* The Wizard/ToyFare fallout continues:

* Heidi MacDonald has another fine round-up of reactions and analysis, including a deeply unappealing self-evaluation of the company’s strengths from a company document. The bit about “we don’t have any of our own employees; we contract them through Wizard Entertainment” is Scott Rosenberg-level unpleasant.

* iFanboy’s Jason Wood walks us through the way that Wizard owner — actually, I’m not sure that covers it; at this point it seems safe to say that Gareb (and perhaps brother Stephen) and Wizard are effectively synonymous, like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails — Gareb Shamus assembled the shell company through which Wizard now manifests itself. Hmm, I wonder if Shamus’s previous enterprises have something on the ledgers that necessitates picking up stakes.

* On a more pleasant note, toy writer Poe Ghostal laments the demise of ToyFare, which in my experience is the one Wizard product no one ever complained about. And for good reason — it was very very good! I’m glad it will continue to exist in digital form.

* I’m about to write more about the “death” issue of Fantastic Four than I expected to. No spoilers, though, so don’t worry!

* As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been reading Jonathan Hickman’s run on FF, variously illustrated by Dale Eaglesham and Steve Empting, for some time now, for the simple reason that it’s good. Pairing Hickman with the Fantastic Four — not just Marvel’s oldest and most storied franchise, but the one constructed around distinct characters, and indeed around character dynamics, more than any other — is a great way to mitigate his tendency to make the “mad idea” king, as seen in his increasingly less impressive S.H.I.E.L.D. reimagining, a book that feels like some kind of experiment in eliminating character from the storytelling equation entirely. The art is meaty and solid, the pseudo-science is fun rather than merely dizzying, there’s lots of cool creatures and villains to fight or outwit, and of course there’s the recognizable and entertaining Thing, Human Torch, Mister Fantastic, and Invisible Woman (and Namor and Franklin and Valeria and Doctor Doom and Galactus) at the center of it all. So I was gonna read the death issue, #587, regardless. The hype didn’t bother me because, and I say this as someone who makes part of his living following comic book industry hype, there’s no such thing as inescapable comic book industry hype. If you choose to escape it, you can, even while you read the underlying books.

* So! I read the comic and it was a good comic just like the rest of Hickman’s FF comics have been. But I was quite surprised upon turning the final page that the hype machine had cranked up as high and hard as it had, given what I actually saw on the actual pages in question. Even given the transitory nature of superhero-comic deaths, this one — based on what we see and what we don’t see, based on what we know about how the franchise works in general and how Hickman’s take on it in particular, based on the fact that the series is about to start over with a new title and new numbering but its landmark, irresistible-to-marketing #600th issue is right around the corner — felt like a well-executed plot point in service of a larger, longer story much, much more than it felt like a “get me the Daily News on the horn, the people need to know!” pop-culture event.

* And interestingly, the book’s editor, Tom Brevoort, really isn’t pretending otherwise:

[Reader Question:] I think we’ve finally hit a point as a fanbase where a majority of the epople who actually read the books aren’t going “THIS DEATH WON’T LAST” and are instead going “How will the is change the status quo and lead to interesting stories for a while?”

[Brevoort:] Well, let’s hope so.

People aren’t even pretending that deaths will stick anymore; the choice isn’t between deaths that last and stunts that don’t, but between plot points that people care about and stunts they don’t, about stories assembled with care and skill versus meaningless cannon-fodder churn imposed from on high. Or as Hickman puts it:

The question is: Are we trying to have an honest, resonating beat within the telling of a story, or are we trying to shock the reader and score cheap points?

I think it’s a bad idea to completely devalue death in a genre built on the creation and solving of problems through violence, but if that ship has sailed, again, I think you could do a lot worse than treating death as Hickman has and as Ed Brubaker and Grant Morrison did before him: as a door you can open to explore parts of your characters and concepts you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

* But leave it to Tom Spurgeon to move past that silver lining and find a dark lining around it:

the takeaway may be that Marvel has helped create a market that limits the reward that used to be due better-than-usual work, and that drastic ways to goose interest and sales in such titles may be the only tools left to them if they want to move more copies.

Good work relies on gimmickry to get over, is the gist of it.

* Anyway, death was already a commonplace for the Fantastic Four: Bully and Douglas Wolk show us just how common.

* Moving on, Tom Brevoort hated, hated, hated this comic. Place your bets, folks!

* Justin Green has a blog! The Pulse!-reading teenager in me is freaking thrilled.

* Jeffrey Brown talks Incredible Change-Bots Two.

* Yet another name change for the Greg Pak/Fred Van Lente Hercules comic. I wonder how long they can Atlas this thing before it runs out of steam. A long time, I hope!

* I normally don’t go in for geeky “who should play so-and-so” casting speculation, but I’ll make an exception for A Song of Ice and Fire’s Brienne of Tarth. That’s a real challenge.

* Jeet Heer leads this piece on Dino Buzzati’s 1969 proto-graphic novel Poem Strip by saying its 2009 translation and republication hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Insofar as I’d never heard of it until reading Jeet’s piece, I’d have to agree. The cover is gorgeous and the two interior panels Jeet reproduces look like John Hankiewicz 45 years before the fact.

* You can watch this Bollywood Tamil killer-robot action sequence from Shankar’s Robot ironically if you want, but I’d kill to see action this intelligently choreographed and impressively staged (for what I’m sure was a relative pittance) in any of the (non-Neil Marshall or Neveldine/Taylor) genre entertainments I regularly consume. Bonus: The Robot looks like Joe Pesci from toward the end of Casino. (Via Michael Kupperman, awesomely enough.)

AX: Alternative Manga Vol. 1
Osamu Kanno, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Imiri Sakabashira, Takao Kawasaki, Ayuko Akiyama, Shigehiro Okada, Katsuo Kawai, Nishioka Brosis, Takato Yamamoto, Toranosuke Shimada, Yuka Goto, Mimiyo Tomozawa, Takashi Nemoto, Yusaku Hankuma, Namie Fujieda, Mitsuhiko Yoshida, Kotobuki Shirigari, Shinbo Minami, Shinya Komatsu, Einosuke, Yuichi Kiriyama, Saito Yunosuke, Akino Kondo, Tomohiro Koizumi, Shin’ichi Abe, Seiko Erisawa, Shigeyuki Fukumitsu, Kataoka Toyo, Hideyasu Moto, Keizo Miyanishi, Hiroji Tani, Otoya Mitsuhashi, Kazuichi Hanawa, writers/artists
Sean Michael Wilson, editor
Mitsuhiro Asakawa, compiler
Top Shelf, 2010
400 pages
$29.95
Buy it from Top Shelf
Buy it from Amazon.com

This is a tough one. I mean, as a Whitman’s Sampler of approaches to Japanese comics outside of the Japanese mainstream, this inaugural English-language compilation of comics from the fat, regularly released alternative-manga anthology series AX strikes me as wide-ranging and comprehensive, almost to a fault. In terms of known quantities for American altcomix readers, you’ll find both the straightforwardly drawn irony of gekiga pioneer and a A Drifting Life author Yoshihiro Tatsumi and the over-the-top visual and thematic crudeness of Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby‘s Takashi Nemoto represented here. You’ll see comics that look very much like the lavishly illustrated horror or porn manga you might have come across (Takato Yamamoto, Keizi Miyanishi, Kazuichi Hanawa) and comics that are so far removed from the manga tradition and so similar in bold graphic spirit to the first wave of North American alternative comics that they’d fit in RAW (Nishioka Brosis, Otoya Mitsuhashi). In perhaps the most marked deviation from work from the equivalent time period (turn of the millennium) here in North America, there’s a metric ton of crass taboo-shattering of the sort cartoonists here haven’t been all that interested in as an end in itself since the underground days (Tatsumi, Nemoto, Mitsuhashi, Osamu Kanno, Shigehiro Okada, Kotobuki Shiriagari, Saito Yunasuke, Hiroji Tani), but there are also twee little slice-of-lifers, modern urban fables, and O. Henry/New Yorker litfic that you could easily see populating a Petit Livre from Drawn & Quarterly or an issue of Mome (Takao Kawasaki, Katsuo Kawai, Shinbo Minami, Akino Kando, Shin’ichi Abe, Shigeyuki Fukumitsu).

So your preferred color of the alt/art/lit/indie/indy/underground spectrum is almost surely represented somewhere in these pages, and chances are you’ll find something you’ll consider a minor revelation. In my case, I was really impressed by the murky, inky body-horror dream comic “Conch in the Sky” by Imiri Sakabashira, the title of which gives a pretty solid impression of what you can expect. Brosis’s “A Broken Soul” combined off-kilter 2-D character designs, a wiry thin line, gray textures that looked like an artifact of photcopying, and a sort of whimsical ennui, to remind me favorably of Mark Beyer. And Shinya Komatsu’s “Mushroom Garden” is a real stunner, its bulbous, plush mushrooms evoking an array of psychedelic comics practitioners from Vaughn Bode to Moebius to Brandon Graham. In other words I don’t regret the time spent with the volume at all, and it’s given me several promising roads for further exploration, god and translators willing.

That said, AX Vol. 1 is consistently undercut not just by the heavy hand of many of its contributors, too many of whom rely on shock value or Tatsumiesque hamfisted irony, but by various production shortfalls. First and foremost among those is the translation work by Spencer Fanctutt and Atsuko Saisho, which is the epitome of the translated-manga tendency to emphasize fidelity at the expense of clarity. Here’s a representative passage from Shigehiro Okada’s sex farce “Me”: “However strangely I might dress, if I could really slip my existence, I could become a part of the cityscape like those ruins of decades ago. My instinct would explode if it took form. The light holds death. The darkness holds life. That’s what I’m waiting for. I…I would die for its expression.” If it’s not a sentence you can imagine a native English speaker coming up with, you’ve got to go back to the drawing board!

Meanwhile, while the design and font selection for the jacket, table of contents, and ancillary material (including Paul Gravett’s informative, if slightly overwritten, introduction) are all quite strong, the lettering for the comics themselves is frequently distracting, with inexpressive computer fonts and, often, vast empty spaces in balloons and caption boxes where kanji clearly used to reside. Finally, the decision to list creators first-name-first in the TOC and on each page but last-name-first in the who’s-who at the back of the book is a baffling one.

None of these things are dealbreakers in and of themselves. Heck, I don’t think they’re dealbreakers even when all added up. Like I said, there are a lot of intriguing comics in here, and a few excellent ones, and the cumulative effect is an eye-opening and educational one if you’re a reader with an interest in Japan’s equivalents to the American alternative comics you enjoy but few inroads into them. But in a field that’s increasingly crowded with impeccably conceived, assembled, edited, and packaged anthologies, AX isn’t just competing with scanlators and sporadic English-language apperances in long out-of-print publications, it’s competing with what the Eric Reynoldes and Zack Sotos and Sammy Harkhams and Ivan Brunettis and Ryan Sandses and so-ons of the world are putting together. It’s in that sense that AX could stand to be sharpened. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

* Kevin Melrose at Robot 6 rounds up links and commentary about the Wizard/ToyFare shutdown, including the shell game being played by Gareb Shamus’s various ventures.

* Excellent investigative reporting by Newsarama’s Vaneta Rogers, who attempts to unravel who, exactly, ran the now-defunct Comics Code Authority, and just how much “authority” he or she or they actually had. It ends with a terrific cautionary tale from retailer advocate Joe Field of how ratings systems of the sort that have replaced the Comics Code often have the paradoxical effect of decreasing the amount of all-ages content available to consumers. (Via Sam Humphries.)

* Tom Spurgeon worries that Marvel’s much-hyped death of a Fantastic Four character in this week’s issue #587 is taking something intended to heal years-old structural problems with comics’ Direct Market — monopoly distributor Diamond’s decision to begin shipping comics to retailers a day before they go on sale, to give those retailers more time to properly stock their stores — and transforming it before our very eyes into just another short-term sales-goosing gimmick (an issue so important we’re letting retailers break the embargo and sell it the day they get it instead of the day after!) of the sort that caused all those structural problems in the first place. I worry about that too. Silver lining, though? For the second time in recent memory, Marvel’s mainstream-media hype for a character death will actually direct curious readers to a good comic with a sizable run of strong quality behind it. There are much worse fates I could imagine than for someone to be duped into buying into the Jonathan Hickman/Steve Epting/Dale Eaglesham Fantastic Four run, or the Ed Brubaker/Steve Epting/Mike Perkins Captain America run before it.

* Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, whose Kaputt is an early candidate for Album of the Year, gives very good interview to NPR’s Matthew Perpetua and The Onion AV Club’s Noel Murray. Bejar made a tremendous record and talks about it with real panache.

* If you know someone who passionately dislikes Ween, chances are it’s because of the track from their 1994 masterpiece Chocolate and Cheese called “The HIV Song.” Here’s a fascinating passage about the song — gallows humor at its most awesomely awful — from Hank Shteamer’s 33 1/3 book on the album.

* Real Life Horror: The by-now comically transparent punitive mistreatment and overincarceration of WikiLeaker Pfc. Bradley Manning appears to be getting some news-media traction.

* A Della’morte Dell’amore sequel? Sure, I’ll eat it.

* Fuck you, there is NOT a Hawkeye story called “The High, Hard Shaft.”

* Finally, we are now accepting Destructor fanart submissions.

* Well, almost: I’ve added a couple more links to my post on the shutdown of Wizard and ToyFare; I hope you’ll read them.

* Your must-read of the day: Matt Seneca reports from Frank Santoro’s “New Values” art show, complete with an interview. It’s even in audio form if you’d like to listen.

* Tom Neely says more Henry & Glenn Forever is on its way!

* Kate Beaton draws sexy Batman. Related: Comics fanboys are assholes.

* Damn this is weird.

* Josh Simmons calls this image “Connecticut.” Wow.

* Curt Purcell checked out Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, David Aja et al’s The Immortal Iron Fist based on something I said once about liking the martial arts tournament bit and didn’t like it. Jeez, no one man should have all this power! Seriously, Curt is right: He was clearly expecting something from that sequence that I never intended to imply it delivered. The question was where were superhero comics’ memorable fight scenes; the Iron Fist tournament was just one answer I gave in a short list of different fights done in different styles with different aims. If Curt had specifically asked me for some knock-down drag-out that redefined the use of combat on the page, I’d have come up with a different list; but I stand by my contention that the way the fights were done — the caption boxes with all those made-up martial arts moves, the sudden defeats of various major characters, the loveliness of Aja’s art — made them memorable, especially if you’ve seen things done in a more traditional way a million times as I have but Curt probably hasn’t.

* Related: Tom Spurgeon answers his own question, the very one that spurred my response that spurred Curt’s disappointing reading experience, by exploring five great superhero fight scenes. I especially appreciate his analysis of fights 1 and 2.

Above: The amazing John Byrne/Terry Austin “Days of Future Past” riff that Tom Derenick and Nelson did for a Batman article in Wizard based on an idea I suggested

Gareb Shamus has shut down Wizard and ToyFare magazines, and is taking his company public as a penny stock while relaunching as a digital magazine called Wizard World. I’ll be perfectly honest with you: It’s been an awful day because of this. So many of the details about the news rankle: How it was broken online by a disreputable gossipmonger who — quelle coincidence! — argues the magazine was at its all-time best during the same time period it was wining and dining him at its conventions and regularly feeding him the company line; the unceremonious and cowardly way the company broke the news to its employees, both the ones it kept and the ones it let go; the time spent with no idea as to the fate of some of those employees, since Wizard’s official press release didn’t see fit to mention them or their magazines’ cancellations; the fact that the company’s years of malfeasance and dubious taste overshadows so many of the wonderful and talented and ethical and comics-intelligent people who’ve worked there; the fact that wanting to celebrate those wonderful, talented, ethical, comics-intelligent people makes it harder, emotionally, to do the necessary work of calling out everyone who’s worked there who are none of those things; the tasteless way in which at least one of the survivors chose to mark the occasion; the unintentionally revealing legal disclaimer tacked on to the PR; the gamut of emotions experienced by those of us who used to work there and the occasionally uncomfortable way those different emotions have brushed up against one another; and, of course, the massive blow to the security and happiness of the people who were laid off, and even those who weren’t.

Before I worked at Wizard, it wasn’t as integral a part of my life as a comics reader as it was for many of the ex-Wiz employees with whom you may be familiar. But the only issue I can ever remember reading is one that played a pivotal role in my getting involved in comics at all: After flipping through a copy I found on my then-boss’s desk and reading about an intriguing-looking upcoming approach to the X-Men by this guy named Grant Morrison I’d heard of and this artist Frank Quitely I hadn’t, I figured I’d go to the store to pick it up. The rest is history — a history that includes three years spent in Wizard’s employ. It was a frustrating three years in many ways, and the way it ended was the most frustrating part of all. But in that time I learned a great deal about effective writing from the editors with whom I worked most closely, Pat McCallum and Brian Cunningham, and for that I’ll be forever grateful. If you’ve ever read a review of mine you liked, you have Pat to thank; if you’ve ever read a feature of mine you liked, it’s Brian. Moreover, I met, oh, between a dozen and two dozen of the best people I’ve ever known, people with whom I’m close friends to this day. You’d recognize their names as they’re in positions of prominence across the industry and the popcultjourno biz at large; I don’t care about any of that so much as i care about the fact that they’re kind, generous, talented people I’m privileged to know and be associated with. And there’s nothing I can say about Wizard and its management more damning than telling you how poorly so many of those people were treated there, up through and including today.

Since the Great Con War erupted, it’s become clear that the comics industry, at least, has less and less time for the management’s behavior. This seems to be at least somewhat mutually beneficial: The comics industry has divorced itself from an entity it clearly has disliked and distrusted for far longer than it’s felt comfortable saying so, while that entity is clearly willing and able to pursue avenues of exploration outside the confines of that industry, its characteristic self-promotional mojo still intact. But the conflict’s resolution has seen more than its share of collateral damage over the years, and this latest spasm of it is just the most obviously and publicly gruesome. I just feel badly for anyone who’s ever seen the people and the work they care about caught in the blast radius.

If you’d like to read more about the situation, I recommend the following articles and interviews:

* Kevin Melrose with the basic 5Ws situation

* Me on that press release disclaimer

* Brian Hibbs’s quick two-liner on the near simultaneous demise of Wizard and the Comics Code Authority

* Tom Spurgeon on what the press release’s silence on certain subjects says about Wizard

* Heidi MacDonald with the first official word of the magazine cancellations; Heidi and her commenters do some sleuthing about Wizard stock

* Andy Khouri on (among other things) an even-handed appraisal of the magazine and its legacy in terms of alumni across the industry

* Rob Bricken of Topless Robot on the cancellation of ToyFare and on the way Wizard World announced its decision

* iFanboy’s Ron Richards interviews a laid-off employee

* An industry-reax round-up at Newsarama that includes my friends and fellow Wizard alumni Ben Morse (Marvel), Mel Caylo (Archaia), and Alex Segura (Archie)

* My friend and fellow Wizard alumnus Chris Ward (Boom!, Bluewater) with a warts-and-all take on it not dissimilar to my own

* Vocal Wizard critic Laura Hudson with a kind and even-handed take on the news

* A testimonial by my friend Ryan “Agent M” Penagos (Marvel)

Johnny 23
Charles Burns, writer/artist
Le Dernier Cri, December 2010
64 pages
$24.95 price
Buy it from Le Dernier Cri
Buy it from PictureBox

X’d Out: This Is The Remix. For reasons unknown and with results most welcome, Charles Burns decided to cut up, shrink down, re-order, and re-release his recent surrealist art-sex satire/Tintin tribute, substituting English for an invented alien alphabet and language (has anyone translated it yet?) and reconfiguring the story into something recognizable but still very different. The trick here is that Burns realizes that the recurring images that populate X’d Out — photographs, holes, voyeurs, fetuses, eggs, wounds, cats, vents, nudes — can be used not only as dreamlike leitmotifs but as Legos, basically — connective nubs that allow him to disassemble the original narrative and put it back together in a new way, with the material between those recurring images treated like interchangeable bricks. Couple this with the inscrutable lettering and dialogue and the effect is even more dreamlike, and even more overpowering. The book’s protagonist Johnny 23/Nitnit is tossed seemingly willy nilly from one reality to another; he’ll walk through a hole in the wall in one world as one version of himself and exit into another as the other; he’ll look through a window and see himself; he’ll pick up a photo, we’ll look at the photo, and then we’ll see that his alter ego is now holding it. The book’s new landscape format furthers the sense of relentless forward momentum now that the pages are longer than they are tall, and the luscious purple ink in which the now colorless line art is printed emphasizes the sensuality of the images even more powerfully. It’s some weird erotic nightmare constructed from raw formal mastery of comics. What a performance.

* I think my friend Kiel Phegley’s latest Q&A with Marvel honchos Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort makes for meaty reading. Brevoort muses at length on Marvel’s difficulty with ascertaining how new readers are discovering their comics; ponders how to effectively communicate to the bookstore audience given its lack of centrality and mostly casual interest in the product vs. the “comic shops on Wednesday/message boards the rest of the week” hardcore; explains the to-me baffling maneuvers surrounding the Thor titles this summer; and pins some of the blame for Marvel’s slackening sales on overextension of four top editorial figures. He also basically becomes Marvel’s new official mouthpiece by announcing that newly minted Editor-in-Chief Alonso, whose responses here are almost all just one sentence long, won’t regularly be participating in these Q&As anymore, putting Brevoort in the Quesada carnival-barker seat.

* Tom Neely, killing it as usual.

* Remember when there was a line of children’s toys and comics basically centered around Cthulhu? No? Then let Monster Brains’ gallery of Inhumanoids comic covers remind you. That guy who was basically giant rotting crocodile with an exposed ribcage remains amazing to me even now.

* Whoa, I fully support this King Collection line of t-shirts based on classic Stephen King jacket art from Fright Rags. Needs that incongruous bird-guy duel from The Stand, though. (Via Dread Central.)

* TPM’s guide to prominent locations in yesterday’s big Mafia bust really does read like a bunch of black-comedy Sopranos subplots.

Two alleged mobsters in Rhode Island (one who’s 83 and another who’s 63) are accused of extorting two strip clubs in Providence for “protection money” dating back to 1993.

Luigi “Louie” Manocchino (also known as “Baby Shacks,” “The Professor” and “The Old Man”) and Thomas Iafrate are accused of extorting money from the Satin Doll and Cadillac Lounge.

* I’m sort of amazed by how extremely creepy the online horror project Marble Hornets remains even though the current storyline depends so heavily on actors who aren’t strong enough to get their improvised dialogue over. Actually, creepy doesn’t cut it — I’ll go ahead and say outright scary. The two most recent episodes went up while my wife was in the hospital, and I actually put off watching them while I was in the house by myself. I caught up just now on the train, and sheesh — at one point I full-out jumped in my seat, alarming the guy next to me. Something about the visual tools they’re working with, the way they locate the horror in the very means by which we’re seeing and hearing what goes on, hits hard and deep and overcomes any shortcomings in performance and filmmaking.

Monster
Paul Lyons, Jim Drain, Michael DeForge, Michaela Zacchilli, Brian Ralph, Chuck Forsman, James Kochalka, Jim Rugg, Peter Edwards, Andy Estep, Oscar Estep, CF, Brian Chippendale, Blade, Keith McCulloch, Mike Taylor, Roby Newton, Edie Fake, Leif Goldberg, Keith Jones, Dennis Franklin, Jo Dery, Erik Talley, Beatrice McGeoch, Tony Astone, Mat Brinkman, Nick Thorburn, Melissa Mendes, Aaron DeMuth, writers/artists
Paul Lyons, editor
self-published (I think), October 2010
88 pages
$20
Buy it from PictureBox

They’re gettin’ the band back together, man! From out of the rubble of Fort Thunder rises the surprise 2010 revival of the gigantically influential Providence underground-art institution’s house anthology, featuring mostly-about-monsters work from all six of the Fort’s core cartoonists — Brinkman, Chippendale, Ralph, Drain, Lyons, Goldberg. Plus Andy Estep, Peter Edwards, Roby Newton, and a lot of other people you’ll see listed as having lived/worked/played in the Fort. Plus fellow-travelers like Providence’s CF and Jo Derry and Highwater’s James Kochalka. Plus Jim Rugg and Michael DeForge and Chuck Forsman and other leading lights of post-Fort alternative comics. And a reunion tour is exactly what it feels like.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s fine comics in this beautifully printed navy-blue-and-white package, many of which take advantage of its unusually large trim size. (We’re not talking Kramers Ergot 7 territory, but the thing is big. Think the Wednesday Comics hardcover.) Brian Ralph uses his comparatively clean cartoony style for a hilariously violent giant-robot comic, “Voltron from Hell,” basically, with huge panels and splash pages taking perversely pretty delight in mass destruction and death. The final panel of CF’s weird tale about an ambulance driver-cum-cat burglar who sneaks into the house of a woman with a mysterious disease actually made me jump — just a beautifully done little scare. Brian Chippendale’s story ties in with his Puke Force webcomic and gives him a chance to draw some villains at full splash-page size. I thought Chuck Forsman cut himself off at the knees a bit with his punchline ending, but until then his contribution was a creepy little thing that reminded me favorably of the urban legend my Delawarean wife recounted to me about the zoobies, the inbred mutant children of the DuPont family who would roam around the woods waylaying passers-by. There are insanely METAL full-page illustrations from Brinkman (who’s by now made a wonderful career of such things), Tony Astone, and Dennis Franklin — I mean, I laughed out loud at how fuckin’ devil-horns they were. And Lyons’s wraparound cover portraits of various barfing beasts is breathtaking, one of the most impressive single comics images of the year.

But in a way, the Fort Thunder aesthetic is a victim of its own success. I lost track of the number of good-to-great comics that came out this year bearing its influence, and those apples-to-apples comparisons make it hard for the work here, which I think all parties involved would admit was done more for fun than for tear-down-the-walls boundary-pushing, to stand out. In terms of anthologies alone, you could stand this one right between Studygroup 12, Closed Caption Comics, Smoke Signals, Diamond Comics, and Mould Map. Fort Thunder and the Providence scene’s DNA is now deeply embedded in an array publishers, including not just the late and lamented Highwater, Bodega, and Buenaventura, but also PictureBox, Secret Acres, Koyama, Nobrow, Pigeon, Gaze, and even the mighty Drawn & Quarterly. Moreover, whether you call it fusion or New Action or simply slap an alt- prefix in front of horror or SF or fantasy, Fort Thunder’s pioneering jailbreak of genre from the mainstream American comics prison has subsequently allowed it to become almost inescapable in smart-comics circles. Finally, Chippendale, Brinkman, Forsman, DeForge, CF, Fake, and Rugg are all in direct competition with work they put out elsewhere last year, most of which was more ambitious. And understandably so! Seriously, I’m not complaining — Monster is what I think it set out to be. It’s seeing Floyd get together for an awesome Live 8 gig, rather than seeing Waters and Gilmour working together again, and as such it’s more a treat for the fans than documentary evidence of why we became fans in the first place.

* Craig Thompson’s Habibi: September 20, 2011.

* DC takes a bold step into the ’00s by dropping the Comics Code.

* Michael May reviews Brecht Evens’s gorgeous Night Animals, which I think is even lovelier than The Wrong Place.

* Sorcerers Supreme Lose.

* As always, the 22nd Annual GLAAD Media Award nominees in the comics category are a fucking joke.

* Not unrelated: I think that when this piece first circulated, I only read the autobiographical section, and I think I even linked to it as a must-read without ever realizing it was just one-quarter of a longer essay. But anyway, here’s Dirk Deppey’s excellent essay “The Mirror of Male-Love Love,” which is about equally dedicated to the history of adult-male/adult-male homosexuality around the world, Dirk’s personal development and coming-out as a gay man, the physical and psychological mechanics of bottoming and male orgasms generally, and taking down an approach to boys-love manga that doesn’t leave a lot of room for actual gay men or the sex drives of the women who love reading about them. It’s really long, but you’re making a big mistake if you tl;dr it — it’s a wonderfully engrossing read on all four topics it tackles. (Via Tim Hodler.)

* And now, Real Life:

* Absolutely fascinating Economist article on the medieval Battle of Towton during the War of the Roses in 1461. If you want to get a good mental picture of what battles in the world of Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire would have been like, start here. (Via Westeros.)

* Massive, massive Mafia bust by the FBI; Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, Colombo, DeCalvacante, and Patriarca family members rounded up in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The link above is for the Daily News; here’s NBC New York, and here’s . (Via TPM.)

* The Vatican directly discouraged Irish bishops from reporting systemic child rape by the Catholic Church. (Via John Cole.)

* Here’s an impressive/depressing list of roughly or explicitly right-wing domestic terror incidents over the past few years. (Via Emptywheel.)

* Khalid Shaikh Mohammed probably personally murdered Daniel Pearl. The odds that he’ll actually ever face this accusation in court are essentially nil.

I meant everything I said about Dirk Deppey, the recently laid-off writer of The Comics Journal’s Journalista linkblog, online editor of TCJ.com, and former managing editor of the Journal’s print version. The earliest iteration of Journalista was indispensable to the formation of the comics blogosphere, and indeed the entire comics internet, as we know it today. Dirk’s stint at the print Journal gave many comics bloggers their first-ever print outlet for comics criticism, from yours truly to the great Joe McCulloch. It also opened that publication up to manga and “mainstream” comics like it had never been before — to my mind an under-discussed and key step in the past decade’s reclamation of genre comics from fanboys, nostalgists, and monomaniacs as an area worthy of genuine critical engagement. Speaking personally, Dirk’s frequently insightful criticism and impassioned industry-analysis polemics were touchstones for me as a growing writer, even if now that influence is less obvious (because he did so much less criticism in recent years in the former case, and because I’m less interested in guns-blazing writing in the latter).

But Dirk has never been a shrinking violet when it comes to warts-and-all appraisals of notable and beloved industry figures as they head for the exits — that’s a big part of why people liked him so much. And it’s in that spirit that I’m saying now that Dirk’s farewell Journalista post was the first one I’d read in months, and the first I’d done much more than skim in years. While my hope is that leaving the Journal will allow him to return to his early strengths, the fact is that they were very much early strengths; if anything, the work he did on the late-model Journalista and on TCJ.com generally represented a major step backward for, or even an undoing of, the valuable work he’d done in years past.

I’m not surprised that the news of Dirk’s ouster was greeted with near-universal sorrow over the move and well-wishes for Dirk himself — they were responses I shared, too. But it seems a shame, and inimical to what Dirk did at Journalista, to let a quickly deleted tweet from Drawn & Quarterly’s twitter account (written, I assume, by a person I’ll refer to as “Schmom Schmevlin”) and an extension of the years-old pointed silence from one-time Deppey sparring partner and blogospheric allfather NeilAlien serve as the only critical appraisals of Dirk’s tenure at TCJ.

With that in mind, here’s a quick list of three major problems I had with Dirk’s work.

1) By the end, ¡Journalista!, for all the hours Dirk put into it, was about as minimal a linkblog as you could think of. The critical and analytical content that drove it in the early years was long gone, and the supplemental stand-alone reviews he used to run were a distant memory. He’d write a few lines about the “Above the Fold” story, mostly paraphrasing whatever he was linking to; beyond that he only even provided a quote or any kind of context for one link per subsection of each entry — the rest was just name/topic, name/topic, name/topic. In the absence of a critical voice or all but the barest context, there was nothing at Journalista you couldn’t get with a fuller and potentially more enriching presentation elsewhere. Eventually, elsewhere is exactly where I got it.

2) I may not be the best person to speak about this, since as I said my engagement with Dirk’s writing was minimal in recent years, but on the increasingly rare occasions when Dirk did offer his thoughts on the issues of the day, his relentless contrarianism too often skewed and obscured his analysis. Perhaps this habit of thought was an outgrowth of his pox-on-both-their-houses Reason-style libertarianism, Dirk’s expressions of which were always redolent with pride for sticking it to both fundamentalist conservatives and latte-sipping Seattlites as though the two were morally and intellectually equivalent evils. (I’d comment further but I assure you I don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to poor politics; when I was at my worst, in fact, Dirk was one of the people who treated me with the most understanding and kindness, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.) Regardless, from his refusal to countenance the idea that the digital-comics landscape had substantially changed in the wake of the iPad despite multiple points of evidence and statements from the major players saying exactly that to his vocal disgust for Facebook-driven PR efforts despite that social network’s obvious utility and near-ubiquity, Dirk frequently rode his hobbyhorses right off the trail, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the positions of his interlocutors in the process.

3) Here’s Dirk talking to Tom Spurgeon about the institution he helmed in both print and digital forms:

Prior to the rise of the Web, the magazine was pretty much the only place where you could get bullshit-free reportage and commentary on comics as a medium and an industry, and the Direct Market therefore tolerated its presence. The Internet changed that, and rendered The Comics Journal essentially superfluous.

So here you have the former managing editor and longtime online editor of the most important comics criticism publication in the English-speaking world saying he didn’t much see the point of that publication once the web came along. I in no way subscribe to Om-tae Evlin-dae’s contention that Dirk destroyed the Journal — he put me in it, so obviously he raised it to heretofore unreached Olympian heights, and at any rate the magazine’s real crash-and-burn days came after Dirk’s departure — but that’s a goddamn bizarre attitude for someone who ran the magazine to have about the magazine. And it very well could explain a lot about the disastrous relaunch of the publication as a web-driven entity. TCJ.com is, frankly, an embarrassment — comically user-unfriendly (just by way of a for instance, I had to manually search it to find Dirk’s aforelinked post on Paul Levitz, which had been voted one of 2009’s best pieces of online comics criticism by one of TCJ.com’s constituent blogs, because the old permalink didn’t work anymore), spastically updated, intermittently focused, and almost entirely removed from the very discourse Dirk claimed had rendered it redundant. That vacuum allowed the emergence as The Comics Journal’s loudest and most prominent critical voice an approach to comics and comics criticism that couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to the traditional ideals and values of both the Journal and its parent company Fantagraphics if it were made to wear a snazzy yellow union suit and call itself Professor Zoom, The Reverse Comics Journal. I’ve never had any clear idea who to blame for all this — Dirk, Managing Editor Michael Dean, Assistant Editor Kristy Valenti, or founder/publisher/longtime editor Gary Groth; frankly, I think the buck has to stop at the top. But here’s how Dirk responded when Spurgeon asked him “Is there anything you might do differently in terms of site development if you had to do the whole thing over?”

…As for site development, I think that Kristy [Valenti] and Mike [Dean] have done about as good job with TCJ.com as anyone could with the available resources.

If you had the potential to change TCJ.com for the better but can look at TCJ.com and think that — and absent yourself entirely from any role in it in the process — that seems to me the very model of malign neglect. And the downfall of what was once the biggest name in comics criticism has got to be discussed as part of Dirk’s legacy, even though the fact that I probably wouldn’t be here without him is part of that legacy as well.

* Wow, did you know you could read Duncan the Wonder Dog in its entirety for free on Adam Hines’s website right now? But only through March, because AdHouse is prepping a $9.95 downloadable version for sale.

* PictureBox and Comics Comics’ Dan Nadel has a fine Best Comics of 2010 list up at the Economist.

* Good Lord, Jim Woodring.

* Good Lord, Hellen Jo.

* Happy first birthday to the fun sketch blog Comic Twart.

* Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle (maybe Catwoman, maybe not) and Tom Hardy as Bane? Sounds potentially delightful, which is probably the first time I’ve ever said that about a Christopher Nolan movie.

* Rob Mitchum’s essay on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall and Roger Waters’s recent tour “The Wall” starts strong with the title and only gets better. He’s definitely right to emphasize the confrontational weirdness of the album; the first time I ever listened to it, my senior year in college, I was stunned that something so insular and vicious was somehow so universal.

* Finally, here are a bunch of Marvel and DC job openings. I bet some of you are quite well equipped to do some of those jobs.

FUC* **U, *SS**LE
Johnny Ryan, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2010
pages
$11.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

Take a good look at that cover, if you will, and you’ll see what it is that makes Johnny Ryan’s grossout humor comics so special. Blecky Yuckerella isn’t just emitting bog-standard gag-strip flopsweat and stinkflies as she hangs, she’s also squirting out tiny little drops of urine. That’s the kind of attention to detail and willingness to go the extra mile that took Ryan to the top!

In Ryan’s last Blecky collection (co-Bleck-tion?), the fun came in seeing the pacing economy of the four-panel gag strip used as a vehicle for a completely unconstrained sense of the absurd, a willingness to turn the corner into even weirder and more ridiculous or offensive territory with each new panel. By contrast, the fun of FUC* **U, *SS**LE (aside from the title itself, Ryan’s best since Johnny Ryan’s XXX Scumbag Party) is mostly how straightforward it is: Ryan’s got a punchline in mind, and by god he’ll set it up in those first three panels no matter how idiotic it is. Wine made from stomping pig carcasses (“I call it S’wine!”), Curly Moe and Larry as the Messiah (“It’s Stoogeus Christ!”), diarrhea caused by eating Bigfoot (“the Sasquirtz”), a porno called 69-11 (“It’s like 9-11, only more erotic!” Blecky points out as Flight 11 and the North Tower perform oral sex on one another) — I’d say “you can’t make this shit up,” but you can, or Ryan can at least, and watching him frogmarch his characters through the outlandish scenarios needed to give birth to these you-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me ideas is Guffaw City. And as I always point out, he’s a fine, fine cartoonist; this idea has more traction in a post-Prison Pit world, I know, but you don’t get to see his buoyant brushwork in those books, while here it’s what sells the childlike glee of everything that’s going on. His thick blacks really vary up the dynamics of each page, too. Unfortunately, this Blecky’s final hurrah, as Ryan has retired the strip. You can certainly see how Prison Pit and Angry Youth Comix afford him a lot more formal leeway, but I’m going to miss the consistently high batting average on display in the Blecky books. I guess it’s like Blecky herself tells Aunt Jiggles: “You can either have a lotta annoying noise and a clean robot pussy, or peace and quiet and nasty robot pussy stench. But you can’t have it both ways!”

* Brigid Alverson tries to figure out where the reduced-price rubber hits the increased-volume road for digital comics.

* Shame on me for missing this when it went up and kudos to Tom Spurgeon for alerting me to it: Emily Carroll’s dream comics. Man, what a talent.

* Curt Purcell vs. Apollo from Battlestar Galactica. I think Curt’s selling the character short — there’s something to be said for sticking a Hero in a non-heroic world and seeing what that does to him, and he was great in the trial — but I think it’s clear he’s the major character with whom the writers had the most trouble connecting.

* Real Life Horror: Philadelphia police have captured the city’s budding serial killer, the Kensington Strangler. Good thing, too — he’s very young (22) and committed several non-fatal assaults in addition to his three apparently admitted murders, so it seems like he was ramping up to a potentially long and awful career. (Via Atrios.)

* Definitely listen to this streaming copy of Destroyer’s new album Kaputt. Avalon and on and on. (Via Pitchfork.)

* Myyyyyyy goodness, this new teaser for Game of Thrones is wonderful. The throne! (Via Westeros.)

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming rounds up reactions to the TCA sneak-peek footage. Speaking of which, Elio and Linda at Westeros offer a lengthy and thoughtful reaction of their own.

* Over at Robot 6 I posted a six-page preview of Night Animals, a graphic novel from The Wrong Place author Brecht Evens due out in March from Top Shelf. Looks lovely.

* Speaking of looking lovely, here’s a fun little comic about not liking Nirvana by Sally Bloodbath.

* There’s a super-limited-edition new Yeast Hoist issue (#16) from Ron Regé Jr.

* Wow, buy all four issues of Josh Simmons’s Top Shelf series Happy for the low low price of ten bucks!

* John Porcellino talks process with Frank Santoro.

* I’m posting this more out of obligation than genuine interest, because it’s difficult for me to imagine circumstances under which I’d be like “Oooh boy, a new Ridley Scott movie,” but Alien and Damon Lindelof are things that I’ve cared about, so here you go: Scott’s collabo with Lindelof is no longer an Alien prequel but a new thing called Prometheus. So there you have it. (Via Jason Adams.)

* Finally, I’m just going to post two images from the brilliant Tumblr Kanye + Comics, which takes images from comics and splices them with Kanye West lyrics, but I assure you I could do this all day. Man, that first one should be the Superheroes Lose mascot. (Via someone on Twitter yesterday, I think.)

A Drunken Dream and Other Stories
Moto Hagio, writer/artist
Fantagraphics, 2010
288 pages
$24.99
Buy it from Fantagraphics
Buy it from Amazon.com

I frequently gasped, out loud, at the beauty of this goddamn thing. Pioneering Japanese girls’-comics artist Moto Hagio is not a world a way from the shoujo artists you might have seen elsewhere; theirs is a shared vocabulary of thin, beautiful women and men who look like their emotions could lift them off the ground. But Hagio’s line is just a little bit fuller, her character designs a little more lived-in, the endings of her stories a less likely either to pull punches or hit you full-force with maudlin tragedy. Most of them remind me of Jaime Hernandez, of all people, in that the force of the narrative is toward the protagonists coming to terms — with the damage done by a cruel mother, with the inspiration that arose unexpectedly from a childhood tragedy, with the sudden loss of a friendship through a shared mistake in judgment, with the death of a hated rival, with a necessary but traumatic decision, with the death of a parent. Or not! Some characters die, some characters are never afforded the rapprochement they seek, and one little girl gets zapped into nothingness by the conformist overlords of her suddenly science-fictional home. Either way it’s the visual journey that counts just as much as the destination, a journey in love with lush gray textures and stippled explosions of light, and in one memorable strip an array of red-based colors from horror-movie-blood red to rusty russet to hot pink, and portrayed through luxurious swooping lines that make the characters they depict look like Precious Moments dolls gone sexy. (A good thing, I promise you!) Each story’s big narrative and emotional moments seem to swell within and explode out of these textures and lines, like they’ve actualized the potential energy there all along. I dunno, I’m probably sounding a little ridiculous — my point is simply that this is the kind of book whose impact comes as much from simply soaking in the images as reading them, like great comics ranging from Kirby to Fort Thunder. Editor Matt Thorn, who also provides a lengthy essay on and interview with Hagio, is also the book’s translator, and he does a magnificent job; I can’t tell you what a relief it is to read manga with none of the clumsy, overly literal sentence constructions that frequently plague even the best and most well-intentioned such projects, ironically thwarting the author’s intended effect in the name of fealty. Really, really fantastic lettering, even — how often can you say that about translated manga? Reads like a dream, looks like a dream.

* I really enjoyed the Inkstuds best of 2010 critics’ roundtable with Robin McConnell, Chris Butcher, Bill Kartalopoulos, and Tucker Stone, and I explain why over at Robot 6.

* Heidi MacDonald interviews new Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso. He seems to draw a pretty bright line through the (STC-mooted) idea of a revival of the Nu-Marvel hands-off editorial style, since the Big Two are very much beneficiaries and/or prisoners of what he calls the “it has to count” mentality, i.e. Event Tie-In or GTFO. Via Tom Spurgeon, who has further thoughts on the role of personal preferences in Marvel’s top editorial job.

* Tom Neely reflects on 10 years of self-publishing comics and art, culminating in the year where his Rollins/Danzig slashfic made him a household name. That’s a weird year alright.

* Critical polymath Douglas Wolk lists 15 Excellent Things Happening in Comics Right Now, while my Robot 6 colleague Chris Mautner lists six potentially great 2011 comics you haven’t heard of. The Olivier Schrauwen and Yuichi Yokoyama books ought to be really somethin’.

* The fuckin’ Spider-Man musical, man. I would say that Sony’s exchange of the TV/animation rights to the character with Marvel for an extension on the musical was an all-time great stupid deal, but who knows, maybe a comeback narrative will soon be established and it’ll open to rapturous reviews and no one more actors will be maimed.

Map of My Heart
John Porcellino, writer/artist
Drawn & Quarterly, October 2009
304 pages
$24.95
Buy it from Drawn & Quarterly
Buy it from Amazon.com

I’ll be honest: I skipped most of the prose stuff. I’ve never felt much kinship with zine culture, and among all the other things that John Porcellino’s legendary, long-running, self-published minicomic series King-Cat Comics and Stories is — most notably a pioneering combination of pointilist autobiography and minimalist cartooning without which the careers of Kevin Huizenga, Jeffrey Brown, James Kochalka, James McShane, and virtually every webcomic diarist would be unthinkable — it is also a zine. Over the years it’s functioned, essentially, as one end of a pen-pal conversation between Porcellino and his readers, and thus his lengthy handwritten digressions about fishing trips or local wildlife or his Top 40 lists of stuff he’s recently enjoyed serve a necessary and fruitful role during that particular round of correspondence. But that’s never how it’s functioned for me: My experience reading Porcellino and King-Cat has come either from buying a bunch of issues all at once and reading them in one go or from seeing his work in collections like this one. I’m here for the cartooning, not for the conversation.

Fortunately the cartooning is fantastic. The stretch of “comics and stories” collected here run from 1996-2002, a pivotal time period for Porcellino not simply in personal terms — he became critically ill, recovered, moved back home to Illinois after years spent in Denver, married, divorced, and remarried — but in artistic ones as well: I’m reasonably sure his long-form memoir Perfect Example was constructed during this time, and within King-Cat his art made its second quantum leap. After what looks to my admittedly inexpert eyes like an experiment with a brush in issue #57 (which followed and revealed his divorce), his line becomes a true thing of beauty in issue #58’s story “Forgiveness.” It’s smoother and thinner, its curves more graceful, the sense of space between them less cluttered and more balanced. With no captions to guide us, we’re left alone with young John in this reminiscence of an unintentional act of cruelty that clearly still haunts him; the image of his younger self twice curled into a fetal position, repeating “I’m sorry” over and over again, is devastating. Similar flashes of remonstrance and self-loathing creep up occasionally and unexpectedly in some of his Zen-influenced comic poems, a powerful juxtaposition with their serene images and contemplative words. Can it get a little twee? Sure, but I think there’s a sharpness and a coldness to that line, and the occasional glimpses of despair it affords us, that make writing Porcellino’s stuff off as cutesy hippie stuff a big mistake. To flip through the comics material in Map of My Heart is to get a picture of a man fighting to find beauty in the world even as what he’s seen of it buffets him around like one of the leaves on the breeze that he draws. No wonder people loved to hear from him.

* Heidi MacDonald takes the 2011 comics sales chart wonkery ball and runs it into the end zone. The picture that emerges is of an industry revolving around the equivalent of a really killer Entertainment Weekly panel at San Diego, basically: Bendis, Johns, Morrison, Kirkman, O’Malley, and to an extent Millar. Heidi also puts everything together in a way that makes me a lot more open to the notion that creator-owned comics, or certainly at the very least creator-driven comics, are the star attraction of the market right now.

* Kate Beaton signs to Drawn & Quarterly for a Hark, a Vagrant! collection in Fall 2011. Kudos all around.

* Corey Blake wins Headline of the Day: “Archie leads the digital comics revolution”.

* Frank Santoro and Dan Nadel have the details on that Santoro exhibition that was teased a few days ago. It’s Santoro vs. Greco-Roman mythology, and thus sounds awesome.

* I’m not as big a Shane Black person as many commenters around here seem to be, mostly because I tend not to care for slam-bang action comedies, but I could certainly handle the writer of The Monster Squad being tapped to write and direct a live-action American Death Note adaptation.

* And I’m not quite interested enough in either project to post them here, but there are pictures of the new Spider-Man and Captain America movie costumes out there, and they both look pretty good. I would also like to take this opportunity to note that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies weren’t very good.

* Curt Purcell has posted another piece on Battlestar Galactica, focusing on Starbuck. He objects to the character’s resolution (a good deal more reasonably than many such objections, I should note); I disagree in the comments.

* The Onion AV Club’s Scott Tobias tackles Real Genius, which I think me and most of my friends took as more of an instruction manual than an actual movie. Chris Knight, Discordian Saint.

* I’m not sure if the drawings in this Josh Cotter post titled “Ben Clark: Inks” are by Cotter or not, but they’re lovely.

* I think the Westeros crew’s review of the Game of Thrones sizzle reel shown to the press over the past week is the best-in-class effort. It drives home a few points I’ve seen in other reports quite clearly: HBO is using the plot to grab people rather than resting on “It’s a fantasy TV show” (compare and contrast with AMC’s strategy for The Walking Dead), Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke are apparently really impressive in the key roles of Catelyn Stark and Danaerys Targaryen respectively, and the Wall looks incredible. (Cf. Myles McNutt’s fine review, and James Poniewozik’s as well; both via this Westeros post.) Their quibbles seem reasonable to me as well: Jaime Lannister isn’t quite as impressively roguish as they’d expected, for example. (They refrain from naming the character with whom they have the most concerns.) If you’re as starved as I am for good GRRM/GoT/ASoIaF talk, these are all places you should be visiting.

* Elsewhere, Winter Is Coming serves up an in-depth report on the press roundtable with showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff. It seems primarily concerned with bouncing the show off things to which it will be compared: the books themselves, The Lord of the Rings, other big HBO shows, non-fantasy fans’ preconceptions of the genre, and so on.

* Finally (via McNutt), if you’re interested in Game of Thrones but haven’t read the books, Alan Sepinwall is the TV critic for you: He plans on going into the show without reading them and without consuming any press materials that give away plot points. Sepinwall can be a very insightful critic when he’s working with strong material to which he brings few preconceptions, so this could be good.

Bodyworld
Dash Shaw, writer/artist
Pantheon, April 2010
384 pages, hardcover
$27.95
Read it for free at DashShaw.com
Buy it from Amazon.com

Did everyone know this was a comedy but me? I actually put off reading Dash Shaw’s, what is it now, second magnum opus and first full-length science-fiction graphic novel because I find the formal experimentation of his SF stuff intimidatingly difficult to parse even in short-story format — surely a 400-page webcomic turned fat hardcover would fuck my shit up, right? But while Shaw’s shorts frequently swap complexity for clarity, at least for me, Bodyworld is a breeze to read. Part of that’s physical — the fun of its vertical layout, kicking back and flipping the pages upward on your lap or desk. But mostly it’s that the thing reads like a quirky indie-movie genre-comedy — think a mid-00s Charlie Kaufman joint, or Duncan Jones’s Moon with more laffs ‘n’ sex. We follow one helluva protagonist, Professor Paulie Panther, a cigarette-smoking, plain white tee-clad schmuck who wouldn’t look out of place hanging out with Ray D. and Doyle in a Jaime Hernandez comic and who has harnessed his prodigious appetite for doing drugs and not doing work into a career as a field-tester for hallucinogenic plants. Basically, he travels around the world smoking anything that looks unusual. For the purposes of Bodyworld that has taken him to Boney Borough, a Thoreau-like enclave whose planners mixed unfettered nature right into the zoning laws as a response to a horrific decades-long Second Civil War that began ravaging the United States, it seems, following the installation of George W. Bush. There he discovers a smokable plant that gives its users a telepathic bond with anyone in their proximity, leading to disastrous romantic entanglements and disentanglements with the local high school’s hot teacher, its prom king, and his girlfriend. But there’s more to the plant that meets the eye, and a Repo Man-style series of surreal/slapstick/science-fictional escalations leads to a funny but still black and potentially apocalyptic ending, like the Broadway version of Little Shop of Horrors.

Bodyworld‘s webcomic incarnation was famous for its vertical scroll, and for my money it’s recreated enjoyably by the vertical flip in the book format. What surprised me about Shaw’s other formal innovations here is how relatively restrained they are. You don’t really need to keep track of his complex, color-coded grid maps of Boney Borough or the school to understand what’s going on where, and the to the extent that he plays with overlaps and repetition and color and so on it’s mostly done to convey the hallucinogenic mind-melding engendered by the drug, quite effectively, at that. Moreover, I’ve often found his character designs hard to parse and hard to like — something about the way they’re constructed from purposely ugly swirls and swoops just gives me prosopagnosia — but his quartet of leads and dozen or so prominent supporting characters are by far his strongest ever in this area; you really can get who they are and what they’re about just by looking at them, which prospect is not at all unpleasant, either. And while some of the yuks fall flat (particularly with the town sheriff late in the game), it’s for the most part a dryly witty, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny comedy, with finely observed humor about high schoolers, teachers, druggies, hoary sci-fi tropes, and the sort of shiftless ne’er-do-wells you enjoy spending an evening with when your buddy brings them along. In short, it’s a prodigiously ambitious cartoonist plying the various tricks of his trade just to tell a good story you can catch some weekend afternoon and then chat about with friends at the diner afterwards.

* Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis are, at long last, officially signed to play Gandalf and Gollum in The Hobbit. Elijah Wood will be back as Frodo, too, somehow.

* Top Shelf has a good 2011 ahead of it, anchored by the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the new Nate Powell, the new Incredible Change-Bots, and the new Ax.

* Jesse Moynihan’s Forming will be collected by Nobrow and released through AdDistro! That’s a good comic.

* Tom Spurgeon muses on the Fantagraphics Complete Carl Barks Disney Duck Comics announcement. Short version: It’s all good.

* Speaking of Spurge, here are links to all of his Holiday Interviews. Tons of talented people in there, interviewed by the best there is.

* Today on Robot 6: Is DC Comics a two-man operation? Actually, you could say that the whole Direct Market is a three-man operation: Fully 65 of the 75 bestelling comic books of 2010 were written by Brian Michael Bendis, Geoff Johns, or Grant Morrison. That seems extraordinary to me, but then I’ve never crunched the numbers to see if this is an anomalous situation. (Hat tip: Douglas Wolk.)

* The New Yorker makes fun of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

* The co-publishers of Secret Acres serve up a fascinatingly candid look at a year in the life of their business, tackling topics from how unexpected demand for one book mucked with their plans for other books to the impact of negative reviews. (To be fair, Barry and Leon: The very same year I was upset by Wormdye, I loved Capacity and named it the #5 comic of the year! Much love for the Acres.)

* Gabrielle Bell battles bedbugs.

* Real Life Horror: The beginning of this Rachel Maddow segment on mass shootings is just magisterially chilling.

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