to today’s reading!

* “The Old Forest”–Outside the Shire, and right away things go to pot. I suppose that this chapter is in many ways akin to the troll incident in The Hobbit, though this time the balance between humorous and menacing is tipped slightly in the latter’s favor–all the more so because, as is the case with the characters themselves, by the time you realize the gravity of the situation it’s almost too late. Old Man Willow makes a memorable villain, and his methods (the cracks that swallow up Pippin and Merry, the root that holds Frodo under water) are treeishly malicious. And then, of course, comes Master Bombadil. Sometimes I find myself talking in his rhythm. It’s hard not to do, once the chapter’s over! (See?)

* “In the House of Tom Bombadil”–Like the Shire-bound tree-person Sam described earlier on, and like (say) the Watcher in the Water later on, Bombadil is one of Tolkien’s memorable unclassifiables, people and creatures and incidents who are all the more fascinating for the fact that Tolkien’s world is usually so very classifiable. Tom’s not a wizard, not an Elf, not a Man, not a Hobbit, not a Dwarf–“He is,” as his common-law wife Goldberry puts it. That sounds like a reference to Yahweh’s “I am who am” shpiel to many fans, who interpret it to mean that Bombadil is some sort of incarnation of Illuvatar (the God of the Tolkien cosmos), but a more likely explanation is that he and Goldberry are Maiar–demigod underlings to the Valar, Tolkien’s gods, who in turn serve Illuvatar–who have (I’ve seen it put this way somewhere) gone native. Other Maiar include Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, Sauron, and the Balrog, and Bombadil seems comparable to these cats (keep in mind that the Wizards voluntarily limited their power, which might explain why the Ring clearly could best them while Sauron, Bombadil, and probably the Balrog had no such worries). I love seeing Tom make a mockery of the mighty Ring, and tell stories that go waaaaay back to “before the Dark Lord came from Outside.” And I love the bit about Sam sleeping contentedly, “if logs are content.” That kind of sounds like me, too!

* “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”: It’s a shame they couldn’t work this chapter into the films somehow, because quite simply it’s scary as hell. The sleep that overtakes them so quickly Tolkien doesn’t even bother to describe it; the fog that rolls in out of nowhere; the two standing stones that suddenly loom out of the fog; the cries of “help! help!” in the fog that trail off into screams and then suddenly stop (I wonder if Stephen King had this chapter in mind when he wrote “The Mist”)… I actually found myself on edge, and jumped a little bit when I read the following exchange, which I’d totally forgotten about:

‘Where are you?’ [Frodo] cried, both angry and afraid.

‘Here!’ said a voice, deep and cold, that seemed to come out of the ground. ‘I am waiting for you!’

‘No!’ said Frodo; but he did not run away.

Whoa. Then there’s the crawling arm inside the Barrow to consider–when Amanda and I read the book aloud, she told me that this was the first image that really got to her. What gets to me every time is what Merry says when he wakes up from his wight-induced coma, his mind still mired in the spectral past:

‘What in the name of wonder?’ began Merry, feeling the golden circlet that had slipped over one eye. Then he stopped, and a shadow came over his face, and he closed his eyes. ‘Of course, I remember!’ he said. ‘The men of Carn Dum came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! the spear in my heart!’ He clutched at his breast. ‘No! No!’ he said, opening his eyes.

That bizarre outburst sticks in my mind like the glimpse of a dead body in a highway accident. It shows the suffering caused by evil in Tolkien’s world–how real it is, and how it can last even when the lives it ruined are long over. It’s a weird, powerful passage, one of my favorites in the book. (Fortunately it’s followed shortly thereafter by the image of all four hobbits frolicking naked–a Room with a View moment that lightens things up a bit, don’t you think?)

Tomorrow: I feel Bree!

The award for Unintentionally Appropriate Headline Juxtaposition goes to two articles currently featured “Inside MSNBC.com”:

Hugh Hefner on five decades of Playboy

Oldest male fossil bares all

Amanda has a lovely post about winter for you to read.

Reader and generally thoughtful person Michael Suileabhain-Wilson writes (edited for excessive sauciness):

I was just reading your latest post on pamphlets, I had an insight into a reason why _I_ don’t like them…

Not that I own many pamphlets to begin with, but I have a few, and I have a bunch of RPG books which are similarly poly-bagged.

Polybags totally suck.

They’re sized, by and large, to perfectly fit whatever goes in them. So you have to fumble with them to get them back in, with a reasonably good chance of fucking up either the book or the bag. It’s a pain in the ass. But the alternative is to keep them loose, which works for RPGs, but is inadvisable for pamphlets.

Thus, the mechanics of the polybag gives you an option between loose storage, which pretty much guarantees a short and ratty life for your overpriced pamphlet, or bags which are a pain in the ass and make you feel like an anal twit slavering over your precious collectibles.

It sucks and I don’t like it.

Me neither.

(Caveat: Now would probably be a good time to link to Chris Allen, who argues that a lot of these binary arguments we have about different aspects of comics are silly. Of course he’s right: Floppies vs. pamphlets are certainly not an either/or proposition. As I’ve said many times, floppies are still indispensable for the industry as a source of revenue; and as Chris points out, sometimes buying individual issues (Acme Novelty Library, for instance) is indeed preferrable in many ways to simply waiting for the trade. (I myself launched a fairly expensive Ebay odyssey to track down old Acme issues.) But Acme and its ilk are kind of the exception that proves the rule. Most floppies don’t provide anywhere near that level of bang for your buck, let alone compare to the value of trades, graphic novels, manga-formatted books, let alone other forms of entertainment. And (I keep saying this again and again as well) only 250,000 or so people buy the dopey things at all. The format’s not working, for a wide variety of reasons. It’s time to start phasing in something different.)

If you look to the left you’ll see I’ve added a tip jar, because why not?

I don’t tend to be wild about the online pronouncements of Warren Ellis. Take this column about pop music, for example: There’s something about a grown man working himself into a rage-filled later over Britney Spears and Pop Idol that smacks of adolescent desperation. The piece is also laden with the kind of passages that sound like they’re saying something about the music being discussed but are really not that much more than distracting pyrotechnics–like the make-up and explosions at a Kiss show, used to cover up the fact that there isn’t a thing Kiss does that Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the New York Dolls, AC/DC, Van Halen, and even Alice Cooper didn’t do better. For example:

And, God, look at the “alternative” choices the machine offers up. Travis and Coldplay. Stubbly weaklings who wear socks as hats and would die of fright if someone played them something as rude and vulgar as a melody. Formless, sensitive strumming, riff-free and invisible to memory, and a belief that their vaunted “songwriting” requires nought but muttering lots and lots of words without actually saying anything at all. These people would vaporise if subjected to an honest thought. When did we stop wanting our music and our bands to be vivid?

I think what he’s saying is that he doesn’t like Travis and Coldplay. Fine; I don’t like Travis either, and though I do like Coldplay quite a bit, I think it’s worth re-electing George W. Bush simply to irritate Chris Martin. But what did Ellis actually say about their music? That it doesn’t have melody? Think what you will of Coldplay, but I will bet you twenty American dollars you’ve had the piano line from “Clocks” stuck in your head more than once this year. And all this business about “muttering” and “vaporizing” and “honest thoughts” and “vividness” makes me feel like we’ve wandered into a review column written by Tom Bombadil during a Sunday-morning come-down after a bad trip with Goldberry. You’re welcome to deduce how any of the above passage applies to any of the actual work either band has done, but it’s new comics day today and I don’t have the time to try it myself. It’s stylish nonsense, and to be honest, it’s not even all that stylish.

But something Ellis in his recent column about how lame pop music is brought to mind a similar issue in comics. He quotes writer Kieron Gillen, who says:

“Some poor kid is going to buy into the Vines and end up laying down eighth-rate memories of how good pop music can be, and thus ending up dismissing it as inconsequential. By wasting their first rush on the Vines, they’re going to be the ageing house-wife who doesn’t think sex is a big deal because they’ve only ever experienced a premature gimp trying to reach their cervix with desperate, spasming thrusts.

“If the Vines are your first favourite band, you’re fucked from the start. You’re the pop-equivalent of a thalidomide baby.”

More of the same purple prose you find in The Face, okay, sure; and I truly do feel that this kind of hyperbollically vicious attack on something as personal as music preference is best left behind with acne and algebra. But isn’t this basically the same argument Alan David Doane made, probably correctly, about the work of what I (and Barton Fink) would call The “Merely Adequate” Comics Writers’ Club? Transparently lousy, stupid art, like Britney’s latest album, is too obviously silly to do any lasting harm. It’s the quasi-acceptable, almost kinda good that ends up hurting, if it convinces us as readers to blur our boundaries and weaken our standards and spend our money on something that doesn’t deserve it. And unlike with pop music, there’s only about 250,000 of us consuming comics in this country. The business can’t afford for us to have lousy taste.

Rebuttals and follow-ups are the order of the day in the comicsphere.

As Grant Morrison’s interview is the most entertaining thing to hit the online comics world in quite some time, it’s garnering a lot of attention. Matt O’Rama thinks Grant’s the bees knees for having the balls to put his most outlandish ideas on display; Johnny Bacardi is less than happy with Grant’s Moore-bashing, and offers a cogent explanation as to how the “heavy-handed” tone Morrison dislikes in Watchmen is a feature, not a bug; Graeme McMillan puts together a “can’t we all just get along?” roundup from the messboards; Dirk Deppey takes a “physician, heal thyself” approach; and The Intermittent says we’ve been down this road before with pop provacateurs from John Lennon on. Is it safe to say that if Grant’s goal was to get people talking about himself and his ideas about comics, then mission most definitely accomplished?

(My attitude, unsurprisingly, is that we need more comics creators willing to give interviews like Morrison. I don’t mean we need more idiots like Rall who go around saying how everyone from Crumb to Spiegelman to Herriman to Ware sucks dick, or even more Warren Ellises, who to me reads more or less like a high school sophomore’s idea of what rebels sound like, but people with fascinating, pretension-deflating ideas, packaged in fascinating ways, flexible enough to change them when the dictates of their own passions call for it. In snappy outfits. We need more comic-book Bowies, basically. That being said, Grant’s definitely wrong about Watchmen, though he may well be right about Alan Moore’s career over the last 15 years….)

Mick Martin explains to me why he holds Bruce Jones’s Hulk in the same kind of contempt usually reserved for the Collected Works of Jeph Loeb. Sorry, Mick, but I’m unconvinced. (Why? Off the top of my head, Pratt is shown to be both a rogue agent and insane, so the supposed plot hole in his kidnapping of Banner is no hole at all; ditto for not using the irradiated blood of the Abomination or Doc Samson, since the Hulk has been shown for decades to be the strongest one there is, and presumably unique in the annals of irradiated-blood-dom; etc., etc., etc. At any rate nothing you point out comes close to the gigantic black hole in the plot of that Austen Uncanny X-Men issue we were talking about; moreover, unlike Uncanny, Hulk is a good read above and beyond its plot inconsistencies or lack thereof. But diff’rent strokes, etc., right?)

Franklin Harris shores up his anti-floppy argument against the various counterarguments the blogosphere has offered up. Listen, like Franklin, I still read the things myself, but my sentimental attachment slash insatiable need for a weekly fix doesn’t prevent me from seeing that this format is as attractive to the world at large as a plastic baggie filled with dog poo that someone lobbed at a garbage can but didn’t quite make it in and is now sitting on the sidewalk with a footprint embedded in it. Is it me, or is this inarguably holding the industry back?

In other news, Kevin Melrose wonders who hit the rewind button at the House of Ideas lately. Hey, Kevin, you forgot Marc Silvestri on New X-Men! (I suppose I lose retro-bashing street cred for having enjoyed the first issue of the Millar/Rob Liefeld Youngblood knockoff of Battle Royale, but I never liked Liefeld when he wasn’t retro, so does that even count? [Okay, but you enjoyed those issues G.I. Joe you read… Ed.] Shut up!)

Finally, Jim Henley crunches some numbers and finds out a weird thing about the page and ad counts in Marvel & DC comics. Is there a story here? Paging Dirk Deppey….

Wednesday, Dec. 3

read: the remainder of Three Is Company; A Short Cut to Mushrooms; A Conspiracy Unmasked

First, hello to all you Eve Tushnet fans, and thanks for dropping by! Hope you enjoyed this series’ first installment. New Comics Day almost got in the way of today’s, but I made sure to make up for the lost reading time!

Looking over what I read today, it’s more than a little astonishing to me to see how much even the names of chapters have seeped into my subconscious. Obviously I am far from the only person in the world who got disproportionately excited when, in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, Sam asked “A short cut to what?” and Pippin replied, “Mushrooms!” And I don’t even like mushrooms myself (except the special kind I ate that one time, but that’s a whole other fantasy world).

* “Three Is Company”–ah, those fabulously eerie first two appearances of the Black Riders. Adding to the ominous overtones of the “Shadow of the Past” chapter, these are our first signs that Tolkien knows a thing or two about horror. The snuffling is a particularly wrong touch. Also worth noting in this chapter is the meeting with Gildor the Elf. Most people focus on the ellision of Tom Bombadil in the films, leaving this magical/majestic meeting forgotten even by die-hards in many cases. Our first glimpse of the Fair Folk, it is in many ways also the first thing that indicates we’re in loftier territory than the humorous whimsicality of The Hobbit.

* “A Shortcut to Mushrooms”–Another unjustly forgotten cameo, this time around by the wiser-than-he-looks Farmer Maggott and his three angry dogs. I tend to enjoy seeing hobbits act smarter or braver than the stereotype. (Well, surely there’s a stereotype within Middle-Earth, right?) Maggott’s description of his exchange with the Black Rider is quietly alarming, as is his dog’s reaction to the visitor. And is that a monumental horror-image I spy, with the Black Rider standing up on the ridge?

* “A Conspiracy Unmasked”–Fatty Bolger puts in his appearance here, and I remember really getting a kick out of the idea that there were more than just the four central hobbits who knew enough about the Ring to help out. I used to imagine Fatty becoming something of a hero around the Shire in his own right for his role in helping Frodo get out of town. That’s what friends named Fatty are for, I suppose. Speaking of friends, this chapter contains one of my favorite passages in the whole book, one I used to toast my housemates of three years upon graduation from college:

‘But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,’ said Frodo.

Sam looked at him unhappily. ‘It all depends on what you want,’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin–to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours–closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.’

Of course, friends aren’t above giving friends a hard time when they’re acting dopey, and Pippin’s imitation of Frodo’s tendency to wax poetic over everything on Middle-Earth–‘We have constantly heard you muttering: “Shall I ever look down into that valley again, I wonder”, and things like that’–is both funny and familiar.

Tomorrow: Dropping the Bomb!

Monday, Dec. 1st-Tuesday, Dec. 2nd

read: Note on the Text; Foreword; Prologue; A Long-expected Party; The Shadow of the Past; about a third of Three Is Company

Despite having already read this book about seven times, it’s occuring to me that blogging The Lord of the Rings isn’t going to be as easy as I anticipated. For starters, I didn’t give myself a whole lot of time to actually read the book, much less write about it, if I want to stick to my plan of having it finished by the release of the third film. (This is the way I’ve done it during the past two years.) Finishing off Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar, an epic undertaking in its own right, pushed my projected start date from Thanksgiving to yesterday; and only now did I realize that the film comes out on the 17th, not the 19th as I’d had myself convinced. And this is to say nothing of an unusually busy period at work, a ton of new albums I’d like to give a solid listen to if not for the amount of time it’d take, several other writing projects I’m embroiled in (not the least of which is the rest of this blog)… Oh, confusticate and bebother the constraints of modern life!

That being said, these first sections of the book are like coming home again, aren’t they? I think I’m going to write about the book bullet-point style, just to save myself the effort of organizing comprehensible essay-style posts, unlike what I did to myself back in October. So away we go:

* Even things like the indescribably anal-rententive “Note on the Text,” which traces the publishing history of the book from edition to error-laden edition until its ultimate more-or-less perfection, mirrors the zealous complexity with which Tolkien detailed his world. I’m sure it’s no more necessary for me to read this every time than it would be for me to read the table of contents word by word, but what the hey?

* I always enjoy Tolkien’s foreword. I like how he says not that he dislikes allegory, but that he distrusts it–an altogether admirable trait, I think, particularly if one happens to be concerned with telling a good solid story. (Admittedly I only read the Narnia books as an adult, so maybe I missed out on its enchantments in some way, but particularly in the last installment the need to cleave to the Christian mythos seems to scupper the needs of the narrative almost entirely.) And his diss of his critics is a gem:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.

Prof. T. 1, Critics 0!

* The prologue contains the first of the many, many intriguing throw-away mentions of some thing or event that give my imagination hours and hours of things to chew over, quite possibly one of the book’s most endearing qualities. In this case it’s a brief discussion of the hobbits’ relations with the once-mighty Northern Kingdom of Men: “To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it.” Boy, but do I ever wish some tale did! The idea of little hobbits of ancient times fighting against the Witch-King centuries and centuries before Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin started out on their own adventures is a delightful mental Easter Egg. What did the Men make of these strange little people? Did they fight well? (One imagines they did.) Might the Witch-King have noticed them, and tucked the knowledge of these creatures away for future use? Ah, the joys of being a Tolkien nerd!

* “A Long-expected Party” is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, where the party really gets started. I was surprised to feel an almost physical sense of joy and pleasure when I read that first line: “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End…” Hooray! We’re off! I know this chapter is often ragged on by pop-culture critics handicapping the books for film fans, but fiddlesticks to them. I love the little jokes, which all read like the japes of a mischievous old man, which I suppose they are. My favorite is the bit about Lobelia Sackville-Baggins being given a set of silver spoons by the departed Bilbo, who suspected her of having stolen several of them in the past: “she took the point at once, but she also took the spoons.”

* “The Shadow of the Past”: Another Easter Egg here–Sam’s ostensibly tall tale of a tree-creature walking around outside the Shire, which, we might surmise from later events, may not be so tall at all. Actually, when Treebeard the Ent tells Merry & Pippin that the long-lost Entwives might like a place like the Shire, neither they nor Tolkien makes the connection with Sam’s friend’s sighting. Are we supposed to? Well, that’s the fun of reading the books, isn’t it? This swell chapter also includes Gandalf’s tale of his years as a glorified private dick on the trail of both Gollum and the Ring’s real history. Images of Gandalf and Aragorn hunting for, capturing, and spending at least as much time with him as Frodo and Sam do later on are intriguing indeed.

* about one-third of “Three Is Company”: A nice creepy just-missed moment when the hissing stranger questions the Gaffer about Frodo’s whereabouts, and a charming little bit with a fox who wonders what the heck three hobbits are doing sleeping outside. Coming soon: the Ringwraiths’ grand entrance!

So, there you have it–I’d imagine that’s how these things will read. Nothing special, just some favorite bits, and some thoughts on what’s making the book tick at that particular moment. Glad you’re walking through it with me!

Hope your Thanksgiving weekend was delightful!

If you’re interested in playing catch-up with the wacky world of comics, Dirk Deppey has it all, as usual. He truly is the Instapundit of the comicsphere.

It bears repeating: Grant Morrison gives good interview. This would also seem to be the apotheosis of the recent trend of comics creators having some fun at the expense of the inane questions they’re occasionally asked.

Bill Sherman lays the smack down on Marvel’s Trouble, the Mark Millar-scripted launch title for the ill-fated Epic imprint (indeed, the only Epic title to reach its intended conclusion, it would seem). Two little points: 1) Continuity-wise, this would work in the Ultimate universe, where Captain America’s sidekick Bucky did indeed survive WWII; 2) Characterization-wise, this kinda sorta might work in the Ultimate universe, where Aunt May is a lot more “on” than her regular-continuity counterpart. Of course, she still looks way to old for the Trouble-established timeline to make any sense. Then again, the Kingpin is way too old for the timeline established in his recent solo title; the argument in both cases was that a good story warrants screwing with established character points if necessary. To which I say, well, yeah–so when are we going to see those good stories, anyway?

Alan David Doane has the answer to the question of whether comics cost too much: The really good ones sure don’t. Actually, this tends to be the answer to every binary qualitative comics question. “Do comics suck?” “Do superhero comics suck?” “Do altcomix suck?” “Does manga suck?” “Do comics retailers suck?” “Is it a waste of time/money to read/buy comics?” The answer is always “not the good ones!” (The exception to this rule is “Do pamphlets suck?”–the answer there is always yes.) Mick Martin is the latest person to state that winnowing down your purchases to stuff that’s actually quite good does wonders for clearing up a lot of these questions. (I’ve got to disagree with him about Bruce Jones’s Hulk run, though; aside from the obviously grafted-in Absorbing Man storyline (notice how he didn’t include a single mention of any of his usual cast of conspirators?) it’s been riveting.)

A separate question related to the cost issue might be “is it wrong to seek out discounted copies of good comics, if they’re available, potentially at the expense of a good retailer near you?” Well, there you have to weigh the pros (saving money) vs. the cons (stiffing a worthwhile shop in favor of, say, Amazon.com, or one of those manga/anime stores). I’ve got to conclude that retailers are fighting a losing battle if they’re trying to convince purchasers as a class to make decisions that adversely affect their wallets. You’d have to be a hell of a good comics shop to convince someone that despite the fact that they can get the exact same material elsewhere for less money, they should go to you for, like, the ambiance or whatnot. Still, this can be done–Instapundit calls it “the comfy chair revolution” (registration required, so just use “laexaminer” as both user ID and password). It’s just going to require a lot more effort (and cash) on the part of retailers who probably can’t afford it.

No trade paperback of The Filth? Or any of the Vertigo Pop books? How does that make sense? Then again, DC usually takes forever to collect things that aren’t Hush, so hope springs eternal.

Finally, Franklin Harris comes up with more anecdotal evidence that–say it with me now–manga is the future. Rich Johnston pitches in as well. But hey, if we keep repeating “it’s just a trend” to ourselves (or perhaps “kids don’t buy comics anymore–they’re only buying video games”), maybe it’ll all go away….

Look high and low, far and wide, for months on end, and it will still be tough to find a comics-related quote that beats the following bit from the Pulse’s interview with Grant Morrison:

I must admit I have no time for the ’80s style “serious superheroes” books riding the retro wave; never resisting any chance to gratuitously stick the boot in, I thought Watchmen was self-conscious, derivative, and heavy-handed when it first appeared and time hasn’t mellowed my opinion of this vastly overrated series – so the comics I dislike most of all at the moment are filled with unsexy ’80s retro “superheroes-in-the-real-world” type stories. All these soldiers-in-tights comics seem miserly and lacking in wonder, surrealism or novelty. Even Alan Moore himself ran screaming from this kind of story and began an ungainly, 15-year long attempt to reinvent himself as me. So why anyone would look to the awkward pomposity of mid-’80s comics for inspiration is baffling.

Holy shit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about scenesterism and hipsterism lately. Partially this is due to my entree into High Society at the X-Men 2 DVD release party at Jay-Z’s club last week. The whole affair was a little disappointing. The fellow who invited us was a delight, don’t get me wrong, and if I said it wasn’t a little interesting to have Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’s ass wiggling against mine at one point, I’d probably be lying. But mainly, I didn’t see the point of going to something like that unless you were a famous person. If you weren’t a famous person, you were just someone standing around looking at/for the famous people, and what kind of fun is that? You’re a hanger-on, a wannabe, a scenester. It’s boring and silly.

Also boring and silly are hipsters. This is a particularly tough pill to swallow for me, as a twentysomething media worker in NYC who likes weird music and films and reads comic books. But the fact of the matter is that now matter how weird or cool you dress, there are at least 200 other people in this city (I reiterate, at least) who dress in exactly the same way. Most of them spend their nights at deliberately trashy bars drinking deliberately bad beer trying to pick up any one of a cadre of identically-dressed girls or boys. They all read the same hipster publications, take the same out-of-focus photos of one another, do the same drugs, have a friend who takes her top off a lot, blah blah blah. God, it’s so tedious.

And what’s depressing about both these things is how magnetic they seem to be to the artist. Being seen at the right place, or with the right people, or wearing the right outfit–it’s just an incredibly tempting shortcut to Worthwhileville, particularly when compared to the struggle to create something of value, art-wise. It’s also a tremendously easy way to augment the creating you do perform in such a way as to make it seem a lot more impressive. I’m kind of horrified at how soul-destroying and peripheral this enterprise seems to be, since it’s so prevalent, and since there’s a real sense that you’re not living up to your potential if you’re not participating in it in some way.

I’ve long said I’m glad I live on Long Island instead of in NYC. I live there out of necessity due to my marriage to a wonderful woman who happens to teach there, but I’m happy this decision was made for me. If I weren’t married, I’d be living in some awful place on the Lower East Side or Williamsburg or Astoria, paying too much, doing bumps in the bathroom and acquiring sexually transmitted diseases, and God knows how much writing I’d actually be doing, and whether it’d be any good or just something dopey like every other artsy boy in the five boroughs. Which is not to say that what I’m doing now is works of brilliant genius, just that I’m reasonably sure it’s MY work, and not the product of some cookie-cutter scene I’ve found myself involved in.

(And let’s not forget how arbitrarily spacio-temporally biased “scenes” are, by the way. I spend the 1990s getting angry at writers telling me that my enjoyment of, say, Soundgarden was invalid because I didn’t have the good fortune to be born ten years earlier in Seattle.)

This is not to say that I think all aspects of scenesterism are invalid. Certainly if you can find a group of people with compatible artistic drives with whom to work or collaborate, even simply on a moral-support level, go for it. Hey, it worked for the Fort Thunder kids! And just because the comics-crit world is starstruck by them don’t mean they acted like the kind of scenester idiots people are usually starstruck by. Also, I do happen to think fashion and style are important, insofar as they are some sort of expression of your insides made manifest on your outsides. Courtney Taylor-Taylor from the Dandy Warhols put it to me in those kinds of terms, and suddenly I found myself thinking, “A-ha! I get it now!” In a way this only makes it more depressing when you walk around Avenue A and see 40,000 people who might as well be sharing your closet. But still, dressing up in a way that makes you feel vital and creative is a self-reinforcing thing, or at least it can be–like an athlete or a soldier putting on your uniform, you’re transforming yourself into the person you want to be. Just make sure that person’s you, and not Julian Casablancas.

The only important place is inside your head. That’s the only thing that defines you and your worthwhileness. When you’re an artist, the window to that is what you put on the page. To the extent that you can make your surroundings and your appearance and your circle of friends reflect this in some way, hey, great. But ultimately none of that matters in the slightest. The inside of your head can’t be reproduced, sold in thrift stores, and worn ironically. It’s yours!

Okay, so I’m starting to freak out just a little bit. The world premiere of The Return of the King has happened, and it won’t be long now before the movie comes out around here. As such, it’s time for my annual re-reading of The Lord of the Rings, a tradition that began in the summer of 2000, when Amy and I read the book aloud together. (Prior to that I think I’d read the book four times–once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school, once in college–give or take one reading; it’s just such a part of me I kinda forgot.)

This time around, however, I’ll be blogging my response to whatever I read during the course of a particular day. Nothing elaborate, I don’t think; certainly nothing approaching the effort that went into the October horror-blogging marathon. Just my observations and emotions about passages that strike my fancy.

Would it be too cheesy to say I hope it’s a journey worth taking? Maybe. But I do. First installment coming soon!

And the December 2003 award for Best Creative Comic-Book Excoriation goes to…

Paul O’Brien, for his righteous take-down of the latest Chuck Austen turkey over in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. Ouch. Best part: pointing out a storytelling flaw that makes Jeph Loeb look like Bill Shakespeare.

Here’s a rule of thumb for Chuck Austen (call it Collins’s Law): If he can’t show boobs and disembowelments, don’t read it. Seriously, U.S. War Machine was terrific, The Eternal has been a lot of fun, and I even loved his art on the Brian Bendis-scripted Elektra miniseries (the sole good story told centering around that character by anyone who isn’t Frank Miller). But aside from that… yikes.

Let’s hear it for the National Dog Show, on your local NBC affiliate! Bichons, baby! Lots of ’em!

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

The other day, a good friend of mine who’s half Jewish said matter of factly that he’s of the belief that within 10-15 years, we’ll see another Holocaust. I was surprised to find myself not entirely in disagreement. Anyone who’s been following European (and of course Muslim) political discourse recently could tell you of the shocking level of Jew-hatred that’s pretty much taken for granted at this point.

Case in point: this cartoon has just won an award from the British Political Cartoon Society. I know, I know, we go through this little two-step every time some hack shits out a sledgehammer-subtle indictment of Ariel Sharon & Israel–“he’s criticizing a man/a government, not being an anti-Semite!” And as usual, I call bullshit: Anti-Semitism has always presented “legitimate” political concerns as a false face (anti-capitalism, anti-Communism, pacifism, protectionism, and on and on). Moreover, such cartoons inevitably tap into a centuries-deep resevoir of anti-Jew imagery (hook noses, money-grubbing, puppet-mastery, the blood libel), or compare the Jewish state to the anti-Jewish state, namely Nazi Germany, or indeed swipe ideas directly from the Nazis themselves. And this one, in which Ariel Sharon is show devouring a Palestinian baby, is no exception. However noxious you happen to find Sharon or his policies, this is the equivalent of, say, drawing Colin Powell in a loincloth, chucking a spear at Iraq while raping a white woman. It’s anti-Semitism in its new, more respectable outfit: anti-Israelism. So much classier than brown shirts and armbands, isn’t it?

But what’s even more troubling than the fact that this cartoon was drawn and then published by people who one imagines are not drunken skinheads but respected members of the political journalism community, is that that same community saw fit to say that this is The Best of what they have to offer. The cartoon came out and was widely criticized, and you know what the British Political Cartoon Society thought? They thought that not only did this cartoon deserve to be defended, but that a message needed to be sent to the world at large: This is truth. This is courage. This is the way the world should be viewed. We should look at a drawing that would be at home in the most grotesque propaganda of pogroms and Inquisitions past, and think to ourselves, “bravo.”

It’s got me thinking something very, very different.

I’m not trying to contribute to the whole “argu[ing] endlessly” bit here, but the fact that even intelligent comics fans still feel comfortable calling manga formatting a “trend” is pretty much why the industry’s in so much trouble in the first place….

David Fiore responds to the minor tizzy he worked the collective comics blogosphere (yours truly included) into with his posts in favor of the mainstream-company superhero-property model of storytelling. Basically, he says, “my bad!” He says he didn’t mean to give the impression that this mode of narrative production is the tops, just that it’s a lot more interesting than many writers are giving it credit for. I’ll certainly grant him that–some of this stuff is just crazy. I think many “serious” art scholars might look at it the same way they look at “outsider art,” which is probably the last thing Dave has in mind, but honestly, there’s genuine formal weirdness inherent in this kind of storytelling that belies its critics’ claims that it’s all adolescent power-fantasy simple-mindedness.

Also on the Fiore beat is Matt O’Rama, who works himself up into an unseemly lather over Dave’s use of critical-theory vocab but scores some as-yet unanswered points against Dave’s assertion that authors lack, uh, authority over their creations.

Shawn Fumo attempts to analyze Marvel’s latest actions toward The World At Large. For those of us who want the company to succeed, the moves can be baffling, but I know that there are enough smart people in there to actually make some progress given time and latitude.

Eve Tushnet reviews Ito, Moore, and Millar. Her comments about Ultimate X-Men are particularly enjoyable. That book really did provide some highly entertaining ass-kicking popsplosive bang for the buck.

Lotsa yuks over at Derek Martinez‘s place, who’s rounded up the good, the bad, and the ugly of the year in comics. (Link courtesy of ADD; Derek, I’ve got no idea why I hadn’t blogrolled you, but consider that problem rectified.)

BEST SUBJECT HEADING EVER

Kevin Melrose discusses the sad level of bare-minimum suggestions for comics retailers to improve their image. It’s funny, because it’s true.

Mick Martin needs manga recommendations. Help him out, and tell ‘im Sean T. sent you!

Finally, my Thanksgiving suggestion to you: Give thanks for good comics! Sitting on my bookshelves right now are unread copies of Dave McKean’s Cages, Chris Ware’s Quimby the Mouse, and two volumes worth of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. I’ve still got half of Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar, Jim Woodring’s The Frank Book, and Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer to go through. And if that’s not enough, I can flip through my already-read copies of various books I got this year, like Unstable Molecules, Clumsy, Unlikely, AEIOU, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Blankets, Kramers Ergot 4, Teratoid Heights, Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, Battle Royale, Tomie, Ripple, 100%, DK2, New X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, Rubber Necker, Powers, Alias, Daredevil, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Ultimates, Incredible Hulk, Truth, Born, Vikings, Forlorn Funnies, Tepid, Big Questions, Chrome Fetus, Amazing Spider-Man, Savage Dragon, Astro City, The Filth, and on and on and on, to say nothing of older stuff I first came across in the past 365. We comics fans (can’t believe I’m using that formation, but there you have it) really do have a lot to be thankful for, if we’re lucky enough to know where to look.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!