There are two big new additions to the Collins Household. The first is the sexy new iBook I’m currently using to blog this entry with. The Missus and I both use Macs at work, and her old PC was increasingly slow and unreliable, and I’d love to have the ability to use a word processor during my 2 hours worth of train rides every workday, so there you have it. We haven’t used it to do much except blog from bed, upload a bunch of Karolyn‘s pictures of Jeffrey Brown from WizardWorld Chicago, and attempt to look at Tori Amos porn, but we’ll let you know if we get it to do something particularly neat.

The second is a lovely little lady named Lucy, a crosseyed calico cat who is now our baby. We brought her home from a local shelter called Bide-a-Wee this afternoon, and that was pretty much the last we saw of her: She’s been hiding under the bed ever since. Apparently she comes out when we’re not in the room–we can tell because her food’s been eaten, her litter’s been used, and her catnip toy keeps moving around. We’re told that many cats are like this for a while after moving into someone’s place from a shelter, so we’re not offended. And she’s just adorable. How she’s found room to hang out under the bed without being smushed between all those comic books is beyond me.

(I know, I know–a few days ago I was saying how I can’t be buying so many comics every week, and then all of a sudden I come home with a laptop and a pet. But both were essentially paid for by my folks–the computer was purchased with long-unused wedding-gift money intended for just such a purchase, and all the cat supplies were donated to us because my parents had bought it all with the intention of getting a cat a few months back but then never ended up doing so. The bank remains unbroken.)

What else is new? Amanda, in additon to cat- and computer-getting activities, has been painting quite a bit ever since she got really excited about it during an art-therapy class at Renfrew. She does lovely, evocative things with colors. The paintings can be hard to look at when you know what they’re really depicting, but it’s a much healthier way to work these things out than her previous coping mechanisms. The most recent one is a larger version of the final panel of a comic Amanda drew the other day, one which nearly tore my heart out. And they’re beautiful, too. We’ve got to get them framed–our apartment looks so bare, since we’ve nothing on the walls.

We’ve also managed to acquire an original page of art from Craig Thompson‘s Blankets. It’s the first such thing we’ve ever gotten, and we’re both just kinda stunned that we have it.

We actually saw two whole friends of ours today, plus my parents and brother, all of which made us feel very popular.

It’s really exhausting to be friendly with the people I’m friendly with and have the politics I have. (Not the friends we saw today, actually, but most everyone else.) I mean, I walk around wondering why there aren’t Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam rollin’ up his sleeves-kinda posters on the walls of my office–I am seriously gung ho, Big Two-style gung ho (this current period being, in my opinion, Big Four). And then I realize that a goodly percentage of the people in my various fields of endeavor and interest think I’m stupid, insane, dangerous, or all three. I spend so much time hearing things that make me want to pound on the table, and then I realize that if I were to open my mouth, that’s exactly how I’d make everyone else feel, and that’s an incredibly alienating feeling. You really do wonder: Have you given up on people? Have they given up on you? Are your beliefs strong enough and important enough that the answers to those questions don’t matter enough to change those beliefs? I want to go back to 10th grade, when my bad guys and the bad guys of the bands I listened to were the same people. I miss that so much.

Well, things may have changed, but my ability to pick fights with cranks is a gloriously reliable constant.

Please go ye and eat Edy’s Pumpkin Ice Cream. It’s a limited edition flavor–they disappear these suckers right after New Year’s. You’ve only got a few months to eat it, and believe me, that is not enough time.

I’ve added a whole bunch of new folks to my blogroll, and shuffled the thing around a bit generally. Browse away.

Ken, if you don’t blog about “the sweater-vest incident,” I will.

There really are quite a few things that I’d like to write about at length for the blog right about now, most notably rebuttals to Johnny Bacardi’s pan of Velvet Goldmine and faint-praise damning of David Bowie’s “Heroes” (which actually compared it unfavorably to, get this, Lodger!) I’m not sure if I have either of these things in me these days, but we’ll see. I’ve got a lot on my professional plate. Ah, the travails of writerdom.

Anyway, yeah, Johnny reviewed “Heroes” in his latest record round-up, which also includes interesting thoughts on post-glam smart-pop duo Sparks, the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated flirtation with psychedelia, the conflict between punk and prog, and more. Johnny–like Bill Sherman, Kevin Parrott and many other pop-obscurist bloggers–is a goddamn great writer, and it’s criminal that there’s no market for this kind of writing in American music magazines. Actually, that’s not entirely true–Maxim’s Blender is actually really good: smart, entertaining and thorough while never resorting to the snarkiness that passes for criticism at Spin or the Joy of Stoopid faux iconoclasm that’s the stock in trade of today’s Rolling Stone (a magazine that placed Jack White at #13 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time–30 or 40 places ahead of Pete Townshend and Frank Zappa!).

Courtesy of Johnny comes a link to this bizarre take on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks by communist pop aficianado Antipopper. He’s a good writer, too, but his almost physical aversion to the concept of “good vs. evil” as depicted in Lynch’s series is as good an indicator as any as why I’ve always found the socialist left completely idiotic, even before recent events made me into the bloodthirsty killblogger you know and love. (That, and the fact that they seem to see the hammer-and-sickle as sexy, and not as, you know, the symbol of the deaths of tens of millions of people in gulags and execution chambers. Their hearts were in the right place, I suppose.)

John Jakala joins in the “Get a Blog, Shawn Fumo” chorus. Everybody sing!

John also has some fun at the expense of some goofy upcoming covers from DC. Particularly entertaining is the way he spots Courtney Cox Arquette in Wonder Woman drag (believe me, this is vastly preferrable to the Joanie Laurer version that Adam Huges did for Wizard way back when–accompanied by Meg Ryan as Supergirl, for the love of Jesus!) and points out that there’s a bunch of characters on the cover of an upcoming Superman/Batman who are complete mysteries even to fanboys.

(A propos of this, can someone please kill off the entire Batman family? All right–I understand the need for Jim Gordon and Alfred, probably Robin, maybe Catwoman, maaaaaaybe Nightwing at the outside, but isn’t Batman supposed to be an intense, driven, secretive loaner? Instead he’s got this P. Diddy-sized posse of Alfred, Robin, Catwoman, Nightwing, Oracle, Huntress, Batgirl, Azrael, Spoiler, Thalia, Commissioner Gordon and the entire Gotham City Police Department, Superman, and Harold the mute hunchback car mechanic, plus the forty million villains who’ve figured out his secret identity, like Ra’s al Ghul, Bane, Hugo Strange, and God knows who else. The writer who gathers all these pointless characters on an island somewhere and then has the Joker blow it to non-Mark-Waid Kingdom Come will be doing Batman a bigger favor than anyone since Frank Miller.)

David Fiore finds some gems in old Marvel letterpages, including a view of Dr. Strange as antinomian rebel. NeilAlien, take note!

David also reponds to my question as to why he will never read Fight Club. I see where he’s coming from, but I think Chuck Palahniuk has gotten an incredibly bad rap as the poster boy for Battle of Seattle black-blockers when his work is about a million times smarter and more involving. (Choke, for example, is a masterpiece; and all his books portray the need for familial connections in a completely unexpected and moving way.)

ADD nails DC’s stillborn attempt at doing for Superman what Marvel did for the X-Men, Hulk and Spider-Man, and what DC itself has kinda sorta -it-or-Sienkiewicz-draws-it done for Batman. On the other hand, much to my own surprise, I’ve been buying and enjoying Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman, and I’d imagine Azzarello’s Superbook will be entertaining, too.

Radically shifting gears, Andrew Sullivan demolishes Wesley Clark’s tough-guy commander credentials. I’ve been saying to people for some time now that anyone familiar with how the Kosovo campaign actually went down should know that Clark is pretty much a joke. (To be fair, Clark’s hands were tied in Kosovo by everyone from the Clinton administration to the foot-dragging NATO allies–but this is now the campaign he’s holding up as an example as to how these things are done! Good Lord.)

Shifting back, Bill Sherman offers his take on the now-completed Grant Morrison maxiseries The Filth. I too thought this book had a heart that many of Morrison’s gonzo gross-out underbelly-touring UK compatriots would kill to achieve. The last caption of the series was tremendously moving, even haunting, to me–this despite the fact that I’m still not 100% sure what the hell happened in that last issue. I’m extremely glad that I stuck around through the duration of this series, which was the most radical thing DC has done (and, unsurprisingly, also the best) since The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

Newsarama brings us a look at Mike Ploog’s art for the upcoming fantasy series Abadazad. I guess it’s silly of me to be surprised that it’s so straightforward compared to the only other Ploog stuff I’ve seen, his extravagantly sloppy pseudo-psychedelia for Ghost Rider from the 70s, but surprised I was. It still looks lovely, though the book is seeming more and more like the Clive-Barker’s-Abarat clone I pegged it as a few months back.

Finally, at long last Dirk Deppey snaps and goes absolutely MOAB on the Direct Market. Read this essay–it’s a thing of angry beauty, like Helena Bonham-Carter at the end of Fight Club. Dirk asserts that the Direct Market has proven, through its complete inability to adopt even the most common-sense changes in its business model, that its complete collapse is inevitable. Frankly, I’m pretty sure Dirk is right, which is a big reason why I’ve been humping the book-like manga format as much as I have. Thin though they might be, there’s no room for floppy pamphlets on the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble, and within ten years at the outside that’s where you’re gonna have to go to buy comics….

Please ignore this post – it will be neither funny nor informative. This is a test of the rss generation system, and has nothing to do with comics, music, capturing terrorists, Halliburton, Amanda Ferguson or her Bobo. It’s just a test.

Man it’s cool being a site operator. Hi mom!

Another good day for killblogging hawkish political commentary: In addition to Andrew Sullivan‘s dismissal of Wesley Clark, there’s Glenn Reynolds‘s ominbus summation of the current batch of sky-is-falling horseshit streaming from Big Media’s collective rear-end, Charles Johnson‘s exposure of the Arab News’s most recent salvo of vicious anti-Semitism, and Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest demonstration that the best weapon against “anti-war” forces is sanity (God, is he good). I highly recommend all four.

Today seems to be a good day for warblogging. If you come here to read about politics, I’m pretty sure you already read the sites that the following links are linking to, but hey, the important thing is that I link to them with the words “I agree” following shortly thereafter.

James Lileks has an absolute must-read (I really don’t say that very often) column. You need to scroll down a bit, but before long he produces an evidence-laden decimation of the assertion that there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda (an argument I hear being made every day, all day long in the mainstream media). He follows up by pointing out that the “Bush Lied” contingent a) didn’t think President Clinton was lying when he bombed Iraq for non-compliance, and indeed thought this was a great move, so long as it didn’t actually threaten Saddam’s grip on power in any substantial way; b) supported lifting the sanctions once upon a time (those same “genocidal” sanctions that, a few months ago, we were supposed to sit back and allow to “continue to work”–ed.) in a proposed best-case scenario that would have left an even stronger Saddam in power; c) when stripped of their veneer of legalese and “yes, but”s and “perhaps, however”s, advocated courses of action in which this monstrous bastard would remain in charge in perpetuity. God, it’s good, so much better than my clumsy summary.

Little Green Footballs’s Charles Johnson is on fire today, which I guess is to be expected, since pretty much every day is a good day if your hobby is cataloguing the neverending stream of violent fanaticism and duplicity streaming from the Islamic world. Today he notes that Saudi Arabia has initialized plans to acquire nuclear weaponry (joining Egypt and, of course, Iran in the We Want the Islamic Bomb Club currently moderated by Pakistan); that Iraq‘s infamous information minister is now openly bragging about having bribed France, Russia and China with lucrative oil contracts in exchange for their support of the Baath regime; and loads more of the infuriating same. Start at that first link and just start scrolling down.

Instapundit, meanwhile, points out that his long-standing contention that France is now an enemy of the United States and is fighting a proxy war against us through various Islamic dictators and terrorist groups is now being echoed in the New York Times by Tom Friedman; he also has a round-up of the mockery the BBC‘s anti-Blair war has made of the Beeb itself.

Both Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan point to stories illustrating the loudly-voiced antipathy many Iraqis feel toward their “brother” Arabs, whose leaders (in many cases with the enthusiastic support of the people themselves) cheerfully ignored the execrable conditions in which the Iraqis were living (and dying) in order to enrich themselves at Saddam’s trough. The Palestinians, who apparently managed to find enough time in their busy schedules of making their children hold automatic weapons and walk in parades full of masked murderers to come to Iraq in droves, come off particularly badly.

Interesting times, eh what?

At some point I will write a full-length defense of Velvet Goldmine, but till then please read Johnny Bacardi’s COMPLETELY BASELESS ASSAULT on this wonderful, wonderful film.

Aw, Johnny, I kid because I love. Just ask the sincerely and kindly apologetic Alan David Doane, who’s been a real gentleman in the aftermath of the New X-Men fiasco he created. But if you do ask him, just be warned: he was actually Frederic Wertham in disguise this whole time!

When Jim Treacher first brought this press release hyping Warren Ellis’s upcoming prose-novel debut to my attention, I read it and thought, “What is this, a parody of the kind of book Warren Ellis would write?” But you know what? American culture’s dark underbelly really is woefully under-toured. I mean, can you think of a single British genre-comics writer who’s toured American culture’s dark underbelly lately? Me neither! Thank God that brave Mister Ellis is there to Abuse Our Illusions, etc!

Heated–and yet intelligent and readable!–debates abound on the Comics Journal messboard today. Here’s the ongoing SPX/Team Comix donnybrook, now centered around the question of whether the current generation of alternative cartoonists holds a candle to the two or three previous ones; here’s a battle over the big anthology Kramers Ergot 4 centered around the question of whether the non-comics material therein helped or hindered the anthology, or indeed whether it’s non-comics material at all; and here’s a thread in which the place of such comics legends as Steve Ditko, Gary Panter and George Herriman is being debated with considerable intellectual gusto. The Journal board is a pretty entertaining place these days. I wonder why…

Jim Henley reviews a bunch of recent comics, and in so doing gets the most recent issue of Captain America completely wrong. I’ll see if I can explain this so everyone understands: What you do with Captain America is not have him run around the country feeling bad about himself, then go cry in a blown-up building in Dresden until some undead schmuck nearly hands his ass to him. What you do with Captain America is also not have him stand around talking to some girl from Atlantis or wherever for five issues until everyone just gives the fuck up on the book around chapter three of the story and waits for your boring ass to go back to writing about people in Iron Man armor blowing terrorists’ heads off and aliens from outer space fucking Cro-Magnon women. What you do with Captain America is put him in a storyline called “Cap Lives” and have him kick the living snot out of Nazis. And God bless ’em, writer (! not quite used to that yet) Dave Gibbons and artist Lee Weeks deliver. Weeks honed his meaty, muscular style to near-perfection during his impressive run on Bruce Jones’s Incredible Hulk, and he gives this “What if Hitler had won?” alternate-history tale the kind of awful pulpy grit and horror it needs to work. Gibbons seems to intuitively understand that to do an effective Captain America, you don’t need to gloss over the terrible crimes that America has committed over the years, but nor should you dwell on them in order to compensate for the fact that during World War II we called Japanese people “Japs”–you just need to depict a man who, dammit all to hell, loves America so much that he’ll make up for those crimes and more–with his fists. (Note: I happened to like Robert Morales’s revisionist take on the Captain America icon quite a bit, but that’s because it seemed tempered with an honest love for what’s great about this country, something that wasn’t coming through in the runs of John Ney Reiber or Chuck Austen. It was also very, very weird, which I tend to like.) It’s a pity that, in a world chock full of genocidal totalitarian theocratic woman-hating gay-hating Jew-hating bastards with not one whit of compunction when it comes to killing civilians willy-nilly because God told them to, this comic felt the need to resurrect the old German bugbears to give Cap someone to beat up, but hey, it’s a step in the right direction.

Anyway, Jim also has some smart thoughts on the most recent real-world-superheroes story, J. Michael Straczynski’s Supreme Power.

Eve Tushnet worries about the results of the infamous New X-Men #146 (Turns out Alan David Doane was the bad guy all along!) Eve, have more faith in Grant Morrison!

New kid on the blogroll David Fiore waxes digressive on an early issue of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire. I think it’s pretty impressive how Cage has gone from laughing stock to revered supertoughguy thanks to his recent treatment at the hands of bald Brians Azzarello and Bendis. Perhaps the material was there all along.

Forager adds his voice to the growing chorus of folks who think that when it comes to Marvel’s much-hyped Elizabethan continuity clusterfuck 1602, emperor Neil Gaiman has no clothes. But he also includes a throwaway line that one of Marvel’s recent titles is one of the “most loathsome super-hero comic books” he’s ever read. Which one is it, Forager? With great power comes the great responsibility to call out comic books on your weblog, man!

Finally, some personal and professional developments have made me cut back on the number of comics I’ll be purchasing for the forseeable future. I’m sad that I won’t be able to experiment as much, but glad that I’ll end my Wednesdays without thinking “That was a waste of money” a lot more often. It’s interesting how necessity is the mother of getting rid of deadweight in your pull bag. Today, for example, there were a couple of comics on the list (Gun Theory, Human Target) that I put back simply because of the coloring, in both cases done (as was instantly obvious upon first glance) by Lee “If it’s yellow, put some green in it; if it’s brown, great!” Loughridge. (I’ve heard great things about his work from creators, and I’ve seen the occasional book that looked lovely from him (Kingpin #1, for example), but it simply does nothing for me. Meanwhile, I found myself still buying Superman/Batman, despite not being wild about either writer Jeph Loeb or artist Ed McGuinness, simply because it would appear that at some point in this story arc Batman and Superman will more or less depose President Lex Luthor. That’s pretty neat, in a Dark Knight Strikes Again sort of way.

“What is required is a steady, unostentatious stoicism, made up out of absolute, cold hatred and contempt for the aggressors, and complete determination that their defeat will be utter and shameful.”

—Christopher Hitchens in Slate on the proper response to 9/11. Also:

“My second-strongest memory of that week is still the moaning and bleating and jeering of the ‘left.’ Reflect upon it: Civil society is assaulted in the most criminal way by the most pitilessly reactionary force in the modern world. The drama immediately puts the working class in the saddle as the necessary actor and rescuer of the said society. Investigation shows the complicity of a chain of conservative client states, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, in the face of which our vaunted ‘national security’ czars had capitulated. Here was the time for radicals to have demanded a war to the utmost against the forces of reaction, as well a full house cleaning of the state apparatus and a league of solidarity with the women of Afghanistan and with the whole nexus of dissent and opposition in the Muslim world. Instead of which, the posturing loons all concentrated on a masturbatory introspection about American guilt, granted the aura of revolutionary authenticity to Bin Laden and his fellow gangsters, and let the flag be duly seized by those who did look at least as if they meant business.”

Yep.

Rolling Stone is the awfullest magazine ever. I say this knowing full well that there are many, many awful magazines out there, now more than ever, perhaps. But weeping Jesus on the Cross, Rolling Stone is just so awful, so very, very awful awful awful. Whether it’s the spectacle of a magazine run by an aging, Eagles-loving gay millionaire putting Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen on the cover and headlining it as “America’s Favorite Fantasy,” or putting Britney Spears on the cover–again!–in a pose so transparently and badly airbrushed that it makes even a Photoshop tyro like me want to put his head through his computer monitor, there seems to be no lengths to which this horrendous publication won’t go to pimp teenage girls in an effort to win over young readers that is likely to be about as successful as Dino De Laurentis’s remake of King Kong, but with less charm and more, you know, appallingly immoral teen-girl body-image mindfucks.

And for the love of David, they call their article on MTV’s annual calculated-“outrage” fest “MTV Awards Fail to Suck,” and lede it with the following: “When the annual MTV glitzfest of the Video Music Awards begins with Britney slipping Madonna some Louisana tongue, you can feel certain that your night in front of the TV is going to be quality time.” Can you, Rolling Stone? When a Rolling Stone article on the VMAs begins with the kind of embarassingly breathless dicksuckery normally reserved for Maureen Dowd columns about the Clinton administration, you can feel certain that the magazine, in actually acting (or worse, being) shocked and titilated by the grotesque, 100% prefab sexual assault against two pill-addled middle-aged-men-controlled developmentally-arrested girl-women by an aging self-obsessed insufferably boring harridan intent on reviving her interminable career as quote-unquote provocateur, is an enormous steaming dung-beetle-encrusted pile of elephant shit. Why I flipped through the magazine, and consequently stumbled across an article emblematic of the kind of hard-hitting political analysis that won Jann Wenner his many Pulitzers in which it is alleged that computerized voting systems are a big plot by the Bush puppet masters to steal (“more”) elections, is quite frankly as much a mystery to me as I’m sure it is to you, but I’ve entered therapy and I’m trying to work these things out. (Next session will be devoted to understanding why I looked at an article about how the U.S. military is poisioning, uh, the U.S. military with depleted uranium. There’s even some pictures of Iraqi kids with leukemia! It must be true! BUSH LIED!!!! Also, Mick Jagger’s solo album is a four-star tour-de-force.)

Please, Rolling Stone, I’m asking you now because I know how instrumental you were in advancing the career of Jackson Browne and that’s obviously really important, but please douse your collective selves in gasoline and light yourselves on fire. It’s really the only way for things to be made right again in this crazy world, RS. The only way.

However you feel about Team Comix, I think you can agree that it’s a concept that brings out people’s, er, passionate sides. NeilAlien has a go at the anti-TC brigade; Dirk Deppey responds with a dollop of snark. Dirk, I think it’s a little unwise for a Fanta/TCJ employee to get into a “who fired the first shot?” contest with Chris Staros & Top Shelf, but you do have a point in this case.

Meanwhile, at the TCJ messboard, yours truly and former Comics Journal editor Tom Spurgeon go at it over the role the Team Comix mentality played (if it indeed played one at all) in the respective pleas for help made by the financially beleaguered indie comics companies Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, and Fantagraphics. There’s also some interesting chit-chat about the role of critics in there, too.

Also on the TCJ board, Shawn “Silverthorn” Fumo weighs in on European comics, aka bandes-desinees, and argues that everything that might make BD popular here in the states (idiomatically it’s much closer to American comics than manga is; it’s almost solely concentrated in genres that make for very popular airport reading in America, like crime, mysteries, thrillers, horror, fantasy, erotica, even sports–the recipe for industry success according to Fantagraphics founder Kim Thompson) is offset by the simple fact that it doesn’t have the same thriving underground support in this country that paved the way for manga’s big success in the last couple years. Good point, as they tend to be when they’re made by Shawn Fumo. Shawn, why don’t you have a blog? I won’t beg, if that’s what you’re waiting for–it’s unsightly…

Though I’m guessing I’m not the only one with misgivings as to Joe Quesada’s ability to accurately portray the lives of club kids and gutterpunks, this new NYX series sounds and (thanks to Josh Middleton’s sensually clear line) looks lovely. Also in the plus column: you’re far less likely to read things like “I really couldn’t give a fuck whether or not you buy this book because I get $5000 for a painting and my girlfriend blows me all the time” than you would if this book had gone through with its original artist, David Choe, still attached.

At long last, Bill Sherman has reviewed Battle Royale, and it was good. (The review and the book both.) Here’s food for thought, though: how is Keith Giffen’s translation-cum-adaptation really affecting the dialogue? I’ve read several interviews in which Giffen proudly claims to have jazzed things up a bit for the English audience, which may not amount to much more than inserting standard-issue “mature readers” comics dialogue cliches. Anyone got a good take on how he’s been doing so far?

Johnny Bacardi hated Velvet Goldmine. I know this news isn’t comics related, but it does make me wonder whether Johnny’s from Bizarro World.

This is pretty cool. Just wish it came in red.

Courtesy of the above-linked Big Sunny D post comes this spoiler-filled run-down of the last year or two of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, as seen through the prism of the most recent issue. You know–the issue that Alan David Doane ruined for everyone who reads his weblog.

Franklin Harris has been righteously pissed at the recording industry and its supporters lately, as should we all. Start there and scroll down.

Finally, Dirk, any time a person’s position on what the Direct Market should be doing is concluded with an explanation as to why it doesn’t make sense to him to buy novels, I think we can just stick that one in the cylindrical file, don’t you?

“And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder:

“One of the four beasts, saying ‘Come and see,'” and I saw;

“And behold, a white horse.”

There’s a Man going around taking names
And He decides who to free and who to blame

Everybody won’t be treated all the same

There’ll be a golden ladder reaching down

When the Man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up

At the terror in each sip and in each sup

Will you partake of that last-offered cup

Or disappear into the Potter’s ground

When the Man comes around?

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singing

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices calling, voices crying

Some are born and some are dying

It’s Alpha and Omega’s Kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks

‘Til Armageddon no shalam, no shalom

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

The wise men will bow down before the throne

And at His feet they’ll cast their golden crowns

When the Man comes around

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still

Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still

Listen to the words long written down

When the Man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singing

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices calling, voices crying

Some are born and some are dying

It’s Alpha and Omega’s Kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks

In measured hundred-weight and penny-pound

When the Man comes around

“And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts,

“And I looked, and behold, a pale horse;

“And its name that sat on him was Death,

“And Hell followed with him.”

–Johnny Cash, “The Man Comes Around”

Embarassment of riches in the comics blogosphere over the last three days or so. It’s been tough to even keep up. Sometimes I feel it’s all just a big feedback loop between NeilAlien, ADD, Dirk, Johnny B., Sunny D., Eve, Bill, Forager, Franklin, Alan, Jim, and myself, with the inexplicably blogless Shawn Fumo riding shotgun–but I guess that’s not such a horrible thing, is it?

Dirk continues his hot streak, following up his best take yet on the obtuseness of the Direct Market with a quick state-of-the-manga address and an SPX-inspired middle finger to Team Comix. Responding to a thoughtful first-hand account by Ditko-phile and SPX attendee Blake Bell, Dirk argues that far from enhancing comics’ appeal to mainstream readers, Team Comix spirit of relentless positivity yields crapola that can only hurt comics’ aesthetic and financial viability.

I wasn’t present during the Ignatz keynote speech by Top Shelf honcho Chris Staros that led to this latest kerfluffle (are any transcripts available?), but I can certainly say in Staros’s defense that the man himself has no problem laying down (constructive, but) harsh criticism when young cartoonists need it; ditto for his partner Brett Warnock. At least as far as the individual personalities involved in this debate are concerned, I think perhaps “Team Comix” is just a way of saying that we should be talking about the glass as though it’s half-full, while “Fuck Team Comix” thinks we need to think of it as half-empty. I think it’s pretty easy to see from buying and critical patterns at a show like SPX that good will out regardless of the approach you take. I myself, as usual, want to have it both ways–I think the networking and socializing inherent in the Team Comix concept are good things that help folks make some headway in an artform that’s almost impossible to garner recognition or financial security in, but that we’re all big boys and girls and WANT some tough love when it’s deserved.

Forager responds to many of Dirk’s latest home runs with an in-depth piece of his own, centered on the potential for comics retailers to follow Starbucks’ brilliant “third place” business model–one that’s being done with quite a bit of success by the cafe/music store/bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Even a watered-down attempt at something like this seems beyond both the brains and the wallets of most retailers, but just making your store look nice and employing non-assholes would be a huge step in the right direction. Forager also argues that fanboydom will make from-within change amongst retailers or publishers almost impossible, and he’s probably right.

NeilAlien is prompted by the release of CrossGen pirate comic El Cazador to second Kim Thompson’s argument: more crap is what we need. ‘Course, Kim was calling for good, solid, entertaining crap, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been tempted to use one of those adjectives to describe a Chuck Dixon comic. His views on homosexuality make for good solid entertainment, though.

Johnny Bacardi reviews some recent comics. I too found LoEGv2#6 anticlimactic, but as was the case with the final installment of Dave Cooper’s Ripple, this might be as much a function of the long delays between issues as anything else. Also, 1602 really is a slog so far, isn’t it? I mean, the big reveal involves an Alpha Flight team member? WTF?

Big Sunny D has a comix roundup of his own, focusing on the recent discussion of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Peter Bagge’s Sweatshop.

Franklin Harris gives a glowing review to the big JLA/Avengers crossover. Personally, I think Busiek has already blown it. If he’d made the conflict between the Marvel & DC superteams’ respective modus operandi into the crux of the book, saving the dereliction-of-duty vs. fascist-overlord fight between Captain American and Superman till the last issue, he could have had a damn interesting examination of super-power (spandex-wearing and otherwise) on his hands. (In this sense it’d have made an interestin companion piece to Mark Gruenwald’s recently rereleased, surprisingly good Squadron Supreme.) Instead, the Big Blues are sparring because of some sort of hinky cosmic mind control, and they’re gonna eventually make up and go around on a celestial Easter Egg hunt. Sigh. On the other hand, George Lopez has managed to turn in some great-looking stuff despite his addiction to women with Dolly Parton’s 70s haircut: the Starro the Conqueror Takes Manhattan double-splash was stunning. (I’m not nuts about Perez in general, but I should say that I think Crisis on Infinite Earths, the series he drew that serves in many ways as a prequel to this one, is just gorgeous as pop art.)

Jim Henley wets Blankets once again, this time arguing that author Craig Thompson’s pronouncements on what comics do well are little more than recounting what his comics do well (and I guess Jim would even argue about that).

Eve Tushnet briefly comments on my thoughts about V for Vendetta and Jim’s on Blankets.

He’ll always be Arthur Stewart from the ‘Erald to me.

And the Comics Journal message board’s own Yasser Arafat has been expelled. Jim Treacher, thou art avenged!

Vengeful glee aside, the absence of this individual from the board will make it a much more pleasant and intelligent place to discuss comics, which in its small way is good for comics itself. Bravo to the admins for taking action. And bravo to Steve Hogan for being as civil as civil can be.

Forager responded to a response to a response to a response to a post he wrote on the utility of discussing popular arts through an academic framework. I think he makes a fine point about a certain amount of groundwork needing to be laid before undergraduates will actually get anything out of a course on, say, Marvel Comics. When I was at Yale I spent my freshman year taking Directed Studies–three year-long parallel courses in history, philosophy and literature. It was a Western Canon kinda deal, and it ensured that during my later college years, when I was writing papers comparing Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I had an intellectual leg to stand on.

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

I was a latecomer to The Sopranos. I caught up with the show all at once in the months before season four. Since the show was so big a part of the popcult conversation during that time, I pretty much knew every major event and “whacking” before I saw them. Needless to say, I was super-excited for season four, since I’d be able to be surprised, at long last, by each episode.

Along comes the episode that, rumor has it, will be The Big One. Every Sunday I’d drive to a friend’s house to pick up his taped copy of that night’s Sopranos and watch it back at the house. But a medical emergency that Sunday meant that I’d have to wait till Monday to pick up the tape. Cut to the next morning, which finds me in the hospital waiting room, waiting (appropriately enough). I decide to go find the vending machines to get a snack and some soda. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but the New York Post vending kiosk and the headline “LOOK WHO GOT WHACKED!” with a picture, right next to it, of the whack-ee. This was published less than 12 hours after the episode aired, and before countless fans (myself included) got to see for themselves what happened. It was a spoiler, in other words, one that ruined the episode for me. And it was a dick move.

And so was this.

More on SPX, including an -ahem- spirited take on a certain political cartoonist, from The Missus.

Jim Henley on Blankets. A pretty even-handed, largely negative take. Jim, I think a lot of your confusion over whether this is supposed to be read as autobio or fiction stems from the “novel” appellation on the cover, which was a marketing tool and not a creative decision; there’s also the general reluctance of many altcomix autobiographers to label their stuff fact rather than fiction. (If you think Craig Thompson’s been evasive on the issue, you should try Phoebe Gloeckner on for size!)

Big Sunny D on reading right-to-left manga. Personally, I thought that my occasional lapses in properly reading the book actually enhanced my appreciation of the overall page layout structure–you take in the totality of the page, rather than a panel at a time.

Eve Tushnet reviews a whole bunch of comics, including Alan Moore’s oldie dystopian-hero epic V for Vendetta and more recent super-cop dramedy Top Ten.

Eve, I think a goodly chunk of the appeal of Top Ten is how very different it is from pretty much everything else Moore has done–from both his capital-S Serious work like Watchmen, V4V and From Hell, and his seemingly endless string of goofy hyperreferential superhero pastiches, including all his work for Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, and the bulk of his own America’s Best line. (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though more complex by virtue of its encyclopaedic references to Victorian genre fiction, is in a similar vein.) My advice would be to pick up Volume 2, which is really just a continuation of Volume 1 and should have been published in a big edition with its antecedent as Top Ten: The First Season.

As for V for Vendetta, I think the problem here is the same one that, for a lot of people, besets Blankets–where do we draw the line between the opinions of the author and those of the protagonist? The line could be seen as blurrier for Blankets as it is an autobiographical work, but I think we all know our feelings and beliefs can change radically between high school and post-college; the extent to which Craig the Author currently holds the same “she was an angel” beliefs that Craig the Character attests to is something we’re all forced to puzzle out. Similarly, I find V for Vendetta’s “all fascism is bad, but some fascism is less bad than others” endorsement of kidnapping, murder and terrorism provided it’s against The Man to be somewhat troublesome. In that regard I suppose the book could be seen as an immature work, especially compared to the more considered exploration of the use of violence to affect the flow of history in Watchmen and From Hell.

Courtesy of reader Shawn Fumo, here’s an intelligent post on the Comicon message board about What a Manga Fan Wants. The writer emphasizes storytelling, characterization, and price, while (rightly) advising against American attempts to imitate manga art and (wrongly) discounting the impact of the manga format. The thing is, of course, that without the efficient book-style format, the price that the writer touts wouldn’t be achievable.

Courtesy of ADD, here’s cartoonist Scott Mills telling his critics that they’re right about his work, and announcing that he’ll be taking something of a sabbatical in order to hone his skills. I’m unfamiliar with Mills’s work, but I’ve seen him held up by many people in many places as the example of Team Comics boosterism enabling well-connected cartoonists to produce weak work. I’ll echo Alan’s sentiment that this was an impressive bit of self-evaluation to undergo–much less to post about on the message board that’s been the prime source of hostility towards the self-evaluater.

Finally, Dirk Deppey produces one of his best rants yet about the sad state of the Direct Market, this time focusing on its inability to cater to or even accomodate non-traditional comics fans (i.e. anyone who isn’t male and white) and responding to DM retailers’ cries of abandoment by companies who offer their wares elsewhere by saying “What the hell else did you expect?” Dirk’s right, as usual, about the DM in both regards. As far as the latter goes, I’ve definitely heard complaints first-hand from folks who feel betrayed by comics companies, anime distributors, even toymakers who–get this–are taking their products to where the customers are–namely record stores, video stores, electronics stores, Hot Topics, and other stores that one could find in malls (you know, those places where people go to shop a lot).

It’s Craig Thompson’s world; we just live in it: Jen Contino at The Pulse has conducted the most interesting interview yet (except for my as-yet-unpublished one, of course) with the indefatigable Blankets author.

In response to my puzzlement over his position, Forager clarifies his stance on popular art. I submit that he just had lousy professors–try Stanford’s Scott Bukatman, regular poster on the TCJ.com messboard, for an antidote to that jargon-laden detatched silliness you were subjected to.

Johnny Bacardi pans Rob Zombie’s directorial debut, House of 1,000 Corpses. I had a hunch this’d be derivative as all get-out, so I stayed away. But fans of White Zombie’s AstroCreep 2000 (or at the very least its incredible liner notes) know the guy’s capable of better. Sad to hear he didn’t make it happen for horror.

NeilAlien praises MoCCA in reference to the MoCCA vs. SPX debate.

Either Osama bin Laden’s got a stash of Just For Men in his cave, or Al Jazeera is lying to us and this tape isn’t “new” after all! But that couldn’t be, could it?

The Pulse’s Heidi MacDonald has the most thorough recap yet of the Small Press Expo. It looks like I’m not alone in finding things a bit on the “eh” side. The MoCCA thunder-stealing theory continues to gain credence, as does the “all the big books had debuted already” argument. But another check is placed in the plus column under “fun to party with altcomix stars.” I still found things a little scenesterish for my taste–and that was with my mainstream-media connections opening all sorts of doors for me.

Did I congratulate Nick Bertozzi and Jeffrey Brown for their Ignatz wins yet? No? Well, congratulations, fellas!

I also should mention that Legal Action Comics Volume 2 was available for purchase at SPX. A good collection for a good cause…

Some comix, some not. We’re mixin’ things up, baby!

SPX recaps may be found courtesy of Eve Tushnet, Jim Henley (I was gonna ask you how many people thought you ran a store, Jim), the Comics Journal messboard (featuring an intriguing argument that the NYC-based MoCCA festival has stolen SPX’s thunder) and The Missus.

Forager muses on the distinctions between high, low, bourgeois and modernist art. I think he’s harder on comics and rock and roll than becomes his art-for-the-people position, but diff’rent strokes and all that.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about the death of Warren Zevon, other than that I used to dance around my family room when I was a little kid as my dad played “Werewolves of London” over and over again for my listening pleasure. I thought the line about wanting to meet the werewolf’s tailor was particularly clever, since, you see, werewolves have tails.

I’ve been informed by reader Elliot K. that, contrary to my earlier conjecture, Akira Kurosawa did in fact take legal action against Sergio Leone’s swipe of Yojimbo. Look out, Mark!

Bill Sherman counters my defense of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club by arguing that the band’s own sullennes, recalcitrance about its influences, and relative lack of movie-star looks is what makes it a record-critic pinata relative to much more enthusiastic Jesus & Mary Chain enthusiasts the Raveonettes. That all makes sense–indeed, my quip about American critics “eating Danish” wasn’t so much an attempt to decry creeping Europhilia as it was a slightly drunken indulgence in a pun I’ve honed through eight years of going out with a woman of Danish descent. Ha ha.

Actually, I think the real argument is that American critics now adhere to what I call the Cult of the Exuberantly Stupid–that is, the dopier the song, the better it is as rock music. This reverse snobbery is anti-intellectualism for intellectuals–call it Earlier, Funnier Stuffitis if you prefer. It’s the same syndrome that leads people to say they prefer The Bends to OK Computer, Britney Spears’s “Satisfaction” to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” Meet the Beatles to Abbey Road, Piper at the Gates of Dawn to The Dark Side of the Moon, the Beach Boys to the Beatles–Christ, Paul McCartney to the Beatles. BRMC’s sonic palette is inarguably more ambitious and expansive than the Raveonettes, hence they’ve just got to be the sort of pretentious drivel that rock’n’roll is around to deflate, right? There’s a certain element to tautology in first asserting that rock music can only do one very simple thing well and then basing your qualitative assessments of rock music on how much it manages to live up to your own low standards.

Bill also linked to a pretty good Village Voice piece on the two bands, sullied only by its de rigeur dig against electroclash. Just because it’s trendy don’t mean there ain’t something to it, folks! I’ve certainly enjoyed electroclash songs as much as any rock/pop music of the last couple years. Also, I happen to sport a fauxhawk and like it just fine, thank you very much.

Johnny Bacardi offers a few thoughts on Nick Drake. Much as my few remaining “I’m not a poseur!” protest-too-much braincells are loath to admit it, I was one of those Volkswagen Nick-Drake newbies. All I can say is, thank God for the new Beetle.

Team Comics, meet Team ComicsBloggers.