Thanks to the generosity of John Jakala, I read the two-volume horror series Tomie, by manga creator Junji Ito, this week. To quote Lost Highway, “that is some seriously spooky shit, sir.” The very concept–human being as tumor–is one familiar to any fan of Anglosphere body horror–Cronenberg and Barker, for example. But here, it’s pursued with a mad capriciousness, fusing the tumor metaphor with the viral metaphor to produce something truly terrifying and seemingly everlasting. The imagery is as strong as you’re likely to come across in a comic; the carpet that gives birth to a horde of empty-socketed faces is a favorite of mine.

However, I wonder if I didn’t stumble across a big obstacle to the effectiveness of comic-book horror, something we’ve been talking about around these parts for ages: Later that night, as I lay me down to sleep, some of those horrifying images started filtering into my mind again. This tends to happen when I watch or read something really frightening–but unlike those peskily persistent pictures of the Shining twins or It‘s evil clown Pennywise, these mental images appeared complete with panel borders and folded-back page edges, as though I was looking not at the image itself (the “real thing”), but the book itself! It’s hard to be truly kept up at night by the recurring image of ink on a bunch of pieces of paper…

The friend of mine who pioneered the “Friendstering the Masthead” game has expanded upon it at Low Culture. Apparently I accidentally scooped him with my post on the topic. Whoops!

UPDATE: In the interest of full disclosure, before I de-Friendstered, the editorial staff at the publication I edit for was an embarrassing four for four.

The responses to yesterday’s plea for help getting into Love & Rockets continue to flow in. The leading candidates seem to be 1) Palomar 2) The Death of Speedy 3) Getting the hell off the Comics Journal message board before it saps your last bit of enthusiasm for great comics. I’ll probably be heeding all three bits of advice.

Ha ha, seriously folks, Palomar and The Death of Speedy are far and away the frontrunners for the best way to dive into the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez respectively; after trying those two, folks have suggested trying Gilbert’s Poison River next, followed by Chelo’s Burden, X, Flies on the Ceiling, Chester Square, and Wigwam Bam to varying degrees. In other words, I’ve got a nice plan of action, and as long as I can wean myself off of my chronological-order-of-release fixation, I should be all set. Thanks to everyone who’s written in or posted suggestions, and please keep those recommendations coming (especially folks who wrote in yesterday with ampersands, since my submission form ate whatever you tried to tell me!).

Also on the Hernandez beat is Eve Tushnet, who’s blogged her own recommendations, and Johnny Bacardi, who’s a rare dissenting voice in the chorus of praise for Palomar. Alan David Doane is representative of the majority opinion. (How often do you get to say that?)

Big Sunny D advances his theory that Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is a horror comic. Horrifying, I’ll grant him, but horror? I can’t buy it. I agree with pretty much everything he says, but I think horror is more than just a sense of despair and futility–much as we’re supposed to think they need to be subverted or destroyed if a given work is to be any good, genre conventions do count for something, and I think that certain conventions of structure, imagery, and message are what enable us to stop the slippery slope that leads us to label as “horror” anything that’s bleak or disturbing. On the other hand, Steve Bissette (scroll down) agrees with Mr. D; it’s definitely a topic worth examining. (I touched on it in a footnote in my senior essay on horror.)

Alan David Doane weighs in on the dangers of the (as Barton Fink might put it) “merely adequate.” I’m not terribly familiar with Geoff Johns’s work so I can’t comment there, but it’s certainly true that there’s more at stake when you buy something that’s “okay for what it was” than just that vague sense of let-down-ness you’re feeling.

Will Franklin find his findings to be factual in the future?

Shawn Fumo unearths a truly shocking statistic from a Time Magazine article on Borders Bookstores–female-centric shojo manga comprises fully 60% of their graphic-novel sales! Speaking anecdotally, I have yet to visit the graphic novel section of the local Borders without seeing books picked up for purchase by teenage girls or elementary-school-aged kids or both. Every single time, people. But surely this manga craze in my Borders is just a fluke–after all, Shonen Jump just won’t sell!

Bruce Baugh has some thoughts on the extent to which righteous anger is an integral part of fandom; he also counters the fandom-supported argument that change is inherently bad. He cites the case of Ang Lee’s Hulk, and he’s right–it’s not the fact that Lee changed the Hulk’s origin that was bad, it was the way he changed it. (That is, needlessly and incomprehensibly complicating it, thereby stripping it of its allegorical resonance. And oh yeah, who gave a damn about any of those characters? The fact is that any time the Hulk wasn’t on screen, or those panel-border dissolves weren’t being used, the movie was dull as hell, and making a dull movie out of the Incredible freaking Hulk is pretty inexcusable. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Note to John Jakala: Nuh-uh! (Translation: there’s an interesting debate going on in that post’s comments feature about the merits of Mark Millar and Brian Bendis.)

J.W. Hastings tries to find where comic books as containers of literature end and comic books as art objects begin. He’s not all that happy with the latter conception of the comic book, no sir. Frankly, I think he’s targeting the wrong book by the wrong publisher–Top Shelf has some vaguely design-y books, sure, but that most recent anthology isn’t really one of them, at least insofar as it garners praise from the artcomix crowd; it’s too hit-or-miss an affair. Most of Top Shelf’s best books are nice to look at but are ultimately valued for their content, not their design–the works of Alan Moore, Craig Thompson, and Jeffrey Brown come to mind. A far more artsy publisher would be Highwater (who, in fairness to JW, are distributed in some capacity or other by Top Shelf); it draws a lot of its energy from Fort Thunder alumni, and NON anthologizer Jordan Crane, who are all leading proponents of the comic-book-as-objet-d’art school. Frankly, I’m tickled if a book is as neat-looking as, say, the hand-silkscreened and die-cut NON #5, but I’m really interested in the comics themselves, you know? Which is good, because Highwater happens to publish some of the best comics made by anyone in the last few years (Teratoid Heights, Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, Skibber Bee-Bye, The Last Lonely Saturday, and yes, the much-maligned-by-JW Kramers Ergot 4. JW, take another look at Kramers–yes, the endless collages are pretty much pointless, but check out “Lonely Sailor” by editor Sammy Harkham, the Sisyphus stories by Anders Nilssen, “Don’t Look Them in the Eye” by Jeffrey Brown–those I remember off the top of my head, and they’re good comics any way you slice it.)

Eve Tushnet responds to David Fiore‘s call for an eye-level aesthetic, which she interprets to eschew both reverence and cynicism. Sounds good to me–reverence and cynicism tend to be totally subsumed into horror in the works I admire…

In a post script to something of a running debate on the potential ameliorative effects of manga on American comics, Dave Intermittent notes that two American-made manga-style books, the Sandman spin-off Death: At Death’s Door and a Lizzie McGuire tie-in, have done well enough at bookstores to suggest that the manga market will, in fact, buy American manga. In other words, it’s not just Japanophile fetishism. This bodes well.

More on manga (hey, isn’t there always?) from Ron Phillips, focusing on manga’s role as sequential-art training wheels for America’s little kids.

Jim Henley, you are not alone!

Jason Kimble points out that amidst all the recent furor about mediocre comics, no one seemed to remember that the crap: gold ratio in other media is just as bad. Hey, I remembered–you don’t see me renting Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle or running out to buy Britney Spears’s In the Zone today, do you?

Finally, in a recent message to his mailing list, Warren Ellis mentioned that he’d been surfing through “the comics blogosphere” the other day. While that explained the strange feeling I got a couple days ago that someone, somewhere, was exposing my dark American underbelly, it did more than that, too: it led Ellis, apparently, to give up on bitching about the state of the comics industry altogether, because it’s all been said before (by him, and now by the bloggers). Christopher Butcher is apparently going to follow suit. Though I wasn’t reading comics, let alone comics-related websites, when Ellis was at the height of his influence, it seems to me that his advice tends to be quite good; but there have been people saying there’s nothing new under the sun for as long as there have been people, if not as long as there’s been a sun. Personal Comics Burnout hits all of us at one time or another, and the joys of complaining are certainly susceptible to yielding diminishing returns, but don’t let’s mistake momentary fed-up-edness with unshakeable insight. If we don’t complain about the stupidities of this medium we love so much, who will? Not the people perpetrating the stupidities, I can assure you of that.

Here’s another comics-related anal-rententivity-inspired plea from me to you.

I have a hardcover copy of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan collection. Since this is one of my favorite books of all time, I like having a hardcover (a relatively rare thing in my collection). Essentially it was a gift from a friend who had an extra copy. The thing is, the cover is ripped along the spine in such a way that the printing and color is removed from an inch-long by half-inch-wide section of it and all you can see is the white of the paper. Think of what happens to wrapping paper when you rip the tape off and you’ll get the idea.

Anyway, this drives me nuts, and during the three or so years I’ve owned this book I’ve always considered it to not actually be in my collection, so flummoxed and flustered am I by that one tear on the spine. I know it’s crazy, but it’s true, just like getting lost between the moon and New York City.

Here is my offer: To the first person who sends me a nice pristine copy of the Jimmy Corrigan hardcover, I will send my own slightly-ripped-cover copy of that same hardcover, plus an undamaged, lovely hardcover copy of Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl: The Beauty Supply District collection. How does that sound? I’ll even take care of shipping. How can you lose?

(You know, if you want to keep it simple and just want to trade Jimmy Corrigans, that’s fine too. But I thought I’d offer the Katchor book too.)

Go ahead and email me if you’re interested. (And I’ve been told the ampersand situation has been rectified, so don’t worry about that.)

Thank you, and goodnight!

You know what? Just go to Dirk’s today, okay? He’s got links to everything, and then some. Everyone else is just linking to those same things anyway, so I’m saving you the trouble. You’re welcome.

Long Island and its neighbors have been insane lately. The Missus has analysis, with particular emphasis on the troubling implications these stories have for criminal justice, high school culture, the eating disordered… fascinating reading.

Hey, it turns out that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were apparently connected up the wazoo.

What, did that not get mentioned on the morning news shows today? Why, it’s almost as though they don’t want you to know!

Jim Henley, meanwhile, has at the New York Times op-chart that offered an optimistic appraisal of the situation in Iraq, which I linked to the other day. Jim’s analysis looks astute, but most of it hinges on the fact that he’s shocked–shocked!–that the U.S. hasn’t been able to repair decades’ worth of damage, neglect, and murderousness within the space of three months. Go figure!

Finally, after spending the weekend watching the astounding making-of documentaries included in the extended-edition Two Towers DVD, I’ve come to the conclusion that Iraq must be transfered to the control of Peter Jackson as soon as possible.

Okay. So I picked up Music for Mechanix, Volume One of the Hernandez Brothers’ epochal altcomix series Love & Rockets, at SPX this summer. I’m stuck about a quarter of the way into it–it’s just not doing much for me. I understand that its quasi-parodic sci-fi soap-opera tone is very different from later, ostensibly better/richer/etc. L&R, but the problem is that I’m extremely anal-renentive and must read a series from its very beginning onward if I’m to read it at all, so I’m reluctant to skip ahead to the “good jumping-on points” volumes in the collection. On the other hand, I have little interest in slogging through a few volumes that won’t appeal to me, as though I was some four-year-old forcing himself to eat his broccoli so I can have ice cream for dessert. Also, I’d pick up Palomar, the big collection of Gilbert Hernandez’s South American L&R tales, which by all accounts is a tremendous masterpiece that presents those stories in the best possible manner, but a) I’d miss out on the Jaime/Mario stuff; b) again, I’ve just got to read things from the beginning; c) If I end up loving it, I’m just going to wind up buying the individual collections anyway, which will bring us back to Do.

So what should I do here? I ask because I totally believe everyone who says that L&R is indispensible, and I want to read it, but I’m just not sure how to approach it. What say you? Drop me an email line (UPDATE: please don’t use use ampersands in your email, because apparently the submission form cuts off everything after them! I can’t tell you how many responses i’ve gotten that read like “Regarding L”–and that’s it, because “&R, you should get Palomar” or whatever else the person wrote has disappeared!), or post your thoughts here, please!

ANOTHER UPDATE: It appears that the whole “Help me learn to like L&R” title is throwing people for a loop, to the point where the above-linked thread is attracting more sarcasm and abuse than John Byrne explaining why we need to show Superman more respect. Partially this is because message boards attract idiots, but it’s also because it’s an admittedly wonky title. It was intended as a joke, or at the very least a hyperbolic provocation, in the grand tradition of jokey/hyperbolically provocative thread titles. Really all I’m hoping for are some tips as to the best way to approach the material.

Yes, there is such a thing. It’s important to purge our pull-lists and buy-piles of mediocre, inconsequential piffle–important to our own wallets and sanity, if nothing else–but don’t let’s forget that some superhero books are still a hoot and a half. Newsarama has neato looks at upcoming projects from Brian Bendis and Mark Millar–the latter unreliable of late but quite good when he’s “on,” the former completely in the zone on Ultimate Spider-Man, Alias, Powers, Ultimate Six, and Daredevil. (Ultimate X-Men I’m not convinced he’s got a handle on yet, but he’s always rewarded my patience in the past.) Enjoy, and be not ashamed!

Never let it be said that I’m just some rah-rah-ing jingo: This CIA report, coupled with this analysis by Jim Henley of the potentially self-deluding glass-half-full mentality of the administration, do not bode well for Iraq. I still maintain that we did absolutely the right thing by invading the country and deposing the monsters who ran it, and that it will be a good thing for the country, the region, and the world in the long run–after all, bad news isn’t always the only news, as we should have learned by now. (For example, there’s this Gallup poll of Baghdadis that speaks tremendously well of the potential for genuine liberal democracy in Iraq; there’s also this chart from the New York Times (!) op-ed page (link courtesy Roger Simon), using a variety of indicators to show that things are actually trending to the positive in several important ways.) Moreover, generally speaking, the people who are saying “I told you so!” because of the bad news are doing so based on assumptions about the nature of America and/or the nature of Middle Easterners and/or the nature of man’s obligation to his fellow man that I find troubling, to say the least. But no one is well served by glossing over the negative, and the trends discussed in the links above ought to be addressed by hawks & doves alike–the whole aviary, in other words.

On a related note, I’d criticize the chickenhawk argument, but since I myself have never used the chickenhawk argument, I have no right to offer my opinions on it. (Seriously, enough with this idiocy already, okay? Roger Simon and Armed Liberal have beaten this fallacy to within an inch of its life–let’s not ever have to go through this again, shall we?)

I recently got off of Friendster, because seriously, enough already. But my coworkers have devised a delightful game to play with the service: Go to the “about the contributors” section of your favorite NYC-based lifestyle glossy (they’ve done New York and MTV’s magazine) and type in the names you find there–you’ll find an embarrassingly high percentage of them on Friendster, and an even more embarrassingly high percentage of them using the same photo on the website and in their magazines.

“It is a story that emits light and yellow and God and love.” –Rosie O’Donnell on her musical Taboo, during her post-suit courthouse-steps statement yesterday

“Rev. Al Sharpton: The Rolling Stone Interview” –on the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine

Also, Ted Rall is scum, but you knew that already.

How to de-mediocrify your comics-buying habits in several easy steps, by Derek Martinez. (Link courtesy ADD.)

The Comics Masochist’s Creed, by Chris Allen.

Must reads, esp. Allen’s.

By all accounts, James Sime is a terrific retailer, of the kind we all wish had a shop near us. He also promotes a form of “comics activism” the value of which I and several others find questionable. These are both topics one can discuss rationally, if one is so inclined.

But man OH man–with friends like these, does James Sime even need enemies?

I think it’s genuinely safe to declare the comics blogosphere “mature,” because in the last couple of weeks there have been about a half-dozen topics covered so completely that it makes MSNBC’s The Abrams Report‘s coverage of the Scott Peterson trial look perfunctory and half-hearted. Seriously, if people want saturation coverage of comics-related issues, then both of them should turn to the comicsphere, since that’s where it’s at. All this is perhaps a roundabout way of pointing out how good comicsphere kingpin Dirk Deppey is; a good many of the links below come courtesy of his indispensable site.

The most recent topic to draw forth the blogerati is really just a sentence, written by Christopher Butcher: “This week

Guess who owns the Extended Edition of The Two Towers, one week before it’s supposed to come out?

Ha ha!

I’ve been meaning to say something about MSNBC’s Bob Arnot for some time now. Of all the reporters currently covering Iraq (and I only really watch NBC and MSNBC, because I don’t get any other cable news nets and, well, they play Imus in the Morning), he’s far and away the one who covers the successes (and there are many) with anything resembling the gusto with which most cover the failures (there are plenty of those, too). He’s a one-man antidote to the police-blotter reporting that’s given so much ammunition to the anti-warriors and anti-Bushites (who, I think it’s safe to assume, comprise a large perecentage of the people doing the reporting). His reports on last night’s edition of Chris Matthews’s Hardball were no exception. Take a look at the other, more accurate (and therefore, unsurprisingly, more positive) side of the story. (Link courtesy of Instapundit.)

For further illustration of how deceptive the “things are getting worse and worse” meme really is, here are a few examples of it–from World War II. (Links courtesy of Little Green Footballs.)

Finally, Christopher Hitchens does his usual comprehensive job dismantling the notion that true peace was ever going to be possible with Saddam Hussein and friends, and Andrew Sullivan shoots down Wesley Clark’s attempts to claim that the Kosovo War was justified while Gulf War II was not. (Might I add that the eminently just and justifiable Kosovo campaign, which Clark touts as proof of his military acumen, was an atrociously planned and executed near-disaster?)

Comics! Yeah.

Johnny Bacardi didn’t like The Dark Knight Strikes Again one bit, and tells me and Dirk Deppey so in no uncertain terms. Johnny, I think you’re misinterpreting both the target of Miller’s ire and his motives for expressing it. I don’t see the book as a “take the money and run” toss-off at all–Miller has explicitly stated that the lo-fi look of the altcomix at SPX were a big inspiration here, so I don’t think it’s fair to say that he just crapped this out because he was irritated with the demand for him to do a superhero comic and wanted to get back to “ancient Greece and Elmore Leonard.” If there’s a single comics professional alive who could spend the rest of his whole life doing any goddamn thing he chose, it’s Frank Miller. He only returned to Batman because he wanted to, and he only wanted to, I think, because he felt the whole damn thing needed to be blown up and started over again. Re-read the exchange between Wonder Woman and Superman in which WW berates Supes for basically becoming a boring pussy–that’s Frank Miller talking to the people who make superhero comics, not the people (like you and I, Johnny) who still read them hoping to be entertained.

Johnny also takes issue with the way David Fiore compares Alex Ross to Leni Riefenstahl. Please forgive me if I don’t dive into this debate with the gusto you might expect from someone who is such an enthusiastic devotee of comics and enemy of fascism, but Christ on a crutch, I’ve seen this argument on the Comics Journal messboard so many times I could plotz. The crux of the debate seems to me to center on whether or not certain artistic techniques (specifically heroic portraits of powerful, physically fit people shot from low angles) are inherently fascist, a notion that always seemed ridiculous to me. It came up a lot during my film school days in terms of the award ceremony sequence at the end of Star Wars. Yes, that scene was cribbed from Riefenstahl’s work, but seeing as how the award ceremony celebrated the defeat of a fascist regime, it seems to me you’d have to go through a lot of “but-but-but”s to explain how this is, in fact, National Socialism with Wookiees. (This goes double because of all the big movies made by the maverick late-60s/1970s generation of American directors, this is the only one I can think of in which the revolution actually succeeds.) It’s no more a fascist film than The Godfather is Communist because it cribbed montage techniques from Eisenstein. Similarly, it seems silly to argue that Ross is a fascist (i’ve seen it be done, believe me) because you can see the bottom of his characters’ chins, which is why I don’t think that’s what David is arguing–what he’s saying is that Ross’s work promotes uncritical valuation of heroes for their hero-ness. I think that’s a fair critique–judging from interviews with the fellow Ross seems to be a bright, insightful guy with altogether too much “respect” for the superheroes he’s made a living off of, as though he truly believes the “modern Pantheon” myth-marketing scheme his work has helped create. I don’t think that’s particularly healthy, but nor do I think it’s particularly fascist. (Seems to me a far more cogent criticism of his work would be that the men all look like gym teachers, the women all look like guards at a women’s correctional facility, and ambient white light finds its way everygoddamnwhere in every one of his paintings, like sand when you get home from the beach.)

This weekend a friend mentioned that Rufus Wainwright’s new album, Want One–specifically the orgiastically magnificent “Go or Go Ahead”–is the kind of music Radiohead should be doing. The Missus and I both agree, wholeheartedly. Hail to the Thief might have its moments, but Wainwright’s manically inventive production and lovely, exotic vocals eat that record alive. “Bolero,” the Brill Building, Brahms, and Britney Spears all find their way in there at one point or another (though Britney, fortunately, is just a one-off reference, not a musical inspiration). It’s tough to talk about individual songs for all that, though; this is an album that’s meant to be taken in as a whole. (That won’t stop me from picking “Oh What a World,” “I Don’t Know What It Is,” “Movies of Myself,” “Go or Go Ahead,” “Vibrate,” and “Beautiful Child” as the best orchestral rock songs since OK Computer, though.) This one’s a must, music fans.

Also picked up the Strokes’s Room on Fire. If that’s a fire, it’s a negative-four alarmer, man. Where’s the urgency? Compared to the first record, which had more hooks than the prop department for a revival of Peter Pan, this one, well, plods. Not plods, exactly–it just kinda putters along, with most every song consisting of slapped-together arrangements of different notes each played eight times in a row. On the other hand, it is growing on me. A couple of songs are obviously great, in the spirit of Is This It–this would be the very nervous sounding “Reptilia” and the album-closing “I Can’t Win”–and the two Cars homages are entertaining too. There’s a decent ballad in there as well, “Under Control,” which uses a “Moby Dick”-esque drum lick for good measure. It’s not as good as Is This It, the album it is inexplicably called a clone of by critic after critic, but it’s good nonetheless.

And that Outkast double el-pee is pretty good, too. I’ve never been as wild about Outkast as many people seem to be: sure, they’ve come up with amazing unclassifiable songs like “Bombs Over Baghdad,” and great hip-hop stuff like “So Fresh, So Clean,” but for all that you have to put up with a lot of meandering stuff that never gets off the ground and (the bane of modern-day hip-hop) skits galore. (And no one will ever be able to explain to me why “The Whole World” was recorded, much less released as a single off a greatest-hits package.) However, I’m pretty happy with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. I think they work best if you really do listen to it as a double album and not just two records that came in the same case. There’s actually something of a flow, an expansion of ideas as the former gives way to the latter. And “Hey Ya!” is every bit as good as “B.O.B.”, possibly better, and “Prototype” doesn’t just peter out the way so many hip-hop songs do, for which I was profoundly grateful, and Big Boi’s “GhettoMusick” is just as weird as anything Andre 3000 came up with, which took me by surprise.

And there’s also Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism to talk about. I’ve only just gotten into Death Cab, thanks to lead singer Ben Gibbard’s wonderful emotronica side project the Postal Service, so I don’t have a whole lot to compare it to; but from what I’ve gathered from fans (and from a few listens to its predecessor, The Photo Album), Transatlanticism is a breakthrough. Ambitious and intimate in equal measure, each song is a lot more “song”-ish than previous efforts, there are surprisingly Beatleish/Lennonish moments, and it’s got a crescendoing 8-minute title song centerpiece that ends in a swelling chorus of “Come on.” I think it’s a beautiful album.

Amanda follows up on the Naomi Wolf controversy with a comprehensive, convincing dismantlement of Porn As We Know It. Among other things she points out the fact that insofar as the clitoris isn’t so much as a blip on the porn-flick radar screen, it isn’t doing anyone any favors–if you’re using porn as your normative standard for how sexual pleasure is given and received, women get gypped, and men aren’t even aware they’re gypping the women. (You’ve also got your basic inadequate sex-ed curriculum to thank for this. Remember the lesson on clitoral stimulation? Yeah, me neither. So teenage girls nationwide go through their teenage years getting jabbed at by their special fellas, wondering what all the fuss is about.)

Amy’s post is basically a close reading of porn, and it ain’t pretty. However, she also disagrees with Wolf’s apparent embrace of religious orthodoxy as something “hot.” Essentially we’re all looking for maximum sexual choice and fulfillment, and neither fundamentalism nor mandated money shots are going to get us there.