No, not the Coldplay song. Bill Sherman’s doing quite a good job at cataloguing the abuse of that particular band’s music. (With a little help from yours truly, of course….)

A bit of background for the non-fanboys (hint: If you don’t know what “fanboy” means, then this part of this entry is for you): A while back there was something of a shitstorm over the cover for Marvel’s upcoming teen romance comic, Trouble. Written by the clever (if occasionally insufferable) Mark Millar, the book’s cover features an actual photograph of two bikini-clad teenage girls. But as Dirk Deppey points out and Jim Henley backs up (they’re both long entries, so you’re welcome to take my word for it), the controversy, such as it was, stemmed solely from the fact that the comics fanboy community automatically associates “bikinis” with “Vampirella,” which is to say with “comics that give me a big boner.” Underage girls in bikinis, then and therefore, equals child pornography. But had these human caricatures ever browsed through the young adult section at their local Barnes & Noble, they’d have seen dozens of similarly themed and targeted books with precisely the same sort of covers. Marvel’s intent, believe it or not, wasn’t to titilate–it was to fit into a preexisting market, one that fanboys and the retailers/enablers didn’t recognize or understand.

But then there’s this. It’s the cover for the proposed second printing of the first issue of Trouble, in case the first print run sells out in comics shops due to unanticipated demand. It features an illustration of the book’s teenage female protagonists (by fanboy fave Frank Cho) that can only–and only too aptly–be described as “titilating.”

I don’t necessarily have much of a problem with Cho’s art: Unlike many comics cognoscenti who think he’s an uninspired rip-off-artist hack, I actually the pin-up girls that are his artistic bread and butter are kinda sexy. But personally he seems unsavory, having teamed up on several occasions with the unfunny Scott Kurtz to let their collective “we’re deliberately ignorant of art- and alt-comix!” flag fly in a series of appalling message-board flame wars and inside-joke-ridden gag strips. (We’ve all experienced the occasional snobbish excesses of alternative, indie, and underground comics, but to assert, as they did, that all altcomix are pretentious unreadable garbage is to be so self-evidently stupid as to nearly preclude a rejoinder. It’s reminscent of those conservatives who, in response to an admittedly annoying diatribe from the Left, proudly flaunt the fact that they waste a lot of gasoline in their SUVs, or that they just ate a really great piece of veal, or that they love smoking cigarettes, or that they find the Diceman funny. Folks, the Left may be annoying at times, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and all that stuff is still hella stupid.)

Sorry for the digression–the point is that Cho’s art is all about the tease, and using it as the cover for a teenage-girl romance in an effort to appeal to precisely the same fanboy and retailer demographic that’s the target for his wank-fodder cheesecake is all kinds of inappropriate. Marvel has to prove that it knows the difference between using mature themes appropriately to tell good stories and using them inappropriately to sell good stories (or worse, bad ones).

It’s official: Dirk Deppey (currently in contention for the title of The Person Seanblog Talks Most About Next To The Missus) has declared the comics blogosphere mature!

QUOTE: “There have been comics-related weblogs for some time now, of course, but the collected group seems to be finally getting big enough, and complex enough, to take seriously as a sort of ecosystem of ideas. We’re starting to see more and more real writing on the subject, from a wider variety of viewpoints — an environment that political weblogs take for granted, but into which comics weblogs are still growing. What started out as a set of isolated rants seems to be turning into a genuine, multi-tiered set of conversations, a state of affairs I’ve long wanted to see.”

Naturally, what the Comics Journal’s online presence praises, Dr. Strange’s online presence malaises. (Was that too much of a stretch?) In a characteristically grumpy post (that’s since been largely deleted) NeilAlien begs to differ:

QUOTE: “Slapping ourselves on the back? Sounds like a peak. Watch out. Years yearning for ecosystem, and then everywhere it looks like echo-system….Another website doing reviews? Another fanboy riot over something Marvel’s done? Another Journalista Supplement peeing on our leg and insisting that it’s raining?…Isn’t there something more important to do?”

Much as I (preparing obscure Bowie reference–ed.) love the Alien (obscure Bowie reference away!–ed), I’ve got to side with Dirk on this one. First of all, only at the Comics Journal website could a half-graf arguing nothing more than “you can have a decent exchange of ideas about comics online at this point” be considered “slapping ourselves on the back.”

Second, Dirk’s right on about the “genuine, mult-tiered set of conversations.” Witness his epic blogstrosity “The Trouble with Marvel,” which spawned long, thoughtful responses and rejoinders from NeilAlien, Bill Sherman, Franklin Harris, Jim Henley, and myself (more than once!). The debate’s been entertaining, illuminating, and (dare I say it) has the potential to be helpful to Marvel should a company man take the time to wade through it. Similar “blogversations” took place over Nick Barrucci’s “call to arms” and Mark Waid’s firing from the writing chores of Fantastic Four. (I’m tired of hyperlinking, but sniff around any of the aforementioned folks’ sites and you’re bound to see stuff about those stories.)

In fact, I’ll see Dirk and raise him some back-slaps: I submit that without his excellent comics weblog Journalista, the maturation he spoke of would not have come to pass.

Over in the political blogosphere, debates and discussions had gone on for years, but it took a) the explosion of interest in political discourse and theory after 9/11; b) the entrenchment of blogosphere superstars like Sullivan, Reynolds, Marshall, and Kaus–each of whom almost everybody on every side of a given issue visits at least semi-regularly–to establish the blogosphere as a viable method of both holding a discussion and influencing that discussion’s direction.

It’s unclear what, if anything, has been the comics industry’s 9/11 (not in terms of tragedy, but in terms of ushering in a new era). It seems to me that it’s been a combination of factors: a wave of hugely successful comics-inspired films; the manga explosion; the infiltration of bookstores; the mainstream success of alternative books like Jimmy Corrigan, Palestine, From Hell and Ghost World; the “New Marvel,” as chacterized by the business and editorial decisions of Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada and the sales and critical success of creators like Kevin Smith, Grant Morrison, Brian Bendis and Mark Millar; the wave of edgy-mainstream writers and artists at companies like Oni, Image, and DC’s Vertigo and Wildstorm imprints (all of which have been used as ersatz farm teams by Marvel); an increase in the amount, quality, popularity, and economic feasibility of webcomics; a post 9/11 jump in interest in non-fiction and political comics, from Joe Sacco to Marjane Satrapi to Aaron McGruder to Tom Tomorrow; increasing cross-pollination between the underground/alternative and mainstream/genre comics scenes; a generalized feeling that a new boom (of whatever kind) is just over the horizon. All in all, a lot of people feel that it’s an exciting time to be involved in comics, and they want to talk about it.

But, and keep in mind I’m speaking as a relative newcomer to the scene, legions of potential comicsphere centers-of-gravity were/are doomed to failure for a number of reasons. The outspoken Warren Ellis‘s legendary but now-defunct forum seems (to one who wasn’t there for it) to have been popular and important, but also to have too easily devolved into a cult of personality. The same could be said of other big niche-oriented sites, from Sequential Tart (its female-centric approach is refreshing, but perhaps lends itself too readily to simple-minded and unnecessary sparring matches with the kind of people who think “Sequential Sluts” is the height of wit) to Alan David Doane’s sites (earnest and articulate but often overbearing, his niche, basically, is “people who agree with me”–didn’t I hear he once kicked people out who refused to pledge allegiance to James Kochalka’s Sketchbook Diaries?). Sites and messboards devoted to particular creators or companies are, needless to say, either focused too directly on their individual output or dominated too strongly by their administrative and syntactic idiosyncracies. The vaugely Kevin Smith-related Movie Poop Shoot is thoroughgoing but incorrigably silly (along the lines of its spiritual forebear, Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool News; the assorted sites associated with Rich “Tommy/Gutter” Johnston rise and fall with the strength of his latest gossipy piss-take. News sites like The Pulse and Newsarama are useful, but their message boards are pretty much useless as a medium of idea exchange, dominated as they are by people with Wolverine-derived screen names shouting about their most recent plans to lead a boycott of Marvel until they revive Psylocke. More enlightening but equally frustrating is the Comics Journal’s message board, whose constituency, some of the smartest and most well-read–as well as the most opinionated–comics fans on the Internet, is (as is readily apparent to anyone who spends five minutes there) as much a curse as a blessing.

Enter Journalista. Though I’m a tyro with the Internet in general and the comicsphere in particular, it seems to me that Journalista fills a substantial void in that online community: It’s an intelligent but comprehensible, opinionated but non-partisan, personality-driven but not personality-dominated, authoritative but not minutiae-obsessed clearinghouse for comics news and thought. It’s the Instapundit of the comicsphere, if you will. And like it (as I do) or not (as NeilAlien might), if the rewarding discussion surrounding “The Trouble with Marvel” is any indication, it’s going to be the comic-biz blogosphere’s agenda-setter for the forseeable future.

Most folks who read this blog probably read a lot of other blogs, and therefore know that some genuinely important things are happening in Iran right now (despite, naturally, European claims that everything would probably be better if everyone would just shut up about it). Bloglord Andrew Sullivan has declared July 9th a sort of “Blog About Iran” day, in which the blogosphere will flex its collective muscles in an attempt to publicize the increasingly powerful demonstrations against the ayatollahs and for democracy in that country. It’s unbelievable to me that this story isn’t getting any attention in the major news media; the hope is that after July 9th said media (consisting in large part of people who read blogs) won’t be able to ignore the issue anymore.

So come the 9th I’ll talk a lot about Iran and the brave students and professors who are fighting one of the most odious governments in modern history. But till then, try and picture what the world, with any luck, might be like this time next year. It’s well within the realm of possibility that in the space of about two years, the Taliban, an al Qaeda with genuine international reach, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist-fascist regime, and the ayatollahs’ Islamic fundamentalist theocracy will all be in the dustbin of history. How freaking bitchin’ is that?

Right on, Canada!

Wow, extending a basic human right to gay humans! What will they think of next?

Here amongst the All Too Flat Family, there’s a new installment of ADDTF’s sister blog, Autobiographically Too Flat. Kennyb talks about art galleries, AC adapters, and Scrabble, but you should read it anyway.

Thanks to someone I can’t remember, I discovered this site, dedicated to counting down the days (the endless, endless days) between now and the release of The Return of the King. Each day there’s a new Tolkien quote. Can’t go wrong there.

Kevin Parrott offers a two-part (here and here; part three coming soon), um, analysis of comic-book convention culture. I think a quick read will reveal that there is nothing not to love about comic-book conventions. If you can’t enjoy the literally incredible cross-section of humanity present at these things, I don’t know what to tell you.

Finally, I read the following blind item in today’s Page Six:

Which talent agent who enjoys coke-fueled all-male orgies in his basement dungeon fired his longtime caterer when he learned one of her waiters was HIV-positive?”

…and I just thought it bears repeating that in this business, the description “enjoys coke-fueled all-male orgies in his basement dungeon” couldn’t even begin to narrow down the possibilities of who this guy is.

Instapundit offers a round-up of bloggers who are wondering aloud why the anti-ayatollah protests in Iran aren’t garnering more attention on the Left. The answer, it seems to me, is because a democratic revolution in Iran is something George W. Bush wants, and therefore it must be opposed by “liberals.” It’s this aspect of the post-9/11 debate that’s depressed me more than any other: the notion that the Left is incapable of supporting drives for even the most fundamental human rights if that means they’d end up on the same side of a given issue as the Bushies.

It’s been brought to my attention (by me) that the link I had in my blogroll to Phoebe Gloeckner’s home page wasn’t working. So I fixed it. For those who don’t know, Phoebe is the incredible artist and writer of the books A Child’s Life and Other Stories and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and in my humble opinion one of the three or four best cartoonists in the world. (Hi, Phoebe!)

Phoebe and many other comix luminaries (including the similarly awesome Nick Bertozzi and Jordan Crane) will be appearing this weekend at MoCCA, the big festival/flea-market alternative-comics extravaganza. It’s this Sunday, June 22nd, from 11am-7pm at the Puck Building, 293 Lafayette Street in Manhattan. There’s so much good stuff to buy it’s ridiculous. Go and enjoy it.

If there’s any justice, this won’t be the last rear-ending this felonious sack of garbage will be involved in. Have fun in prison, Your Holiness!

I’ve long insisted that Liz Phair is actually some audioanimatronic thingamjig cooked up by a bizarre conspiracy between the imagineers at Disney and the critics at Spin magazine to create the perfect 1990s indie power-pop star. (Which is not to say that “Fuck and Run” isn’t an amazing song–it is. The little ditty they sing in the Hall of Presidents isn’t so bad either.) But I guess she’s human after all, because like other human female musicians (Mariah Jewel Britney Christina) she’s apparently felt the need to get attention by stripping down and slutting up. I know, I know, she’s always been highly sexual, that’s great. But on her new album she’s enlisted “hot production team The Matrix” (responsible for putting the “p.u.” in “punk” rocker Avril Lavigne (who isn’t terrible, certainly not worth getting all worked up over, but still, come on)), dresses like a girl in a 50 Cent video and sings a song called “H.W.C.” Let’s see if we can figure out what that stands for, shall we?

It’s the fountain of youth

Give me your hot, white come.

She also goes on at some length about how frequent dousings have cleared up her complexion and made her hair moisturous or luminesque or whatever the Clairol commercials are calling it these days. All together now: That’s entertainment!

I don’t know about all this. I’ve never been a big Liz Phair fan because of all the indie-snob attention she’s garnered, but The Missus loves her. And I’ll admit that that’s kind of a hot thing to sing about (ultimately, is it any different than “Brown Sugar! How come you taste so good?”). But as Amy often points out, the line between using porn cliches and conventions to critique or parody porn cliches and conventions and using them to actually just put a hip veneer on plain ol’ porn is often so thin as to be nonexistent.

The scariest movie I ever saw was a bootleg copy of The Blair Witch Project. I’m sure I’ve told this story at some point, but at the time I was working for Troma, of Toxic Avenger & Sgt. Kabukiman fame. They met the Blair Witch guys at Cannes and the BWs were big Troma fans, so they gave them a few copies of the movie. I watched it with my friend and fellow horror nut Davey Oil, knowing only that it was supposed to be very scary, and that it was a mockumentary kind of deal.

I have literally never been so scared in all my life. Dave and I just sat there after it was over for about an hour (we finished it at 2 in the morning or something) because we were too frightened to leave the room. My bathroom has one of those fan deals, so you can’t hear what’s going on outside, so when I had to go afterwards I made Dave stand at the door and talk to me so I knew he was still out there. When I drove him home we were afraid of the back of the car.

That’s how scary that goddamn movie was before a) the constant hype spoiled people’s expectations and b) they added in the bit about the Witch-inspired killer making one kid stand in the corner while the other was killed. Believe me, without that little condescending post-production addition, the movie’s final image was maybe the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen. When a couple weeks later we showed the movie to a bunch of friends at an upstate cabin, at least one of them was so upset by it she got mad at the filmmakers for making “emotional pornography.” I don’t think I’ll ever buy the DVD of the movie because I think I saw it in the way God intended.

Perhaps all this explains why I reacted so strongly (nightmares and all) to The Ring–I know the power of a scary bootlegged VHS tape.

Courtesy of Blogcritic Phillip Winn comes this link to a description of some of the footage added back into the extended edition DVD of The Two Towers. I think Kennyb put it best when he said: SO HUGE.

Dirk Deppey has posted a director’s-cut version of his five-part essay on Marvel Comics’s effort to break into the bookstore market and thereby the mainstream (or vice versa). I’ve already touched on a few aspects of this thoughtful and thought-provoking series, (as well as some general questions and concerns about Marvel’s sundry attempts at innovation) here, here, here, and here. .

To that I’ll add that NeilAlien’s take is excellent for several reasons, not the least of which is that he quotes me (this is the first time this has ever happened outside the confines of a criminal proceeding). The Palindromic One picks up my mantra that the whole “no one reads comics because they’re so disproportionately dominated by superheroes” idea just doesn’t hold water: after all, who’s helping all these superhero movies make all this money? It’s not just the people who are buying X-Treme X-Men, that’s for sure. I know I belabor this point, but it’s important for comics pundits to realize that hating superhero stories is just as unrepresentative a mindset vis a vis the world at large as is loving superhero stories to the exclusion of everything else; both are the twisted products of living in the hermetically-sealed world of comics fandom.

Neil’s also right to point out that even if Marvel’s market share in bookstores is dwarfed by its market share in comics shops, its increase in the last year is cause for celebration. After all, Marvel hasn’t been at this very long (not really); moreover, the businessmen who run the company* surely don’t believe they can replicate Marvel’s dominance of fanboy-run comics shops in the much larger and more cosmopolitan world of bookstores, even within the graphic-novel subset of those bookstores. Their goal is probably to compete on a fairly even keel with the big manga publishers, Viz and Tokyopop, and to do that they’ll need to change readership habits among teenagers who go to bookstores but not comics shops, and that’s going to take a while. So far, though, so good.

However, this is not to minimize the amount of work that’s left to be done for the big American comics publishers. By way of anecdotal evidence, I offer my Father’s Day Weekend trip to the local Borders. As usual I found myself in the graphic novel section, and I noticed it had been reorganized in the last couple of weeks. Of the three bookshelves devoted to graphic novels, fully two of them were stocked with beautifully organized and alphebatized manga collections, offering the complete line of nearly every popular title. Crammed onto the last bookshelf was everything else–Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, Fantagraphics, Pantheon–all smushed together in no discernible order or pattern. Brand spankin’ new X-Men hardcovers were next to Dan Clowes collections were next to a random installment of Justice League.

Part of the problem here appears to be trade dress. Lined up one after the other, with uniform spine designs and easy-to-follow numbering and titleing, the manga collections simply look nicer on the shelf. Marvel has been a johnny-come-lately to uniform trade dress, largely because up until recently their policy for what gets collected and reprinted, not to mention when this happens, was catch-as-catch-can. Make the books look like they belong on a bookshore shelf, and not only will the employees take more care with putting them in order, customers will be more likely to give them a look.

*Note: The above used to include a line about “business men who run the country.” It should have read “businessmen who run the company,” as in Marvel. However, this is not to say that the error was really wrong, when you think about it.

I used to have a blog called In the Court of the Crisco Bandit. That’s all over now, but occasionally I’m gonna cannibalize stuff from it for ADDTF consumption. Here’s a review I wrote of King Crimson’s album Red. It’s good, is what I’m saying.

One of the great pleasures my post-Velvet Goldmine (the film that changed my musical life) explorations into the weirder side of classic rock have afforded me is stumbling across albums that actually meet the cliched criterion of sounding ten years ahead of their time. The Stooges, the MC5, the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music and (my hero) Bowie all had their fair share. A trip to my local used record store (the fantabulous Empire Discs) led me to another one: King Crimson, and their 1974 guitar onslaught Red.

Lead guitarist and mastermind Robert Fripp should be familiar to anyone who’s heard his often imitated, never duplicated soaring-siren guitar sound on Bowie’s “Heroes”; he’s also responsible for one of my top-five all-time favorite guitar solos, the relentless high-end trainwreck in the middle of Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire.” In addition, he’s credited with coining the term “dinosaur rock”–to refer to his own band, impressively enough.

But those of you who were already familiar with Fripp’s work don’t need me to tell you that in an oddly conservative era for solo-driven music, the guy was (to nigh-unforgivably understate things) something else. From start to finish, Red is a rhythmic and sonic assault on the ears, as licks and meters intersect, divide, and pile on top of one another with all the weird geometric mysticism of Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. Bassist/vocalist John Wetton and drummer Bill Bruford provide a durable, mercurial rhythm section eminently capable of carrying Fripp’s riffs (kicking and screaming, it would seem) from one weird-time-signature section of each song to the next. Yet for all the non-grooviness, the album grooves; grooves in an inescapable, evil, “uh oh i know where this is going and it’s going to be scary” way. The effect is one that Tool (who toured with the Crimson last year) have harnessed to great effect time and again. (And even Bowie’s non-Fripp late 70’s work reflects the influence. Compare the structure of Red’s instrumental title track to that of Low’s opening instrumental, “Speed of Life,” for example.)

I’ve often seen the word “joyless” used by reviewers when they don’t like an album. However, to call Red joyless is to pay it a great compliment. This is serious, angry, strangely (almost existentially) frightening music. It means business.

When I first graduated from college I worked as a P.A. on various films and TV shows for about half a year. A P.A. is a “production assistant,” a Latin phrase meaning “indentured servant.” Like everyone on a film or TV crew, PAs work 12-14-16 hour days and run around like crazy people. Unlike everyone else on a film or TV crew, they do absolutely nothing creative and spend most of their time getting bagels, making copies, shuttling people from place to place, and picking up stuff at Home Depot. And oh yeah, they don’t get paid.

One of the films I PA’d on wasn’t so bad, because it was a micro-budget digital-video indie film, and NO ONE was getting paid. The film was called (at the time) Mondo Cruel, or Cruel World, and it told the story of two Hispanic brothers from Washington Heights and the various trials and tribulations the older brother (an ex-con) goes through to keep the younger brother (who just graduated second in his class from high school) away from their father (I won’t spoil the film, but there’s good reason for this). This was the first film I’d worked on since graduation, so it was a ton of fun seeing how all this stuff worked, even if most of it consisted of the skeleton crew that made it (myself included) riding around in the back of a cargo van, pretending to have permits from the Mayor’s Office for Film and TV, and marveling at the fact that no one above 100th St. gets their dogs neutered. It was a long hot summer and a challenging, involving film.

Now it’s called Manito, after the younger brother, and it’s apparently getting all sorts of good reviews and did well at Sundance and Tribeca. Hell, Slate is writing about it. I haven’t seen it myself, and now I’m all excited to do so. It’ll take me back to one of the only worthwile PA jobs I ever did–worthwhile in the sense that I was part of something good, and worked for good people. I wish them well.

(PS: Yes, Franky G. was a big dude.)

(PPS: Astute viewers of Manito might be able to spot The Missus in the graduation party scene. Hint: She’s the non-boriqua.)

A while back I mentioned that my boss’s assortment of action figures could convincingly be the touring company for a Cats revival. Looking around the office now I see that some additions have been made that might offset this somewhat. Butch-as-hell Orion and Darkseid, from Jack Kirby’s New Gods saga, are now here, and so is Batman. Of course, they’re all still in their boxes, instead of out and proud (so to speak) like their fellow figures. And Batman comes in a pack with Robin, who I’m pretty sure I saw attempting to teach the Dark Knight the cowboy dance from Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” video. But finally, and somewhat disturbingly, there’s an Eminem action figure, who’s been making threatening gestures in Mon-El’s direction. Green Lantern and Cyclops might have to get Stonewall on his ass.

So my Fergless weekend has proceeded much as predicted: With much eating of pizza and watching of movies with vomit in them. (For those who don’t know, the missus is emetophobic. The slightest glimpse of vomiting, dry-heaving, retching etc. in a film and she goes fetal for about half an hour. It’s unpleasant.)

Re: The Ring–holy moses! This is a frightening, frightening movie. Please do yourself a favor and watch it in the dark by yourself–boy, what a great time you’ll have! Dead faces in mirrors, bizarre noises, frightening phone calls–it’s a recipe for having a blast when you’re all by your lonesome!

Yeah, it scared the crap out of me. Which of course meant that I was delighted, since I am an enormous horror aficionado. I wrote my senior thesis on the types of imagery in horror films that I feel are the most effectively horrifying (as opposed to gross or jump-out-and-scare-you startling), and it’s as if The Ring’s filmmakers simply read it and applied everything I said. Plus, for a horror buff it’s just a smorgasbord: I caught allusions to The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Twin Peaks and Eraserhead (and Scream, but hey, they can’t all be winners*). This is a geniunely frightening film, and there aren’t a lot of those anymore.

Case in point: Ginger Snaps, the other movie I watched this Fergless weekend. It’s actually pretty bright: it’s an indie film that uses werewolves as a metaphor for female adolescent sexuality, menstruation, etc. A sharp concept is undercut by the fact that the filmmakers don’t seem to know whether they want the main characters to be sympathetic or not; you can practically feel their indecision as the film careens from mood to mood and ratchets up the violence with seemingly very little regard for pacing or believability. It has its moments–mostly clever ones rather than scary ones–and the monster’s behavior could compare favorably to Clive Barker’s monumental short story “Rawhead Rex” (in which the titular character is basically the final word in “monster runs amok” genre stories), but by the end of the interminable climax, you really don’t know what you’re supposed to be feeling, nor do you care.

Oh hey, she’s back! Hooray! Cold pizza for everybody!

*I actually liked Scream when I first saw it–which was at a drive-in with famed dopey-movie aficionado Kennyb, so that explains a lot. It was clever and scary, but it doesn’t stick in your mind any more than, say, Men in Black, and it was a terrible thing to base half a decade of horror movies on. Thank God for Shyamalan.)

Superhero comics do a lot of things well; depicting criminals realistically isn’t one of them. Multiracial vest-sporting gangs, bad attempts at dialect that consist primarily of leaving the d’s off the word “and” and the g’s off anything ending in “ing,” Mafia stereotypes that involve grandiose ring-kissing and boss-of-bosses crap that never actually happens–it’s what I’ve come to expect from all but the best costumed crimefighter comics that take a break from supervillains to delve into the underworld. So I picked up Kingpin #1, the first issue of a new series about the lord of organized crime in the New York City patrolled by Spider-Man and Daredevil, with expectations lower than the odds that Paulie Walnuts will live through Season 5 of The Sopranos.

I like the character–he currently makes regular, compelling appearances in Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s ongoing Daredevil title, alternately menacing and protecting his horn-headed archenemy in a pulp-fiction pas de deux. And it’s not that I doubted the talent involved in this particular Kingpin project. Writer Bruce Jones, the oldest “new kid” on the Marvel Comics block, has reinvigorated The Incredible Hulk, turning it into something creepy, mysterious, edgy and (get this) sexy–all while hardly ever showing the Hulk himself (it’s the threat of turning into the Hulk, Jones realized, that makes the life of Bruce Banner so interesting). Layout artist Sean Phillips turned in the best artwork for Uncanny X-Men in recent memory, while finisher Klaus Janson is rightly renowned for his legendary Daredevil and Batman collaborations with Frank Miller (the Daredevil books featured the Kingpin quite prominently), as well as his strong solo work (I particularly like his adaptation of Clive Barker’s best short story, “In the Hills, the Cities,” found in the recent collected edition of the Barker anthology comic Tapping the Vein). Nor was I echoing the kvetching of the continuity wonks, who’ve complained loud and long that the Kingpin series, taking place as it does during a time when both the Kingpin and his web-spinning nemesis are just starting out in their respective careers, is playing fast and loose with the strictly-monitored timeline of the Marvel Universe (in all his appearances up to this point, Kingpin appears to be much older than Peter Parker). I’ll buy anything if it gives me a good story and tells it with impressive art–but this was a crime comic set in a superhero world, and experience has taught me that instead of the usual comics-title superlatives (Amazing, Uncanny, Invincible, Ultimate), that kind of comic might as well be tagged with the adjective “Inessential.”

It’s great news, then, that the creators of this comic devoted to the meanest, most murderous bastard ever to cross paths with the tights-wearing set know that, like revenge, the Kingpin is a dish best served cold. This is a crisp, gritty, brutal book, indulging in no honor-among-thieves cliches and getting straight to the heart for whom power is an end in itself.

Still known as plain old Willie Fisk at the time of this story, the title character is an enormous, bald side of beef navigating the dangerous intersection of street gangs and the Five Mafia Families of New York. This first issue concerns his and his newfound lieutenants’ attempts to simultaneously wrest control of the gangs from the Mafia, consolidate the gangs they take over, and expand their drug-dealing territory into white areas of the city. To say much more would be to spoil nasty twists that surprised even a veteran what-passes-for-surprise-in-superhero-comics predictor like me.

It’s not just the story that makes this debut issue so strong: the devil, as is his wont, is in the details. The stark, expressionistic tints employed by colorist Lee Loughridge play up the irrationality and violence of young Fisk’s world, and imbue the deceptively cartoonish Phillips/Janson artwork with menace. The imagery takes unexpected turns: with the flip of a page one can find oneself immersed in the sensual, pulpy eroticism that’s fast becoming one of Jones’s strongest suits. A brief cameo by Spider-Man is largely silent and appropriately eerie–after all, the intrusion of such a gaudily costumed, inhumanly powerful being into the mean streets would be genuinely disconcerting to Fisk, and should be so to us as well. Even the layouts of panels on the page and objects within the panels, facets of comic art too often neglected in superhero books, are smart: After you read the book, take a good look at the first & last pages and see what they alone tell you about the man called Kingpin. As it stands now, I’m willing to learn as much about him as this bunch is willing to teach.

Just got an advance copy of a new Killing Joke album in the mail. As if the words “new Killing Joke album” weren’t surprising enough, who should turn up on drums but Dave Grohl! I guess Martin Atkins has thoroughly burned his bridges at this point.

Blogger Johnny Bacardi (working permalinks pending–try the home page) points out, in a recent round-up of some vinyl records he’s been listening to, that Bootsy’s Rubber Band, P-Funk/JB’s bassist Bootsy Collins’s ’70’s side project, is fricking awesome. People, listen to the man: he’s right on the money. One of the finest funk records I’ve ever heard is the Rubber Band’s Live in Louisville 1978. The band taps into the cosmic groove so deeply on this record it’ll make your hair hurt. When the horns kick in at the end of “Very Yes”–send in the weapons inspectors, because that shit is THE BOMB.

Johnny also talks a bit about Roy Wood, which, as anyone who’s heard “The Ball Park Incident” will tell you, is always a good idea.

Man, but I’ve been prolific with them long reviews lately! I promise I’ll get back to the usual brief, stupid crap. For example, why was there an O.B. tampon plastic wrap-band thingee on the floor of the men’s room today?