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.

The War On Drugs is an obscene, violent, Orwellian, unconstitutional sham. Film at 11.

Also: Is the “Bush lied about the imminent threat” meme an imminent threat to my ability to take Democrats seriously ever again? Andrew Sullivan reports, you decide.

“And this would have solved things how?”

By winning, Jim. By beating them. That’s how problems caused by armed people killing us are solved, generally, not by retreating behind Fortress America and congratulating ourselves for no longer “abridging liberty” while lunatic theocratic fascists skullfuck their subjects with impunity.

Or do those folks’ liberties not count? This is an aspect of the antiwar libertarian argument I’ve never understood. That, and the Confederacy fetish. I dunno, maybe I’m still a pinko at heart.

Uh, how ’bout that Alias storyline, huh? 🙂

Well, the big news here is that I received a link from the mighty Corner, The National Review‘s group blog. Mike Potemra comments on my discussion with Eve Tushnet of the Calvinist/arbitrary horror in Kubrick’s The Shining. This precipitates a discussion about Kubrick, Tarantino, Un Chien Andalou, etc. with Jonah Goldberg. (What does the fact that I’m actually pleased about getting linked to by NRO say about post-9/11 politics? That’s a topic for another post, I’m afraid.)

Bruce Baugh talks Wicker Man, pointing out two subtle strengths of a movie with many. He also reviews The Eye, yet another Asian horror film I’ve heard good things about, and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (The only Argento I’ve seen is Deep Red, an experience which took a lot out of me. Man, that bathtub scene is… unpleasant.)

Big Sunny D talks about the ways your viewing conditions affect your receptivity to horror movies (a very important point, i think), and refuses to give up hope for a horror comic as scary as a really great horror film.

Rick Geerling asks whether less is more in horror, in terms of both what is shown and what is explained. The consensus seems to be that sometimes less is more, and sometimes more is more–it just depends on the intent and the execution. That’s my take on it, as a cursory glance at the films on my list might suggest. But beyond the fact that I like horror films that take a wide range of approaches to showing and explaining the horror, it seems that I tend to prefer films that show quite a bit and explain very little. But that’s not a hard and fast rule.

Finally, the Malaysian government has banned horror fiction (link courtesy of Dirk Deppey). Apparently they’ve decided that their revolting brand of Islamic quasitheocracy is scary enough.

The little meme that could continues to spark discussion as more bloggers jump into the “do comics actually suck?” fray, and earlier contributors refine their original statements. Here’s Johnny Bacardi on the trials and travails of buying comics on an unemployed person’s budget. Here’s Kevin Melrose on how bad bad retailers can be for comics (the post also touches on Pimpgate–joy!). Here’s Eve Tushnet on what’s wrong with floppies. Here’s Ron Phillips, taking a view on all the negativity that’s roughly equivalent to Clemenza’s view on the upcoming war between the families in The Godfather. And here’s the man who started it all, John Jakala, saying “My God, what have I done?” and clarifying that he’s only as fed up (or not) with comics as he is (or isn’t) with every other art form. On the upside, here’s Tegan Gjovaag, defending both floppies and Diamond’s pre-ordering system as embodied by Previews. It ain’t all gloom and doom!

In other news:

My defense of DK2 is seconded by Dirk Deppey, who offers ebullient praise for Miller’s controversial book himself as part of an exceptionally entertaining day at Journalista. And mine and Chris Allen’s dueling reviews of the book are being discussed at the V forum.

Entertaining capusle reviews from Jim Henley (particularly insightful regarding the unsatisfying wrap-up of the actual Purple Man storyline in the final issue of Brian Bendis’s excellent Alias), and from Big Sunny D (on the mess that is the current X-Statix storyline), and from Eve Tushnet (Grant Morrison and Ultimate Spider-Man, pros and cons thereof). Eve also offers entertaining capsule summaries of the appeal and drawbacks of different superheroes. She’s wrong about Ultimate Spider-Man in both posts, though, because that book is awesome. (Wrong about Batman, too.)

Over on the Comics Journal message board, there’s a thread that’s equal parts horrifying and hysterical about the problems the New York Press has been having with paying and firing its freelance illustrators. In my experience in publishing, when it comes to arguments about this sort of thing, the freelancers are almost always in the right. Just keep that in mind.

This anti-porn article by Naomi Wolf has been making the blogosphere rounds lately, most recently by way of a dismissal of it at The Intermittent. I’m of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I’m a lot more sympathetic to Wolf than most people, and even many feminists, seem to be. This is because I found The Beauty Myth, her book about how the fashion, diet, entertainment, and cosmetics industries essentially generate neurosis in women to fuel their respective economic engines, both compelling and convincing. It does not hurt that I’ve seen this in action, live and in person, with my wife, who without putting too fine a point on it was driven to slow suicide with the help of the standard of “beauty” propogated by contemporary culture. The current wave of “lighten up!” sentiment is well taken when it’s used against the stifling of dissent that’s part and parcel of political correctness, but when it ignores or ridicules the real, demonstrable damage done to real, demonstrable women by unrealistic, impossible standards of appearance and behavior, it’s something to fight against, not for.

And Wolf’s article points out many things to be feared about the pervasive influence of pornography on our culture. I guarantee you that high school and college age girls now feel compelled to kiss each other to turn guys on. This is not some victory for the sexual revolution–well, it may be for some girls who are genuinely bisexual or even lesbian–it’s just forcing yet another unrealistic, male-dictated sex role on women who ultimately have little say in the matter if they want to be valued as sexually attractive beings. I’ve talked about this before in the context of MTV (the Tatu and Madonna/Britney/Christina bullshit), but it seems reasonable to suggest that porn has helped raise the demand for this sort of behavior among men–aided and abetted, of course, by the pop-culture media that jerks itself off about such things (Rolling Stone, anyone?). Finally, there’s certainly an argument to be made that while porn is interesting and arousing, PORN! as trumpeted on the covers of every New York City-based glossy and beamed into our homes in countless salacious MTV and E! and Dateline reports and staring down at us in the shape of a 200-foot Jenna Jameson billboard in Times Square is a tedious, anti-sensual bore, just like trucker hats and Ashton Kutcher.

But Wolf also evinces what appears to be a strange and, I think, unhealthy aversion to sex practices that have little or nothing to do with pornography. Listen to the way she seems to shudder as she discusses the idea of using orifices other than the vagina for sexual gratification, or the prospect of having one’s face ejaculated upon. I’ve never been able to figure out what’s so degrading or demeaning or insulting or dominating about any of these things. They aren’t degrading or demeaning or insulting or controlling at all–if you’re doing it right. They can, and maybe even should, be a part of any sexually healthy person’s repertoire of giving and receiving pleasure. Personal preferences may vary, and no one should do anything they find physically or emotionally uncomfortable, but Wolf appears to suggest that there’s something intrinsically wrong with these things, beyond the clear wrong of feeling pressured to do them.

This vague sense that sex is somehow dirty or bad is reinforced by her effusive praise of an orthodox Jewish friend of hers who has adopted the strict dress code and head-covering routine of that religion. Wolf breathlessly describes how “hot” it must be for this woman to only be visible, sexually, to her husband. I don’t think I need to suggest that you simply substitute “fundamentalist Muslim” and “burqa” for “orthodox Jewish” and “head-covering” for the bizarrely retrograde and repressive nature of this notion to be readily apparent. I’m all for women covering up if that’s what they feel like doing, but fundamentalist religions make not doing so a sin, something intrinsically wrong and bad. There’s nothing hot about that at all, particularly since such rules of dress and conduct usually applies a lot more stringently to women than they do to men. And the idea that this kind of covering-up is for the wife’s benefit as opposed to the husband’s (his property, his alone to enjoy) is simply preposterous. (I don’t mean to suggest that orthodox Jews are akin to the Taliban or the ayatollahs–I’ve heard of very few honor killings in Crown Heights, just by way of a for instance–but you’ll forgive me if I have very little respect for religions that prove how “special” women are by forcing them to shroud themselves like dead bodies at a crime scene.)

As for the notion that men are being “spoiled” by porn and are no longer attracted to real live women, I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of this, but in my experience and in that of most guys i know, seeing sexy women makes us more interested in being with sexy women, not less. At any rate, if the prevalence of male-directed porn is truly a problem, to me the answer is more porn, not less–and this time of the female-centric variety. And not just porn, either, but Maxim-style magazines where the latest male starlets are paraded around half naked and airbrushed for the perusal of bored women commuters; sitcoms where dimpy, annoying women are married to gorgeous, intelligent men and not the other way around; Justin Timberlake making out with David Bowie; and so forth. Women are not going to be sexually empowered by sticking them in head coverings and nuking the Internet so men have no other options; they’re going to be empowered when they take the reigns of sexual culture and are free to explore and demonstrate what they find sexy, not what they’re supposed to find sexy–pornography and puritanism be damned.

This was the speech I’ve been waiting for during long months of wishing I was governed by Tony Blair. It articulates nearly everything that needed to be articulated about why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why it needs to be done. Someone up there gets it.

And yet those same voices who complained for years about our coddling of dictatorships the world over–and rightly so–are beside themselves with rage now that there’s an administration who’s actually doing something about it. No, they’re not doing everything, and they’re not doing it perfectly, but it’s a start, and a good one.