I’m back from San Diego. Expect some postings soon.

Hey guys. I know this comics stuff is boring you to death. But hey, you might find out something neat, so do read it, won’t you? I’m telling you all, that Blankets book is fantastic.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled comix news and views roundup:

First of all, the Pulse offers a overview of tomorrow’s San Diego Comic-Con, to which Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat will be sending a representative or two. It’s really, really big, if you want the nutshell version.

While we’re on the SDCC tip, the best summary of the experience that is this enormous comic-book convention comes from Scott Tipton of Movie Poop Shoot. (Amy, I’ll bet you like that website name.) It’s an excellent piece–go and read (after you finish reading this whole post, of course).

Speaking of Blankets, Newsarama has an interview with Craig Thompson on his soon-to-be-released magnum opus. It’s interesting to see how, a la Phoebe Gloeckner, he’s almost hesitant to call it “autobiography” due to the liberties he takes with the facts of his life for the sake of the story. (He has a sister?) It’s also an interesting glimpse into how an altcomix creator pays the bills.

Jess Lemon, Pulse’s designated fly in the fanboy ointment, takes on Mark Millar’s Epic teen book Trouble. Ouch. As I said, when there’s not adamantium skeletons and black ops and pop-culture references to kick around, Millar’s a bit, shall we say, limited in the dialogue department.

Bill Sherman reviews Iron Wagon, the new murder mystery by Norway’s mononymed master of incredibly sad cute-animal comics, Jason. This is Bill’s first Jason comic, and it’s an odd one to start with, as it was adapted from a turn-of-the-century Norwegian novel by Stein Riverton, and as such is unrepresentative of Jason’s usual musings on life, death, and loneliness. But Jason’s thematic preoccupations show through to a surprising degree, particularly his effortlessly chilling depiction of the haunting power of death over the living. The ending, also, is more powerful than it perhaps has a right to be. Excellent work.

In a long roundup of his own, Alan David Doane scoffs at fans’ objections to the way Darick Robertson draws fan-fave character Wolverine (namely, like a knee-breaker for the Teamsters). Why? What’s the objection to making this dangerous, mysterious character a sexy one as well, instead of depicting him the way an eight-year-old might? ADD’s gloating about the uproar seems like kneejerk contrarianism rather than a thought-out response to a controversial aesthetic decision.

Johnny Bacardi (“always interesting”? aw! right back atcha!) has some thoughts on my pamphlet post of yesterday, and points out that many long-form collections of initially serialized books seem to drag on after a certain point. I’d argue that that’s a strength of collections, not a weakness–separate the wheat from the chaff and all that.

Eve Tushnet (who probably doesn’t remember that I lived next door to some of her friends at Yale freshman year) offers a non-fangirl take on some comics she bought on a whim. She has good things to say about Grant Morrison’s and Pete Milligan’s X-books, unsurprisingly. (Link courtesy of Jim Henley, who shouldn’t worry about ever coming off my blogroll. I second his recommendation of books by Brian Bendis, by the way.)

When I post some hype for my day job at the Comics Journal Message Board, this is the kind of thing that happens. It’s actually a lot more civil than I thought it’d be, and is slowly turning into a fairly interesting discussion of pop-culture philosopher Slavoj Zizek. All this because of a clothing catalog, folks!

Finally, I was surprised to see copies of the Comics Journal issue with Gary Groth’s pro-criticism essay in it. Having read it in its entirety, I’ll say that while I still agree with it generally, it’s a flawed call to arms for a couple of reasons.

First of all, Gary never really develops his theory of why criticism (by which he means negative criticism, as well as simply well-written and well-informed positive criticism, which is also in short supply these days) is a dying breed. There’s a lot of complaints about corporate this and corporate that, and a few potshots about invading Third World countries thrown in for good measure, but ultimately the death of criticism indicates that critics anywhere, not just at corporate-owned publications, are in short supply. Why does no one want to grow up to be a critic? Are schools or the academy simply not preparing people to be critics? Has the corporate boosterism mindset (or, on the other side of the coin, the po-mo aversion to value judgements) infected writers’ mindsets during their educations? These interesting and vital questions go unexplored in favor of windmill-tilting heated rhetoric–admittedly Gary’s forte, but still, I was looking for something I could sink my teeth into.

Second, Gary appears to conflate rah-rah’ing critics with the infamous Team Comix mentality of artists. It seems ungenerous to me to demand that artists become critics themselves. While there are certainly cases where luminaries in one dabble in the other, and in some cases even thrive in both, it’s really not one artist’s job to pick apart the failings (or to praise the strengths) of another. Much of what Gary interprets as an appalling lack of critical faculties (or of backbone) on the part of today’s alt-comix in-crowd may simply be seen as a desire to avoid talking shit about people when that’s not what they’re being paid to do. Historically, Gary Groth has had an admirable immunity to fear of being seen as an asshole. Not all artists were born with this sort of bulletproof willingness to tell otherwise nice people that their comics are for shit, and not all artists should be expected to do so. If they set themselves up as “critics,” have at ’em, Gary, but don’t fault people for not wanting to pick fights at parties over whether James Kochalka’s Sketchbook Diaries were any good.

Well, folks, that’s probably the last round-up for a while, as the Con is almost upon me. Don’t know what the computer-access situation will be in sunny San Diego, but I guess we’ll find out together, you and I. Let us join hands and walk into that future together!

Assuming the submissive role, as once can conclude is his wont, Jim Treacher follows my suggestion and blogs about his favorite band. Well, technically, he blogs about song-poems, but good enough.

In addition, he brings it to our attention that somewhere there exists a mash-up of Gary Numan’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and the Sugababes’ cover of Adina Howard’s legendary ode to the congress of the cow, “Freak Like Me.” Holy shit, people. For the record, I hated the infamous “Smells Like Teen Spirit”/”Bootylicious” mash-up just as much as Amanda did, but Numan and a paean to doing it doggystyle? Please tell me if you think that’s anything but two great tastes tastin’ great together.

(I know, I know, this blog has been very heavy on comics lately, but Comic-Con is coming, and I got comics on the brain.)

When most people think of comic books they think of the thin, staple-bound, flimsy things you used to see on racks in drug stores. In comics-biz parlance they’re called pamphlets. A Comics Journal messboard thread about the slow demise of this format led me to post the following:

The problem with pamphlet-format comic books as I see it is that they denote throwawayability to the average Joe. Most people aren’t in the habit of saving and rereading magazines or newspapers, two periodical forms that comic books most closely resemble. If people still think that “comics are for kids” (and not in a good, Harry Potter kind of way, but in an annoying, Double Dare and Garbage Pail Kids kind of way), I think we can blame the association in grown-ups minds between comics and the easily beat-up and torn-up and soaked-through and discarded pamphlet format they may remember leaving strewn around their bedrooms as children.

Now, even superhero creators are writing and drawing with an eye toward a lasting legacy: improving paper quality and cover stock and coloring techniques; writing in multi-issue arcs geared toward collection in more durable paperback and even hardcover formats; and in some cases a rise in the overall quality of the art and writing itself (though that, of course, is a more controversial position to hold). In light of these developments, to say nothing of the obvious qualitative and aesthetic reasons the superheroes’ alt-comix counterparts have for appearing in graphic-novel form, clinging to a transitory, far less durable format like pamphlets seems especially anachronistic. The need to get away from pamphlets only increases now that the huge up-and-coming comics-reading audience–teen girls and guys who read manga–have been weaned on book-sized, book-shaped, and book-bound collections.

Yes, there are practical reasons (both in terms of economics and of critical feedback) for the pamphlet, even in alt-comix land, as detailed by many of the posters in this thread. But much of the childlike joy it engenders in comics fans (both of the superhero and alt-comix varieties) is offset by the aversion it apparently produces in the general populace. As Dr. Frank N. Furter might put it, pamphlets have “a certain naive charm–but no muscle.”

“ELVIS PRESLEY EYE COLOR AND PENIS SIZE”

When have I ever talked about Elvis Presley, or eye color, or penis size on this blog, let alone all three in tandem? Ah, the vagaries of Google.

While we’re on the subject, if Google’s being a bit slow, may I suggest All Too Flat’s Google mirror?

In other odd news, I’m going to visit a psychic tonight. This will mark the second time this week that a member of the Collins household has visited a psychic, but only the first that a member of the Collins household has visited a psychic who isn’t also Tori Amos’s psychic. This is the world I live in, folks.

The big-media onslaught begins: Here’s Time.comix’s review of Craig Thompson’s masterful Blankets. Go Craig! I’ll be interviewing Craig for the A&F Quarterly during the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con, so I’ll be doing my part as well. And as soon as this comic comes out in wide distribution, I’ll let you all know. I don’t care who you are–there’s almost no reason you shouldn’t enjoy this book.

(And I endorse this review, despite the fact that Time.comix’s main man, Andrew Arnold, was so goddamn wrong about the work of genius that was Frank Miller & Lynn Varley’s Dark Knight Strikes Again that it makes my hair hurt. That book was “corporatized,” Andrew? What the hell kind of corporation says “this has Big Bucks written all over it” of a book in which Superman and Wonder Woman destroy a mountain while fucking?)

Over at Markisan Naso’s column (scroll down for the pertinent item), Epic editor Stephanie Moore lays the smack down on some the conspiracy theories advanced by “Felicia,” Marvel’s ersatz Deep Throat. Go Stephanie! (I’m just speaking for myself here, but having had some contact with several of the parties involved in Epic, I can say that while there are some snags being hit, and with some regularity, it’s not some giant con job, and Stephanie herself is a smart, dedicated, talented, devoted editor who wouldn’t let it become a con job even if that’s where it was heading.)

Bill Sherman sez that the old strip Pogo is applicable to today’s self-righteous warbloggers. Hey, Bill, I resemble that remark!

Franklin Harris, unlike Sandman impresario (and Friend Of Tori) Neil Gaiman, seems to have gone unnoticed in lists of antiwarbloggers. Hey, Franklin, I noticed you!

Only six months till Economas! Start shopping, people!

The incredibly illustrious (and tenured!) Stanford scholar Scott Bukatman points out on this Comics Journal messboard thread that the New York Times has gone completely apeshit over superheroes lately.

First there’s this article by Douglas Wolk, arguing that the comic-book version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is superior to the film version in virtually every respect. Having not seen the film yet, it’s tough to comment, but from everything I’ve heard I’d suspect that even at its best the movie is probably the same kind of streamlined (or dumbed-down–your call) version of the Alan Moore original that From Hell was a year or two back. League was actually one of the only two comics from Moore’s America’s Best line that actually succeeded in being compelling and involving as well as clever (the other being Top Ten), so it’s tough to imagine how it can be brought to the screen with all its good qualities intact. (I must say, however, that Moore’s kvetching about the addition of Dorian Grey and Tom Sawyer is extremely unbecoming. What makes them any more or less appropriate or multi-dimensional than, say, using Fu Manchu as the bad guy?)

Then there’s this article by A.O. Scott, complaining (or is it? it’s that kind of high-falutin’ pop-cult critique that’s apparently too smart to actually bother coming down on one side or another of the issue it’s talking about) that the genre of “term paper blockbusters” like Ang Lee’s Hulk or The Matrix Reloaded is sucking the fun out of big movies. (Again, that’s what I think he’s saying–if you write pop culture commentary for the NYT, refusing to enter a value judgement is apparently in the style sheet.) I myself sorta see where he’s coming from–The Hulk, The Matrix Reloaded, and before them Spielberg’s A.I. and Minority Report (or even the two Star Wars prequels, with their emphasis on Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda and their op-ed tie-ins to real-life cloning and digital-media debates) could all be reasonably argued to have, shall we say, overplayed the intellectual hand that God gave their makers. (I happened to like them all, if you’re interested.) Still, I can’t help but be appalled at Scott’s apparent belief that dopey, dopey movies like the Charlie’s Angels and The Fast and the Furious franchises are in some way preferable to movies that are at least trying to say something interesting, regardless of whether or not they succeed. (This “it’s just harmless fun” viewpoint is one of the cultural bugbears Gary Groth’s attempting to slay in his latest essay, and good luck to him.) Scott’s also wrong to put any sort of “blame” for this “pretentious superhero” genre on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, whose blend of whimsy, awe, emotion, action, and intellect is virtually unsurpassed and the excellence of which is all but unquestioned. It may have a brainy bent, but blaming it for less successful combinations of CGI and PhD strikes me as being as unfair and silly as “blaming” Star Wars for Independence Day or Seinfeld for Suddenly Susan.

Big Sunny D, in a repost of a conversation he had with a fellow comix fan, inadvertently but correctly notes that the maddeningly infrequent output of most alt-comix titans makes the alternative/indy scene a lousy candidate for “saving the medium/industry” despite its inarguable superiority content-wise. How often does Black Hole or Eightball or Acme Novelty Library or Weasel come out these days? Twice a year at the absolute most often. People like Crumb and Spiegelman publish actual comics even less often. And even though I happen to dig the cartoony low-key Highwater/Fort Thunder/used-to-do-minicomics style (into which, I suppose, one could lump Kochalka and Hart and various other 3rd Wave luminaries), most of them lack the financial security, the grand ambition, or (in some cases) the talent to regularly publish the kinds of comix that take the biz by storm.

Instead, the alt-comix world revolves around one-time-only “event” books like Blankets or Diary of a Teenage Girl or Safe Area Gorazde or Persepolis which, by definition, cannot come out with any sort of regularity, or on “event” collections like Jimmy Corrigan or David Boring or Boulevard of Broken Dreams which are wholly dependent on the completion of the infrequently published series from which they draw.

As an alternative to this feast-or-famine publishing model (one which nearly bankrupted Fantagraphics due to their inability to accurately predict which one it’d be), alt-publishers might try the Japanese manga model: publish big fat compendia of work by all their top creators for cheap, so that people can get a wide sampling of what’s available, then go seek out the individual issues or collections of the creators they most enjoy. The problem here might be the wide variety of formats and sizes that alt-comix folks work in. It’d be pretty damn difficult to figure out how to publish a book that contained a full issue of both Eightball and Acme Novelty Library.

Is it me, or are the commercials for NBC’s fall shows actually designed to make you not want to watch them?

Between For Love or Money, Will & Grace and every conceivable iteration of Law & Order, the Missus and I watch a decent amount of NBC. (Helps that we only get 23 channels–minus the two of which that are home shopping, the two that are public access, the one that’s the guide to all the other channels and the four that are in Spanish–so there’s no specials about UFOs or sharks or serial killers or 80s nostalgia to watch.) This means that I’ve seen the almost infomercial-length commercials for Las Vegas and Miss Match approximately seven hundred thousand times each. Jesus Harold Christ in a bright yellow Hummer are they annoying.

First of all, let’s take Las Vegas. “They caaaaall… you laaaaa… dy luck.” No, they call you the goddamn commercial that has actually ruined Guys and Dolls for me for the rest of my goddamn life. And then there’s what goes on in the commercial. Basically they’ve concocted some vile blend of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an excellent film, by the way, which means that this show is going to be great too!!!! Oh wait, NO IT DOESN’T) and Aaron Spelling’s Melrose Place, and thrown in a very, very tired looking Jimmy Caan because, I guess, he played a mafioso once, and that’s supposed to have generated enough goodwill for us to watch him in this piece-of-shit show, or at least its countless interminable piece-of-shit commercials (actually, it didn’t). So at some point we see Molly Simms (who, surprisingly, actually DID generate a fair amount of goodwill from those Old Navy commercials she did) fuckin’ some guy, and then she turns around and faces the camera (a Caan’s-eye-view) and says, “Oh, hi, Daddy.” Damn, people, but is there anything sexier than seeing a woman with a man’s erect and throbbing penis in her well-lubricated vagina turn around and say hello to her father as he walks in on her copulation? Yes, actually, because THAT’S FUCKING VILE AND DISGUSTING. Meanwhile poor Jimmy gets to say shit that nobody on Earth would ever actually say like yelling “Nobody cheats in my casino!” haughtily to a room full of gamers who are probably like “this guy watches too many Mafia movies.” And it all ends with the voice-over guy saying “and the city of Las Vegas as itself,” as if Vegas had been handed a script and said to its agent “you gotta get me in on this, Bruce.” Bullshit. If its lucky Vegas will be dropped after the pilot like the original captain in Star Trek and move on with its life.

And then there’s Miss Match, a show starring Alee-see-ah Silverstone (oh, I’m sorry, did you think it was pronounced “Aleeshia”? Not now that she’s a member of the NBC Family–that’s the motherfucking Peacock Network, motherfuckers!). Miss Match is about the fact that she’s not just a pretty face. I know this because about seven thousand fucking times per commercial they play the same fucking line from some stupid fucking song, which goes “Sheeee’s… noooot… just a pretty faaaace…” I don’t know, was there a legion of people arguing the contrary? Was America saying to itself, “Remember that girl from Clueless who in a dangerous marathon operation had her career donated to Reese Witherspoon? She was just a pretty face!” Maybe I missed that. Anyway some guy says something stupid about some girl’s hair, and the guy who created Sex & the City was involved somehow, which means maybe there’ll be some character who can eat pussy real good involved. Or not, I don’t know, it’s broadcast.

The only show whose commercials are actually a little intriguing is that new Rob Lowe thing The Lyon’s Den, because they’re making it sound like there’s going to be some big season-long murder mystery a la Laura Palmer, only it’s in Washington D.C. so it’s going to talk about The Important Issues and explore whether Justice Really Is Blind and whatnot. I guess that’s interesting. Rob Lowe was really good in The Stand, but I think leaving The Howard Dean Show might have been a mistake. (That’s what it was called, right?)

I would like to say, in case anyone from GE is reading this, that NBC isn’t the only network with godawful commercials for its fall shows. I was a big fan of America’s Next Top Model (go Adrienne! go people who wear nine inch nails and Pink Floyd t-shirts in general!), which meant that I had to sit through ads for an abortion in sitcom form called Rock Me Baby, starring Dan Corteezy (Oh, I’m sorry, did you think it was Dan Cortezz? Then you a asshole) formerly of MTV Runs Around Screaming A Lot About Sports. A baby urinates on him in the commercial, which is funny! Ha! Ha! Ha! Look, people, people urinating on other people is now funny, and we’re all going to have to get used to the idea, so quit your goddamn crying and be a fucking man about this. BE A GODDAMN MAN FOR ONCE IN YOUR FUCKING LIFE.

I think I understand what went through Elvis Presley’s head, shortly before he’d shoot his television.

Another trip to the local Borders, another glimpse into the future of comics. As Amy and I looked through the one bookshelf dedicated to, well, every comic in America that isn’t manga–Boulevard of Broken Dreams next to Hellboy next to The Big Book of the Unexplained next to The Invisibles next to a Bendis Daredevil next to Dark Knight Strikes Again next to Blood Song next to a Mad collection next to The Totally Awesome Guide to Spider-Man or whatever–a teenage girl (and not one o’ them pink-haired Hello Kitty backpack-sporting teenage girls, but an Abercrombie & Fitch wearing POPULAR GIRL–drags over a guy friend and starts handing him book after book of manga series that she likes, which are found all neatly shelved on three bookshelves devoted entirely to Japanese comics. They were joking and laughing and getting all into it–“oh my God, no wonder you like this, it’s like porn!” or “Hey, don’t show me anything, I’m not up to that one yet!”–like it was a good movie or TV show they were into. It was just another form of entertainment that perfectly normal teenagers are into.

This is the future of comics. Why the big American companies are still letting, essentially, the fanboy culture of retailers and readers dictate business decisions like format and trade dress is completely beyond me. If you were DC, wouldn’t you just take volumes one through 15 or whatever it is of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, reprint them at manga size, give them nice uniform trade dress, ship ’em to Borders and B&N, and watch the money just roll in? This is such a no-brainer it’s absurd. And actually, it gives that (probably spurious) Felicia doomsday theory, in which Bill Jemas is said to be conspiring to fire all the big-name creators and replace them with talented nobodies, an element of common sense, if said firings were done in tandem with a wholesale switchover to the smaller, more readable manga format. This girl doesn’t know who Mark Waid is, and couldn’t care less. She DOES read comics, and lots of them. This is the market. If it takes a legion of new blood willing to cut ties to the industry’s past and tap into this audience of rabid, enthusiastic fans, then so be it.

Well, just to prove it ain’t all gloom and doom here at ADDTF, here’s a really cool article about creator Jai Nitz from CNN.com. I’m not familiar with Nitz’s work, but what’s great about this article is that it makes comics seem like a perfectly legitimate, perfectly respectable, perfectly interesting form of art and entertainment to be involved in. Go ye and read, and think about the future.

(I’m trying to think of a good title to stick with for these little round-up posts I do from time to time. I really like “Comix-and-match,” but what if, as in this current case, it’s not all about comics? Oh, who am I kidding–it’s always all about comics for me.)

Due to rising controversy, Princess Diana will no longer be appearing in an upcoming arc of X-Statix, the superhero/pop-culture satire by Pete Milligan and Mike Allred. Oh well. I thought it was a funny idea, but then I’ve never felt particularly attached to the princess, and have learned the hard way (during a disastrous “musical tribute” sketch I was a part of back in college) that the people who liked her will fucking tear you to pieces if they think you’re insulting her in some way.

Speaking of things that matter more if you live in Great Britain, Big Sunny D doesn’t like the new Blur single, “Crazy Beat.” I’ll up the ante by saying their entire new album just plain sucks. Granted, their last, heretofore most difficult album, 13, was an acquired taste that I managed to acquire, but I can’t see that happening with Think Tank, a self-indulgent aimless mess with a couple of tossed-off pop-chart sops thrown in to drive sales. The current single’s an example of the latter. Anyway, may I reiterate how good Big Sunny D is?

Bill Sherman notes that The Big Shocking Ending Of The Current Arc In Mark Waid’s Brilliant But Tragically Cancelled Run On The Fantastic Four (TM) stands no chance of actually lasting. Indeed, it’d stand not chance of actually lasting even if Waid hadn’t been booted from the book. Without giving things away too much, let’s just say major changes to a main character’s appearance do not last in comics, ever. It’s a lazy way to “make an impact,” and ultimately, who cares?

Gary Groth is back, with an excerpt from an upcoming essay tearing into the lack of critical standards in comics and the world in general. As always, he’s worth reading, because like any grumpy old socialist, he wants the best for the masses, even though they don’t deserve it, the morons. Seriously, it’s a pretty smart piece. I’m sure I’ll talk about it some more when I read the full version.

(One funny little note: Mainstream superhero comics actually do have a vociferous contingent of critics who aren’t afraid to say negative things–creators themselves! Peter David, Erik Larsen, Micah Wright, Bill Jemas, etc. etc., savage so many creators and books so often that it’s actually pretty unbelievable. Of course, sending rambling grammatically poor emails to news sites about why the Epic editors didn’t treat you with the respect a star of your magnitude should be afforded is probably not what Gary had in mind. Basically, all those guys, like them or not, talk shit about business decisions they don’t like and have no real critical background or standards to speak of. I guess it’s better than unchallenged boosterism, though.)

NeilAlien has some brief snarky things to say about Dirk Deppey’s latest anti-superhero rant, which I sort of had an opposing take on here. NeilAlien fights the good fight, man.

Finally, James Lileks (in the middle of a pretty long Bleat) says something I and several other people I know have been saying for a while: Stephen King is the late 20th century’s Charles Dickens. Yes, I like Stephen King. I consider rreading The Stand the equivalent of getting a doctorate in Post-Apocalyptic Arts. Which will lead me to my next post… (stay tuned…)

(Now updated, with 20% fewer potentially offensive overly broad generalizations! You’ll see what I mean.)

Okay, folks, here’s the deal. It’d be too damn tough to talk about what needs to be talked about when discussing this film while avoiding certain give-away’d plot points, so I’m not going to bother. If you’ve already seen the movie, or you don’t care about having stuff spoiled for you, knock yourself out, okay? Okay. (I will say that I don’t QUITE fully give away any of the big surprises, except one of them, and that’s at the veeeerrry end of the review. But still, caveat lector. Or in other words, SPOILER ALERT!!! (And to those who were here when I had the whole post hidden except if you highlighted it, it was just too damn irritating for me myself to read. Sorry.))

I’m a big fan of director Danny Boyle’s first two films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. The former is a supertaut thriller, the kind of thing Hitchock might do if he had the sensibilities of a 90s filmmaker. With little more to work with than three characters and their own paranoia, Boyle built a sense of mounting madness and violence that demonstrated he’d have a deft hand if he were to try his hand at horror proper. Trainspotting showed more of the same, with its nightmarish moments (the heroin-withdrawl scene, particularly) giving lie to the “salute” to the junkie techno lifestyle that a lot of hipsters I went to college with seemed to think the movie offered. Though I skipped seeing A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, following rules I have about the proper response to movies involving Cameron Diaz or Leo DiCaprio, I was certainly excited to find out that Boyle was going to be doing a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, because folks, I don’t know if you know this about me, but if there’s one thing I love it’s a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.

Like most good recent horror films, 28 Days Later is as memorable for its allusions to past genre masterpieces as it is for what it achieves on its own. There’s a scene in an abandoned supermarket that’s straight out of George Romero’s anti-consumerist zombie fable Dawn of the Dead, there’s a military-dinner-amid-the-savages scene straight out of Apocalypse Now Redux, a hand-to-hand combat murder straight out of Midnight Express; moreover the overall feel of the film, from its grainy appearance (courtesy of digital video, as opposed to, say, the 16mm on which genre classics like Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were shot, or the beat-up rented videocasette copies we grew up watching them on) to the characters’ haircuts to the fact that it’s set in Great Britain (a country that for all intents and purposes is perpetually reliving 1977), is a throwback to the bleak horror films of three decades ago.

But then there’s the innovations. If 28 Days Later’s only claim to fame was the fact that it had zombies that moved fast, it would still go down in zombie-flick history as a true pioneer. MAN, those fast-moving zombies! Technically, though, they aren’t zombies at all, but zombified living humans who’ve been infected with a nebulously defined chimpanzee disease that turns them into mindless red-irised killing machines so fixated on slaughter that they don’t even bother to stop and eat their victims. (That’s right, it’s a zombie movie with no real cannibalism–innovation number 2!) Boyle films the lightning-fast zombies at odd angles and with choppy editing that only enhances their mercurial menace. The result is the kind of fast pace that modern audiences require, meaning that 28 Days Later isn’t just a valuable addition to the horror canon, but perhaps a vital one.

And there’s the stunning use of soundtrack. It just wouldn’t be a British Post-Apocalypse without Brian Eno, and his “An Ending (Ascent),” used with devastating emotional effect at the end of Stephen Soderbergh’s Traffic, is employed with equal aplomb here. There’s also a memorably haunting “Ave Maria,” a bit of rambly Britpop in the shopping-cart scene, and tons and tons of Godspeed You Black Emperor*, which in terms of eeriness is a good thing indeed.

None of this would matter, of course, if you didn’t care about the characters, but the foursome that comprise the film’s band of protagonists (tough survivor Selena, ectomorphic bike messenger Jim (What is it with all these malnourished British actors, anyway? Damn, Danny, hire a freaking craft services department already!), good-humored cab driver Frank and quiet, thoughtful teenager Hannah) are almost instantly (and non-manipulatively) likeable. I found myself favorably comparing the bunch to the four characters at the center of Ang Lee’s Hulk film, who despite about two hours of in-depth psychological investigation and backstory muster hardly a whiff of empathy from the audience. (Would you have cared for a second if the Hulk had wiped out the entire remainder of the cast?)

Basically, I loved this movie. This is not to say, however, that many aspects of it, particularly in the film’s final third, weren’t actually kind of easy to predict, provided you had an extensive enough background in the Post-Apocalyptic Arts. Some lessons, if I may be so bold:

1) In terms of faint military radio broadcasts audible on your hand-wound AM receiver, repeated use in the broadcast of the word “salvation” is roughly equivalent to saying “we have gone Colonel Kurtz and are setting up rape camps and impaling heads on sticks as we speak.”

2) In the world of post-apocalyptic fiction, anyone who knew how to use a gun before the apocalypse is going to be a bad guy after the apocalypse. The bad-guy quotient increases geometrically if said individual learned to use guns while in some form of uniformed service. (Exceptions to the bad-guy gun rule are made for quiet, steely loners from rural areas who learned to shoot by picking rusty cans off a tree stump.) Please see Kathy Bates’s last stand in the TV minseries version of The Stand for more information.

3) Strangelove’s Law: Any time you’re in a group of people in which females are greatly outnumbered by males, things are going to get unpleasant. Likelihood of unpleasantness increases proportinately to the amount of males in said group to whom the Bad-Guy Gun rule is applicable.

4) Bad things will always happen in churches in the post-apocalypse, because zombies, much like filmmakers, can’t resist symbolism.

5) Strider’s Axiom: When attempting to hide from relentless undead killing machines, do not light fires.

6) If you are one half of an attractive mixed-sex pair making your way through the post-apocalyptic world, you will fall in love and fuck. Ridiculing the notion that, as one half of an attractive mixed-sex pair making your way through the post-apocalyptic world, you will fall in love and fuck, does not prevent this from occurring.

7) A virus with a window of “10-20 seconds” between exposure and mindless raving zombiehood greatly reduces the likelihood of said virus spreading off the island of Great Britain and to “Paris and New York.” If a zombie got on a plane, that plane’d be a debris slick inside of two minutes, and it also seems safe to assume that a boat full of zombies would be fairly easy to see coming. Really the only way the virus could spread would be through the Chunnel, and do you honestly think that France would be welcoming fleeing Britons with open arms? Please. Chirac would be manning the barricades himself to keep them out if he had to, swinging a baguette and waving a TotalFinaElf flag.

7) This isn’t a Post-Apocalyptic Arts lesson so much as it’s a Film Stuides Lesson: Anyone who refers to any movie of any genre as “a genre-busting vision” is an asshole who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. If a movie of a particular genre is good, it hasn’t “busted” the genre or “transcended” the genre or any other dopey pseudoeducated cliche–it IS the genre, insofar as it’s the best the genre has to offer. So please, horror film snobs, sick that in your pipe made out of a severed human head and smoke it.

(I’m a little defensive about horror films, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

That said, our foursome’s protracted run-in with the military hits the usual notes of “it’s not the zombies who are the worst thing imaginable, it’s selfish greedy establishment types.” Not a bad lesson, even if it’s one taught (with a great deal of last-minute expectation-reversing panache) by Night of the Living Dead and countless other horror films. Still, they do it well here, throwing in a Deliverance-esque transformation from mild-mannered “this can’t be happening” type to stone-cold killer to boot. Also, when was the last time you saw a zombie movie in which the main characters’ survival hinged on one of them breaking into someplace, as opposed to keeping the zombie out? (Innovation #3!) And it’s also worth noting that, particularly during the final chase through the military’s compound, it appears that the zombies have no heightened sense of hearing, smell, or miscellaneous ability to “sense” living humans nearby–they’ve got to find them the old-fashioned human way, i.e. with the five senses the good Lord gave ’em. Innovation #4!

Back to the military aspect: Much of the success of this final section of the film owes to the strength of actor Christopher Eccleston’s performance. It’s one of the strongest in the film (along with the almost painfully sympathetic Frank, played by Brendan Gleeson). Eccleston, who portrays the ranking officer in the military unit that takes our heroes in, was the pivotal character in Boyle’s Shallow Grave. His performance in that film was rivetingly Gollum-esque, a chillingly grotesque demonstration of the outcome of keeping secrets. Here, though, he’s a model of reserve and polish. Far from “going native,” Eccleston’s Major acts as officers are supposed to act–sacrificing everything, even, perhaps, his own morality, for what he honestly believes to be the good of his men. It’s knowing that the Major, at heart, just might not be such a bad person that makes him so effective as a villain.

It should also be added that what might seem like yet another throwback to the liberal 1970s horror cycle–making the military the ultimate bad guys–has much of its P.C. aura deflated by the fact that the plague was unleashed by a bunch of do-gooding animal rights activists, who free a test chimp despite being told by one of the project’s scientists, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, that the monkey is infected with a lethal disease. In all fairness to the PETA goon squad, though, I think I too might be a bit skeptical if told that a chimp was infected with “rage.”

Actually, calling the chimp’s disease “rage,” as opposed to inventing some wonky faux-scientific explanation, made the film that much more effective for me. Citing emotion instead of bacteria as the source of apocalypse heightens our awareness that a moral law has been breached, not just some E.U. testing ban. And the film’s opening section, in which a chimp is forced, a la Axl Rose in the video for “Welcome to the Jungle,” to watch countless looped clips of horrific mob violence the world over added a chilling tone to the proceedings that folks of all political leanings could appreciate.

And speaking of politics, though it’s kind of sad that that’s what this is reduced to at this point, there’s a scen towards the beginning of the film in which Jim finds a kiosk covered with xeroxed “missing” posters made by families trying desperately to find lost loved ones in a country increasingly ravaged by the zombie infection. It spoke more directly to the chaos of confusion, pain, and loss in New York City after 9/11 than just about any work of art I’ve seen since the attacks occurred.

There are a few little plot flaws I’ll note briefly:

1) I understand that the army guys waited as long as they did to make their presence known to our foursome in order to establish that said foursome was harmless, and in so doing inadvertantly ensured that said foursome was reduced to a threesome. But given what we later learn of their motives, why not cut said foursome down to the appropriate twosome and be done with it?

2) C’mon–surely SOME radio and TV signals are still floating around Great Britain post-apocalypse, especially given what we come to learn about the worldwide situation by film’s end?

3) If the British government and/or military were faced with the kind of the decision the rest of the world apparently made about the UK, wouldn’t nuclear blackmail start looking like a good idea?

Aaaaallllll that being said, I’m concerned that my relatively flippant tone indicates that I thought this movie was “a roller-coaster ride” or “a popcorn-guzzling theme park attraction” or something else that people say about 2 Fast 2 Furious. It isn’t. It’s dark, dark, dark–it’s one of those movies that grabs the audience around the neck and forces them to watch unpleasant, horrible things happen to good, decent people. It’s a nastiness that the dopier aspects of the action-packed climax, or even the happy ending (for which I was unspeakably grateful, especially after the filmmakers naughtily teased us with several possible bad-ending red herrings, including one that was once again awfully close to Night of the Living Dead), can offset. It’s the kind of nastiness that makes for great horror.

Oh yeah, that’s right–it’s a zombie movie with a happy ending. Innovation Number Five!

* Political digression that might irritate you so please stop reading if you think it will because I want you to like this review of this movie, honest I do: Godspeed You Black Emperor and I have sort of had a falling out, after they titled the first huge song on their latest album, Yanqui U.X.O., “9-15-00,” in “honor” of the start date for the most recent (and most appallingly, senselessly violent) Palestinian intifada. To me, this is a bit like there being a group of people in the world of the film who are militantly pro-zombie. (Update: No, I don’t mean that all Palestinians are zombielike. Just the suicide belt brigade and the “not one Jew left” crew. I’m not an asshole, honestly!) It was a weird bit of cognitive dissonance only enhanced by the fact that once I left the Union Square theatre in which I saw the film, there was a “Free Palestine” demonstration going on in Union Square, in which folks played hackey-sack and danced around and waved signs and did other things that, of course, they’d never be able to do if they lived in a country run by Islamic Jihad. But hey, back to the light-hearted stuff, like killer zombie movies!

Do you think things are shaping up so that this whole Nigerian uranium mess is just a roundabout way of giving George Tenet his long-overdue pink slip?

Brief li’l comics roundup:

Bill Sherman reviews Trouble, the teen-romance series written by Mark Millar as an attempt to break into the teen-girl manga/Sweet Valley High market. I myself will just say that a story in which Millar can’t throw around words like “adamantium” and “black ops” and “I’d suit up and take out those terrorists myself, but I’ve got a date with Shannon Elizabeth” reveals a certain weakness in the dialogue department, and that a comic that ends with a line that’s basically a thirty-year-old in-joke is an unlikely candidate for jumpstarting a new audience. But it was a good idea to try, and the art by Mr. & Mrs. Terry Dodson is suitably sexy.

Jess Lemon at the Pulse reviews Alias, Brian Bendis’s bleak and evocative mature-readers ex-superheroine private-detective series. It’s somewhat controversial whether “Jess” is actually the complete comics newbie that “she” claims to be, but regardless, the review neatly summarizes how to make a comic new-reader-friendly. Bendis (with the help of the incredible artist Michael Gaydos) knows how it’s done.

NeilAlien ought to be pleased that Vikings, the upcoming grand-guignol Thor tale by Garth Ennis and Glenn Fabry, will apparently guest-star Dr. Strange. They may not be the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, but they come from the land of the ice and snow…

Also at the Pulse, there’s a nice little article about Battle Royale, the genuinely fucked-up manga about a dystopian future Japan in which classes of 9th graders are forced to kill each other gladiator-style in a Running Man-esque TV program. This is the first manga I’ve really ever read, and I’m enjoying it, even more so because it was printed right-to-left which makes it this weird head-trip to read.

Finally, yesterday Dirk Deppey gave his most well-reasoned argument yet against superhero comics and movies. Conceding that the genre is capable of greatness, he simply argues that this means there’s all the more reason to call superhero crap “crap.” He’s right, of course, even if he’s being way too hard on the really cool X2 movie. It’s also important to remember that the superhero crap chokes out EVERYTHING good, superhero and non-superhero alike. I think we all realize we’re at the point where when you try to tell your in-laws, for example, about a comic like Blankets, for example, the first thing out of their mouths is, “Wait, it’s a comic, but not about superheroes?” People are hardly aware such comics even exist. That ain’t good for anyone.

If things have been slow for you here in the realm of All Too Flat, it’s because my compatriots have been garnering attention from some pretty high-falutin’ sources lately. The Astor Cube prank was noticed by the illustrious Gawker, and the Crossing Man prank received kudos from none other than Dave Barry!

(And, uh, a site called Sensible Erection lent a hand. So to speak.)

Anyway, the Cube prank is now #18 on Blogdex. Huge!

So, here it is: Blog About Iran Day, and I find myself with little to say. Except this:

If you run a country, and you put gigantic portraits and statues of yourself throughout that country, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and your political platform invokes the terms “hate” or “death,” YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and you treat women like cattle, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and you operate under the assumption that God wants you to kill civilians, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and you believe you are in possession of The Truth, and that that Truth is so important that you are allowed to imprison, torture, and murder those who don’t share belief in that Truth, YOU WILL FALL.

If you run a country, and your main goal is to fight like hell to keep that country from having anything remotely resembling a healthy, happy, free future, YOU WILL FALL.

This I believe.

For more information on Iran, including the threatened Tiannemen Square-style massacre of studetns that the government has promised in order to quash planned demonstrations today, please visit Jeff Jarvis.

I’m starting to get a handle on fellow comics/politics blogger Franklin Harris–he’s an, I dunno, supralibertarian. I’ll admit that this is something of an… odd concept to me. I’ll plead I.L.I. (Ivy League Ignorance) on this one: At Yale, political belief systems tended towards old-money Republicanism (veering off into advocacy of a reinstated monarchy) or white-guilt liberalism (veering off into People’s Republic of Berkeley communism). Libertarians were few and far between, and though most everyone had libertarian leanings, they tended to be along the lines of “end the drug war, legalize the weed, no censorship, no Big Brother surveillance” etc. That’s certainly my viewpoint at any rate.

Point is, Franklin mildly took me to task over my ripping of Pat Buchanan’s pro-Confederacy stand. Franklin argues that putting the issue of slavery aside, the Confederate states had every right to secede from the Union, and Lincoln’s victory in the Civil War was some sort of might-makes-right blow to the Constitution.

I can see where the argument comes from, but to be honest, it just sounds like so much legalistic nonsense to me. It seems nuts to put “state’s rights,” i.e. the rights of a concept involving boundaries and official birds and flowers and whatnot called a State, before the rights of the people living in them–in this case, the slaves. I know, I know, the Civil War wasn’t started because of slavery, it was because the economy of the North would tank without the South and because advocates of a strong federal government didn’t want to set a precedent for secession, yeah yeah yeah. But in the end, if the South had succeeded in securing its “rights” from the North, you’d have ended up with some creepy militaristic apartheid state occupying the lower half of North America. Blecch. I’m simply not going to get too exercised about the unconstitutionality of an action that freed millions and millions of people and put an end to one of the most appalling practices in human history, particularly when that unconstiutionality only adversely affected the “rights” of an invisible picket fence.

This argument reminds me of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s comments in Spin about the war in Iraq. Regardless of “this particular maniac,” said Thom in reference to Saddam Hussein, the laws and rules of the UN must not be thwarted by the U.S. & the U.K. Putting aside Thom’s ridiculously rose-colored view of the UN (when has it ever solved a conflict? when did it ever operate independently of the vested interests of its member states, in particular the US and the USSR?), he was apparently putting the “rights” of the imaginary entity known as “Iraq” ahead of those of the real live people living inside Iraq. This just seems like a tremendous abdication of responsibility to me–to say nothing of the fact that, from a libertarian perspective, Iraq (and for that matter the Confederacy) was one of the governments most intrusive into the lives of the human beings living therein.

What you’re left with, it seems to me, is the view that everyone else on Earth can go scratch, because my libertarian ideals prevent me from allowing my government to ever do anything to help them in any way. Again, blecch!

I myself believe that the ultimate arbiter of moral AND political rightness or wrongness is the degree to which people are allowed to choose, for themselves, how they want to live. This stems pretty directly from the occult teachings of Aleister Crowley and the pseudophilosophical prank religion of Discordianism, but I’m not as mean-spirited as the former nor as irresponsibly goofy as the latter: I believe that every man and woman was put on this Earth to achieve something, that it’s up to them to puzzle out, and that any time you do something that impedes people from figuring out what to do on their own (from lying and cheating all the way up to murder and totalitarianism) you’re doing something you morally oughtn’t. That’s where my libertarian streak comes from–it isn’t up to the government to decide what God you should worship, for instance–but it’s limited by the fact that, stemming from this belief, I try to take every issue on a case-by-case basis, so I never get hamstrung, as I believe Franklin has, by the kind of thinking that has you arguing for the Confederacy on a technicality.

It’s good to find out, every now and then, that I’m still a liberal at heart.

Hey!

Here’s a nice long interview with writer/artist Erik Larsen about his odds-defying comic book series, Savage Dragon. This exciting, smart, completely unpredictable book has been turning superhero-story conventions and cliches on their ears for about 110 issues at this point. I haven’t been crazy about the last few (a lot of anti-New Marvel injokes–alright, Erik, we get it: You don’t like Brian Bendis!), but the series has given me some of my all-time favorite comics moments, and (along with the sporadic output of Frank Miller) kept my interest in comics alive (if on life support) during several years away from the racks. Do yourself a favor and pick up an issue. It’s delightful!