Just came across this fascinating round-table discussion featuring Rutgers professor James Turner Johnson, reporter/activist (and Seanieblog favorite) Christopher Hitchens, and about a dozen other prominent columnists and journalists about just war theory, jihad, the UN, terrorism, international law, Catholic pacifism, Iraq, and the difference between acquiring information on a topic and becoming educated about it. Long, but well worth your time.

To paraphrase the Fresh Prince’s mother, if they think your government murdered 3,000 of its own citizens and destroyed a major hub of its own economy in downtown Manhattan, you don’t need ’em, ’cause they’re not your real friends.

Via Instapundit, here’s an article on a disturbingly egregious violation of journalistic ethics in which the Reuters news agency substantially rewrote a bylined reporter’s article in order to insert thoroughly biased and roundly discredited accusations about the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. The article is written by the reporter herself, who finds herself wrongfully accused of the offending and baseless slant of the article. Gosh, I sure am grateful the news media is impartial–could you imagine what it’d be like if they weren’t?

Actually, I do–I just couldn’t resist paraphrasing John Lennon.

A post on this Comics Journal messboard thread praising Craig Thompson’s book Blankets for exposing the “pap” and “hypocrisy” of modern-day American Christianity led me to post the following:

I think the book is far less judgemental than Juliette’s making it sound. I myself am a thoroughly lapsed Catholic who has a hard time believing in a personafied God with an active will at all, yet I always find the vitriol heaped on Christians by artsy-fartsy types–“Those goddamn Christians are so judgemental! Fucking assholes, I hope they burn in hell!”–to be extremely off-putting. I thought Craig did a tremendous job of showing exactly what he found unpleasant and stultifying about his fundamentalist upbringing and the Christians he came in contact with while growing up without leaping to broad generalizations about “pap” or “hypocrisy.” After speaking about it with Craig personally, I came away with the feeling that his big problem with Christianity as an organized religion was the judgement passed on non-Christians and the overemphasis on heaven as opposed to the divine within everyone, not that he thought Jesus was bullshit or that he felt that everyone was molesting children the second they got home from Bible camp. (I’m pretty sure that not once does he show a Christian preaching against something, then doing it himself–so so much for exposing hypocrisy or whatever.)

Anyone could write a book full of ad hominems and stereotypes about the big bad Christians, but Craig took the time to throughly explore the doctrine that caused him to reexamine his faith and come to a new belief on his own. Good for him for not taking the easy way out.

I’ve never read J.M DeMatteis’s for-grown-ups comics, like the Moonshadow book I always hear about; nor am I part of the DeMatteis/Giffen Justice League cult. But I’ll always have a soft spot for the guy, because his Kraven’s Last Hunt is the best Spider-Man story I’ve ever read. (With the possible exception of Brian Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man series, of course. But until that book came along Kraven was my favorite webhead tale by a very, very substantial margin, and at any rate I prefer Mike Zeck’s art on Kraven to Mike Bagley’s on Ultimate (even though Bagley has improved as the series has gone on, and it has a weird vibrant energy to it that’s much greater than the sum of its seemingly pedestrian parts), and at any rate I don’t think Bendis has yet told his definitive Ultimate Spider-Man story. Phew.)

So I was intrigued when I heard that DeMatteis will be writing a children’s/young-adult fantasy title for CrossGen’s creator-owned imprint called Abadazad. The concept, and especially the title, sound a lot closer to Clive Barker’s kid-fantasy epic Abarat than they do to the classics DeMatteis cites as influences; the fact that Abadazad will be a comic and Barker’s book is prodigiously illustrated only enhances the comparison. But even if we dock points for originality, I’ll be excited to see artist Mike Ploog back in action. Ploog worked on the early years of Marvel’s Ghost Rider, and his art had this freaky sloppy melty pop vibe that was an undeniable joy to look at. I’m very interested to see where he’s at today.

Every night I try to watch the news, and the only news channel I get at this point is MSNBC. Normally this isn’t so bad, but Chris Matthews is in his own freaking world at this point, spending hour after hour after hour saying things like “what did the president know, and when did he know it?” about the goddamn Nigerian uranium story. I know many people have said what I’m about to say many times in ways far more eloquent and persuasive than I’m about to, but for the love of fucking Mike, Democrats, give the goddamn uranium story a rest. Nobody else cares. Nobody. You may think this is the worst thing that any government has ever done ever, but you are in the goddamn minority, and the more you shreik about it, the more you start to look like the Republicans who kept the equally idiotic Lewinsky blood-feud going long past its sell-by date. I know, I know, war is more serious than blowjobs, blah blah blah, but Clinton lied under oath, and Bush read a line that had been vetted by several dozen other people and is still supported by the British intelligence to whom he attributed the claim right there in the speech. I know you hate Bush. I know the sound of his voice and the sight of his face makes you want to vomit. But Democrats, here’s a news flash: most people don’t feel this way. Most people don’t believe he’s lying to them every time he opens his mouth, most people didn’t make up their mind on the war over the Nigerian uranium claim and therefore feel bamboozled, and most people are not going to all of a sudden reverse their support for a popular war that we already won. And win it we did, despite all the “quagmire” and “the Iraqi people want us out” nonsense that anyone who’s honestly paying attention and has ever done some research into military history can see right through. You may want all the above to be true, but most people don’t. Whether or not you’re in the right, change your goddamn tactics and change them now, because they’re appealing only to people who enjoy saying things like “Bush stole the election” and “it’s all about oil,” or to German kids who think the CIA flew the planes into the World Trade Center, or to British leftists who think that Tony and Me by Georg Bush book is funny, and that’s not enough to get you into the White House. So please, please, please, please, please, shut up about the stupid Nigerian uranium story. Even if you’re 100% in the right about it, shutting up about it will actually give you much more of a chance to fix the underlying problems of which it is symptomatic than continuously screeching about it night after night will. Consider dropping the story to be, as you believe Saddam Hussein was compared to Dubya, the lesser of two evils.

Another glimpse into Matthews’s psyche was afforded by a comment he made in an earlier segment of the show about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. As you might now, in a move roughly tantamount to tipping over the coffins of 9/11 victims (the ones of whom enough pieces were found to put in coffins, of course) and giving the bodies the finger, the government has kept sealed 27 pages of the 9/11 report, and it’s believed those 27 pages are a damning indictment of the Saudi government’s role in failing to thwart, if not tacitly or not-so-tacitly encouraging or even directly funding, the attacks. Matthews’s guests, including relentless terrorism expert Stephen Emerson, denounced the Saudi government over and over again, and denounced the administration for seemingly bending over backward to avoid any unpleasantness with these murderous douchebags, who use their fluke-of-geography oil money to spread their poisonous death-cult ideology, Wahabbism, into mosques and schools all over the world. Matthews, who agreed with the guests, closed the segment by saying “This is something we’ll be talking about for the rest of our lives.”

Not if the hawks can help it.

If you actually read what the policymakers behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are on record as saying, the wars are more than just an effort at direct punitive retaliation for 9/11, or to enforce scads of UN resolutions and regulations on Iraq, or (heaven help us) to acquire more oil. It’s an ideological campaign against the sexist nationalist luddite homophobic Jew-hating war-crime-committing murder-suicide pact known as radical Islam, which as practiced by thousands and supported by millions is the root cause of this war just as the radical Christianity embraced by millions in medieval Europe was the root cause of that society’s ills. Among the many purposes for the Iraq War was the fact that it’d enable us to pull our troops out of Saudi bases and put them into Iraqi ones (at least for the time being), to modernize and open up an enormous amount of oil fields that would be operated by a friendly democratic government and whose revenue would go to the country’s people, not some UN-sanctioned grift that fed Baathist apparatchiks and their miserable genocidal writing-Korans-in-his-own-blood boss. In other words, as many hawk policymakers and thinkers would gladly tell you, it was a war to divorce ourselves from our odious gender-apartheid suicide-murder-exporting client regime, the House of Saud. The antiwar people yelling “What about the Saudis?” seem to have failed en masse to do any research on the subject, as the road to Riyadh runs through Baghdad.

And if this policy continues, which I sincerely hope it will, by the time I get old I won’t have to talk about Saudi support of terrorism, except in the past tense.

Maybe this makes me sound regionalist or sexist, but when you’re calling technical or customer support and you get a woman with a Southern or Midwestern accent on the line, don’t you just say “Thank you, God”? They are invariably the friendliest, most helpful, most knowledgeable people working in any given support department. Men, people who sound like they’re from a big city or the East Coast, and people with foreign accents–you might as well hang the hell up. But talk to some woman who sounds like she might have been in a Wal-Mart commercial and not only will your problem get fixed, but you’ll probably end up paying less money for more service and maybe even get a free hat or something. It’s uncanny. It’s to the point where if I get through, I’m just going to ask to be transferred to the person who sounds the most like Dolly Parton.

Speaking of accents, my in-laws are from West Virginia. This means that very early on in my relationship with The Missus, a lot of inbreeding & redneck jokes were employed. This also means that only slightly less early on in my relationship with The Missus, I spent some time in the local hospital traction unit. I’m glad I learned that lesson the hard way, though, because (though maybe the last paragraph runs counter to this, but what the hell! I contain multitudes) nothing makes you sound like more of an asshole than making fun of someone because they sound different–particularly if they sound Southern or country or Noo Yawk/Noo Jurzey. Time and time again my somewhat unreconstructed “liberal” coworkers say things to the effect that they hate Bush because they don’t like listening to him talk, and they were absolutely merciless to Jessica Lynch (Private First Class Lynch to them, thank you very much) basically because she’s an Appalachian who never took a course on public speaking. All those much-vaunted egalitarian ideals of so much of the Left seem to disappear when confronted with a voice that twangs (or, on the flip side, says things like “whaddayagon’do”).

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Virtual Dog Shit Creator.

Maybe it’s the comics equivalent of feeling ashamed of yourself (and also a bit chafed) after a four-day orgy, but it seems like there’s a lot of gloom going around today.

Dirk Deppey (perennial gloom purveyor that he is) offers the latest in his Movie Doomsday Theory series, insisting that a downturn in the comic-book-movie blockbuster market could actually spell the downfall of the entire Direct Market if it causes Marvel to go under. I think what we’re seeing this summer (i.e. movie after movie fails to live up to its blockbuster potential–gee, do you think maybe that’s because a new “blockbuster” is released every week?) is as much a Movie Movie Doomsday Theory as it is a Marvel Movie Doomsday Theory. Hollywood’s in trouble just as Marvel is if they’re relying on this obviously faulty business model.

Joey Manley, founder of various and sundry online comics sites, has a pretty depressing take on this year’s Con. I think he’s altogether too hard on pop-culture geeks–guys in stormtrooper outfits are harmless at worst and hella entertaining at best; it was certainly heartening to watch the snobs get smacked down on this Comics Journal messboard thread on the subject–but I’ve often wondered myself about the health of a medium in which such a large percentage of its consumers are “hardcore” fans, if not would-be creators themselves. (Guilty on both counts!)

Me? It’s tough to be pessimisstic about an industry that yielded Blankets, Diary of a Teenage Girl, The Frank Book, Quimby the Mouse, and The Dark Knight Strikes Again in the last year.

The BBC seems almost as upset about the deaths of Uday & Qusay Hussein as, one would imagine, Uday & Qusay Hussein were. LGF has a rundown of how the Beeb has carpet-bombed the story with scare quotes. Or the “story,” as they’d want you to believe.

Wouldn’t “The Widowmaker” be a great name for a really huge bong?

In other news, Amy has been posting a lot. You should go read it.

Before I get to the San Diego goodness, here’s another comics-related post.

Recently I was asked by All Too Flat extended family member Dov to recommend comics to him. He’s a complete newbie who got hooked on Bruce Jones’s current (excellent) Incredible Hulk run due to the 25-cent promotional issue Marvel offered during the release of the film, and wanted to know what else he might dig. I wrote him a long message, just recommending a whole bunch of my favorites, and it occurred to me that this is the sort of thing I should put up on the old blog, too. Hopefully the choices will illustrate that there really is something for everyone in comics today. And I’m not doing this as Team Comix boosterism, honestly–I just feel like otherwise media-savvy people who don’t read comics are driving down the art highway on only three wheels.

Here, then, are some of my favorites, all of which should be available at Amazon. Any one of them is a great way to start your comics-reading career.

We’ll begin with some of the current crop of ongoing superhero monthlies:

NEW X-MEN w: Grant Morrison a: various–This is the best ongoing superhero series around, and maybe even ever. The hardcover collection of the first 12 issues or so is fantastic, but it’s also available in smaller softcover editions (the first of which is called E is for Extinction). Morrison is a real visionary, very Burroughs or Pynchon or Dick. His ideas are just huge.

DAREDEVIL w: Brian Bendis a: Alex Maleev–another fantastic superhero comic, close in spirit and execution to the current Hulk series. Very pulp stories, with beautiful art; Bendis probably has the best ear for dialogue in comics today. Lots of collections of this creative team’s run are available; the first is called Underboss.

ALIAS w: Brian Bendis a: Michael Gaydos–Bendis also writes this very dark look at the underbelly of the Marvel superheroes. It’s a mature-readers book that’s actually mature, which is saying something. Gaydos’s art hooks you like nobody’s business. It’s about a private detective who used to be a superhero before some unnamed incident traumatized her. Again, you can find collections of this, the first one of which is I think just called Alias Volume 1.

THE ULTIMATES w: Mark Millar a: Bryan Hitch–an ultra-modern take on the superteam that consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk, this has probably the best art of any superhero book out there and is really unpredictable and large in scope. There’s only one collection to date, but it’s a killer.

Now moving on to altcomix and classic graphic novels:

JIMMY CORRIGAN w/a: Chris Ware–This is the best comic ever made, bar none. It’s about this sad middle-aged man’s journey to meet his father, which runs parallel to his grandfather’s recounting of his own trouble childhood. The art, especially the incredibly complex layouts, is just unbelievable. The Citizen Kane of comics.

DAVID BORING w/a: Dan Clowes–Close in tone to the Coen Bros’ darker movies, or David Lynch’s less over-the-top, this is a strange noir tale about a man’s sexual obsession with a woman during a tense period of terrorist attacks. Clowes’s art has this creepy 1950s feel that works perfectly for the story.

WATCHMEN w: Alan Moore a: Dave Gibbons–Supercomplex, realistic, and incredibly involving story of a group of superheroes whose time is almost at an end. Conspiracies, mysteries, politics, sex–it’s the highwater mark of the genre in many, many ways. Probably my third-favorite comic ever (after Jimmy Corrigan and…)

THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS w/a: Frank Miller–My favorite comic. Batman returns from retirement to a world that doesn’t want him anymore but needs him more than ever. Incredible art, searing satire, heroism on the grandest scale. This book is a juggernaut. The old saw is that if Watchmen performed the autopsy on the superhero genre, Dark Knight is its brass-band funeral. It’s awesome.

FROM HELL w: Alan Moore a: Eddie Campbell–The movie version was okay, but it was the equivalent of making a movie of Hamlet that consisted of Hamlet and Laertes training for the duel at the end. The book, on the other hand, is this hugely complex examination of the Jack the Ripper killings, Victorian England, Freemasonry, patriarchy vs. feminism, the occult, and god knows what else. This will really challenge you.

SIN CITY w/a: Frank Miller–beautiful black-and-white comic noir about a huge loser’s quest to avenge his lost love. Miller’s art is rarely better than it is in this, and the story’s got an almost primal momentum. Another favorite.

ARKHAM ASYLUM w: Grant Morrison a: Dave McKean–another genuinely beautiful book, this one is painted and uses remarkable collage techniques. It’s a psychological horror story about Batman entering into the insane asylum where most of his big villains are kept. A really chilling examination of abnormal psychology, again rife with the kind of huge occult-influenced symbolism that Morrison specializes in.

HEY, WAIT… w/a: Jason–Translated from Norwegian, this book uses cute-animal characters to tell a really painful story about loss, grief, and regret. This guy’s one of the best on the scene, and this story will haunt you.

THE FRANK BOOK w/a: Jim Woodring–Essentially they’re the creepiest, scariest cute-animal stories ever. Frank is this sort of cross between a cat and a beaver and a mouse and a bear, who wanders around this hallucinogenic dreamscape getting into adventures and being pursued by various miscreants. If you like twisted children’s stuff like Willy Wonka, this will appeal to you. Woodring’s a hell of a cartoonist and has imagined his whole own cosmology with this book. Some of the material is available in much cheaper (but smaller) softcover editions.

BLANKETS w/a: Craig Thompson–I talk about this all the time on the blog, but to recap, it’s a coming-of-age autobiography involving the parallel finding and losing of first love and religious faith. Elegantly illustrated and stirringly told. Damn, it’s good. And sweet.

DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL w/a: Phoebe Gloeckner–Another one I talk about a lot. This is a combination thinly-veiled autobiography written in journal form with autobio comix and illustrations, telling the story of the brilliant but deeply troubled teenager Minnie Goetze as she navigates the free-wheeling San Franciscan 70’s. I challenge you not to be deeply moved by this book.

Each gets my full recommendation. Happy reading!

Note to Jim Henley: Yes, Brian Bendis will be creating “a whole new cast of supervillains.” In his Marvel panel at San Diego he said this will happen after he comes back on the book following David Mack’s fill-in arc (issues 51-56). So get psyched!

Note to Bill Sherman: No, Brian Bendis won’t be ditching comicsville for Hollywood. In that same panel (and, actually, in the interview I conducted with him some months ago for the A&F Quarterly), he said that after writing the pilot for MTV’s Spider-Man series (doing which got his name on every single episode), he hasn’t spent a single second working on the skein since. He’s instead chosen to work on a project closer to his heart, namely his newborn kid. So he’s still all ours!

More like this coming soon…

Still playing catch-up with work and email. But you can expect recaps, reviews, reminiscences, revelations, and reprimands of the events of the San Diego Comic-Con all coming in the next few days. I’ll probably even talk about some non-comics stuff at some point. ADDTF Fever–catch it!

At a panel celebrating 25 years of the graphic novel (the fat book-like format that’s become the preferred way to package “good” comic books), I saw an interesting glimpse into how damn difficult it’s going to be to get comics into the genuine mainstream–i.e. libraries. Colleen Doran (the incredibly cool cartoonist with the splendid Southern accent who writes and draws the immensely readable fantasy series A Distant Soil) spoke of her (pretty selfless) attempts to get comic books into the hands of librarians and library-system buyers at Book Expo, the regular-book publishing industry’s big convention. Speaking of the obstacles to this process, she said the one complaint she hears most often from librarians is that simply not enough information is given to them about a comic book or graphic novel for them to be able to make a decision about buying or shelving it. Often times the publisher just hands them whatever they wrote up for the comic-shop guide Previews, and in the real world, “Corsair makes a startling revelation to Cyclops, but can the Starjammers save either of them from Omega Red?” isn’t very helpful. Also, they don’t put age levels or grade levels or the other standard things that go on books headed for young-adult sections in libraries.

Well, this last bit caused quite a row amongst the participants of the panel. Graphic designer to the stars Chip Kidd angrily snapped “Why don’t they just read the books and decide for themselves what their about and who should read them?” The obvious reply, one which was shouted out by librarians in the audience, was that believe it or not, librarians do not have the time to read every single comic book in the world. They want to stock graphic novels, but without some help from the publishers in terms of explaining what they’re about and who they’re geared toward, it’s hopeless. But Kidd and some of the other panelists, namely Craig Thompson and Will Eisner, continued taking umbrage at the suggestion that age-levels be placed even in the catalog listing or promotional copy let alone on the back of the book (as is done with, oh I don’t know, every young-adult book in the world).

I don’t necessarily fault these important creators for having their positions, at least from some standpoints. They come from a world in which they’re constantly doing battle against a two-headed dragon: One head being the notion that comics are for kids, the other being that we must institute codes and censors and guidelines to make sure that all comics remain for kids, under the threat of hauling people off to jail for selling adult comics to adults. But this simply isn’t the reason why librarians want these things–it’s so they know where to put the books on the shelves, so they know who to recommend it to, and so they know (believe it or not, this isn’t such a bad thing) not to hand an eight year old a copy of The Filth.

My point is not to find fault with Kidd et al, but to point out this enormous blindspot in their ability to accurately and effectively market their books to libraries. A simple difference in trade-dress culture literally prevents comics from getting into libraries.

Comics are climbing, but let there be no doubt that even at their best (i.e. Kidd, Thompson, & Eisner) they’re still climbing uphill.

The most dangerous threat to comics is not the unreconstructed fanboy (i.e. the people who keep writing Pete Milligan and asking him to bring back the original X-Force cast), but the pseudoeducated fanboy, or PEFB. I spoke with one or two in San Diego, and it was a chilling experience, all the more so because they honestly mean well. These are the people who think Udon Studios is manga, that Alex Ross is the best artist in comics history (“I mean, they look like real people!)”), and that Liberty Meadows is an alternative comic. These people are aware enough to understand the “Team Comics” concept of getting comics out to the world at large, but not aware enough to realize that what passes for “different, out of the mainstream” works in their comics cosmology is insipid manipulative middle-of-the-road crapola. People who watch Martin Scorsese and read Kurt Vonnegut will be handed a Chuck Dixon CrossGen book as an example of something similarly great and groundbreaking by the PEFB. I think it’s difficult to underestimate the kind of damage such egregiously bad standards can do if their proponents remain such a vocal part of the comics-proselytizing movement.

That’s why Gary Groth’s recent jeremiad in favor of much more rigorous critical standards is so important. As he and others like him have long argued, it’s impossible to justify holding up, say, the Speedy-does-heroin storyline from the old Green Lantern/Green Arrow book (regardless of how forward-looking it may or may not have been in the context of the superhero comics of the time) as some sort of masterpiece of the form when Robert Crumb was working at the same time. Similarly, I’ve been hard on Mark Millar’s teen-geared Trouble at least in part because, as a professional writer, he should know better than to hold it up as some sort of instant classic in a medium that also produced genuine teenage-oriented masterpieces like Ghost World, I Never Liked You, The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Blankets.

There’s just no excuse for mediocrity in a medium capable of greatness. And there’s even less of an excuse for confusing the former with the latter.

Well, I’ve returned–physically, at least; mentally I’m in the kind of ADD nirvana that only a huge honking pile of unread comic books can provide–from the San Diego Comic-Con, basically the biggest pop-cultural convention of any kind anywhere in the United States. This is my third year in attendance, and each year it appears to have doubled in size. (This go-round the con expanded to occupy the entirety of the San Diego Convetion Center, which at the height of traffic on Saturday felt like a small city unto itself.) Each year I buy an ungodly amount of comics of every type imaginable. Each year I’m indescribably tickled by the collision of mainstream comics, art comics, video games, toys, movies, and Klingons. Each year I rub elbows with some pretty ridiculously luminous luminaries. Each year I miss The Missus. Next year I’ll definitely be bringing her, because SDCC is something that everyone should experience at least once.

For those who aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about, SDCC is the biggest trade event in a field that has lots of them. There are panels in which different comics-related issues are discussed, announcements are made by the big companies involving their upcoming plans, pros come to sign books and meet and greet the fans, parties are held for mingling purposes, comics-related and genre-based movies are previewed, and tons and tons of stuff are sold on the enormous convention floor. It’s one of the rare places where a person dressed as Frodo Baggins could meet the actor who played Frodo Baggins. It’s also one of the rare places where Los Bros Hernandez sign autographs not five feet away from Rob Liefeld doing the same. Metaphorically, SDCC is the sublime and the ridiculous getting hammered and screwing on a pool table with a Halloween party full of people watching. (Hat tip to Kevin Smith–who was there, actually–for the imagery.)

Highlights for me were many, and since this is a blog, I can just list them and leave all that structure malarkey for the New Yorker. Here we go:

** Upon arriving at the hotel booked for myself and my companion, one of the A&F Quarterly’s illustrators, we found that both of our rooms had hot tubs in them. At a con where some of the best cartoonists in the world sleep three in a bed, we were basically pimped out.

** Meeting Dirk Deppey, the mastermind behind Journalista, live and in person. He’s just as delightful in the flesh as he is online. Be sure to ask him about anti-Scientology hip-hop bands, and tell him Sean sent ya!

** SDCC is one place where you are allowed, if not encouraged or even mandated, to talk about comics for hours and hours on end. One night myself, Josiah (the illustrator) and Fantagraphics intern extraordinaire Sebastian spent probably four hours drinking beer and talking about every comic we could think of. In the real world it’s next to impossible to find someone smart who’s smart about comics. If you know where to look at SDCC, you practically swim in them.

** Among other insights that such conversations yielded was Josiah’s assertion that the character of Jack the Ripper in Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s From Hell was, in fact, a superhero–he’s got extraordinary powers, he receives a mission from a supernatural authority, he’s part of a secretive order dedicated to the betterment of mankind, and he takes action to change the world. I’m pretty much ready to re-read the comic because of this simple recontextualization. That’s the kind of good stuff that comes out when you put smart comics fans together.

** Conversation between myself, Sebastian, and Kim Thompson re: David B’s Epileptic:

SEBASTIAN: How is that, Kim?

KIM: It’s a masterpiece. Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, Epileptic.

SEBASTIAN: Is that the whole thing, or is there more?

KIM: He’s working on the second half. It’ll be called Epileptic 2.

SEAN: …Electric Boogaloo? (Too easy, right?)

KIM: No. Epileptic Boogaloo.

Those krazy kut-ups at Fantagraphics!

** Speaking of which, Gary Groth is a really nice guy. He seems truly pleased to talk with you if you’re interested in Fanta books, and the fact that if you wrote something he didn’t like he’d tear you a new asshole in print actually enhances his likeability. He’s honest, even if you disagree with him half the time, and I like that a lot.

** I had a fantastic conversation about Roxy Music and design with The Filth artist Chris Weston and Vertigo Group Editor Shelly Bond. Getting a group of Roxy Music fans in one place is even rarer than getting a group of smart comics fans in one place.

** Just to stake my claim, I was part of the conversation in which Ron Rege & Marc Bell devised a plot to encourage Teratoid Heights creator and master of funny monster one-liners Mat Brinkman to do a weekly gag strip. If it ever happens, you heard it here first.

** Interviewing Blankets author and almost impossibly friendly guy Craig Thompson. He said his next book will be a fantasy of sorts involving drought, adding another intimidating natural feature to his repertoire (the ocean and snowy winters have already been tackled). He also posed for a picture with my wife’s stuffed wombat and went skinny dipping, but not at the same time, much to my wife’s chagrin. But the sketch he did in the hardcover copy I bought for my wife was just phenomenally beautiful, meaning that it suited its recipient, basically.

** The second-best Kim Thompson quote of the con: Chris Ware’s next graphic novel, Rusty Brown, “will make Jimmy Corrigan look like a minicomic.”

** Met some PEFBs. Survived. (Click that link for further details about the PseudoEducated FanBoy.)

** Met Colleen Doran. Was delighted. Not only is she friendly and funny (and, as seems to be the case with most really good comic-book creators, cool-looking), but she brooks no bullshit. Amidst a long debate during the “25 Years of the Graphic Novel” panel, in response to the question of whether changing the terminology would help the form gain respectability, she said, “Sometimes I just think, ‘You won’t read somethin’ because it’s called a ‘comic book’? What an elitist loser! Why the hell would I want you to read my book?’ I wouldn’t treat a ditch-digger the way some people treated me when I told them what I did. Who needs them?” Testify!

** Doran really held her own at the “25 Years of Graphic Novels” panel, and in so doing revealed a pretty big knowledge gap about the real world even amongst really great comix creators. Click here for details.

** Say what you will about Kevin Smith, but the guy is funny. During his very popular panel he told a story about getting walked in on by his daughter while having sex with his wife that was just a scream. Probably not so much for him at the time.

** In the regret column: On separate occasions, being seconds away from talking with Dave Cooper and Frank Miller when they suddenly get up and leave. The ones that got away, if you will.

** Chatting with Grant Morrison about the X2 premiere party in London at Sir Ian McKellen’s house, to which I was invited but stayed home to interview Phoebe Gloeckner instead:

SEAN: How was it?

GRANT: It got so gay so fast!

As is the wont of parties in which Sir Ian and Alan Cumming are in attendance, I’d imagine.

** Also in the regret column: Looking at someone in a costume consisting of a thong and fishnet stockings from behind, then realizing that someone was a man.

** Watching a woman whose “shirt” consisted simply of two strips of electrical tape pose for pictures outside the Highwater Comics booth. Word is sales of Kramer’s Ergot 4 improved dramatically at the time, displaying an unpredicted crossover appeal for Vampirella fans.

** Because it bears repeating, Los Bros Hernandez (Love & Rockets) did a signing about five feet away from Rob Liefeld (Youngblood) doing the same. This is roughly akin to Stanley Kubrick doing a joint appearance with the makers of 2 Fast 2 Furious.

** Blind item: Which prominent Vertigo creator tore me a new asshole not two minutes after first meeting me for the crime of interviewing and liking TV psychic John Edward?

** Josiah swiped Frank Miller’s pint of Guiness at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund party. (Frank had already left, but still.)

** Met Brian Michael Bendis in person. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I was a little bummed that my interview with him was just a phoner. He’s funny and friendly in person, and told me that before he realized I’d sent him a comp copy of the A&F issue he was in, he went to the store to buy it and got screamed at by the teenage clerk for flipping through the book without buying it first. And he gave me a freebee copy of Total Sell Out. Huge!

** I had a long conversation about Fossil watches with one of the women working at Dave McKean’s booth. I walked away with new enthusiasm for my timepiece. (Those flashing colors really bug people out!)

** Erik Larsen (of Savage Dragon fame) told Josiah he could “draw the hell out of” stuff. Damn.

** I discovered that there actually ARE laugh-out-loud funny comics out there. Marc Bell’s Shrimpy & Paul, Johnny Ryan’s Portajohnny and Jason’s Meow Baby were freaking funny. Now if only I could discover a horror comic that was actually scary…

** Got to see almost half the cast of The Lord of the Rings at a panel presented by New Line. Sean Astin is adorable, Elijah Wood is good looking, Dominic Monaghan (Merry) is surprisingly good looking as well, and Andy Serkis (Gollum, pre-CGI), besides seeming like a genuine badass, appears to be quite blessed in the Li’l Smeagol department, if his tight trousers are any indication. Also, the few clips they showed of Return of the King revealed a scale that simply dwarfs the imagination. The big battle in RoTK features an enemy horde twenty times the size of the one in The Two Towers. Holy moses.

** Further regret: Josiah lost his ATM card, leaving it at the Fanta booth after using it. That’s the kind of thing that would have drove me NUTS if I had done it. He handled it with aplomb, I must say, as it didn’t interfere with him walking across a beach for an hour or so later that night. (Stay tuned for explanation.)

** Went to a fabulous art-gallery show of original comic art by a ton of altcomix heavyweights. There’s something awe-inspiring, in a cult-of-the-object sort of way, about seeing the original drawings from great comics. I was particularly wowed by the two-page spread from Dan Clowes’s David Boring and the comic (my favorite one, actually) from Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl. I also bought the show’s catalog, which as an added bonus came with a baggie full of authentic trash from a cartoonist featured in the show. Mine had Phoebe’s–I recognized the Long Island Rail Road ticket!

** Another item in the regret column: Taking cabs. Almost without exception, every single cab driver we encountered was an incompetent moron. One just couldn’t figure out how to get to 420 G Street, despite getting onto G Street and driving in the direction of the number 420. He actually rolled down his window and yelled for help to other cabbies, who, surprisingly enough, were no help at all. Another couldn’t figure out how to get to 530 Broadway, again despite getting onto Broadway and driving in the direction of the number 530. This winner blew past the hotel, took us five blocks out of the way to get back (he seemed genuinely surprised that the streets in the area were one-way, and who can blame him? he’s only a goddamn cab driver), overcharged us once he got us close enough to drop us off, and then nearly tore the arm off the girl trying to get in the cab after we got out as he drove off with the door open in an effort not to pick her up. (Keep in mind both of the above incidents took place in the tourist-heavy downtown area, where, one would think, a cab driver might be familiar with the locations of major hotels, as well as the existence of one-way streets and the fact that numbers proceed up or down the street in a fairly orderly, not at all mysterious fashion.) But the one who took the taco was the miserable bastard who, when told to take us to Ocean Beach, then after saying “Pacific Beach?” and being told “no, Ocean Beach,” proceeded to take us to Pacific Beach anyway, without telling us he was doing so. He drove us about 15-20 minutes out of our way, dropped us off on the wrong land mass, let alone the wrong beach, and made a killing because it cost so much damn money to get that far away. Since we were looking for a party on the beach, we actually ended up walking the entire length of the shore, about five miles, before we realized we weren’t just dropped off at the wrong place on the beach, but at the wrong beach entirely. We had to get back in another cab (the one good driver we encountered, thank Christ), cross a bridge, and drive for about ten minutes before we were back to where we should have been. Mizzable bastards. I did not handle this well, no sir.

** Beach party fun: Aside from the aforementioned glimpse of Craig Thompson’s bare ass, there was the added spectacle of watching an incredibly inebriated lone party crasher plop down on the sand and drunkenly warble along to her acoustic guitar, while an also-drunk artcomics fan tried to shout her down.

** More beach party fun: Tom Devlin offered his most direct take on EC Comics yet: “Oh, they suck.”

** Doing our good deed for the weekend, we offered two very nice women who were in town to support altcomix luminary Dame Darcy one of our hotel rooms so they wouldn’t have to sleep in their van. No word on whether they took advantage of the hot tub.

** I bought a lot, and I mean a lot, of comics.

Teratoid Heights by Mat Brinkman

Yeast Hoist by Ron Rege Jr.

Only a Movie by Jordan Crane

Shrimpy & Paul and Friends by Marc Bell

The TCJ Library: Frank Miller from the Comics Journal

Meow Baby by Jason

Ripple by Dave Cooper

Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware

Cages by Dave McKean

Alec: How to Be an Artist by Eddie Campbell

A Distant Soil Volume 1 by Colleen Doran

The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot by Frank Miller & Geof Darrow

The complete Martha Washington series by Frank Miller & Dave Gibbons

The Buenaventura Gallery Show Catalog by various and sundry awesome cartoonists

I also bought copies of Craig Thompson’s Blankets, Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl and Jim Woodring’s The Frank Book for friends. Yes, I’m a giving sort.

** Finally, a veritable orgy of namedropping, as much to indulge my ADD-derived love of listing things as to brag (though believe me, I’m bragging). Huge thanks to all the comics pros who talked with us, drank with us, gave us freebies, signed our books, invited us to parties, or otherwise made our lives enjoyable at the Con: Mark Alessi, Axel Alonso, Brandon Badeaux, Marc Bell, Brian Bendis, Shelly Bond, Charles Brownstein, Peggy Burns, CB Cebulski, Jordan Crane, Dirk Deppey, Tom Devlin, Marshall Dillon, Colleen Doran, Shawna Ervin-Gore, Tim Ervin-Gore, Gary Groth, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Jason, Erik Larsen, John Layman, David Mack, Grant Morrison, Dan Nado, Mike Norton, Mike Oeming, Ron Rege Jr., Jamie Rich, James Robinson, Johnny Ryan, Gareb Shamus, Craig Thompson, Kim Thompson, Brett Warnock, Chris Weston, and everyone else we hung out with.

Thank you also to The Missus, for being patient with her husband the geek.

Stay tuned for reviews of the books that I got. Maybe even reviews of all of them. I’m feelin’ productive!

Nyuk, nyuk.

Please read this article from Time magazine, detailing some of the practices and policies of the late Uday and Qusay Hussein. How does it affect your perception of the phrase “blood for oil”?

I’d like to return the praise of the excellent popculture/comics blogger Big Sunny D. He’s a tremendously effective critic and reviewer with great taste in pretty much everything. If I weren’t writing this blog, I’d want to be writing his.