I’m not going to comment all that much on the Joe Wilson’s CIA Spook Wife scandal, because it seems self-evident to me that 1) It’s pretty awful, and the heads of the people responsible should roll as far as the laws of physics will allow, and 2) It’s being overblown for political purposes by the Bush Bash Brigade. Believe it or not, both 1 & 2 can be the case.

At any rate, Jim Henley offers the most plausible explanation I’ve yet seen for what the hell the administration staffer who leaked the info was likely up to. (If you ask me, the White House should be taking a lot less, er, esoteric action against the habitually incompetent George Tenet. If that guy manages to hold onto his job after both 9/11 and the no-WMDs-after-all “scandal,” the Red Sox should hire him to manage them in the post season–he’s un-curseable.)

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I like horror.

I mean, it is the kind of thing to which you probably should give a lot of thought. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve spent (to use the apt cliche) countless hours watching movies in which hundreds of hapless individuals are needlessly subjected to varieties of frightening and violent unpleasantness as appalling and terrifying as they are oddly creativ by an assortment of monsters and lunatics ranging from potty-mouthed demons to giant cannibalistic retarded hillbillies. My wife, whose constitution, thank God, is more delicate than my own, has asked me on numerous occasions how I can stand to watch films that are little more or less than parades of inhuman and undeserved brutality that more often than not end badly for everyone involved. “I just do” is not always the response I give, but it’s probably the most accurate.

But again, why? I’m still not 100 percent sure. I guess the usual vicarious-thrill/cathartic-release arguments about roller-coaster-rides and monster-identification hold as true for me as they do for anyone, but there’s more to it than that, I think. I’ve noticed that the underlying themes of the horror fiction I enjoy are also present in a lot of my favorite non-horror fiction. (What do you think’s really going on in Eyes Wide Shut, for instance? Or Nineteen Eighty-Four, for that matter?)

I finally put my finger on it in therapy a few weeks ago. Somehow I got to thinking about all the movies and books I’m really passionate about, and I realized that the overwhelming majority of them have down endings. And not just “oh, too bad things didn’t quite work out for them” endings, but “her friends and brother have been beaten with sledgehammers and carved up with chainsaws and she was just tortured for hours and now she’s escaped but she’s been driven batshit insane” endings. In many of these works, and in the horror ones particularly, there’s no shelter, no safety, no hope. And that’s when I realized that what these films and books offer is certainty. Yes, it’s an awful certainty, the certainty that nothing will ever be right again, but to stare that darkness in the face is preferable to the great not-knowing, isn’t it? And if we’re left with nightmares, that seems but a small price to pay for the lesson learned.

Now the days are getting darker quicker, and it’s time to learn the lesson again.

All this is a roundabout way to introduce Where the Monsters Go, a 31-day horrorfest here at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat. In honor of the evil little holiday that ends the month of October, I plan on blogging something about horror (horror films, mainly, but other stuff too) every day. I’ve got two big projects planned: The first is to make available for download several of the papers I wrote on horror films during my undergraduate years as a Film Studies student at Yale University; the second is to end the month with The Thirteen Days of Halloween, a 13-day (who’d’a thunk it?) marathon of horror-movie reviewing, in which I’ll watch and post thoughts on one of my favorite horror films every day for nearly two weeks, culminating on Halloween itself with The Scariest Movie I Ever Seen. In the tradition of the great low-budget horror films of yore, I’m pretty much flying by the seat of my pants here; come by every day, because you and I both will never know what I’ll, ahem, dig up.

A quick word about “Where the Monsters Go,” the title of my little Horror Month: It’s a quote from Clive Barker, specifically from his novella Cabal and the film, Nightbreed, derived therefrom. The to-the-point description of the fictional underground village of Midian, where a wide assortment of creatures and freaks live undisturbed by the horrors of the real world, it seems like an equally apt description of this blog for the next 31 days or so. Also, insofar as Nightbreed was the very first “real” horror film I ever watched (I’m not counting the old Universal flicks, or Godzilla movies, or The Lost Boys), it’s a phrase that initiated me into this dark world much as it did the character of Boone in the film. Moreover, the movie helped begin my long love affair with Barker’s work. Indeed, since his films and books (particularly Hellraiser and the six-volume Books of Blood, and even more particularly the short story “In the Hills, the Cities”) have had an appropriately transformative impact on me for nearly a decade, I gratefully dedicate this project to him. And to the monsters.

It’s been a delightful couple days to be ADDTF, thanks to the extremely kind words folks have been bandying around in reference to my gentle chiding of Jeph Loeb from yesterday. I’m privileged to say that so many people have said so many swell things about the piece (using fun words like hilarious, torrid, destroy, and annhiliation in the process) that I’ve actually lost track, but thank you to one and all. No one may have ever gone broke underestimating the taste of the American public, but no blog ever lost hits for beating the rhetorical snot out of people who do so.

So, what can I tell you. I realized after I posted the piece that I’d left out another major, sure-to-be-permanent change in the Bat-mythos that took place in “Hush”–Two-Face is now one-faced once again. Yes, a little plastic surgery and he’s handsome and one of the good guys, pretty much. Gee, that’ll last. Funny thing, though–why does this plot development seem so familiar? Oh, right.

There’s a ton of good writing floating around the comicsphere these days. John Jakala is back from vacation–I’m not sure if he’s even up to double-digits in terms of number of posts, but he was born a fully-formed comicsblogger. J.W. Hastings responds to David Fiore‘s take on Geoff Klock’s How to Read Super-Hero Comics and Why, and the endlessly fascinating Fiore (seriously, this guy puts up a comics-related gem every single day) responds back, and adds more analysis; there’s thought-provoking stuff said about everything from Jack Kirby and fascism to Neal Adams and realism to Frank Miller and revisionism to Harold Freaking Bloom and the anxiety of influence to Spurgeon & Raphael’s Stan Lee biography (David, you “loathed” it? Explain! and explain how you could call Raphael childish but give his “critic” a pass…) mixed in there, too.

I got over the hump on a couple of big professional projects today. That leaves me available to lay out some plans for what I’ll be doing on the blog this October. I’ve got some big ideas, about which you’ll hear tomorrow. They involve evil, but that’s all I’m saying for now.

Finally, remember: If Mr. Loeb (who I’m sure is a perfectly nice guy) happens to ask, make sure to tell him that it was actually Clayface who wrote that post.

Good.

Bad.

Ugly.

Warning: Spoilers ahead, provided that, semantically speaking, one can spoil something that’s already rotten. (There’s spoilers for New X-Men, Daredevil and Wolverine: Origin mixed in there too.)

The big event of mainstream comics 2003, the number-one best-selling book month after month, the title that’s supposed to be DC’s entree into the battle for superhero supremacy unilaterally initiated by the New Marvel regime of Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas (with hires like Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Brian Michael Bendis and J. Michael Straczynski riding shotgun) has come to an end. And it sucked.

As a matter of fact, the conclusion of “Hush,” the 12-part storyline written by Jeph Loeb and illustrated by Jim Lee in Batman’s eponymous flagship monthly title, was offensively bad. It was much, much, so much worse than even I thought it would be. I suppose that saying this is akin to saying I was shocked–shocked–to discover, upon watching MTV’s reality series Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica, that pop sensation Jessica Simpson maybe has had a somewhat sheltered life and also is maybe not too bright,. But I am a superhero comics fan, and as such have a capacity for willful self-delusion rivalled only by Scientologists and Boston Red Sox fans who think it’s “their year.” The conclusion of “Hush” was like Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner rolled into one, if, that is, Bucky Dent and Bill Buckner were dressed up in spandex and then had the bottoms of their shoes drawn in awe-inspiring detail.

“Hush” concerned Batman’s attempts to determine the identity of a mysterious new foe, the mastermind behind a serious of surprisingly sophisticated attacks by the vigilante’s rogues gallery. In the first few issues, Batman balanced this detective work with the pressing need to become reacquainted with a childhood friend who apparently played such an important role in young Batman’s life that decade upon decade of Batman writers felt unequal to the task of portraying this relationship, because “Hush” marked this character’s first appearance. Ladies and gentlemen of the Batman-buying public, if you think this random-ass character, who appeared in Batman’s life at exactly the same time as the mysterious villain and wore exactly the same trenchcoat as the mysterious villain and made a big point of using the word “hush” which is the name of the mysterious villain, is in fact that very same mysterious villain–you’d be wrong!

Ha ha, no, I’m just blowin’ smoke up your ass. He’s the villain.

But writer Loeb was not satisfied by the depth of ineptitude to which this “mystery,” in introducing a brand new stupid-obvious character no one gives a tuppeny fuck about and then making him the big top-secret villain of the piece, has sunk–a depth which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is already pretty fucking shockingly low. Any mystery writer worth his salt will tell you that the reader must be thrown off the trail; Loeb, as a “mystery” “writer” who created a trail about as difficult to find as the Vegas Strip, had to go above and beyond the call of duty to throw us off of it. He therefore took the bold, clever, brilliant, not-at-all-cheating step of killing the brand new stupid-obvious character no one gives a tuppeny fuck about, but then–get this!–through a series of Batman-universe wonky sci-fi/fantasy plot devices, it turns out he wasn’t dead at all! He was just hiding! Ha ha! Fooled you, stupid readers! I’m a genius, I tell you!

Fortunately for us, Loeb didn’t blaze into this uncharted, not-an-enormous-gyp-at-all form of storytelling unprepared. Oh, heavens no. From what I’m told, this master storyteller actually honed this bold, daring, kill-the-villain-but-keep-your-fingers-crossed-when-you-do-it approach in not one, but two previous Batman projects. These projects, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, are part of his long-time collaboration with (legitimately talented) artist Tim Sale, a collaboration which nine times out of ten yields paint-dryingly dull, consequence-free rehashes of early-years continuity in the lives of various superheroes created several decades ago. Alas for me, I have not read either of these Batman books, and therefore cannot describe to you how Loeb refined this stunning, shocking, ground-breaking, not-an-humongous-motherfucking-lazyass-fraud-in-the-slightest method of funnybook magic from one to the other. But I’m quite sure that it’s an inspiring journey to take. And by “an inspiring journey” I mean “I wonder if there’s a class-action lawsuit pending because centering your story around a completely unearned surprise twist that you have to cheat like a bat-corking home run king to arrive at should be grounds for legal action on behalf of all the people who paid money to have their shoes pissed on and then get informed by the pisser that no, in fact, it’s Hurricane Isabel.”

I don’t want to give you the impression that Loeb is alone in concocting a plot the shocking surprise of which was possible only because the writer put no effort into setting it up in an even remotely plausible way. I direct you to Origin, the Paul Jenkins-scripted Wolverine story that spent two full issues following around a surly little funny-haired kid named Logan, who any reasonable reader would expect to be the earlier self of the surly little funny-haired mutant named Logan, whose code name happens to be Wolverine. But on the last two pages of issue number two, a second kid, one who neither looks nor acts nor is named nor (up until that moment) did a single goddamn thing to make us think that he might be Wolverine, has claws pop out of his hands. I can only imagine the back-slapping and high-fiving that went on in the Marvel offices upon the devising of this “shocking” “twist”–because I’m so distracted by my complete flabberghastation that grown men could congratulate themselves as brilliant writers for sticking a plot twist in the middle of a book without putting a single clue, a single character trait, a single goddamn anything that would enable a particularly perceptive reader or a reader who’s rereading the thing after discovering the twist to believe anything other than the initial deceptive direction that the author forced us into that even if I were at the back-slapping session in question I’d just have to sit there scratching my head and saying “what the fuck?” (A reaction similar, no doubt, to your own in trying to unravel that grammatically torturous sentence. Do you see what bad writing does to me? It’s contagious!)

Another comparison might be instructive here. In a recent issue of New X-Men, writer Grant Morrison revealed that the zen-spouting masked healer known as Xorn was, in fact, the presumed-dead Alan David Doane Magneto in disguise. Like all good twists, it was one that almost no one saw coming. Also like all good twists, it was one that, upon re-reading the issues that led up to it, almost everyone would smack themselves in the head and say “how could I not see that coming?” Morrison did a real purloined-letter on this, peppering Xorn’s words and actions with clues as to his true nature and identity. But his talent at misdirection was such that we a) never felt that this was too obvious (as might be the case if, say, you introduced a brand new character no one had ever heard of before who dressed exactly like the secret villain of your piece); b) never felt that this had been done by cheating (as if, for example, you introduced that character only to shoot him in an alleyway in full view of like five other major characters, then say “ha ha, no, that was actually a guy made out of clay using his magic powers to make himself into a clone of that character”; c) never felt that the surprise twist made a reductive mess out of the preceding storyline (as if, by way of a for instance, you’d kept everyone buying a story religiously for twelve months promising that “nothin

g is what it seems,” only to reveal in the final issue that, in fact, everything was exactly what it seemed, you dumbasses).

There’s more to “Hush” than this awful phony non-twist, though, I hear its proponents saying even now (they’re not using the words “awful phony non-twist,” but the sentiment is roughly the same). There’s the art by Jim Lee! Ah yes, and, um, art it is. I’m not part of the cult of Jim, a cult formed primarily through his work on X-Men and his co-founding of Image Comics in the early 90s. Though his hyper-rendered artwork doesn’t do all that much for me, I don’t find it offensive, as some others do. But what bothered me was my ever-increasing conviction that Lobe’s “plot,” such as it was, was simply an excuse to publish “How to Draw Batman the Jim Lee Way,” enabling Lee to create almost comically labor-intensive portraits of Batman villains (given slight revamps so that they look REALLY BAD-ASS!), Batman sidekicks (an ever more redundant clique of S&Mish nitwits who clutter up this supposed loner’s life like the world’s worst-dressed in-laws), and Batman shoes. Lee at his worst is not unlike Neal Adams at his worst, obsessed with “realism” yet divorced from reality, consumed with what and how he is drawing yet never really stopping to consider why. Why, for example, do we need to see painstakingly accurate portrayals of the bottom of Batman’s boots not once but twice? Unlike the identity of Hush himself, that one really is a mystery.

So you had the offensively stupid and badly-constructed “twist,” the plotless plot, the occasionally Yngwie-Malmsteenish art. What else is there? Oh yeah–the fact that not a goddamn thing that happened in this book matters a goddamn bit. Sure, Batman and Catwoman are now “together,” but if you asked nine out of ten non-fanboys (they’re easy to spot–they’re the ones who didn’t read this book) I’m sure they’d tell you that Bats and Cats were already an item. Capitalizing on the sexual tension between two gorgeous PVC-wearing nocturnal vigilantes–ooh, that’s a tough row to hoe! And sure, the brand new character (whose name was Thomas Elliott, if that matters, which I assure you it does not) was killed too–no, for real this time, it was in the last issue after he’d already come back from the dead so they couldn’t possibly bring him back again, hey we all saw him get shot right in the bulletproof armor and fall off the conveniently placed bridge into the flowing river that i guess moved his body downstream and out to sea where no one could find it, but he’s got to be dead, I mean, would Jeph Loeb lie about something like that? Another major, sure-to-be-permanent change in the Bat-mythos is that Two-Face is now one-faced once again. (Funny thing, though–why does this plot development seem so familiar? Oh, right.) Yes, a little plastic surgery and the bipolar baddie is suddenly handsome and one of the good guys, pretty much. Gee, that’ll last

It looks like professional concerns will calm down a bit next week, so that will probably be the time where you’ll see some longer-form posts: the oft-promised defense of Velvet Goldmine, for example, as well as possible examinations of Bowie’s Berlin period and an excoriation of Loeb & Lee’s Batman run. Till then, it’s the usual calvacade of links (which inevitably turns out longer than a long-form piece would, but whatever).

First and foremost, a fond farewell to Alan David Doane, who’s calling it a day and ending his website and weblog. It’s funny: A year or two ago, I vaguely knew of ADD as a guy who usually was on the opposite side from me of various message-board arguments, but I’d never actually gotten into it with him. So I ended up getting to e-know him from the interaction of our weblogs, and lo and behold, I quite like him and his work. Funny how the Internet works: A guy I probably would have hated had I spoken with him in one format turns into a guy I admire and like because I spoke to him through another format. Alan is/was a fine example of Internet comics criticism, whose passion may have occasionally gotten the best of him but much more often than not led to revelatory writing on comics many people (myself included) might not have otherwise tried. Since that was his frequently stated goal, I congratulate him: Mission accomplished.

On the other side of the coin, there’s bad Internet comics criticism. And then, o my brothers, there’s so-bad-it’s-good Internet comics crticism. Enter Michael David Thomas’s hysterical (in both senses of the word), ad hominem-laden attack on Tom Spurgeon & Jordan Raphael’s biography of Stan Lee. I haven’t read the book, I must admit, so who knows? Maybe the book is as bad as this review says. (It would be hard pressed for the book to be as bad as the review itself.) I do happen to know from experience that Tom Spurgeon’s antipathy to superhero comics is unslakeable. But in reading this review you get the impression that any book about Stan Lee that didn’t use a ton of exclamation points an alliteration and refer to Lee as “Smilin’ Stan” would be not just unacceptable but borderline heretical. What can you say about a review that slags the book for being biased, then ends with a section titled “Still ‘The Man'”? You can say it’s dumb, is what you can say. (Thomas gets extra points for referring to the Comics Journal in much the same way that George Bush the First referred to the ACLU, or how that woman in the diner referred to Tippi Hendren in The Birds.)

What, they couldn’t come up with a fourth book for the Fantastic Four? C’mon, guys. Make the Newsarama headline writers’ jobs a little easier, okay? “Four on the Floor?” “Four for Four“? “Fantastic Four?” It’d practically write itself!

Great, lengthy Grant Morrison interview over at comic book resources. With each new story arc my conviction deepens that this will end up being pretty much the best run on a monthly superhero comic ever.

Also on the Morrison tip is Big Sunny D, weighing in with his fourth take on The Filth, this time emphasizing the fantastic covers. I reiterate the need for someone with design sense, like cover creator Carlos Segura, to have design control over whatever collected edition The Filth ends up in. Also, feel better, Sunny!

Johnny Bacardi has updated both his blogroll and his front page, adding a Dave Stevens pin-up that I remember very, very well from my youth. I remember seeing it in an issue of Femme Fatales magazine that I bought from my local comics shop, Gotham Manor, back in the ninth grade. Boy, did I like that tissue. Issue. Sorry.

(Why does Johnny B’s site always inspire me to comment on what bits of pop-culture cheesecake I, as a pre-Internet adolescent boy, relied upon for kicks? Beats me. I have no idea.)

CrossGendered Comics continues to snip away at its assets, including, apparently, artist George Perez. I never cared one way or the other about CrossGen, except insofar as they a) Seemed to have the right idea when it came to packaging their trade paperback collections; b) removed a lot of retro-flavored fanboy-favorite artists and writers from wider circulation with their exclusivity agreements. While they’ve been bleeding those guys for some time now (hence Mark Waid being on Fantastic Four in the first place), I’m most nervous about Perez leaving. I happen to like quite a bit of what he does artistically, but having this 80s stalwart treated as a superstar (as he no doubt will be, what with the furor the CG situation is creating and the heat on his JLA/Avengers crossover) will be a big aesthetic step backwards for the superhero industry, one that’s already indulging in 90s retro with the Jim Lee run on Batman and Rob Liefeld’s comeback on Youngblood, and the upcoming Lee run on Superman, Marc Silvestri run on New X-Men, and Rob Liefeld covers run on Cable/Deadpool.

Forager–who, in the style of Daredevil, Captain America, Professor X and Spider-Man, has outed his secret identity as one J.W. Hastings!–has a couple of great posts today. One is a rant inspired by Frederic Boilet‘s manga vs. bandes-desinees article, including a refutation of the (baseless, pretentious, elitist, etc.) assertion that real-life stories are automatically better and/or more worthwhile than fantasy-tinged stories, and an upbraiding of the artistically self-indulgent minicomics scene. It touches (though it doesn’t mention it by name) on the possible negative ramifications of Team Comix’s hip-hip-hooray-for-us spirit; it’s also relevant to the discussion of the altcomix anthology Kramers Ergot 4 going on at the Comics Journal messboard.

The second good Forager piece isn’t comics related, but here it is anyway–a description of Forager’s ideal cinema studies program. For what its worth, the film studies program from which I graduated (magna cum laude, phi beta kappa, highest average in the major, best senior thesis essay in the major, ahem ahem), at Yale, was actually quite similar to the one Forager advocates, at least in terms of the classes I chose to take. I guess that’s the idea, though: in most cinema studies departments/programs, people can coast through on a river of bullshit if they want. (Even at my own beloved alma mater, I know one guy who didn’t even bother watching the movie he chose to do his thesis on. People, that movie wasn’t Ivan or Empire or something like that. That movie was The Blues Brothers.) Interesting Forager-post crossover: The fantasy writer he cites in his comics post as the best novelist of the past 30 years, John Crowley, was the person who graded my senior thesis screenplay for film studies! (He gave me an A-.)

David Fiore continues to mine old Marvel comics for philosophical-slash-theological gold. And like me, he thought Marvels was overrated. (And yet, I liked Kingdom Come. To quote Dr. Channard, the mind is a labyrinth.)

Two Jim Henley notes. First, Jim links to this post from the site Lean Left, following up on several of Jim’s criticisms of retailers and claiming (accurately, I think) that emotion, rather than intelligence or even common sense, seems to play the biggest role in the various arguments about how the industry should be run.

Second, Jim counters my counterargument about the Dave Gibbons/Lee Weeks Captain America run. Jim, I think you misinterpreted my bit about you “getting it completely wrong,” which is understandable, because that phrase is extremely misinterpretable. Alls I meant was that the comic was good, you thought it was bad, and therefore, you were wrong. (Hey, it’s my blog, and you’re wrong if I want you to be.) Politics didn’t enter into it (except that I assumed that, in critiquing how superhero comics “used to be written,” you were talking about not just the prose style, but the we’re-right-they’re-wrong theme of many of the plots). I certainly wasn’t accusing you of being part of an “anti-American conspiracy,” or even thinking of you as such in jest. Believe me, as seriously as I take my own politics, I’ve got no plans to resort to that kind of horsepucky.

Good news: Eve Tushnet is blogging about comics again! Bad news: She’s not blogging about anything I’ve read.

CrossGen scraps its own business plan and fires two dozen employees!

Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo are hired back onto Fantastic Four!

Firestorm’s getting his own series again!

Switchboards across the country are on fire as portly gentlemen wearing glasses and all-over-print t-shirts put aside their copies of Spider-Girl, Brath and Fallen Angel to discuss these startling developments!

Every once in a while I’ll notice that my wife or one of my friends is visiting this page. Usually they get about as far as a sentence that begins, “With the final, Big-Reveal-laden issue of Jeph Loeb & Jim Lee’s Batman storyline, “Hush,” due in stores this week,” or “Heated–and yet intelligent and readable!–debates abound on the Comics Journal messboard,” then turn around and get the hell out of here. I’m not sure that I blame them.

For the unreconstructed fanboy in all of us (speaking of surefire ways to begin sentences in a fashion that scares the Missus away, huh?) comes the news that Brian Michael Bendis’s superduper Ultimate Six series will be extended a full issue because its climactic fight scene is too long. That sound you hear? That’s glee. (However, it is a bit disingenuous for Bendis to claim, “I didn’t realize the sixth member was going to be such a fun guessing game for everyone.” When you say you’re doing a book about six characters but only reveal the identities of five, you know what’s gonna happen.)

Bill Sherman continues his exploration of manga by reviewing Iron Wok Jan!, a series about chefs. No, I’m not kidding. It seems to be proof that Japanese comics can make anything interesting–you know, like movies can do. (Would you have reacted similarly if I had said Bill reviewed a movie about chefs? Didn’t think so.)

(Actually, Japanese TV has made cooking interesting, too, but maybe that’s just because when I watch Iron Chef I picture Chairman Kaga as mad warlord, with a legion of chefs-slash-ninja-assassins at his disposal. I mean, look in his eyes when he bites into that pepper–that is the look of madness. Dr. Doom looks like that sometimes. And during the final episode of Iron Chef, Kagasan rode into Kitchen Stadium on a horse. I swear to God.)

Ahem. Also on the manga beat is Shawn Fumo, who today discusses what European comics could learn from their Japanese counterparts. According to an article he sites by bandes-dessinees creator Frederic Boilet, manga’s strength is its lack of reliance on genre, which he sees as being as much of a problem in Europe as many believe it is in America. The flaw in Boilet’s argument, as Shawn and I both see it, is this anti-genre snobbery: Boilet appears to think that when it comes to genre fiction, none of it is particularly good (and believe me, in Europe they’re tackling a lot more types of genre fiction than we are here in superhero-fixated America). If Fantagraphics’s Kim Thompson is right and More “Crap” Is What We Need (the scare quotes are mine, naturally), then Europe isn’t a bad model to follow. Still, Japan’s emphasis on everyday-life stories (in my book, just another genre) is admirable, and one that American comics would be well-advised to investigate.

Let’s everyone wish Dirk Deppey well, okay?

Before it degenerates into the usual anti-Bush fatuities (is “The Hand Puppet” as clever and devastating a perjorative nickname for the President as Rall’s “Generalissimo El Busho”? U-decide!), Steven Grant‘s column offers a provocative two-pronged take on the perils of “servicing trademarks”: The dead-end nature (creatively and, in the long run, financially) of revamping old comics titles or characters, and the role that continuity rehashes like X-Men: The Hidden Years and Spider-Man: Chapter One played in artist/writer (I almost put “writer/artist,” heaven forbid) John Byrne’s fall from grace into “yesterday’s news” territory. I think Grant underestimates the enjoy-ability of a good revamp (what else would you call The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, for example, let alone Ultimate Spider-Man?), but he’s basically right: The big companies, and market & labor practices in general, have made supercomics the only game in town for people who wish to make a good living off the Direct Market, and the only supercomics people really buy star those good old characters; couple that with the big companies’ reluctance to publish stuff they don’t own, and you have a dramatic lack of new properties being invented. It’s the comics equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture, and in the long run, it’s not good.

Jim Henley analyzes the good, the bad & the ugly when it comes to his local and semi-local comic book stores. He points out something that should be obvious: People will walk past all kinds of stuff in a store to get to the staple products that they know are in there. This is why grocey stores put the produce and dairy all the way on the sides of the store and the meat in the back–they want you to walk past all the rest of the stuff, and since you know those important foods are in there and you know you’re gonna buy them anyway, you really don’t care. So why, then, do comics retailers insist on putting pictures of Batman and Spider-Man in their store windows while sticking altcomix and books all the way in the back? Supercomics fans know what they want, and they know where to get it–believe me, they’re not NOT going to come into the store on Wednesday because they think you’ve stopped stocking Wolverine since he’s not right next to the check-out counter anymore. As a matter of fact, everyone knows they can get superhero comics in comics stores, because nearly everyone thinks there’s no such thing as non-superhero comics. The stuff you put up front should be stuff that actually might catch non-fanboys’ eyes. I mean, duh.

I have to say, it was a pretty good day at the comic book store today. I don’t like to list what I bought, generally speaking, but I was just tickled by nearly everything I picked up today.

Amazing Spider-Man 499: Alls I can say is that NeilAlien will fucking flip out. And with that gorgeous JRJR art, who can blame him? One question, though: What exactly is going on in the graveyard at the end? Are we supposed to know?

Thor: Vikings 3: I’d imagine the ‘Alien will flip out again, but not in a good way–Garth Ennis seems to be writing Doc Strange a bit on the lavender side. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… but moreover, the callous attitude with which Thor and Strange, two of the Marvel U’s foremost boy scouts, treat the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people is jarring, and not particularly relevatory or clever. I am enjoying the gore, though, and there seems to be more of that on the way, so hooray!

Born 4: Ennis’s Vietnam Punisher origin story comes to its brutal and depressing climax. Thank God for brutal and depressing, as opposed to brutal and zany, which Ennis has been doing in his main Punisher series with diminishing returns for some time now. I’ll quibble, of course, with the broadly stated anti-American-war sentiments at the beginning (I can only assume the comments are directed at the architects of Gulf War II, who are obviously the puppets of the big companies and therefore attacked Iraq, but are obviously the pupptes of the big companies and therefore DIDN’T attack Iraq for years, so, uh…does not compute), but Ennis’s look into the addictive psychology of killing and the soporific effects of hopelessness was very appealing to me, and a good sign for what will happen when he takes the Punisher into his promised more-serious direction later this year. (I guess Mark Millar will be taking up the zany reins on his upcoming Punisher project. Woo hoo.)

The Incredible Hulk 61: Now that we’re really focusing on The Conspiracy, it would help if at least some of the conspirators didn’t look exactly alike. Still, I can’t wait to see where writer Bruce Jones ends up with this, and Mike Deodato’s art is lovely (and sexy, again). One question: the leader of the conspiracy has got to be The Leader, right? I mean, who else?

Captain America 18: A big “fuckin’ a!” to this story of Captain A, on the run from Nazis in a German-ruled alternate 1960s New York City. Like I pointed out last week, this is how you do Captain America–un-arrogant, unbowed, and beating the snot out of genocidal totalitarians. It’s also how you do alternate-history Marvel stories, by the way: This Easter-Egg-filled romp of an issue, with some tremendous action sequences by the increasingly good Lee Weeks, is basically a Where Are They Now (or Where They Were Then, or Where They Would Have Been If Then Was Like This Instead Of How Then Actually Was?) of important Marvel characters, showing the ways in which an Axis victory in WWII would have changed our beloved fictional universe. Writer Dave Gibbons’s done this much more entertainingly–and, importantly, organically–than Neil Gaiman has managed with his much-touted, now much-maligned series 1602 thus far.

Smax 1&2: I guess I was one of those people to whom this project just screamed “inessential”–chalk it up to the goofy art and the “Top Ten meets Shrek” word-of-mouth. I figured this was going to be another lark in the vein of much of writer Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics work, which leads to a “thanks, but no thanks” from yours truly. But on ADD’s recommendation, I picked up the series’ two issues thus far, and enjoyed ’em quite a bit. Since it’s a Top Ten spin-off, it’s written very much in that mode: If TT is a TV show, Smax is like the nostalgia-fueled post-cancellation TV movie. It doesn’t have as many fanboy eye-pops as its predecessor, but there’s still quite a few fun cameos in there (the white troll buying drugs from a black troll would have been a funny and pointed gag even if they weren’t troll-doll trolls; I also enjoyed spotting the occasional Tolkienism). I wasn’t quite as disturbed by the second issue as was ADD, but it was definitely rough stuff that belied the cartoony look of Zander Cannon’s art, and that dragon was simply astounding. Glad I picked this up.

Finally, the much-ballyhooed Batman 619: Um, are you kidding?

Lo, there shall come… a Fumo! Prolific comment-poster and manga-booster Shawn Fumo has got hisself a blog at long last. Enjoy!

The comicsphere gets Filthy: Bill Sherman, Johnny Bacardi and myself offer our opinions on the now-completed Grant Morrison series The Filth, while Big Sunny D has a thoughtful three-part examination of the book with a fourth on the way. This weekend I lent all my trades of Morrison’s The Invisibles to a friend, and took the time to compare it to this more recent, superficially similar series. “The Invisibles,” I said, “didn’t make sense. Neither does The Filth, but unlike The Invisibles, it makes sense in the way it doesn’t make sense.” Um, can we get Chip Kidd to design the collected edition? Or let cover creator Segura Inc. run the show? Please?

Jim Henley finally gets around to reading Eightball #22, which is probably the best single-issue comic ever. I don’t like doing the whole “best ever” kinda thing, but trust me, this book deserves it. 32 pages long, and you can go back to it as often as you do Watchmen, From Hell, Dark Knight, Jimmy Corrigan, or whatever happen to be your own personal favorites. It’s astounding.

Damn, but Doctor Strange lettercolumns were interesting! David Fiore reprints another letter examining Doc’s theological repercussions. NeilAlien, your people need you!

A stupid talk show bashes a stupid comic book, which leads to a stupid political thread on Newsarama, which leads one to the inevitable conclusion that nothing good can come from Joe Kelly thinking that he’s the spandex set’s George Orwell. (See also: Wright, Micah Ian, delusions of grandeur of; O’Reilly, Bill, enormous boost to Al Franken’s book sales due to comments by.)

Ninth Art has a roundtable discussion of comics-creators-as-rock-stars, and the extent to which a writer (that’s primarily what they’re focusing on here) can establish a “brand” through a high public/fan profile and a unique physical appearance. They cite Grant Morrison as the foremost example of this phenomenon, and indeed he is–as I’ve said before, he understands the personal, psychological, and creative benefits of persona creation as well as the economic and business ones. The Ninth-Arters also mention Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and (they debate this, though to me it’s undebatable) Alan Moore. Notice a through-line here? They’re all from the UK, where the arts, particularly the popular ones, are steeped in a rich tradition of self-conscious theatricality. Personally I think 9A missed a couple additional obvious examples: Mark Millar (though he’s modeling himself more on brash Hollywood types than rock stars) and Paul Pope, the sexiest man in comics. I saw Paul at SPX, though, and in that crowd a good-looking, stylish, thin cartoonist sticks out a lot less than if you surrounded him with DC Editorial and the founding members of Gorilla Comics, for example. But Paul really seems to “get” what he’s doing–“I want to look like I could have stepped out of one of my comics,” he once told me, and he does. I think the rock-star model will be very important to the medium in the future–or at the very least an extremely useful tool for ambitious and talented creators.

With the final, Big-Reveal-laden issue of Jeph Loeb & Jim Lee’s Batman storyline, “Hush,” due in stores this week, and with the sales of Kurt Busiek & George Perez’s JLA/Avengers generating much discussion of the degree to which it is or is not a huge hit and does or does not proscribe the limits of the Direct Market audience, I thought I’d weigh in on these two books, the supercomics equivalent of big summer tentpole popcorn movies.

I’m trying very, very hard not to have the ending of “Hush” spoiled for me. (For those who don’t know, “Hush” chronicles Batman’s attempt to survive unusually sophisticated and dangerous attacks from about half of his Rogue’s Gallery, instigated, it would seem, by a mysterious villain in a trenchcoat and invisible-man face bandages. The mystery villain appears to be acting with inside information, leading Batman to question his relationships with the various vigilantes and helper-monkeys with which he makes common cause). To be honest, getting that big payoff of the surprise ending is close to the sole reason why I’m buying the book. It’s not that I actively dislike “Hush”–It’s… entertaining. In a way. A lot less entertaining than a lot of books that I buy strictly for entertainment value, but entertaining nonetheless. Unlike what seems to be the case for most people who buy-but-don’t-really-dig “Hush,” I don’t particularly care for Jim Lee’s–but then I never did, not even back when I first started buying comics and Image, the company he co-founded with a slew of other then-popular flashy artists, was King Shit of Turd Mountain (I was a Spawn/Maxx guy). In this current case, I remember seeing the cover for his first Batman issue, being told by my boss “Isn’t it awesome?” and saying “Well, it certainly is an awe-inspiring view of the sole of Batman’s foot.” Yuck, in other words. Lee’s a solid craftsman, but for me at least, that’s as far as it goes. The story, meanwhile, has all the trappings of a big shake-up without actually changing anything about the book’s status quo. Sure, Batman and Catwoman are now an item, and one of Batman’s most redundant and irritating sidekicks is no more, but so what? The Loeb/Lee Batman, while superficially similar to the New-Marvel approach in that it took a pretty big-name writer, paired him with a big-name artist, and put them on an imporant character, really is just an excuse for Batman to run around bumping into his Rogues Gallery and chatting with his comically large posse of S&M-dressed vigilante buddies and assorted other characters who know this intense, near-psychotic loaner’s secret identity, address, and social security number, written by a man who’s made a career out of doing change-free continuity rehashes and drawn by maybe THE fanboy-fave artist in the industry. Compare it to the big books that define New Marvel, like New X-Men, Daredevil, The Incredible Hulk, even (to a lesser extent, but still) Amazing Spider-Man–these writers were trying to redefine what these books could be about, how stories about these characters could be told, what kind of audience could read and enjoy them. But the reason I keep buying, and yes, even enjoying “Hush” is mainly because, despite all its flaws, it has managed to make itself into A Big Event by sheer force of will. This is a book that will matter in the long term for the character, which to me is an important criterion for superhero comics. I love the character, so even though I think this kind of storytelling and artistic model is a very bad one for the industry to start following–it’s basically a streamlined, souped-up method of Preaching To The Converted–I’m buying this book. I realize I couldn’t have thought up a reason to buy this book less relevant to a real critic’s way of thinking if I sat around and tried, but that’s the way it is.

Regarding JLA/Avengers, I bought it out of willingness to give a Busiek-scripted book the benefit of the doubt: Though I didn’t like Marvels, I do like Astro City and really enjoy Arrowsmith, which I picked up solely on a whim. I’ve also got a bizarre weak spot for George Perez’s art–again odd, considering I wasn’t weaned on his Teen Titans or anything like that. I think it’s weird that he gives every woman giant Dolly Parton hairdos (didn’t think I was gonna say “hairdos,” didja?), and weirder still that CrossGen thought it was a good idea to base their entire female-character aesthetic on this, but there’s something about his manically overdrawn pages that has this weird pop appeal to me. The hardcover collection of Crisis on Infinite Earths that my wife gave me a few years back is one of my prized possessions–what’s done in that book, and also in JLA/Avengers, can really only be done in comics, and moreover is inherently comics, if that makes sense. In the first JLA/A issue, there’s a two-page spread of an alien-parasite invasion of Manhattan that is genuinely breathtaking. Also, I actually think Busiek did a pretty nice job with characterization and dialogue in this one, much better than he usually does. My two major complaints? 1) Why in God’s name is he sticking to the official Avenger’s roster? Half–actually, let’s face it, all of the appeal of this book comes from seeing the biggest characters from Marvel and DC punch each other. I suppose there are fanboys who are genuinely interested in finding out whether the Avengers team proper would win in a fight against the self-evidently more powerful Justice League–but is anyone else? I can’t imagine anyone being really excited about a matchup between also-ran Avengers like Jack of Hearts and, well, anyone. Ditto Yellowjacket and all those other dorks. Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, fine–throw in Hulk and Spider-Man and Doc Strange and Namor and Wolverine and the Fantastic Four and make it fun, for Pete’s sake. (I guess he’ll be doing this later on, but I’m impatient.) 2) As many people have pointed out, the video-game-style hunt-for-magical-objects structuring device couldn’t be lamer. Busiek really hit on something in the fascist-overlords vs. dereliction-of-duty ideological conflict between Captain America and Superman in this first issue; it’s that rare thing in supercomics–an battle of ideas in which both sides actually make some good points. If he had slowly built this conflict up and let it explode at the series’ climax, he’d have had a really good book. Instead he seems to be implying that Cap and Supes are only arguing because of some hazy cosmic jive (the other team members seem stunned at their leaders’ belligerence), and he’s sure to abandon the battle in favor of having the teams join together to fight the Anti-Monitor or Thanos or whatever. Boring. But again, this is A Big Event. That’s part of the attraction of superhero comics to me.

I just wish that a summer blockbuster comic would come along that’s not just a story well told, but a story worth telling.

Amanda has the scoop. Since that post went to press we’ve actually gotten some QT in with Lucy–last night she let us reach under the bed and pet her, and she even came out from under while we were in the bedroom to play with her toys! Tonight we think we may leave the bedroom door open so she can explore the rest of the apartment, because we can tell from her attempts to get into the closet that she’s getting both curious and brave. And soon… snuggles!

I’m sorry–was that too cutesy? Read the post below, in which I basically cop to buying a couple of dopey comics because they’re popular. That’s nauseating in a whole different way.

Courtesy of ADD, here’s a link (click and then scroll down) to a tremendous interview of Ninth Art & X-Axis critic Paul O’Brien by Movie Poop Shoot “Breakdowns” columnist Chris Allen. If you are interested at all in the state of comics criticism–a hot topic ever since Gary Groth’s recent jeremiad in the Comics Journal–this long, essential dialogue between two internet critics is a must read. For though Groth was right in calling for more stringent critical standards, applied frequently and without the interference of misguided team spirit, he was wrong in saying it’s nowhere to be found. It’s here on the Internet.

In a wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion, Allen and O’Brien tackle a slew of issues facing comics critics, fans, and creators.

* The pros and cons of niche reviewing: O’Brien’s X-Axis site is devoted almost exclusively to reviewing just about every mutant-related title that Marvel puts out. This enables him to compare how different creators explore different themes using the same core concept, and their relative success or failure; it also forces him to review dreck for completeness’ sake and is an essentially procrustean outgrowth of his early years as a fanboy.

* The need to engage the mainstream: Both Ninth Art and X-Axis (obviously, in the latter case) focus primarily on mainstream comics. O’Brien argues that this was, in fact, his deliberate critical intention, because it is vital for any artform for its mainstream entertainment to be engaged and evaluated by critics. I’ve complained long and loud about what I perceive to be the lack of such engagement from print-media’s only “legit” source of comics criticism, the Comics Journal. (Well, “only” is an exaggeration, but not by much.) My conversations with TCJ staff have since led me to the conclusion that they simply do not see the magazines role in the artform or the industry the same way I would were I in charge, and that’s fine; this is why I think online comics criticism, embodied by the comics blogosphere and non-press-release-reliant news-and-reviews sites like Ninth Art are of (pardon the pun) critical importance to the medium.

* The role of “duty”: As I mentioned below, I get some comics out of more or less the perceived obligation to keep up with the really big, popular books. As a kinda sorta critic, this obligation is heightened, in a way; for bona fide critics like Allen and O’Brien, it’s even more of a consideration. It’s fascinating to see issues like this get discussed.

* The weakness of the floppy pamphlet, the switchover to trade-paperback as the dominant American-mainstream format, the coming rule of manga over all of comics, and the effect that all of the above are having on mainstream storytelling: These are all pet topics of mine, and that Allen and O’Brien are tackling them too bodes well for building up some sort of critical mass (again, pardon the pun) toward getting the industry to really pay attention to these issues. It may be a pipe dream, particularly when the folks we might usually count on to publicize voices speaking to these issues, ie. Gary Groth and the Journal, seem to be writing off the one venue of criticism that’s out there promoting these smarter business and artistic decisions because it doesn’t read enough like Pauline Kael. But if comics have taught us anything, it’s to dream big.

There’s more, too: on Grant Morrison’s franchise vs. creator-owned books, on the respective difficulties of writing really negative and really positive reviews, on how the need for topicality leads columnists to focus either on molehill-derived mountains or almost exclusively on industry trends rather than aesthetic or literary concerns, on the strengths and weaknesses of New Marvel’s X-books, on the relative dearth of reviews graphic-novel and alternative comics offered by O’Brien’s sites (his one real weakness, in my book–I don’t think there’s much of an excuse for holding up “new mainstream” books, like Queen & Country (which I’ve never read, admittedly, but somehow I doubt it ranks with Black Hole) or even James Kochalka (who’s good at what he does, but probably not the sign that points the way to where comics should be going), as the books “everybody should be reading)… Fascinating stuff that I’m glad to have read. Good Comix Criticism Ain’t Dead.