Slate‘s David Edelstein takes a giant shit all over Lars von Trier’s latest exercise in sadistic misogyny masquerading as An Artistic Statement, the Nicole Kidman-starrer Dogville. Apparently von Trier, a consummate bullshit artist whose crassly manipulative Dancer in the Dark nearly drove its open-hearted genius of a star Bjork insane, has added a heaping helping of ignorant and facile anti-Americanism into his usual formula of undergraduate misanthropy and sexualized violence. Normally I’d expect a certain class of film fan and quote-unquote intellectual to eat this shit up with a spoon, but I wonder if von Trier hasn’t finally jumped the philosophically and artistically bankrupt shark that’s been swimming around in his very shallow idea pool for so long.

Found a couple of interesting essays on the ramifications of fast-moving zombies. (I love being a horror geek.)

Slate‘s Josh Levin traces the zombie genre from its roots in the Carribean-hypnotist flicks of the 1930s through the Romero/Fulci Golden Age of the late 60s and 70s and the fast-acting video-game undead and their motion-picture spinoffs of the late 90s and early 00s, culminating in the critically-acclaimed one-two punch of 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead. Have we reached the tipping point as to public pereception of zombies as being slow or fast?

Blogger Tim Hulsey, meanwhile, thinks that fast-moving zombies lack the sociopolitical relevance of slow-moving ones. No, I’m not kidding, you genre snobs. (Link courtesy of the Slate article.) He makes some solid points over the philosophical, almost poetic resonance of the prevailing zombie-attack image of the original Romero films–that of a lone human succumbing to a slow but unstoppable mob of zombies, arms outstretched, mouths gaping.

But isn’t there something to be said for the image of Sarah Polley’s zombified husband, launching himself across rooms, bashing down doors, leaping on car hoods, running full tilt down the street in a frantic effort to slaughter and consume the woman we’d seen him make love to in the shower and then snuggle with in bed not five minutes earlier? I certainly think there is.

Aside from the fact that fast zombies have shock potential that’s scary as shit, and present the kind of palpable threat that makes you recoil physically from the thought of being caught up to by one of them (I’ve certainly had more nightmares about zombies after 28 Days Later and the new Dawn than I did before them), fast zombies also take the impersonalized mob metaphor of their slow-moving counterparts and make it horrifyingly individual. Yes, they still move in packs, but any one zombie of this new breed will stop at nothing to murder you, and indeed the ability to do so is well within its grasp. In an age where taking the bus or the train to work is an act of substantial courage, where a handful of men can slaughter thousands and rewrite the course of history with nothing more than stuff you’ve got lying around your garage or tool box, isn’t the fast-moving zombie deeply, almost uncomfortably, evocative?

POSTSCRIPT: Now might be a good time to point you back, once again, to my initial spoiler-y review of 28 Days Later. I think both movies were excellent, though it’s worth pointing out that I detected any number of logical errors and plot holes in 28DL, whereas DotDv2 really only had one, which was that every character, most of whom had probably never handled a firearm before in their lives, was able to hit fast-moving targets in the head–while running, no less, and sometimes while running backward. These folks got more head shots than Delta Force, I’m telling you.

A couple of days ago I questioned Franklin Harris’s assertion that the preponderance of superhero comics in the Direct Market does not force non-superhero comics out of that market. Today Franklin responds:

Sean assumes that if only comic-book shops stocked more non-superhero titles, those titles would sell. But the direct market hasn’t given me any indication that there is a sizeable, unmet demand for non-superhero comics.

Yes, but this is because the Direct Market is a classic example of the self-fulfilled prophecy. The DM was created by superhero companies (mainly Marvel), staffed by superhero fans, and geared almost exclusively toward superhero fans. OF COURSE superhero comics sell very well in the DM while other comics don’t–superhero fans have had several decades to learn that this is where they must go for there superhero comics, while fans of other types of comics have had several decades to learn that in any given state in the Union the stores that can fully service their needs number in the low single digits. That the indie and alternative companies have been able to find a niche in the DM at all is almost more luck than anything else.

The reason it appears as though non-superhero comics won’t sell is because, given the current set-up of the DM, they can’t. Decades of deliberately targeted anti-competitive publishing, advertising, and retailership have created a situation where, if on this very day every comics shop in America started ordering as many copies of Optic Nerve as they do of Batman, the things would just languish on the racks. Except, of course, at those mythical “good” comics shops, where things like Optic Nerve sell like hotcakes, because people know they can find them there. The point is, not only have superhero comics (or at least their blinders-wearing hardcore devotees) forced out non-superhero comics from the DM, they’ve pretty much destroyed any chance for non-superhero comics to ever come back. This is why publishers who specialize in other genres are so energetically exploring other venues.

Usually debates like these devolve into some pro/anti-art comics argument: “You’re just upset because some lame autobio comic isn’t selling as much as JSA” or whatever. So for the sake of avoiding this argument, let’s ignore Blankets, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, Maus, Ghost World and any number of other acclaimed and successful alternative comics that nine comics shops out of ten don’t even carry. How about manga, for crying out loud? Japanese comics are a sales phenomenon in the bookstore market, as anyone can tell you–and the DM is ignoring it! Indeed, a vocal contingent of both retailers and consumers is actively advocating against pursuing it! If you can give me a reason why this easy-access source of buckets of revenue is being eschewed that isn’t “the DM, through the predilections of its retailers and consumers and through the machinations of the big American publishers and their monopolistic distributor, is willfully incapable of selling anything but superhero comics,” I’ll shake your hand.

And hell, since manga is almost as divisive a topic as altcomix at this point, how about comic-strip collections, perennial best-sellersr in the real world? When was the last time you saw The Complete Far Side or a Calvin & Hobbes book at your local Android’s Dungeon? Any guesses as to how many copies of The Complete Peanuts Vol. 1 the place has ordered? The bitch of this is, of course, that the reactionary retailers we hear from from time to time may in fact be right–maybe altcomix and even strip collections and manga won’t sell in the DM. But that, paradoxically, is because the DM has worked too well as a superheroes-only vendor. Retailers would have to break decades-old habits held to with devotional fervor by both themselves and their clientele in order to draw in consumers for these other genres, who’ve long come to associate DM shops with Superman and nothing else. Many, I’d guess, wouldn’t survive the transition. And yes, this is the fault of superhero comics.

Over at Tim O’Neil’s blog, Comics Journal editor emeritus Tom Spurgeon writes in to make many of these same points, drawing on information gleaned from his years at the Journal, and as an employee of indie comics stalwart Fantagraphics. Tom also points out something I hadn’t really thought of–the superhero companies have been so effective at creating an environment where only superhero comics sell that it’s next to impossible for them to publish anything but superhero comics. DC still tries some noble experiments, but the majority of even its most unorthodox ventures still center around the “extraordinary man”; Marvel, one-time publisher of the genuinely bizarre Epic line, has by now pretty much said that superheroes are and will be all they do, forever and ever amen.

Listen, I know that superheroes are popular enough and that these companies can make pretty decent bank from superhero fans; I know that the genre isn’t hated by the people of the real world as it is by the anti-genre partisans that claim to speak for said real world here within comics debating circles; I’ve heard all the arguments saying that there’s nothing wrong with these publishers being niche publishers and these stores being niche stores; but doesn’t it strike you as close to wantonly self-destructive for publishers and the market that keeps them afloat to have set themselves up in such a way as to fundamentally preclude diversification?

POSTSCRIPT: It’s worth noting that, as Dave Intermittent points out, there’s always some definitional hinkiness going on when comics is discussed, due to the fact that by comics one can mean

1) The art form/the medium

2) The industry/the business

3) 22-page floppy pamphlets

4) Trade paperback collections of same

5) Graphic novels

6) The publishers

7) The distributors

8) The consumers

9) The readers

10) The fans

11) The creators

12) The retailers

13) The direct market

14) The bookstore market

15) American comics

16) All comics worldwide

And on and on and on. For example, in his most recent post on the topic, Franklin says this:

To be clear, I’m talking just about 22-page comics, not graphic novels. Still, it is even more obvious that superheroes aren’t squeezing other genres out of the graphic-novel sector, because in bookstores manga is “squeezing out” superheroes.

So, among 22-page comics, the superhero genre is the last genre standing following an industry-wide decline that began in the late 1950s. And in bookstores, superhero graphic novels are losing the battle for shelf space to manga. Either way, I don’t see how superheroes are to blame for driving out other genres.

In a way, the definitional fuzziness works to his advantage: He’s able to argue that superhero comics aren’t stifling the sales of non-superhero comics, because non-superhero floppies don’t sell well anyway, and because non-superhero graphic novels sell better in the bookstores than do superhero graphic novels.

But if you focus the debate on the Direct Market itself, as I have tried to do, these supposed mitigators of superhero hegemony are revealed to be nothing more than the consequences of that hegemony. 22-page non-superhero comics don’t sell well because the Direct Market is built to sell only 22-page superhero comics, and it’s been this way for years–the people who shop in the Direct Market aren’t interested in non-superhero comics, and the people interested in non-superhero comics no longer shop in the Direct Market. Non-superhero graphic novels sell better than superhero graphic novels in the bookstores because they’ve been forced into the bookstores by the complete domination of the Direct Market by superhero comics–fans of non-superhero comics go to the bookstores because that’s where they can find what they want, while fans of superhero comics don’t go to the bookstores because they can already find what they want elsewhere, at shops designed around their needs in toto.

Unfortunately for all of us, non-superhero companies still do enough business in the DM–which despite its best efforts to limit the field to one genre is still the main place to get any kind of comic, not just superhero ones–that if the DM were to implode, it would take nearly the entire American comics industry with it. Indie publishers still mainly rely on those “good comic shops” to keep them afloat; good comic shops still mainly rely on superhero companies to keep them afloat; superhero companies still mainly rely on crappy comic shops to keep them afloat; crappy comic shops still rely on superheroes-only readers to keep them afloat; superheroes-only readers are a dying breed. Non-superhero comics readers, therefore, are unhealthily tied to their superheroes-only bretheren in terms of whether or not they’ll be able to read any comics at all.

It’s a problem for everyone, in other words.

Attention all new(ish) comics bloggers! You may not be aware of this, but blogger Dave G. runs a superb update/referral page, which can be found here. If you know how to ping Blo.gs, you can be a part of the page. It’s a really easy way to keep readers up to date on when you last posted, and it’s rapidly become the number-one traffic generator for this blog and many others. If you’re new to the blogging game and haven’t gotten on board the page, you really ought to.

Okay, I’m just saying this because having you all on the Comic Weblog Update Page just makes my surfing a lot easier. But it’s good for you too, honest!

Blogging’s been light around here lately because I’ve been busy with my new gig, namely being a supervisor in the music and movie departments of a local bookstore. Did I ask about how their graphic novels are selling? You bet I did. And apparently they’re selling like hotcakes. Supposedly they move a lot more than they even have room for on the floor. And who’s buying them? Kids. And which ones are they buying? I’ll give you three guesses. Ladies and gentlemen, can we please agree to retire the “kids don’t buy comics” meme once and for all?

Anyway, I haven’t had much time to surf, but I’ve noticed several big pieces that address some big issues.

First up is Steven Grant, who offers an overview of the problems faced by DC and Marvel in the current comics market and press. I think it’s clear to most of us who follow these things that the New Marvel Magic has pretty much worn off–what do they do now? DC, meanwhile, is gaining a little critical and audience traction, but are they showing any signs of being able to capitalize on this? Check out what Steven has to say about it, and who knows? You may see a little guest analysis yours truly…

Jim Henley, meanwhile, has honed his thoughts on the superhero genre into an essay, defending the spandex set as “the literature of ethics”–if it’s done right, naturally. Tim O’Neil, who much to his amusement has unwittingly become something of an archvillain to we pro-superhero types, offers an agreement-slash-rebuttal that strikes me as the most reasonable thing he’s yet said on the subject. Read ’em both.

And read the comment thread on Jim’s essay, too; I particularly like Sean Gleeson’s questions: “What’s so bad about being a male child’s fantasy? Is it because there’s something wrong with being or having been a male child?” Of course, he later commits the ultimate sin of referring to books that “transcend the genre.” Listen, folks: If a given work is of a particular genre, and it’s really good, it hasn’t transcended the genre–it epitomizes the genre. It shows you what the genre is capable of. To say it transcends the genre is to write the potential for greatness out of that genre by definition!

And read Bill Sherman‘s take on Jim’s essay, as seen through the prism of Kurt Busiek’s Superman-related minseries Secret Identity. It serves as a thoughtful exploration-slash-critique of Jim’s take on superhero politics.

(I’ll offer a critique of my own–Jim, my good man, where are these neoconservative superheroes you’ve seen? From where I’m sitting, all the big writers (except Morrison, who’s got less irritating fish to fry) have been spending the last few years tearing neocon foreign policy to shreds with their superhero yarns. President Luthor, anybody? The attack on “Qurac”? Geoff Johns’s Avengers arc? Mark Millar’s work on The Ultimates and Superman: Red Son? Brian Bendis actually destroying most of the Middle East in Powers? Point is, while I (a liberal, for the most part, in case you’d forgotten) personally may agree with Jim’s contention that acting like a neocon in the foreign-policy arena is a natural outgrowth of left-liberal politics, most left-liberals don’t agree, and if you need more evidence than the past two and a half years’ worth of actual behavior from left-liberals, you can look at the superhero comics they’ve been writing, too.)

Franklin Harris serves up something in the same vein as Jim–a defense of superheroes, this one focused on the folks saying that the genre is the reason for comics’ financial woes. I mostly agree, but I think Franklin is wrong about superhero comics squeezing out non-superhero comics from comics shops. He says they don’t, and I guess in a sense he’s right, since most shops don’t stock non-superhero comics at all. They’re not just squeezing them out–they (or more accurately the developmentally retarded fanboys who run most comic shops) are keeping them from ever getting in. Still, it’s always worth shooting down facile anti-superhero arguments, and Franklin’s a past master at it.

Finally, ADDTF reader Ben Burgess pointed me to this Gardner Linn post on Grant Morrison’s recently completed New X-Men. An in-depth summary of the entire forty-issue run, tracing each of Morrison’s themes from inception to conclusion, this post is so good it will make your hair hurt. As sad as I am that Morrison’s X-book is no longer a going concern, and that Marvel shows no sign of following it up with anything remotely resembling its genuinely revolutionary combination of sophistication and heart, the thought that we’re now able to talk about it all the way Gardner talks about it makes me glad indeed.

Okay, back to work.

Robert Rodriguez will be “co-directing” Sin City with Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino.

Seriously, people.

Holy. SHIT.

(BTW, this shores up my theory that Miller was a big influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill. But mainly, HOLY SHIT.)

ZZ Top, Bob Seger, and Jackson Browne are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Black Sabbath is not.

Seriously, people.

What. The. FUCK.

Lord of the Rings fans who were disappointed that Saruman’s death scene was cut from the theatrical release of The Return of the King may appreciate the news that the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, has been killed by Israel. Yassin is the White Wizard’s spitting image, though Saruman was probably a better person overall.

This man was truly one of the worst people on Earth. May he and his goals be forever forgotten, and may the only death that results from his passing be that of his poison ideology.

I couldn’t resist. (And I’m not the only one.)

Dawn, by the way, is excellent, a worthy successor to both the original and to the other recent fast-moving zombie flick of note, 28 Days Later. In many ways it’s better than 28–the apocalyptic scenario it constructs is far more logically consistent, for example. Actually, in some ways it’s better than the original Dawn, too–it’s able to draw thematic elements from all three of the original Dead movies, for starters. It’s well-acted, intelligently and gorgeously shot and directed, gory, and frightening, with the original’s commentary on consumerism supplanted not by dumb Hollywood action-flickisms but by a more universal and potentially more chilling exploration of civilization, community building, and entropy. And the opening sequence is absolutely flawless, maybe the most relentlessly harsh and frightening first ten minutes of a film since Saving Private Ryan.

This was a remake that was worth the re-making. Fence-sitters turned off by one soulless and slick horror-classic redo too many, do yourself a favor and don’t pass this one up.

PS: I’m really entertained by how so many critics who didn’t like the new version are talking about how it supposedly lacked the deft satirical touch displayed by auteur George Romero in the original, a parable about consumerism. Folks, he took zombies and put them in a shopping mall–a little un-subtle, no? Don’t get me wrong–it’s still a wonderful, intelligent, maverick film–but we’re not talking Tartuffe here. For my money the unspoken racial subtext of Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s first zombie film, make that one the gold standard for socially relevant horror filmmaking.

PPS: Also, does anyone fact-check Elvis Mitchell these days? I remember being taken aback by how he misquoted Gandalf’s key line to Pippin (“just a false hope” instead of the better-sounding and more complex “just a fool’s hope”) from The Return of the King in his review of that film; in his review of the new Dawn he mischaracterizes the relationship between Sarah Polley’s character and the zombie girl who attacks her husband (she’s the girl’s neighbor, not her mother) and erroneously claims that the original Night didn’t explain the origin of the zombie plague (it doesn’t come right out and say it, but it is strongly implied on several occasions that radiation found to have contaminated a returned Venus probe may be the cause). I’m glad he’s a Frank Miller fan and all, but someone should really pay attention to this stuff.

Oh, man.

Long-time ADDTF readers may remember that back in the early days of this blog, I spent a lot of time talking about the importance of well-designed, uniform trade dress to the trade paperback/graphic novel/manga market. (Seriously–do a search for “trade dress” and you’ll find I spent the entire Spring and Summer of 2003 talking about it.) My thesis was that manga had a huge advantage over American comic collections not just because they were sized closer to regular prose books, but because you could actually enjoy looking at and have an easy time reading the spines when they’re lined up on a shelf.

Sadly, things have not improved much since back then. Dark Horse recently reprinted all the Hellboy collections in order to capitalize on the Hellboy movie–but they still haven’t numbered the books in the series! (Argh–this is maybe the most difficult series around in terms of figuring out which book comes when. Help us, DH!) (UPDATE: Augie de Blieck writes to say that they do, in fact, have numbers. Man, I’m glad to be wrong about that.) DC doesn’t number the collections of its big icon series; on some of those series they do number, the number is so small they may as well not have bothered. Marvel continues to shoehorn both classic old runs and pointless new miniseries into its “Legends” line, producing confusion, lousy sales, and bizarre circumstances such as the fact that the recent Spider-Man/Wolverine miniseries is in print as a trade paperback and the seminal Kraven’s Last Hunt is not. And Image’s yellow logo on the spines of each of its trade paperbacks is as ugly as sin would be if sin had botched cosmetic surgery.

So thank you, thank you, thank you to Brian Hibbs, whose latest column is all about How to Dress Your Trade Paperbacks. He tackles the issue from a number of fascinating and important perspectives, both general and specific: from discussing how the look of a trade impacts sales to dissecting exactly what constitutes good design to pointing out flaws in different companies’ programs to raising questions about the role trade paperbacks may be playing in mid-list titles reaching their breaking point to whether indie companies are shooting themselves in the foot by completely eschewing pamphlets.

Please, go and read it. These are issues that every comics company should be thinking about very carefully.

Reports suggest that the cast of Robert Rodriguez’s film adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruce Willis, Elijah Wood, Mickey Rourke, Brittany Murphy, Kate Bosworth and Jaime King.

Huh?

Take it easy, man! It was nothin’ personal!

In all seriousness, the above-linked pieces are Chris Butcher’s responses to the somewhat, uh, spirited defense of superheroes offered up by me and Steven Berg yesterday. Right off the bat I want to apologize to Chris for getting personal–he seems pretty upset about some of the things that I said about him, and while I didn’t intend to or even think that I did get personal, clearly that was my bad. I don’t think Chris is an idiot, or that “he’s wrong because I say so,” or that he’s a poseur trying to sound smart, or that he’s an asshole whose philosophy prevents him from ever taking a clear look at a book, or that my post was so great that all discussion about the topic must now end, or anything like that; nor was I mad at him, even a little bit. Can I see how it would seem that I do think those things, and that I was mad at him personally? Oh, absolutely. That’s my fault for being a lousy writer (couldn’t resist “‘Nuff said,” could you, Collins?–ed)–not Chris’s fault for having a position I disagree with. Again, I’m sorry.

I do disagree with a lof of what he says about superhero comics, though. Still do, actually, despite his long and impassioned explanation of how he came to his current conclusions about the relative merit of the spandex set, corporate or no.

For example, I don’t think it was clear that, when he said Powers will be remembered ten years from now and Bendis’s Marvel work will not, he was talking about things like whether or not the books will still be in print, or how many collections will be available, or whether previous creators’ runs on those characters will be remembered foremost–it seemed to me he was talking about the quality of Bendis’s actual work on the titles, pure and simple.

I also don’t think that the fact that Bendis’s Marvel character Jessica Jones swears in one book and doesn’t swear in other books affects the quality of any of those books at all–certainly not to the point where the “integrity” of Bendis’s work at Marvel is threatened by the company’s diktats as to whether and when she can say “fuck.”

I also think superhero comics are a lot more amenable to “realism” than Chris does–this is something I’ve gone on at length about before–though I certainly agree that this approach can be done badly very easily indeed, and should be handled with care. (I’ve talked about that before, too.) But the fact that corporate comics try and fail to go this route so routinely doesn’t influence me when I read books that succeed, or books that try something else entirely.

On a specific note, I don’t know whether or not New X-Men is, in fact, just “a book for smart 14-year-olds,” but this particular 25-year-old of what I guess I can say is reasonable intelligence thinks it’s one of the best comics he’s ever read, for whatever that’s worth.

I understand that Bendis has complete control over Powers and varying degrees of “much less so” over his Marvel books, but my reading of them doesn’t see this as being responsible for a drop-off in quality or integrity of the work. Long story short, if a particular comic is good, I don’t think much about where it comes from, certainly not to the point where I talk a lot about how corporate comics are “the most egregious offenders” about this or that, as Chris does. It’s a very different outlook than the one I have. I’ve seen Chris employ this outlook in talking about corporate superhero comics–that’s where I (and I’m assuming Steve Berg and others) were coming from when we said that Chris draws a qualitative distinction between corporate superheroes and creator-owned superheroes that I/we feel is an arbitrary one that isn’t related to the text itself.

And while I fully agree that the odds are stacked against a creator when he toils in the trademark mines in terms of digging up something worthwhile and meaningful, it does happen, quite often, regardless of whether or not characters can curse or disemobwel each other or rape monkeys or murder the Pope in the process. When a book is good, it doesn’t make sense to me to hold its origin against it; nor, when I initially evaluate a book, is its origin something I give much consideration to (unless, of course, something’s in there that just screams “corporate watering-down!”. A book like Daredevil is so compelling that the fact that the characters can

Via Dave Fiore I’ve discovered the delightful blog of one Marc Singer–and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a long and in-depth post tearing yours truly’s Spain theories into tiny little pieces. And he’s really, really good at it, too! Oh, man…

It seems like Marc and I have drawn very different conclusions about terrorism and the war thereon, and I very much doubt that our considerable rhetorical skills (well, his, at least) will manage to convince the other to abandon his position. I think you know where I stand, dear readers, and I think that if you read Marc’s post it’ll be clear where he stands, too. You can draw your own conclusions from there. So I’m going to avoid getting into the meat of the issue.

But I would like to defend myself on a few, mostly technical kinda points on which I think Marc has misjudged or mischaracterized me. (Not maliciously or anything, but hey, it happens.)

* Marc says

But Collins’ posts aren

Andrew Sullivan has the goods on the shameful full-court press currently underway against even the most fundamental guarantees of equal rights for gay Americans–not just marriage, mind you, but civil unions, domestic partnership benefits, workplace discrimination protection, sodomy laws, even in one case the right to live in a given county. It’s insane, and it’s orchestrated and egged on by those compassionate, small-government conservatives we’ve heard so much about in the Bush Administration.

I sure do want John Kerry to lose the election, but if you truly do care about the liberal values we’re fighting and dying for every day overseas, it’s tough to want George Bush to win it.

All yesterday afternoon and evening I watched reports on all the networks and cable news stations about the horrific car bombing in Baghdad, all of which had headlines screaming “dozens dead,” most of which seemed to be drawing on the implicit “look what we’ve done!” causal through-line from the Madrid massacre.

Today, I just got finished watching a briefing from the coalition in Baghdad, announcing that the death toll has gone from being proclaimed as “dozens” to being calculated at “17.”

Do you think the difference in the death toll will become a story? Do you think if the death toll had been revised to be higher, that would be a story?

I’m just asking.

Another month, another tedious kerfuffle about whether or not superhero stories are inherently bad/childish/stupid. I gotta tell you, for all that superhero-bashers decry the genre’s tendency to lapse into rote, repetitive predictability–well, I guess you can see where I’m going with this.

The lastest debate centers around Christopher Butcher, who (as I discussed the other day) is really pissed off that writers like Brian Bendis have eschewed ostensibly more personal work to play in the big spandex sandbox. As backup, he links to a Millarworld messboard post approvingly cited by Graeme McMillan. The post argues that superheroes are inherently non-adult, that any attempts to create some sort of “adult take on superheroes” are doomed to failure, that the books heralded as the “adult takes on superheroes” (The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen) are in fact about “about the impossibility of treating these iconic characters as “adult” and having them continue to behave in the way we have come to expect,” etc. The poster seems to find the the Big Two’s big guns the most offensive in this regard:

the mainstream characters – the archetypes and the bit-part players that surround them – simply cannot be written as adult characters with out appearing utterly ridiculous to all concerned.

In this way his prejudices dovetail neatly with Chris Butcher’s, who’s drawn that same distinction between corporate superheroes and creator-owned ones.

Can anyone tell me why? Seriously, I want to know. Of course the odds are against you if you want to do some serious life-changing work in a flagship title–it takes someone with the talent and clout of Frank Miller or Brian Bendis or Grant Morrison to convince the suits that allowing them to really fuck around with some of the company’s toys might make the remaining toys work better. But it can be done, and it is done, all the time. Again, what is this mystery difference in quality between Powers and Bendis’s Marvel work, or The Filth and New X-Men, that folks like Chris & Tim O’Neil treat like an article of faith? Creator-owned superpeople are better because they’re creator owned. QED. If there’s more to it than that, I’d love to have it explained to me.

Steven Berg is all over this particular beat, offering a hilarious takedown of Chris’s assertions. How, he asks, is what Bendis is doing with Daredevil or Morrison doing with Cyclops any different than what Moore is doing with Mina freaking Harker? Taking it a bit further, how is it different from Street Angel or Powers or Hellboy or The Filth or any of the other creator-owned superhero concepts that Chris, Tim and others fawn all over? The answer: It isn’t, and moreover I would submit that only people immersed in fanboy culture, who subsequently want to differentiate themselves from fanboy culture, would suggest that there’s any difference at all. I think we’ll all admit that people working in the corporate-trademark field have an uphill battle ahead of them, in terms of dealing with a bureaucracy that wants to preserve the illusion of change without dealing with the actual ramifications of change, that people working on their own characters don’t face–but good work is good work, plain and simple. Your individual mileage may vary, but it seems safe to say that people like Brian Bendis have successfully waged that battle. Why in God’s name would the fact that someone else owns the trademark make the story any less good?

What makes this particular iteration of the superhero debate so weird is the inconsistency of the opposing position. In one breath (in many, actually), Chris will go out of his way to lambaste corporate superheroes and superheroes generally; in the next he’ll go apeshit for a superhero comic, and even a corporate superhero comic, Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier! The flip-flopping is egregious, and in my opinion can only be explained by the desire to gratuitously differentiate oneself from fanboys, and, perhaps, a fairly straightforward hard-on for Marvel.

(And what is it about The New Frontier that drives otherwise sensible reviewers into flights of rhetorical ecstasy? Listen, the art is obviously gorgeous, and two issues in may be too early to draw a conclusion, but so far this just seems like unreconstructed Marvels-style icon worship at its most cloyingly nostalgic, with the added “bonus” of incorporating the impenetrable continuity wonking of (the otherwise superior Alex Ross book of note) Kingdom Come. Honestly, folks, I am a huge freaking geek, and I don’t know who half these goddamn characters are. The fact that the book is drawn by the inheritor of the Bruce Timm mantle can really only get you so far.)

David Fiore, as you might expect, has more reasons why this latest anti-superhero argument is missing the formally inventive, narratively compelling, philosophically fascinating superhero forest for the “people don’t wear funny costumes” trees. Read his piece, read Steven’s, mentally tag on a “‘Nuff said,” and I think this round is over.

Larry Young is the co-founder and head honcho of AiT/PlanetLar, the independent comics publisher that is currently celebrating its five-year anniversary. Known for publishing the comics of such creators as Brian Wood & Tom Beland, as well as the prose writings of Warren Ellis, Young has parlayed a strong Internet presence and innate marketing savvy into a growing spot in the public eye for his company. He got behind the trade paperback/graphic novel format early, putting his creators in a prime position to take advantage of the rise in sales of those formats both within the direct market and in the larger bookstore world.

Never one to shy away from making his opinion known, Young has made statements in Brian Wood’s Delphi Forum and on his own blog that have made him something of a bete noire among comics bloggers of late. So I was both surprised and pleased when, in response to my post on this topic, Larry offered to answer any ten questions I cared to ask him, for publication on this very blog. I happily took up this generous offer, and as you’ll see, the results were both informative and candid. You’ll also see that I probably cheated a little bit on the whole “ten questions” thing.

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Larry Young

Sean T. Collins: So, how did you “develop such a hard-on for bloggers?” Were there specific comics bloggers who said something you found upsetting or misleading? If so, who were they? Or do you think that, your own blog aside, the publishing mechanism itself is inherently problematic?

Larry Young: Well, I just don’t see myself as “having a hard-on” for bloggers, in the first place. I just think the comics blogs I have seen are pretty self-indulgent affairs, is all. Someone will send me a link with a note pointing out something they think I’ll be interested in, and I have to wade through laments about the cancellation of Angel and political screeds about terrorism and lamb stew recipes and whatnot to find a two-line mention of Demo #3.

I mean, I get enough of that sort of thing from my pals in the real world; I don’t need to read about it online, too. 🙂

Your blog is mostly an AiT/PL news and update source. Could you ever see yourself offering comics commentary and criticism as well?

No, because that’s not what it’s for. It’s just a way for me to update the home page with company-related news without having to learn html. I’m not sure I could get away with it, now, anyway. When I did my 52 issue fanzine, Planet Lar, I did four or five short reviews a week for a year. People liked ’em, for the most part, because I was a guy riding mass transit on his way to work and writing about the comics he’d just read. If I reviewed something now, people wouldn’t look at it like a guy just telling you his likes and dislikes; they’d think The King Of Independent Comics was being “combative” and taking a dump on their hard work.

Conventional wisdom has it that your online persona is combative; some have said unnecessarily or even detrimentally so.

People see what they want to see.

Is this persona deliberate on your part, or do you think this assessment of your Internet presence is inaccurate? If you have adopted this persona consciously, how does it differ from the way you are in real life?

Here’s the thing about that; I don’t have a “persona,” I have a certain amount of skill in writing. Those reading my writing have a certain level of skill in comprehension. It’s possible there might not be a lot of overlap, there. While I may feel I’m writing clearly and without room for interpretation, a reader might not understand whatever point I’m making, or, even, may not agree with it. If I respond, I’m just being “combative”? Not from my point of view.

Neal Stephenson has a great line about this in Cryptonomicon: “Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen year olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”

I haven’t been following the debate as closely as some, but perhaps this is a good time to set the record straight on Wood & Cloonan’s Demo. Are there now or have there ever been plans to release this series as a collected-edition trade paperback upon its conclusion?

Man, this is like a Perry Mason question. No, counsellor, there are not now or have ever been plans to release this series as a collected-edition trade paperback upon its conclusion.

You’ve said in the past that the book will not be collected–how unequivocal is that?

I don’t believe I’ve said we WILL NOT collect it; I may have been exasperated with a loon or two and written that we may as well come out and say that. But that’s a business reality, and business realities change all the time, and successful companies adapt to those changes.

AiT/PL is a company known for its belief in and success with the trade paperback/graphic novel format; why was this particular title selected to be given the “hard sell” on behalf of its individual, pamphlet-sized installments?

I don’t think it’s been given a “hard sell.” People have written they’re waiting for the trade, I tell them if they don’t buy it now, there might not be a trade. That’s just an economic reality imposed on us by the nature of how this project is set up. The poster-stock covers, the cover-weight interiors, the self-contained stories; everything about Demo screams “$2.95 mini graphic novel.” If some observers of the scene think we’re violating what they think our company is known for, good! That’s how businesses grow, but stepping outside of expectations.

How has this mini-brouhaha affected sales, and for that matter critical & audience reception of the work itself?

There’s no effect that I can see. The work is the work. Critical and audience reception of a project doesn’t (or shouldn’t, at least) be impacted by what a few vocal cats without all the info say on a message board.

AiT/PL has now hit the five-year mark, and the company has an increasingly high profile. To what do you attribute your success thus far? How do you plan to maintain or increase your appeal to comics buyers?

Slow and steady wins the race. We keep putting out the good comics, and people will keep buying ’em.

What book/s are you most proud of having published? On the flip side, what book/s do you see as having been a misfire, or something that you and/or the creators could have handled better?

This is like asking a parent which offspring they love more. I love all our books, for different reasons.

From fans to retailers to creators to publishers to critics, ours is an industry that seems intently focus on spreading the word about comics to the outside world. What brand of “comics activism,” for want of a better term, have you found most successful? How do you think the industry in general, or your own company in particular, can improve upon its existing outreach efforts?

Nothing beats hand-selling. In a well-stocked shop, I could sell anyone a book that they would enjoy, just by talking to them for a couple minutes. If somebody told me one of their favorite movies, the last place they went on vacation and what they had for breakfast, I could put a comic in their hand that they liked, just because I’m enthusiastic about the form and I can extrapolate all sorts of stuff about folks from those three questions and their body language. It’s kind of a monkey trick I learned from my orthodontist when I was a kid, actually.

How do you see AiT/PL functioning in relation to the other indie comics companies–what role does it play, what niche does it fill, what reader needs does it service? Are you satisfied with where you stand in the industry?

I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who asks me this question: we’re publishers, just like Marvel and DC and whoever. The $12.95 it takes to buy The Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America from your local comics retailer is the same $12.95 it’ll cost to buy yourself a copy of Last of the Independents.

What one thing does comics need more of? And what one thing does comics need less of?

The one thing comics needs more of: TREES. The one thing comics needs less of: average comics.

Finally, if there are any current or upcoming projects you’d like to plug, please plug away!

Well, I’m personally excited about the upcoming Planet of the Capes, just because it’s been a long gestation period for the project. I’m looking forward to Ursula, our first translated-from-the-Brazillian-Portugese graphic novel, and of course Hench and Bad Mojo. I can’t wait for WonderCon in San Francisco, too. Nothing better than going to a major comic book convention and being able to sleep in your own bed at night, too.

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For more on Larry and his company on their fifth anniversary, check out Newsarama‘s big piece on the subject. Thank you once again to Larry Young for suggesting the interview, and congratulations to him on five years of AiT/PlanetLar!

I’ve gone on and on about what I think of Spain’s response to the 200-odd murders that occurred on its trains the other day. So why don’t I point you to what I feel is a more appropriate response:

In the face of this kind of subhuman nihilism, people know without having to be told that the only response is a quiet, steady hatred and contempt, and a cold determination to outlast the perpetrators while remorselessly tracking them down.

That’s Hitchens, though as you can tell by parsing his syntax he’s talking about how Spain, and the world, have reacted to ETA and their ilk. He’d like to extend this sensibility to Islamist terrorism.

Of course, other people feel quite strongly that though their methods are abhorrent, their goals are basically sensible, and it’s best for us just to do what they want, since if do that they’ll just give up and leave us alone.

Take your pick, ladies and gentlemen.

Scenes from the theoretical victims of what Franklin Harris insists on referring to as “Bush’s failed war” and what Spanish Prime Minister-elect Zapatero refers to as “a disaster” (courtesy of ABC News):

A year after the bombs began to fall, Iraqis express ambivalence about the U.S.-led invasion of their country, but not about its effect: Most say their lives are going well and have improved since before the war, and expectations for the future are very high.

Worries exist

Question: How will you be able to find Sean T. Collins at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con?

Answer: He’ll be the gentleman with a lovely lady wearing this on his arm.

First off, you may have missed it amid all the poliblogging, but I did a Comix and Match yesterday, too–you can find it here. The juicy part is a defense of Brian Bendis’s franchise-character work against criticism I find arbitrary at best. Take a look.

Franklin Harris reports that manga publisher Gutsoon is placing all its titles on hiatus, while they try to figure out how to get a wider audience to purchase them. Well, that certainly seems to be a better strategy than, say, simultaneously launching six or eight series featuring second- and third-string characters and hoping that maybe like one or two of them are ordered in sufficient numbers to avoid being cancelled inside a year. But is this a sign that the manga skeptics were right, at least insofar as their claims that the sheer volume of titles coming out from Tokyopop and Viz were going to keep other manga books from finding a viable foothold? In other words, will those two companies be to the bookstores/Japanese comics what Marvel & DC are to the Direct Market/American comics? Stay tuned…

…or look to Newsarama, where there’s an article on this very topic (link courtesy of Kevin Melrose). Reporter Matt Brady predicts “a manga bloodbath” in the coming year, wherein

lower sellers will drop out of stores entirely, as they won