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Baltimore Comic Con 2010 (Late Edition): George Gordon Pope

2010-09-15T23:00:00.001-04:00

I was not trying to troll Paul Pope at all. It was simply in the long tradition of my forgetting to find things for Paul Pope to sign that I realized I had forgotten my notebook. I had, before buying Life on Mars #2, only a copy of a short, racy biography titled Byron in Love, which I had been reading for class. I figured Pope could sign it. It was not a totally inappropriate thing for Paul Pope to sign as the two men have a few things in common: Paul Pope is a rock star – Byron is the original rock star; Paul Pope makes me want to rip off my shirt – Byron had lots of people ripping off their shirts for him, and frequently; Paul Pope is conscious of his public image – Byron played with his public image. It made sense.

After falling all over my giddy self with an explanation, Paul Pope signed my book while laughing at me, trolling me right back with a signature from Lord Byron. I walked away lightheaded; how Byronic.

Baltimore Comic Con 2010: Without A Plan

2010-09-03T01:40:00.000-04:00

Going to a comic con is in some ways like a job. At least the people with their laptops and four page printed out lists seem to approach it that way. In the back of my mind I've always had the desire to go all-out, officially fill-in all the missing pieces to different series, and to remember all the things that I actually want to get.

So, to prepare for this year's Baltimore Comic Con, I went through my long boxes and piles of random comics, and I made an all-encompassing, page-long, handwritten list: An entire nights' work only to leave my list at home. I turned from perfectly-guided ballistic missile into some sort of misguided comic carpet bomb. Ultimately, it didn't matter because the best part about conventions is taking a chance on something new. Here's some highlights:

I'd been looking for this series for a while with no success. Reminded by this really good article from The Comics Reporter, I made this one of my priorities going into the convention. I paid 6$ for a couple of issues, but just looking through them, it looks worth it. This is Starlin at his peak as an illustrator. Each page is filled with interesting layouts and each panel oozes with Starlin's unique busy, brilliant style.

Every since reading Carl the Cat That Makes Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Jim Mahfood has been on my radar. I'm excited to read this issue which features both the Rhino and some guy in a bear suit both of whom are featured on the cover.

This is one of the things that I actually remembered from my list. I've been trying to collect all the grey Hulk issues because I read one a while back and it was really good. This run of Hulk is almost like an elseworlds story with the Hulk doing pretty much whatever the hell he wants. It seems to be inspiration on a way the Hulk is portrayed in a lot out of stuff these days like Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine and Old Man Logan.

An insane and bizarre issue written by Kevin Eastmen, drawn by Simon Beasley, and some incredible coloring by Steve Lavigne. This comic is 110% in your face. Each page is like a stand alone and things jump back and forth without a clear central story. The art is stunning and at times that's how you feel reading this comic.

An adaption of the movie from 1978 drawn by Howard Chaykin. It approaches Star Wars from the level of a hit movie and not a completely entrenched part of our culture, so everything looks weird and slightly off, but that's why I like it. Probably won't ever read it but I've looked through it a couple times already.

Loved Ellison/Corben A Boy and His Dog, so logic would dictate I like this. I got into Ken Steacy from his issues on Marvel Fanfare which are excellent. Steacy's art isn't as polished here as in Fanfare but still looks OK.

This was the find of the convention. I bought it on a whim and it turned out to be completely worth it. The text of the opening page sold it for me. After the heading "80,000,000 Years Ago" the panels are, "It was ending./ The last of the booby trapped suns had novaed./ ...They were near./It was time to go." The art is incredible in a sort of Judge Dredd inspired vein and the story is very good. Like a lot of random small press ventures this one folded, but ffantasy ffactory only produced this one issue. An interesting account of the series' downfall from artist Conner "Freff" Cochran can be read here in the comments section. It's a shame because it's rare for such a hard core space comic to be drawn so well and more importantly to have such interesting characters. The main characters are robots and aliens and the comic plows right through the traditional missteps of those archetypes as characters, and creates some real emotions from them.

Baltimore Comic-Con 2010: Year Of The Whitebox

2010-09-01T13:24:00.000-04:00

What makes Baltimore Comic-Con special is that it isn't a multimedia event like the San Diego or New York Comic-Cons have become. There aren't panels about movies or video games with lines that wrap around the convention center, it's about long boxes and making deals, talking to creators and busting out your list to complete a series. This year was the first I've gone without said list, instead deciding to buy weird shit or comics that I had been looking for for so long that I knew the numbers by heart. I found them all, in case you were wondering.

Every year the first hour is almost overwhelming, the sense of "fuck, where the hell am I going to start?", surrounded by long boxes, merchants peddling their goods and cosplayers pushing people who are shopping to be in a picture. I swept the convention floor from right to left, pillaging every booth of it's greatest wares. For past cons, I've given you a comprehensive list of everything I got, but this year there was really too much to list and explain. The dealer tables were more significant this year and it speaks loudly to Baltimore Comic Con's anti-San Diego approach, and just to the kind of comics reader attending the con. Here's some highlights of this year. Note that very few of these are all that "hard to find" or "rare" or whatever because that's just not the point anymore.

I've been looking for these issues for a long time but usually all you can find are the Marvel ones. This is the Japanese Godzilla comic where he doesn't even show up in the first issue, and instead of focusing on the army or Godzilla himself, it's about the people who were affected by the bomb and Godzilla's attacks.

I think Aragones is a genius, his parody work is some of the funniest stuff out there and I didn't even know this issue existed. Thank god for unsorted dollar bins.

As I said above, I went in this year without a list, dedicated to weird-ass stuff. Something about these ten old Duckman issues was irresistable. Also there's something beautiful and hilarious about old licensed comics like The Simpson's or Ren and Stimpy--they're always a little more grotesque and "mature."

Same applies here, this Bill and Ted series is done by Evan Dorkin of Milk and Cheese fame. I found the first issue and decided to buy it, but then later in the Con found the entire series for six bucks. The art is simple but expressive, the anatomy is hilarious and garish. It's incredible. Let me know if you want my extra first issue and I'll send it out.

I Saw It is an early work by Keiji Nakazawa of Barefoot Gen fame. Nakazawa is a survivor of the atomic bomb and has done numerous comics about the event and his experiences. This single issue is pretty hard to find and is another White Box Hero, found in a fifty cent bin. It's in color which so few manga that came to America are. The book is incredible.

Brandon bought this for me, marked "adult", it starts with a zombie fucking a cow from behind and then being shot. Oh yea, it's done by Frank Cho.

A big market at Comic Conventions are bootleg DVDs. Often they are of television shows that never came out on DVD due to licensing issues, like The Wonder Years or Doug. There's always a back section though with some weird porno, which is where I found Seinfeld: A XXX Parody. After trying to convince every one else how much they wanted it so I could watch it, I went in Sunday with Monique and bought it for myself. The similarites are hilarious, you guys don't even know about Newman and Soup Nazi.

This was the first Marvel Comic toy I ever owned, and it really defined "cool" to me in 1994. Ninja Turtles barely could raise their arms, and G.I. Joes did some serious posing but this mother fucker could do all of Spider-Man's poses. My original toy was murdered when I dropped him out of a tree onto an unsuspecting Punisher figure. He broke in two and wasn't really the "Multi-Jointed Action Posing" toy he was before the accident. I built him these lego legs/wheel chair sort of thing and he became a bad guy. Those are the breaks, Spidey.

Frank Miller Week: Green Lantern-Superman: Legend of the Green Flame Cover

2010-08-19T11:16:00.000-04:00

Everything that makes Frank Miller’s art iconic is featured on this cover: fat meaty paws in place of hands, awkward chunky anatomy and the over-use of negative space (or possibly a calculated under-use of color would be more accurate). With a style more recognizable than Jack Kirby’s, Miller knows he doesn’t need all the pieces of the puzzle to tell a story, with bare, trace facts he can build his narrative and make us believe whatever story he'd like.

Superman’s “S” logo, curl and cape are the three traits about him always used to identify the character, and that's all Miller needs--literally nothing else but a body frame is drawn. More time was spent detailing the giant bird claw that is piercing both heroes than on the heroes themselves. It’s about the curiosity of what could kill both of these men, not that they are even characters in the story. They're symbols.

As mentioned in Monique’s post, Miller draws the clawed leg coming from the left side of the image, the beast largely unseen, pulling our eyes slowly to the right. While he uses this trick again to direct us along the picture, his intentions are different, it tells a story in itself, forcing us to ask what the beast is, where it came from, and how did Superman and Green Lantern come to be in it's possession?

Less bad-ass than the majority of his work, Miller's ability to instill fear is showcased here: the horror of the blackened, presumed dead Justice Leaguers close to the center of the page, while the actual events are taking place elsewhere. The best and maybe the most affecting aspect of the image though, is Superman's cape ripped to shreds with and the Green Lantern's ring still glowing from the fight. Even in a single-image, Frank Miller can make the action intense and very real and maintain his balance of the mythic and gritty.

Frank Miller Week: Bone #38 Cover

2010-08-19T00:27:00.000-04:00

Bone is Jeff Smith’s fantasy epic about armies and destiny, but at it’s very center is the story of Thorn and how she goes from being a girl to a woman. Issue #38 has Thorn at the crux of her transition, and Miller’s cover obviously shows her in complete woman-warrior mode.He shadows her face and makes her dark nature central to what’s going on; in the Bone universe that same darkness is there, but significantly pushed into the background. There’s also, an enhanced sexuality to Miller interpretation, in the insanely skinny waste, the prominent breasts, and huge red lips. The cover draws some strong parallels to one of the panels Brandon talked about earlier this week.

What’s especially interesting is looking at this cover in comparison to all three covers that came out for the same issue. Alex Ross draws the complete opposite version of Thorn: a little girl, in harsh lighting, cowering behind basically a stuffed animal. Smith's cover lands somewhere in the middle, showing the Bones as comic relief, but also Thorn hurtling over a branch--as both warrior and woman. Contained in the three covers is Smith’s balancing act of Bone, and it’s this combination of seriousness, comedy, and complex deeper meanings that make the series worth reading.

It’s Miller’s cover though that really stands out of the three. Next to Miller’s cover, Ross’ looks washed-out and his photo-realistic style just makes Bone look like something weird that shouldn’t exist. Like a CGI character or something. Ross’ cover is also focused on the most boring early aspect of the story: Thorn as a little girl with a crush on Bone. Miller takes the subtle themes from Smith’s story, particularly the ones that he'd find most appealing and forces them to the forefront. The absence of the titular characters is important because it gives Thorn a really powerful spotlight and cuts out the comedic relief, which is important sometimes. It shows Thorn struggling with her loss of innocence and finding her spot in the world, but at the same time, it makes her the center of attention and a powerful, Frank Miller-esque bad-ass.

Frank Miller Week: "Lance Blastoff" Panel-By-Panel

2010-08-18T13:42:00.000-04:00

Here's the thing about Frank Miller's politics. If my rambling, non-commital piece from Monday didn't already say it without saying it, the dude's worldview is pretty nuanced and complicated. And really, the best way to parse it out is through um you know, actually reading the work. This "Lance Blastoff" story from the very strange Dark Horse-released one-shot Tales To Offend is a good place to start figuring out what the deal is with Frank Miller.

Thankfully, The 4th Letter did the scanning for me and did some of their own reading of the story already. Author of the piece, David Brothers notes that "Lance Blastoff" is "one of the relatively few times he’s done an out and out humor book," and indeed, it's basically broad satire, but it's appropriately Miller-like in that it's multi-directional in its satirical targets. It's not quite the sledgehammer-subtle parody of the American action hero that it may at first seem. I mean, it is that, but it's also an attack on P.C sensitivity and liberal hypocrisy...or something? Let's take a look at this twisty turny, brilliant, retarded comics short...

While this title-sequence-like panel is a parody of Golden-Age superhero comics, it isn't that far from Miller's usual stylistics. That's to say, this is ironic but it isn't a total corrective or anything. Miller loves this style and next to Richard Corben, I can't think of another comics artist as in love with basic, visceral comics grammar. But yes, this still introduces "Lance Blastoff" as something absurd. Even the dialogue, "Here's a beefy little yarn--with an important message for you kids!" reads a bit like yeah, a parody of old comics, but a parody of Miller's stunted, noir-tinged writing style too.

So this panel is just beautiful. What's with Miller and dinosaurs? He has some weird ability to draw them as kinda awe-inspiring but also massive and horrifying. And that's the tension going through this panel and the source of its satire. We have the female character talking about the dinosaurs from an "enlightened" environmentalist perspective: "My friends witness nature in perfect balance." The joke of the panel is they're neither scary as expected (yet) or all that elegant. They're more like overgrown cows or something, just munching on grass. Already here though, Miller's satire is shifting its focus or at the least, kinda corralling in an opposite point of view to also take a big shit on. This female character is an idiot too.

Here, we're closer to revealing that this character is indeed, a woman. And you know, she's in good company in terms of strong, wise female characters in Miller's work: Elektra, Martha Washington, many of the females in Sin City. Really though, the main point here is the ratcheting-up of the female character's rhetoric. Her all-too-common liberal condescension: "Unsullied by fast-food restaurants spewing forth burnt animal flesh to fill the bloated bellies of sweaty, obese people." Sounds like a lot of people I know after they read Fast-Food Nation.

The female character's revealed. Giving a weird, didactic tour to a bunch of like Cro-Magnon alien freaks or something. Now, Miller's really got her going though. Lots of "nature's perfect and peaceful", dime-store Rousseau going on here. This kind of idealized, loving sense of the world isn't just a point of contention with pseudo-tough guys like Miller though, it's precisely the kind of self-important, self-deluded, vanity that all your classic satire's based upon. Just this silly, satisfied sense that the world would or could be a better place if not for us awful humans and our damned civilization.

Lolz! What the comic's so clearly setting-up: The ideal, gentle, untainted dinosaur goes for the humans. This is the punchline panel. Since it's pretty obvious, let's focus on Miller's world-building here. So, we've got a future where we can visit the dinosaurs somehow, and spaceships look like bad-ass fifties cars. Going along with what I said about the first panel of this story, this is Miller mocking the signs and signifiers of old-timey comics and being totally in-love with him. The strange combination here (dinosaurs, nice cars, post-feminist space tour-guide) is exactly the kind of weirdness you'd see in some cheapo 1950's space pirate tale.

The unfortunate realism after the punchline. Bodies are flailing, limbs are floating through the air. That "CHOMP" will be important later.

Miller gives you a close-up of the horror. The female character is kinda making eye-contact with the reader here, like she's realized how goofy and just plain wrong her idealized view of the dinosaurs is and she's reaching out to someone, anyone, to give her some comfort in what'll obviously be here final moments of life. More "CHOMP"s.

Some artful, McCloud Understanding Comics type time-between-the-panels shit. Now, the female character has landed on the ground, having escaped the T-rex's "CHOMP"s. She's also totally shifted her view on the creature at a very convenient time. Faced with death, she respects and is seemingly taken by the raw brute desires of the dinosaur. It's a comment on the shifting values of the liberal idealist.

Notice Miller's visual economy here. Lance Blastoff shows up, but because everything in this story's cut to the bare essentials, he doesn't get a build-up or an extended introduction or anything, he's just there all of a sudden. The byproduct of this is perhaps something a bit mock-heroic or anti-climactic about his arrival. He's also delivering a kind of mealy-mouthed action hero "one-liner" that's stretched into two panels because it's so complex and rambling, which is pretty funny.

The satire shifts here to Lance. The female character is speaking reason or perhaps I should say, "reason". She's basically pointing out that a basic trope of comics heroes is pretty silly: That it isn't enough to simply save the person, the villain or aggressor must be decimated. Miller mocks Lance Blastoff's excess.

Lance is just an unaware, macho douche here. His reasons for killing the T-rex are to eat it apparently. Perhaps something of a joke on the justification many hunters make for killing animals ("I'm going to eat it"), which is respectable but also pretty dopey because like dude, it isn't the caveman days, you're just feeding your ego playing hunter/gatherer. The really funny stuff in this panel though is the bizarro sound effect ("Spam"?!) and the fact that Lance is like, shooting a mini-WMD into the dinosaur's mouth. The female character's attitude is once again shifting to hystericism: "You fiend! You monster! Stop!"

The T-rex exploding in a very awesome comic book way. But again, there's a sense of reality to it, as the T-rex is contorting in pain. Miller's playing the classic comics grammar game but he's twisting it subtly, hedging the ra-ra blow-em-up stuff a bit.

Miller as Douglas Sirk here. Look at those expressionistic colors and crazy shadows as she cries into her arm. Then, there's Lance, off of the page, unfazed by the woman's emotional outburst or really anything, telling her once she tastes dinosaur meat, she'll change her mood. Lance is the obnoxious dad at the 4th of July BBQ mocking his newly-vegetarian goth girl daughter.

Notice that Miller's economy stops when it comes to more sensory type stuff. The dinosaur biting the car, the dinosaur blowing up, and now, the woman smelling the cooking dinosaur meat takes up multiple panels.

More Sirk. She perks up, her tears and worry and supposed values are slowly floating away and the smell of fresh meat takes over.

The red and black color scheme, the attention to her breasts, her hands near her crotch, it seems like Miller's adding some like, weirdo sexual attraction to this bizarre turn of events. This is basically confirmed in the story's climax, with groan-inducing references to "real meat."

With that "CHOMP" a parallel's drawn between the dinosaur's base desires and the female character's here. This is the conceit of the comic really, that the female character's denying the universe's immutable thirst for violence and will-to-power.

More "CHOMP"s. Lance standing proudly as the female character's is head inside of the T-rex's leg (which is like a chicken leg) and she lets out some orgasmic moans of "yes...Yes!" Despite Miller creating a fairly complex or atypical female character here, he's shifting into pretty basic, painfully obvious parodies of feminism and feminists: That they deny their desires, that they've asexualized themselves, that they just need a good man to change them. Miller's aware he's doing this and parodying that attitude, but he's not exactly deconstructing it. I think Miller knows why that's problematic, but think it's true or closer to true than the wimpy counter perspective.

Look at how Miller changes her whole look in this panel. She's kinda stoned-looking and evil. She's turned into a femme-fatale (Miller's favorite image of a woman it seems) and she's rejecting all the ideals she spouted in the previous panels. It's at this point that Miller's satire sorta goes off-the-rails or rather, it enters pure Frank Miller territory where it stops making sense or loses all of its nuance and is just sorta malicious and dumb. The strength I think of the story is the satire of the female character's blindness towards reality (seeing the dinosaurs and nature as pure and untainted, even when it attacks her), but Miller turns it into like, worldview-confirming, dream-fulfilling weirdness by having the female character not only be dead wrong about how the world works, but ultimately, on the same page as Lance. She isn't just incorrect, her core being is in-tune with Lance Blastoff.

More kinda sexual imagery. The romance comics-esque embrace, the red and black, the anti-feminist declaration, "a real man."

Miller kinda saves himself with this final panel because it's just so goofy and hilarious and once more, shifts the satire to Lance Blastoff's moronic moralizing and over-simplication. This was hardly a comic about why kids should eat lots of meat, right? It's kinda tacked on which is really funny. Also, it did nothing to confirm the benefits of meat or whatever, it just takes them as a given and spends most of its time mocking a wimpy, tree-hugging-ass bitch who eventually comes to her sense and loves um, "real meat". Miller's aware of this and he's kinda having it both ways, mocking Lance's sloganeering and over-the-top macho, but finding just as much, and maybe a bit more wrong with the character that's the antithesis of Lance.

Frank Miller Week: Miller and Gravity's Rainbow

2010-08-18T10:29:00.002-04:00

If I had been involved in the decision making which resulted in Frank Miller's commission to illustrate the cover for a new edition of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Miller's would likely not have been the first name to come to my mind. Rick Veitch, whose Maximortal, like Gravity's Rainbow, considers some of the dangers inherent in the use of comic book heroes as propaganda, seems an obvious choice. Robert Crumb is another. But sometimes the obvious is not the best, particularly when dealing with a writer as intentionally diversionary as Pynchon.

But leaving aside for the moment Miller's suitability for the job, it is important to point out that comics are really central to what Pynchon does in Gravity's Rainbow. The book is too damned long and complicated to get into an extended discussion of what happens, but it is enough to know that it largely takes place in Western Europe during the final months of the Second World War and is concerned in varying degrees with the German V-2 rocket program, race and imperialism, with a healthy dose of scatology and buggery mixed in.

The novel's ostensible hero, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, discovers that a map that he keeps of his sexual conquests in and about London matches precisely with a map of sites targeted by German rockets—Slothrop always comes before the bombs. This leads him to discover that he may have been programmed at birth by a secret cabal of Fascist occultists, known as PISCES, to play some part in the creation of the Raketestadt (Rocket State). Along the way he temporarily assumes the identity of Rocketman, instrument of Raketestadt propaganda, then joins the quixotic quest of the Floundering Four, heroes of the preterite, and is eventually deconstructed and left to languish in a sort of postmodern version of the Negative Zone.

Miller's decision to rely on minimalistic, negative imagery nestled in a wildly entropic background is pretty much dead on. Pynchon employs images of sexual violence and scatology in order to convey Nazi propagandists' version of the threat posed by inferior races. Moreover, he does not shy away from the phallic association of rockets—they are more or less the massive steel penises with which the Raketestadt buggers the degenerates of the world. Thus, Miller's stark rocket stenciled into a background of Pollock-y drips and smears conveys pretty succinctly Gravity's Rainbow's barrage of great white dicks smearing about in shit, semen and the ashes of bombed-out cities.

What is doubly interesting about this illustration is that it turns out that Miller returned to the image of a rocket, nosecone down and foregrounded by Superman, on the variant cover of All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder #4, thus implicitly associating that maligned series with Pynchon's almost universally praised novel. Bizarre though that may sound, when considered in this context, it goes a lot to explain Miller's conception of Superman and the relationship between Superman and Batman in this and his other Batman books. Superman, though ostensibly subjecting himself to the rules and norms of his adoptive planet, is not of our world and is in a position of superiority over humans in pretty much every sense that matters. He thus aligns quite neatly with the propagandistic hero of the elect as envisioned by the psychopaths at PISCES. Batman, on the other hand, is the hero of the preterite. He spends his time in Gotham's slums, wrestling with pimps and defending prostitutes. His day job as billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is nothing more than a distasteful cover, which allows him to live his real life, wallowing about in the city's piss and shit, unmolested.

But while Gravity's Rainbow is perhaps the incredibly cumbersome key to this portion of Miller's oeuvre, this is still the guy who is ostensibly going to launch Holy Terror! on the world. Though, as with much of Miller's more controversial work, this is perhaps not as contradictory as it might seem. While Pynchon was clearly aware of the potential dangers of comic book propaganda, he was also demonstrably anti-Fascist and it would be difficult to argue that he would have opposed the propagandistic aims of many World War II-era comics.

Frank Miller Week: Jurassic Park Cover

2010-08-17T22:23:00.005-04:00

"To the left, to the left" is where Beyonce is going to move all your shit when you do wrong. Why left? Most human left hands are non-dominant and religions often revere the right hand/side of the body. So, I guess the left is the less significant side. But we read from LEFT to right. This Frank Miller cover for Jurassic Park plays on our reading from left to right, but because this is such a minimal cover, I feel it's also using the left side to increase the scare-factor. When you first look at the cover, your eyes impulsively go left and follow the dinosaur body down to the human body in its mouth. Your eye hits the body last, as its not even the center point of the image. The right always gets the last word when we're reading, it's where our eyes stop or pause and this cover suggests: Dinosaurs: 1. Human Race: 0.

To texturize the skin of the dinosaur and to shade the human, Miller employs chunky, sharp-edged sections of black. This kind of sectioning-off reminds me of Miller disciple Mike Mignola's work more than Miller's own work, but it's a clever trick to the eye, as the same blocky shading/texturizing is present on the back of the dinosaur and the human (the wrinkles in his clothes are especially well-done and strange). The background is a little cheap, using a muted contrast with variations of orange and green in the dinosaur (rather than red), while also looking like a wall your mom decided to sponge-paint back in 1994. Perhaps it's the result of an old veteran like Miller having to confront digital art and computer coloring.

But the most annoying aspect of this cover is the blocking lines around the edges of the picture. These would work to better balance and improve composition of the image if they were on the right rather than on the same side as beginnings of the T-rex body. I guess the lines may be there for a textual reason on the completed cover. Like most work from Frank Miller. it's complex and conflicted, nearly schizophrenic and despite its flaws, the cover remains a success because it doesn't look traditional (which is eye grabbing) and it serves its purpose: to make the dinosaur the focus and not the humans--which is what Jurassic Park is all about.

Frank Miller Week: Miller's Gummy Politics

2010-08-16T15:35:00.001-04:00

Kinda bouncing off what David said about Miller and Moore--or even, Miller vs. Moore--one of the most baffling aspects of comics fandom and comics criticism (which are more of less, one in the same) is the unquestioned love of both Frank Miller and Alan Moore, often by the same people. If you're actually reading these works, there's really no way to be "a fan" of both of them.

Sure, one can appreciate both artists and enjoy reading their stuff, but I've met too many people that list both of these guys as their favorites and don't really seem to grasp the themes, ideas, and politics behind the work. Moore is your kinda classic bohemian liberal, tinged with the nihilism and knowingness that many aging left-leaning idealists have. Miller's essentially a hard-line Libertarian and in recent years, especially post-9-11 (which is something that's really infected his rhetoric in pretty much every interview) perhaps something of a nutty, FOX News-style Neo-Con. The only thing they have in common is a very fashionable cynicism.

Last year, Sean T. Collins over at Robot6 "Frank Miller, conservative comment-thread commentator" pointed out Miller's comments on a Conservative message board. This was interesting not only because it was a quasi-private discussion in public from a comics legend, but because it's a tangible confirmation of where Miller "stands". If you read them, he's sometimes nutty, sometimes smart, usually conflicted--and that's great.

Now no one's surprised that Miller's something of a conservative, but that point is often ignored or used as part of the comics nerd in-joke that Frank Miller's essentially, over time, lost his fucking mind. To contrast with his supposed right-wing turn, we're reminded of Superman as Reaganite goon in The Dark Knight, Miller's work with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, or black feminist superheroine Martha Washington. And his conservatism's used to explain why All-Star Batman is retarded. And to parse-out the roots of the movie 300's propagandistic qualities. And to mock the apparently no-longer having much to do with Batman, "superhero vs. Al Quaeda" comic Holy Terror!.

The thing is, these two supposed "sides" of Miller say more about the way many perceive the right, than anything about Miller. Like Christopher Hitchens, who took a supposed "right turn" after 9-11, it's more the result of readers reading what they wanted to read in the guy's work and assuming a grand, over-arching political understanding because of some key issues in common. Indeed, Miller's work has always been informed by a rarefied mix of Nationalism and Libertarianism. Miller's a smart guy, he's hardly a knee-jerk like most actively liberal comics artists, and he's well aware of the full extent of his politics, and is comfortable taking them to their logical, complex, sometimes not-so-pretty end. With superhero comics, that's pretty much always the uneasy attraction and repulsion we have towards vigiliante-ism. This is something I'm going to work out in some longer pieces later on, but I'd encourage everyone who's been so skeptical of Miller's recent work, to go back and look at his older work and finds the connections.

Frank Miller Week: Reading Elektra

2010-08-16T12:12:00.003-04:00

There is really no analogue for Frank Miller's Elektra anywhere in mainstream comics. She isn't a superhero, though neither is she a villain, in the strict sense of the term. Her origin, as it were, is rooted in familiar generic tropes, and yet these lead her along a very different path than that followed by the typical costumed warrior. For most of her appearances, she is inextricably tied to the psychic narrative of Daredevil/Matt Murdock, but you just have to read the exceptional Elektra Assassin to understand that this Hellenic pugilist has plenty of her own shit to deal with. Indeed, while there are a few definitive things that can be concluded about the impact of Miller's Elektra tales, it is just possible that her most profound significance is her intoxicating inscrutability.

In considering Elektra, particularly her initial appearances in the mainline Daredevil book, it is important to remember that Miller began writing these stories some five years before Alan Moore's purportedly ground-breaking Watchmen hit the shelves. I mention this because if you consider Moore's stated intention in composing Watchmen—to show just how batty superheroes would be if they lived in the 'real' world—you have to conclude that Miller had already been doing exactly that (and doing it in a much more affecting and believable way than Moore ever would) half-a-decade before Moore's self-involved buffoons were even a twinkle in their creator's myopic eye.

Lest you think I'm simply taking an opportunistic swipe at Watchmen, I think this is a really important point. It is clear that like Moore, Miller believes that someone would have to be batshit crazy to be a superhero—or super-assassin, in the case of Elektra. But unlike his British counterpart, Miller reasonably surmises that there would likely be some overwhelming psychic trauma as the underlying cause, rather than olympic-level self-involvement.

What separates Elektra from Daredevil, what leads her to become an assassin, rather than a hero like her irrepressibly moral lover, is the fact that the death of her father triggered a collapse of her world view. While I don't think it is particularly useful to linger over the specifics of superhero origins, it is important to recognize Elektra's transformation as the slide toward nihilism that it is. For one thing, it is humanly more understandable—at least for me. But even more importantly, it helps to demonstrate that Daredevil and Elektra are two sides of the same coin—or at least suffering from the same philosophical misconception.

What I mean by this is that both characters are hampered—in a way, both are ultimately doomed—by their failure to recognize the constructed-ness of their respective world views. For Daredevil, this is the source of his crippling obsession with Elektra, both before and after her death: committing himself at once to saving her life, imprisoning her and ultimately relentlessly reliving his 'guilt' over her death. Of course the consequences for Elektra are more profound and ultimately more tragic, but this is what makes reading Elektra so rewarding.

The best literary creations are those that transfix despite our ability to recognize their flaws. I am not comparing Elektra to, say, Milton's Satan, but I am suggesting that they operate on the same principle. I am haunted by Elektra, whether it is the living assassin from Daredevil, or the hallucinatory specter of Elektra Lives Again, or even the batshit apparatchik of Elektra Assassin, the same way Matt Murdock is haunted by Elektra.

And this is a pretty important observation because most of the time that Murdock dwells on Elektra in the stories she is absent. Thus, in a way, Murdock is 'reading' Elektra, in much the same way that I am reading her. While this is certainly the case before her death at the hands of Bullseye, this notion of Murdock interpreting Elektra takes on added significance after her demise.

Nowhere is this more important than in Elektra Lives Again. In typical Miller style, the reader (and Murdock, for that matter) is initially left guessing as to whether the reappearance of Elektra is genuine or if it is a figment of the lawyer/hero's tortured mind. But this is just a ploy and the real significance of this superb story is in Murdock's painstaking insertion of himself into the moments of Elektra's life from which he is most alienated. Thus, while Murdock may see himself as somehow protecting his departed former lover, what he is really doing is 'reading' the gaps in her biography so that he can ultimately let her go.

One blogger has suggested that Miller only knows how to write two sorts of female character: the woman who is created to be killed, and the woman who is really a man. While Miller may have known that Elektra would die when he first introduced the character, I do not think that this in any way lessens the significance of the character. In a way, Miller's Daredevil is more defined by Elektra than the other way round, or at least this is so in my reading of the stories. However you interpret her, though, Elektra is clearly one of Miller's most inspired creations.

Frank Miller Week!

2010-08-16T00:55:00.006-04:00

Why Frank Miller week? Why not. Though we usually try to wrap our theme weeks around some current comics event, it seemed appropriate to tackle the quasi-grizzled, bat-shit crazy, mainstream comics game-changer without thinking about it too much. Miller is also of course, the big, looming figure over smart-dumb comics and there can never really be enough analysis and argument about his work. The guy's both incredibly overrated and incredibly underrated. Loved by "entry-level" comics fans and enlightened fans surrounded by whiteboxes of 70s Marvel, and fundamentally misread by both of those groups, Frank Miller's exactly the kind of figure we're all attracted to over on this blog. So, all this week we're going-in on Frank Miller. Should be fun. Use that "comment" button and join in, and provide links to any pieces you've written (or end up writing) if you're moved to do so.

Wake Up Wake Up It's The Best Of The Month: July 2010

2010-08-06T08:00:00.001-04:00

The Bulletproof Coffin #2 by David Hine and Shaky Kane

This issue continues the series' meta-comics thread, wrestling around with themes of escapism, and once again, it's done in an intelligent, complex, but very comics manner. The pull of this issue is the fleshing-out of the Steve character, who comes off equal parts pathetic and sympathetic. His home life's pretty awful (meaningless sex, fat annoying kids, etc.) and his reasons for escape pretty obvious, but it's the form of escapism that solidifies the character. Even his escapism inactive and non-commital: "The costume chooses you!" And really Steve does what plenty of depressed nerds do--he reads a comics and pretends he's the comic book character. Hine basically wrote the worst fanboy one could imagine (quite different from the type parodied ad-nauseum in the media, mind you) and it just so happens that the worst fanboy is also Hine's best friend. Pushed along by Shaky Kane's pop-art Darrow style, Hine grabs onto all that's great about comics and stuffs it in their book, but aren't afraid to call bullshit on the medium's faults.

Red Mass for Mars #4 by Jonathan Hickman and Ryan Bodenheim

When All-Star Superman finally came to a close, I was instantly disappointed. I was so excited for the final issue, that when I first read through it all I could think about was, “This is it?” After letting it sink-in and reading it a couple more times, I finally began to make sense of it and realized how well-done it actually was. The same thing happened with Red Mass for Mars #4. Of course, Bodenheim’s extraordinary artwork and colors are a highlight, but at first glance there’s not much going on here other than a big battle and even that, has a strange distance to it. It feels more like a flashback of a battle--like in a comic or movie when a character provides exposition of some great, universe-altering war--but, it's just Hickman's quasi-mythic style and the issue's about Mars deciding the fate of mankind.

Each issue has been framed around a different view of Utopia. The last issue dealt with Equality: Through a Mars-founded superhero coalition, they virtually eliminated crime and created a society that was "equal". Then, that society failed. At the beginning of this issue, Mars sees the dark side of himself in the form of an enemy commander. He's at a crossroads, which isn't a place you see super-powerful characters in comics very often. Mars will either run away as he did before or take a stand and fight.

What ultimately moves Mars towards the more noble of those choices is his memories with the other superheroes. He recalls their sacrifices in battles and it ultimately, moves him to sacrifice himself for Earth. This final issue's utopian ideal is Fraternity, an ideal deeply rooted in experience and one that can only be achieved by moving through the three previous stages. Note too that Mars is the catalyst for the book's "Fraternity" theme, that it's his active thoughts and decisions that solidify it, and also note that it's through violence (in comics the experience) that this utopian ideal's achieved. Mars is basically Superman, only he's made more complex and real and flawed (he's like a Greek god in that sense) and so, he contains both the best and worst of humanity within him. He's still a widescreen comic book epic hero but he's much more complex and less glamorous. Hickman though, ends the issue on a wizened but hopeful note, with peace and perhaps utopia there temporarily. Yet Mars' actions hang around in the background, hinting at the inevitable fate of every person (death) and the reality that gut-level, non-utopian things like acts of violence are part of the natural order.

RASL #8 by Jeff Smith

RASL is such a weirdly perfect series. It comes out every couple of months so it’s hard to remember the exact plot points, but when you pick up a new issue, the series' eerie but earnest world is vivid again and all the tiny details come back. What's really great about RASL is that it has this elaborate plot but its rarely the focus on the comic. When the first page of an issue begins with a perfectly penciled and inked beat-up face from Smith and the quote, "It's never too late to fix it. That's what I've always believed," it's just instantly engaging regardless of plot details and continuity concerns. It feels fresh and exciting like a brand new comic. The previous issue of RASL got a little too bogged down with plot points and those way too late references to the Patriot Act just felt off. This issue though, steers away from that and focuses on something small but significant: Rasl's relationship with Maya.

From Bone, it's clear that Jeff Smith is a world-builder--the sort of guy that gently places details into a narrative until the reader's eyes are opened to the whole picture. In the beginning of the series, Rasl's sleeping with Annie, who appears to be a round after his relationship with Maya. But here, we see Annie and Rasl together at the same time that he's with Maya, and it's Annie that gives him the advice to stop seeing her. In a series that flirts with time and time-travel conventions and concerns, it's cool to see Smith employing the actual narrative and hiding or rearranging details and having them mess with the reader's timeline and knowledge of events.

But the center of this isn't some Inception-like narrative trickery, but the emotions and personalities of these characters. Smith begins showing Maya as perhaps a little off her rocker. When she says, "I feel like I’m the conduit between two scientific geniuses – helping you both to greater heights," it's probably one of the strangest, most disorienting moments in the whole series and it has nothing to do with trippy time-travel physics. That line, the expression on Maya's face, and Rasl's wordless reaction feel very real, like you can feel the awkward pauses as if it were happening in front of you. That moment too, fills the scene with tension that builds and builds until Maya leaves. The issue's second half deals with the strange little girl that was introduced earlier in the series. Her overt strangeness actually falls flat though compared to very-real weird stuff between Rasl and Maya, and it ends up really just furthering the plot along.

Also: King City #10, Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain #2

Wrestling with the Crimson Pig: The Perverse Genius of Porco Rosso

2010-07-22T17:44:00.002-04:00

One of my projects this summer has been (and continues to be) to spend as much time with my brainy pipsqueak of a ten-year old nephew, introducing him to some of my favorite comics and, most particularly, the movies of Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki's films are of course well known for their broad appeal among audiences of all ages, but re-viewing the film the other day with the aforementioned pipsqueak, I was particularly struck by the notion that the director's early-90s dogfight-fest Porco Rosso is a strange and wonderful film that cannot really be considered a children's movie at all.

Porco Rosso stands out in the director's oeuvre in a number of obvious ways: its setting is historically and geographically identifiable and, excepting the fact that the hero is an anthropomorphic pig, the film eschews any significant fantastical elements. This is not to say, however, that the movie falls under the rubric of narrative realism. Indeed, Porco Rosso is a more or less pure expression of the sort of Romanticism associated with the poets of the last great phase of the 'movement' in Britain, particularly Byron and Shelley, but more on this later.

Another genuine oddity of Porco Rosso stems from the decided conclusion that the movie doesn't really have a plot, at least not in the fully realized, feature film sense. This is in part attributable to the film's source and the circumstances of production. The genesis for Porco Rosso was a 15-page watercolor manga published in English as The Age of the Flying Boat. As Miyazaki recounts in an interview which appeared in the July 1993 issue of Animerica, Porco Rosso was originally intended to be "a 45-minute film exclusively for screening on international flights," but as the film kept growing it was determined that the only hope for recouping the spiraling costs would be to release it as a feature film.

That same issue of Animerica reprints the first five pages of Miyazaki's original manga, roughly corresponding to the film's opening set piece, in which Porco—or Marco, as the pilot is properly named—foils the Mamma Aiuto gang's piracy of a pleasure craft, securing half of the captured gold and rescuing the gaggle of intrepid young girls taken hostage by the pirates. This scene plays out a bit differently in the manga and these differences are instructive in understanding how just how strangely subversive Porco Rosso is.

Rather than flying off with an entire classroom full of pre-pubescent girls, as they do in the film, the Mammut Gang, as they are called in the comic, pointedly bring just one adolescent girl along with them as a hostage. Moreover, the pirates are singled out as having a particular predilection for beautiful young girls—indeed, Marco himself twice refers to the pirates as having a "Lolita complex." This pointed allusion to a possible sexual motive for the pirates' hostage taking is belied by the gang's strictly mercenary behavior. When the young girl jumps from their plane after Marco has shot it down, the pirates lament the loss of their "source of revenue."

But while the explicit references to sexuality in the comic are undermined by the behavior of the pirates, thus neutralizing any sense of sexual menace, the situation is reversed in the film. At first glance, the substitution of a dozen or so pre-pubescent girls for the manga's solitary adolescent beauty seems to remove any hint of the sexual danger suggested by the comic. However, close consideration of the young girls' fearless and playful response to their captors and the succession of images of half-dressed water nymphs crawling all over these grown men and their undeniably phallic machines reveals the film's version of events to be paradoxically far more transgressive.

One need look no further than Richard Hughes's intoxicating 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica to find a quasi-canonical literary analog to the events chronicled in the film's opening. In Hughes's novel, a ship carrying the children of British expats living in Jamaica back to England is set upon by a crew of pirates at least as bumbling and ineffectual as the Mamma Aiuto gang. When the children are taken hostage by the pirates, they become almost animalistic inhabitants of the ship, just as the young girls captured by the Mamma Aiuto gang do in Porco Rosso.

What is interesting about A High Wind in Jamaica is Hughes's refusal to romanticize childhood. With the children aboard, the pirate ship is steeped in violent and sexual animal energy—in part exuding from the pirates themselves, but equally, if not more so, from the children.

One of the more puzzling aspects about Porco Rosso is Porco's largely unexplained ambivalence toward women, displayed in his turbulent relationship with seductive bar owner Gina, but even more exaggeratedly in his attitude toward the teenage creator of his improved seaplane, Fio. Fio is a bundle of latent sexual energy, profoundly affecting all the men around her, and Porco is clearly uncomfortable with this from the beginning. Porco's discomfort with sexuality, displayed in its turn when he rescues the young girls from the pirates, in his relationship with Gina and in the strong parental yet still somehow more intimate bond he establishes with Fio, may in fact be related to his transformation into a pig.

Though the reasons for his porcine state are never adequately explained, what becomes clear as the film progresses is that it seems strongly tied to a sense of self-loathing in the character. Porco vandalized the only surviving photograph of the human Marco, scratching out his former face until it is unrecognizable. Moreover, when Fio comes straight out and asks how he was turned into a pig, his response, that "all middle aged men are pigs," is telling in spite of its obviousness.

Though I don't think it would be fruitful to speculate on some sort of explanation for Porco's self-loathing in some imagined past events, this detail fits in with his overall Byronic character. It is also of a piece with his obsession with aviation, which burdens Porco with an implicit death wish. Not to take this too far, but Porco's obsession with airplanes and aviation echoes somewhat the nautical obsession of the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley met his ultimate end in a somewhat mysterious sailing accident—some have suggested that his boat had been set upon by pirates—in his newly custom-built vessel off the shores of Northern Italy, leaving his creative and much younger wife Mary a widow.

The end of Porco Rosso, like pretty much all of the film, is even more vague and ambivalent than Shelley's demise. We can guess from Curtis's remark that Fio's kiss has restored Marco's human visage, but this is perhaps more of a typically Miyazakian recourse to fairy tale tropes than any definitive statement of redemption. We also know from Fio's closing narration that Porco ultimately evades his Fascist pursuers. But Porco's feud with the Fascists seems more a gesture of individualism than a statement of deeply held political conviction. In a way, then, it is almost unfortunate that movie is not still known here by its original title, Crimson Pig. By saddling the character with such an explicitly inflammatory label, the film simply completes the aura of ambivalence and danger that surrounds the porcine ace.

Why Iron Man 2 Is Better Than The Dark Knight

2010-07-16T04:49:00.004-04:00

It's curious how The Dark Knight became canonical while Iron Man 2--which is starting its slow death to DVD at the dollar theater right now--got the shaft. Both attempt an "In These Times" contextualization of their heroes, but only the latter does so with the understanding that social commentary is nothing new to comics, or life in general, and thus carries it off with genial aplomb.

Tony Stark, like Bruce Wayne, loosely fits the Randian hero framework. He’s a billionaire industrialist whose technology is seen as unwieldy in private hands, is considered a menace to societal stability and faces the threat of collectivization by deadweight bureaucrats who can’t appreciate or understand his will to power.

The Dark Knight, though, has superficial insight into ineffectual bureaucracy and its vulnerability to corruption, chalking it up to either one large buyout by the mob or, later, an inability to deal with unconventional, ahistorical terror (kind of like how Blue Velvet’s critique of the White Picket Fence’s placid illusion relies entirely on the outta nowhere psychotic city mobster Frank), inadvertently leaving essential questions about representative government and what it takes to build a passably democratic system entirely out of the picture.

Iron Man 2, on the other hand, is grounded in the real world complications of the military-industrial complex, where Tony Stark, claiming to have “successfully privatized world peace,” is really just compromising to avert what essentially would be a governmental monopoly on the same thing. At the hearing over what should be done with Stark’s invention, Senator Stern hollowly invokes “the American people” even though both of them work outside the public interest (with Stern using rival corporate figurehead Justin Hammer to co-opt Stark’s technology on behalf of the US military, and Stark coasting on the benefits of being a public superhero with private property).

The Dark Knight takes most of that for granted. Where most of the moral dilemma in The Dark Knight turns on the question of who should be allowed to regulate crime: vigilante Wayne or the government as epitomized by “White Knight” Harvey Dent, the arsenal provided by military hardware specialist Lucius Fox is only considered nominally transgressive in the film’s final moral dilemma over the use of mass-wiretapping to catch the Joker.

From the start of the first film in the Iron Man franchise, cause and effect in relation to military technology is the core of the moral dilemma, taking it from a realistically unprogressive epiphany on Stark’s part that “it’s hurting our boys” to a whole plot point resting on the connection between the arms industry, the military and international weapons trafficking, with Stark’s plans to shut down the arms wing of Stark enterprises and focus on alternative energy invoking shareholder wrath. In no way does it exclude the glitzy, pyrotechnic allure of the technology and its seductive prowess, making the Iron Man franchise a wholly subversive deconstruction of the military’s technologically advanced weaponry wrapped in a self-aware plug for it.

Iron Man 2 is also firmly rooted in history, assessing Stark’s “will to power” in the context of the Cold War, subverting the heroic theory of invention by showing the privilege afforded Stark in having been on the winning side. The villain, Ivan Vanko, is the son of Stark’s father’s partner-in-development, a similarly brilliant but unfortunately Russian scientist cast out by the U.S. government on suspicion of character. Dying without the means to realize his vision, poor and unacknowledged for his contributions, the legacy left to his son is a brilliant scientific mind wasted by an arbitrary political turnout.

The Joker, meanwhile, has no back-story, which is flaunted by the filmmakers as some transcendent bird-flipping in the form of pat explanations (an insult to the audience who sat through the two hours of exposition that was Batman Begins). Basically, he’s an enigmatic evil whose Deus ex Machina lunacy becomes a ticking time bomb exercise in “the ends justify the means.”

The Joker has a cynical view of mankind that has led him to transcend societal norms but not at the expense of making sure everyone knows that they’re capable of being forced to break those norms, too. His preferred method involves placing random kidnapped targets in compromising situations that will force them to act out of base self-interest and in spite of ethical standards. And so begins a debate whose answer is little surprise to anyone familiar with literature documenting human behavior in concentration camps, or the Milgram or Stanford Prison experiments, even just those Saw movies.

Vanko’s villainy is an identifiable, sympathetic vengeance that carries with it a pointed critique of public relations techniques used to rehabilitate the pasts of shady personages, companies and countries in the public mind, powerfully corroborated by the sequel starting off with Stark having learned nothing, going back to his old ways after capitalizing on the public’s affection for his alter ego. Though the film kind of whitewashes Stark’s father’s past as a World of Tomorrow beacon for alternative energy, in the context of the preceding exposition it’s reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s turn in Julien Donkey-Boy, where just because he’s philosophically astute doesn’t exculpate him from being an asshole.

Both films make statements about the post-9/11 “war on terror” with its changing rules of engagement, but whereas The Dark Knight’s villain is symbolic to the point of being problematic, Iron Man 2 has a sense of history that pushes the truth of how wars or adversarial stances don’t end but are put off, merely setting up the lingering after-effects. 9/11 and the “war on terror” deal with agents of chaos whose historical narratives and philosophies are inextricably tied with the society they target, creating an overlap of implication that equalizes culpability in violence, not postmodern menaces whose actions accidentally overlap with those of the governments they target.

Iron Man 2 also has subtle insight into sex and race in the upper echelons of power. Whereas The Dark Knight casts Morgan Freeman in his usual supplementary role as a wise, useful hand and Rachel Dawes is merely a volleyball between two dynamic males, Iron Man 2 comments on the precarious positions both Rhodey and Pepper Potts face as black and female officials, respectively, in high-ranking positions. While Tony Stark is allowed to be a wild card, indulge in swaggering debauchery, and play highly destructive games of cops and robbers, Pepper Potts has to take care of the paperwork while Rhodey has to handle the PR.

Both films have a spare but pointed usage of pop music highlighting the discrepancy between Stark and Rhodey’s boundaries. In the first film, on a private jet, Rhodey attempts injecting a level of gravity into Stark’s experimental shenanigans while Stark puts on a Ghostface Killah video, gets some Sake and orders his flight attendant to strip for him, Rhodey losing it in the process (perhaps a joke on Terence Howard’s professed disavowal of rap music). In the sequel Rhodey crashes a private party at Stark’s mansion. Stark, drunk in full Iron Man regalia, tells his Jewish DJ (the late Crazy Town member Adam Goldstein) to put on a rap and pop medley, while Rhodey, putting on a prototype and excluding himself from “getting down,” locks Stark in a game of battle bots in order to knock some sense into him.

Stark (and importantly, not the director) filters Pepper through the Madonna/Whore complex, seeing her as a symbol of purity, a saving grace and real love interest he can set aside his womanizing of floozies for. She, meanwhile, has to assess public perception knowing that her genuine hard work keeping Tony in line and generally functional while also running his company for him could be compromising. If she gets entangled in what could possibly just be an impulsive, if slightly matured, libidinal urge, she could get branded a gold digger who slept her way to the top in the process.

Iron Man 2, importantly, has a sense of humor, like Sam Rockwell’s turn as Stark wannabe Justin Hammer, a hilariously meta in-joke referencing the initial consideration of Rockwell for the part of Stark before it was handed to Downey, Jr. It doesn’t forget that it’s Hollywood entertainment but is smart enough to realize that it’s not an either-or dichotomy, instead expressing a wide variety of emotions more reflective on human discourse than Batman’s one-note plodding.

Unlike the mostly humorless Wayne, Stark doesn’t brood depressively underneath the weight of the world, instead sardonically playing the greased machinations of politics for the farce it is, trading scathing ripostes with everyone from the still funny underneath that Botox Gary Shandling to really anyone he comes into contact with. That The Dark Knight was polarizing in a way that had critics making stances means that it won in another way. It's a product whose import begs to be taken seriously via a bombardment of unleavened grimness, working on the assumption that utter devastation is the only way to make an impression (regardless of whether there’s a coherent point to be made) and thus is itself akin to an act of terrorism.

Wake Up, Wake Up It's The Best of the Month: June 2010

2010-07-02T01:00:00.001-04:00

S.H.I.E.L.D #2 by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver

With this series and his recent run on Fantastic Four, Jonathan Hickman is becoming one of Marvel's brightest stars--even if most comics readers don't realize it. His work borrows a page from the Morrison handbook and utilizes science-fiction/fantasy in broad terms to illustrate themes about society at large as well the characters' inner development. It's the artful way he does the former and the fact that he cares about the latter at all that makes his work so interesting.

Hickman's big trick is taking everything up a notch. In Fantastic Four Reed Richards wants to literally solve everything, and S.H.I.E.L.D. is no different, with grandiose dialogue like "Drink deeply and live forever" and "I built all of it." It sounds like this would get old after a while, but it never does. Hickman uses sci-fi as a tool and not as the focus of his stories. You're too busy thinking about how the characters relate to each other to seriously consider the guy with a nuclear reactor in his chest, and it all feels properly commonplace.

Issue #2 suffers from a scatterbrained style--which is probably another Morrison influence--but it's still a strong read due to well, the same thing Hickman does in everything, and also smaller things like an incredibly designed double-page spread featuring Nostradamus and Leonardo's continued presence as number-one-most-awesome-human.

Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain #1 by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, and Peter Snejbjerg

Abyssal Plain begins with a Russian man trapped in a submarine waiting to die and writing to his girlfriend to pass the time. He goes on to talk about, in the panel above, how you never really think you will die, how there's always some hope. It's the kind of thing that makes you feel like you've been punched in the solar plexus. Short and direct and really powerful.

The opening is effective but strange, because it doesn't have anything to do with the plot really, and even the deeper, thematics aren't addressed in the story. What it does do however, is provide a the sense that every character in this story--and the Hellboy universe--whether important or not, has a notable, affecting backstory. The result is that even the smallest detail or piece of information, even the slightest shift in person feels bigger and deeper. So when Abe's counterpart in this B.P.R.D mission starts acting like a jerk, he's not just a foil or simple counterpoint to Abe's good-natured kindness, you get the sense of this guy slowly cultivating his shitbag attitude...and that makes it all the worse.

Tons of wordless panels help this story to fly by--each panel feels like it carries it's own weight--but the tone's set with the opening. Again, not thematically laid-out and not a key piece of plot information, but somehow the feeling of this issue's set from page one. Immediately after the opening, a panel of Abe staring out into a grey sky gives the impression that Abe is having the same sort of thoughts that the sailor had, and when Abe briefly meets up with the sailor's body later, there's a mysterious knowing look between Abe and the corpse and we almost understand it.

The Bulletproof Coffin #1 by David Hine and Shaky Kane

This is one of those comics that feels like such a small portion of the overall picture that it's hard to know exactly what's going on at times. The plot has no clear focus, with things jumping from the main character, Steve, to excessive explanation of the fictional Hine and Kane and their Kirby/Lee like relationship.

The comic is ultimately a celebration/deconstruction of comics' underbelly. The stories behind the stories, like the Lee/Kirby drama, and the early weirdness of comics where from panel to panel really anything could happen. It's like how Paul Karasik included his search for information about the Fletcher Hanks in the back of I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!. His interest started with the weirdness of the comics, but grew into an interest into the man behind them, and pretty soon real-life weirdness and comics weirdness were the same thing. There's definitely a natural inclination to try to understand the psychology behind the people who create art--especially in those who create the weird or subversive--and Bulletproof Coffin feeds that interest while still giving readers the more visceral and simple thrills of a comic book.

It's successful as a meta-comic because it doesn't try too hard to analyze what is going on, and like the comics it emulates, Bulletproof Coffin is interested in entertaining; in being awesome. The book's major diversion is sticking in an entire comic by the fictional creator and it's not all that different from the rest of the comic--just as weird and cool and exciting. Kane too, subtly shifts his style for the comic-in-a-comic but not too much, so it's all one big, weird thing.

Kane draws Steve lounging comfortably holding that comic in his hands, and it's a great panel because it wordlessly captures what it's like to relax and read a comic. The next panel is his hands holding the comic, then it's a full page spread of the comic he's reading, and you proceed to read the whole comic he has in his hands. It's a trippy all-encompassing use of visual narrative and when I saw the cover inside the comic, it threw me for a loop--the idea of starting another comic inside this other comics--and I think that's the feeling Hine and Kane are going for here.

Others: Thor #611, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #3, King City #9

Benjamin Marra and I talk about Rambo: First Blood Part II.

2010-06-29T13:37:00.005-04:00

For The House Next Door's "Summer of '85" series, Benjamin Marra (Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, Lil B album covers) and I discussed Rambo: First Blood Part II. Go read it!
Brandon Soderberg: Let's talk about the waterfall scene towards the end because it inspired this discussion. Basically, Benjamin was part of a panel at the Small Press Expo (SPX) called “The New Action” that was talking to “indie” creators engaged with more visceral narrative styles. At one point in the discussion, Benjamin just kinda lovingly describes the scene, late in Rambo: First Blood Part II, where Rambo fires this explosive arrow at this guy on a waterfall and there's like one killer beat between the arrow launching and the explosion and then—blam! The guy just gets decimated.

Benjamin Marra: Yeah, that whole scene really resonates with me. I really love it. The music, the way it's edited, it all just really sticks in my head. I think the scene is emblematic of the action movies around that time. Death Wish 3, Cobra, Commando, The Running Man, Invasion USA, Red Dawn, feel, through the prism of time, completely bizarre. I get the feeling they were constructed without any self-awareness. I can only speculate really that what occurred in those movies at the time they came out was totally acceptable and normal action. That's at least how I felt about them, but I was pretty young. If any of those movies were released today, they'd probably be perceived as satire.

Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard #1 “The Battle of the Hawk’s Mouse & The Fox’s Mouse”

2010-06-24T00:34:00.011-04:00

David Petersen’s Mouse Guard: Fall and Winter draws you in with the art and keeps you reading with the story. That may sound simple, but so many comics these days do one or the other--and just as many do neither. Petersen constructs his universe with a Tolkien-like precision and then, stuffs it full of realism and adventure. Instead of magic and monsters, Mouse Guard is populated with the animals that surround us every day. Maps, and world building details--and even the characters' way of speaking--provide glimpses into the much larger world of Mouse Guard. The overall effect is akin to being in high school Social Studies and that one bit of cultural anthropology or off-to-the-side history that sticks with you and sends you to the library to do your own amateur nerd research.

Despite Petersen's rarefied, handmade world, Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard shows the comic handed over to other creators. The legends work with varied degrees of success, but it's always interesting and unsurprisingly, the more these stories have in common with Petersen's Mouse Guard, the better. Jeremy Bastian’s legend “The Battle of the Hawk’s Mouse & The Fox’s Mouse” continues Petersen’s focus on realism and universe, but adds in some classic fairy tale elements into the mix as well. It’s really an origin story, but Bastian makes the ending very close to being a parable or fable--and the simple fact that the story has plenty of different interacting brings up memories of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The structure of “Battle” is delicately balanced, with each strand of narrative carrying individual meaning that both supports the story and Petersen’s universe. It's formally perfect, with everything lining up or counter-acting. In "Battle", two opposing feudal states of the Fox and Hawk are set up the same with minor differences and the same goes with their mouse underlings. Each mouse servant is allowed to keep one companion mouse. One chooses a wife while the other chooses a son.

The pages where each mouse and their predicament are presented have mirror layouts and are reminiscent of Petersen’s Social Studies textbook tone. Looking at the pages is almost like looking at arrangements of “typical period costumes” in history textbooks. The strong parallels between opposite sides supports the story in its final panels when the mice come together and realize for the first time that they are really all on the same side.
Bastian’s art has the same supportive effect. He is more detailed oriented than Petersen giving his story a distinct ancient quality. It also respects the power Petersen has placed in the carnivores that populate his world. It enhances the story by providing a gravitas to the potential origin of the Mouse Guard.

An interesting subtext in the story the way it subtlety presents a balanced view of history. It takes place in a time before any mouse civilization and is heavily described by the narrator as being complete chaos. Despite the grim description of the time period, the hawk’s mouse and the fox’s mouse both have extremely intricate clothes and weapons giving the impression of some sort of structure to the society. It reinforces the idea of the story that mice have a great potential, but it also reflects how people think of the past in terms of lack of current technologies or societal institutions and not in terms of the actual daily life of that age.

The narrator comments at one point that even though this special arrangement between predator and prey is tyrannical it was still a better alternative to the other options the mice had. It's a smart way for Bastian to humanize the time period and to basically say to judge the past on it's own terms.

The other stories in issue #1 are enjoyable, but don't carry the same weight as Bastian's. They feel like they could have been told anywhere whereas Bastian's inhabits the Mouse Guard universe and fully understands what makes Mouse Guard worth reading. The art in "Battle" is clearly gripping, but the focus on the humdrum details of daily life of the characters in between their adventures is what makes Mouse Guard stand out from other animal personified adventure comics.

White Box Hero: Gringo #1

2010-06-05T03:07:00.037-04:00

Everybody here at "Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?" is the type of comics nerd to spend two hours flipping through a quarter box of comics with the hope that there will be at least something sorta cool in there. Every once in a while, the nerdity pays off and you end up with something greater than you could've ever expected...a white box hero!

In the strangely forthright introduction to Gringo, writer Kyle Garrett tells readers that the intention of the issue is to “test the waters” for future Caliber western comics. Why this one-shot Western comic put out by Caliber in March 1990 even has an introduction is the first of too many times you'll say “what the hell” if you read through this thing.

Garrett—the perfect surname for a western writer by the way, extra funny because it's a pseudonym for Caliber publisher Gary Reed—also uses this introduction to provide a small but interesting look into the struggles of a comics publisher and comics writer: “Let me tell you, it would've been a lot easier to do a mini-series than just 32 pages. How much can you do in 32 pages when you know you have to place a character in a situation and resolve it in such a short amount of space?” The tension between publisher—it's cheaper, less risky to do a one-shot—and writer—writing a one-shot is tough—isn't one most comics types are willing to address, especially with such sobriety, so that's pretty cool.

A few paragraphs later, Garrett/Reed even wrestles with the anxiety of influence, stating that “one of the hardest things to do with a western is to remove it from the images of the movies.” Gringo's story does read like a western comic raised on the movies—a mysterious stranger who can't remember his past enters a town and helps save the day—but it doesn't feel like one, which you know, is more important anyways--that feeling.

Where Gringo stops having much of anything to do with western movies--and western comics for that matter--is in the art and visual narrative from Wayne Reid. Namely, the comics bounces around from a really rigid, conventional panel design to sudden, awesomely awkward page-high, panel-less whirls of images and dashes of ink. Gringo is is all weird amateur experimentalism, and in its simultaneous adherence to western genre conventions via the story and rejection of expectations with its comics grammar, is one really weird book.

Let's start with Wayne Reid's awesome-terrible style. Everyone in the comic is kinda handsome or like ruggedly beautiful, the men and the women, and they're often rocking like perms, and sometimes their faces are a bit too small for their heads? And sometimes their heads are too small for their bodies? Whatever. In short, he's got a style. An identifiable, tangible style, and like, everybody from Jack Kirby to Gene Colan to Rob Liefeld to Frank Quitely has that and on a good or bad day, some snob could say how any of those guys' art isn't "realistic" or messes with anatomy or is just plain bad, so those asides about Reid are totally not a critique, but a celebration. Nothing else really feels like the art here, even though it might even come off as a bit generic or third-rate, it's really damned consistent and has a scratchy, line-y thing to it that helps to counteract the idealized sexy cowboys.

Maybe the best example of this tension is on the first page of the book: A six-panel, time slowed-down page that shows Gringo, sunbaked, confused, wandering up over a sand dune. The first three panels illustrate a basic elapse of time and then, the small fourth panel gives us a close-up of Gringo.

He's stunned, his eyes all glazed-over, his hair sticking up and messy, all kinds of crap of his face. There's a sincerity to Gringo's face, the result of Reid's bizarre art; the guy looks cherubic, or almost like a baby-faced actor with some B-movie grit and grime slapped across his face, not a guy, even a guy in a comic, who's actually wandered through the desert. And then, just as we're introduced to Gringo, he falls flat on his face. The page's final panel is presumably a few hours later, when Gringo's discovered and taken back a local ranch.

The next page begins with a similar, slowing-down time technique, illustrating Gringo's return to consciousness via four panels that move from black, to hazy indistinct confusion, to comic book clarity. The rest of the page introduces the setting (Ranch De Macido), two of the important characters (Juanita and Manuel), and the fact that Gringo doesn't remember his past...or does he?

The title/credit page comes next, and it's the first of many panel-less inky whirl of images--dollar store Gene Colan--and in the very corner, Gringo, answering Manuel's question from the previous page ("Hey Gringo, who are you? Where'd you come from?"): "I-I don't know." This page kinda plays on the readers' perception of this comic as goofy and amateur because it's hard to tell what's going on or if you're supposed to take it literally. You're kinda in this zone of "this comic's out there so maybe some shit just doesn't make sense" but, it's all really awesome set-up. Later in the comic, it's revealed that Gringo does indeed remember and so, the page functions as a hint to the reader that he does remember (the cloud of images, his memory), but at first view, it seems more like Gringo's being bombarded with pieces of memory and he can't parse it all out--which is more like actual memory loss, it isn't blank, just the details don't fit together yet. Either way, it's a cool way to represent Gringo's hesitant mind-state.

Let's step back for a second because just three pages in, you're getting a sense of Gringo's kitchen-sink approach to visual narrative. The first page was a word-less sequence. The second page introduces a lot of information but begins with a slowed-down montage pretty much exactly like the one on the page before. Then, the comic opens up into a splash-page. It's all just a little bit too much, like one too many ideas crammed in there. But then you turn the page and it's all straight-forward panels for a while, until another splash page and some weird panel/montage tricks. And then there's a relatively normal page and a panel-less splash page across from a big wordless panel?

There's a nutty structure to the thing. As Gringo goes on, the amount of pages that are "normal" decreases, there's a bunch more oddball splashes and panel-less explosions of images, and even the panel construction gets pretty nuts. More and more pages are based around a main image that's panel-less and then, stuck on top of that, are some typical panels. Again, none of this is groundbreaking or new on its own, but the sheer amount of weird stuff going on, page to page, builds up.

The weirdness really hits its breaking point, appropriately enough, during a duel between Gringo and one of comic's villains, Stoner (I'm purposefully avoiding plot summary because it really doesn't matter). At the top of the page, there's the shit-talking, experience-less Manuel dropping out of the duel, Gringo stepping in for him. It's done in small, wordless, close-up panels.

The middle panel is your classic Western medium wide shot but it's effective and then it gets really effective further down the page, when the panel's copied and reduced and surrounded by the nervous eyes of Gringo and Stoner. It's just like, what?

And then, to increase the tension even more, before the men fire, there's another one of those panel-less splash/memory pages, and then finally, the duel, in another world-less panel.

You turn the page and you get a cool, awkward montage of how the duel plays out--Stoner gets shot--and again, Reid's odd approach to anatomy makes the sequence work. Stoner twists and turns around with each hit and it's awkward and strange-looking, unhinged, not cinematic, or barely cinematic really--a little closer to what a person may look like when they're shot.

After this, Gringo just gets AWESOME as the mysterious cowboy systematically takes revenge on every one of the land-stealing Dardin's men, of which Stoner was one. He throws a guy through a window--the build-up is established through that slow-motion four panel thing again--and then uses a fire-poker to burn Dardin's eyes out. Then, he returns to the ranch to inform Manuel, Juanita, and their father that their farm will be okay and he rides off into the sunset--illustrated with one final, four-panel montage.

Something Old, Something New: Wilson vs. BodyWorld

2010-06-02T01:05:00.007-04:00

So yeah, I did a piece on Dan Clowes' Wilson and Dash Shaw's BodyWorld for the Baltimore City Paper this week. There's a ton of other stuff to discuss about these books than what I crammed into a thousand or so words, but my main point is simple: Wilson is pretty much a loathsome waste of time and BodyWorld is just jesus christ amazing.

Primarily I was wrestling with the feelings I had while reading Wilson, which were "Wow, the younger me would've loved this but now I just find it really obnoxious and off-putting." I see why the books works but I don't care. This kind of cynicism, this disdain for everybody--which Clowes undoubtedly has, this isn't as simple as mistakenly reading Wilson as Clowes' voice--makes me uncomfortable and sad. And that's the intention but um, whatever?

When you read it right along with BodyWorld, the books are almost arguing with one another. There's literally no way Shaw was making his book as a response but it works through that lens. BodyWorld's Paulie Panther is very Wilson-like but we end up kinda "getting" him and feeling for him, even though he's a clueless asshole. And then there's the issues of visual narrative and like, a care for the comics form, which Clowes--like Ware--loves and loathes. Dash Shaw just loves comics and it's rushing through the whole damned book. In the review, I compare BodyWorld to Infinite Jest and I mean it!Anyways, click below to read my take on these two graphic novels...

"Every year--at least since Art Spiegelman's Maus, and most certainly by the time Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth was a bookstore-ready hardcover--a few sophisticated, sprawling comic books make their way out of the alt-comics echo chamber and into the mainstream. Last year it was David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp and R. Crumb's Book of Genesis; April alone saw the release of Daniel Clowes' Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly) and Dash Shaw's BodyWorld (Pantheon). Though it won't replace the great American novel anytime soon, the past 20 years have certainly witnessed the rise of the great American graphic novel.

Both Wilson and BodyWorld are graphic novels in the loaded, fancy sense of the term, but each book also subtly defies the expectations for the kind of smarty-pants comics that get write-ups in magazines and, well, free alternative weeklies. Clowes' collection of depressive joke strips--a parody of the Sunday funnies--about a middle-aged, out of touch douchebag, shuns comics' recent fascination with the grand statement, opting for a terse take on America in the aughts. It feels like a relic from an earlier indie comics era when every release didn't have to swing for the fences. Shaw follows up 2008's Bottomless Belly Button--a 720 pager about divorce--with an erotic, pulp-obsessed, 384-page book about a strand of weed that makes you psychic: It's a new kind of comics epic..."

Wake Up, Wake Up It's Best of the Month: May 2010

2010-06-01T10:29:00.002-04:00

Return of Bruce Wayne #1 & #2 by Grant Morrison, Chris Sprouse, and Frazier Irving.
Didn't really expect these to be as good as they are, but Morrison always finds ways of taking a "cool" idea and adding extra layers onto it. Here, the layer is Superman's squad time-hopping around, trying to stop Batman from coming back to the present, which. Issue #2 tackles it mostly and artist Frazier Irving draw Superman as thin and vaguely wimpy, which actually goes along well with the hyper-sincere tone Morrison's adopted for Superman since All Star Superman and Final Crisis.

The first issue is just paced perfectly. With not a lot of dialogue, the story moves along really quickly but somehow keeps you fixated on each and every panel too, like there's caves of meaning in every sequence. And it uses simple comics tricks, like weird colored skys and backgrounds to enhance the time travel element of the story, and make the world of the cavemen seem like it's forever on the verge of violence. Little tricks like reversing expectation and having Bruce Wayne's speech incomprehensible and not the cavemen is subtle and just good, smart comic book stuff.

Issue #2 pumps up the dialogue and almost lost me in the mix a couple of times, but as the issue pushes on it picks up steam. Things become more frenetic for both Superman and Bruce towards the end of the issue and Morrison/Irving do a good job of slowly modulating the pace as it goes on. Throwing in these hints of the Batman/DC history we all know, such as Bruce's familiarity with the cave and Annie's Wonder Woman connection are once again, fun comics nerd things but they also highlight the sad, fleeting connections that this dip through time allows.

Spider-Man Fever #2 by Brendan McCarthy.
A big improvement over the clunky first issue, this issue sheds most of the weak humor of the first issue and replaces it with more intense images that are spooky, bizarre, and even, strangely beautiful. The plot now revealed, McCarthy sinks his teeth into the meat of the story with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange on duel quests in a bizarre magical realm.

The story actually retells Spider-Man's origin as a magical event and not a science-based one--which is actually a pretty ballsy move, even out of continuity. It turns out the spider that bit him is part of the weird spider cult that has abducted him in this magical realm--or something--and he's creepily turning into a giant spider, kind of like the six-armed Spider-Man in the 90s cartoon.

Strange's and Spider-Man story go well together, each having to deal with the inhabitants of this odd territory and both making it work. Strange is obviously in his magical element, but Spider-Man feels oddly at home too, hanging out with spiders and the nomad/wanderer look really works with his character.

Wolverine #900 by Various.
The curiously numbered Wolverine #900 is just Wolverine doing what he does best: one shots. The issue is crammed with 104 pages and a bunch of solid, one-shot stories. There seems to be a never ending stream of sad ass Wolverine one-shots, and this issue dares you to get tired of them, but it's one of those things that only the most obsequious comics nerd gets mad about--too much of a good thing.

The stand out tale is by far the Wells/Rivera "Birthday Boy." Wells' Wolverine has a palpable inner sadness that's in lots of Wolverine stories but is sensitively done here. Wolverine's emotionally locked away, aware of his position in the world as a killer and maybe murderer and struggling with it. Basically, Wolverine gets Spider-Man to hang out with him because Spider-Man's a decent guy and sees the good in Wolverine, and he doesn't want to feel like a shit on this night.

Wolverine and Spider-Man are philosophical opposites--Spider-Man as a young naive "Good Guy" and Wolverine as a proud cynical hard-ass--and as the story progresses, you get glimpses of ways they meet in the middle. That's the emotional tension of the story, but the big reveal, the devastating detail that makes this story so great is Wolverine's last-page reveal as to why he convinced Spidey to come out and hang: It's his birthday.

It's borders on sentimentality, but Wells holds back and lets the reader wonder, and even sympathize with Spiderman's whining, until the end when Spiderman finally gets it and feels bad for giving Wolverine a hard time. Rivera's art is perfect as always, and helps add a bunch of little touches that give this story a subtlety and nuance that makes the entire issue worth the $5 price tag.

Free Comic Book Day:
Weathercraft and other Strange Tales by Jim Woodring.
I'm not a big fan of Woodring's Jim or Frank and things are even kinda similar in Weathercraft, but take out the words and replace cute characters with a weird piggy man and things work out pretty well. The plot is told remarkably well for being silent and the whole thing does a good job of focusing on the main character's spiritual-esque journey. The tale could easily be a scene out of the movie Holy Mountain or something, particularly the comic book transcendent ending in which Weathercraft's absorbed by the space around him. It has the same sort of uncomfortable power of Jodorowsky's film.

Iron Man/Thor by Matt Fraction and John Romita Jr.
Just a well characterized, drawn, and composed, team-up of two characters who spend a lot of time in each other's company but don't necessarily interact all that often. They always seem to be fighting and yelling and never just have a conversation. Similar to "Birthday Boy", here are two characters who are really different and nearly opposites just hanging out. Thor's old fashioned and his power comes from an inner strength, while Iron Man basically lives in the future and his power comes from his ability to be on the bleeding-edge of technology.

Although they clash in certain respects, they end up complimenting each other as a team. The story's subtext highlights Thor as a God which is often forgotten or just kinda accepted without comment in the comics. As Thor talks to Iron Man on the moon, Iron Man suddenly realizes that Thor is talking in space and how every once in a while Thor will just do something impossible like that--because he's a God and all. Like Iron Man 2's characterization of Stark/Iron Man, it breaks down his techno-futurist edge and reveals his knowing, child-like sense of wonder.

Others: Orc Stain #3, King City #8, Joe the Barbarian #5.

Dan Clowes' Wilson & McTeague

2010-05-26T23:47:00.000-04:00

"Has anyone read McTeague? If so, could you write an essay or blog post describing in what way, if any, the novel’s story or themes resonate with Wilson? Because I want to read that essay, and I am not going to have time to get to McTeague for a very long time."

Over at the always engaging Comics Comics blog, T. Hodler's opened up discussion on Daniel Clowes' Wilson. Among the many things that Hodler brought up is the connection between Wilson and Frank Norris' McTeague which Wilson is reading. I briefly explained the connection--or my interpretation of the connection--in the comments fray but I thought I would flesh it out a bit...

Before T. Hodler's question/prompt, I hadn't actually thought of Clowes' use of McTeague as anything more than a novelistic detail: A small, seemingly minor thing thrown in the story that succinctly characterizes Wilson. But that is a good place to start--we'll get to the thematic connections in a second.

Think of Wilson reading McTeague the same way John Ellis in Ghost World had a zine called Mayhem and was very much enamored with stuff like snuff films, kiddie porn, serial killers and just generally flaunted an anarcho-conservative point of view. The character is specific but not too specific. Just a "type" that you recognize, maybe you went to school with a guy like, or some chick's boyfriend is that very same kind of "subversive". I always thought of Jim Goad when I read the book--Goad would very much have been in the alt-comics/zine world news of the time--but Clowes' satire isn't so squarely aimed as that; again, it's more about a "type".

Wilson reading McTeague is similar. A detail there for those people that "get it" to chuckle to themselves, but it isn't crucial to understanding the story. For those that do get it however, it's quite rewarding. Even your classic elitist isn’t going to reach for Frank Norris’ social realist classic, but a certain kind of “never wants to fit in but thinks they’re a man of the people” type jerk would totally read McTeague. The novel’s grotesque and literary, but it’s also very raw and immediate--something resembling popular literature. I can imagine Wilson thinking “this is preferable to the hoity-toity works of Proust or Conrad" (who were writing around the same time). A false populism--which Wilson most certainly exhibits.

The detail also clarifies Clowes' pointed satire. It's the author/artist saying to readers, "Look, I know this asshole well, I'm hip to his game". By employing such a clear but still general reference, Clowes enters the world of his satirical targets and proves himself to be ridiculously spot-on about them. Most satire stems from a mix of contempt and distance, but Clowes is right there, beyond superficial characterizations and simplifications. Kinda that same way Hipster Runoff has an uncanny ability to inhabit the minds of the bros it satirizes.

Wilson would read McTeague. John Ellis would have some awful, third-generation shocking zine. The main character of Caricature's "MCMLXVI" would defend his love of 1966 precisely the way Clowes has him do it. It's the opposite of Clowes mocking himself--and establishing a distance between creator and creation--in Ghost World but it has the same effect. It tells the reader that a very self-aware artist is behind the very mean work you're reading.

Thematically, McTeague isn't going to open up the whole book, it isn't the Clowesian key to all mythologies or nothing, but Clowes shares Norris' rather harsh, unforgiving view of man. Norris is writing only forty or so years after Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species and so, all these connections between man and animal are new and just really fucking shocking. Like, seriously, not to dig up all my notes from when I taught 11th-grade English, but think of how much of a shock to pretty much everybody's beliefs it must've been when they couldn't take for granted--at least in quite the same way--all this stuff about God and where we come from and shit.

Norris channeled all these Darwinian ideas into McTeague. Wrapped up in the Social Darwinism survival of the fittest stuff that was hovering around, and caught up in bat-shit crazy ideas like Eugenics and Phrenology, Norris crafted a novel based around this unforgiving view of humans beings. People as animals, looking out for number one, cruel, harsh, and manipulative but ultimately, pathetically unchangeable. That's where Wilson enters. He's like an animal, scrapping around for survival--think of how he looks for his ex-wife once his dad dies, or how the girl that watched his dog ends up moving in with him--while at the same time, pinned to basically the same pathetic life patterns.

Lastly, there are a some weird biographical connections between Clowes and Norris. Both were born in Chicago, both eventually ended up in the Bay Area--Clowes in Oakland, Norris in San Francisco. McTeague's subtitle is "A Story of San Francisco" and you get a sense of the bubbling bay area around the late 1890s. And though environment isn't quite as key to Wilson, you certainly come out of the book with Clowes--or Wilson's at least--subjective view of Oakland--and because American's not quite so regionalized anymore-- the weird sad United States in the early 2000's.

Apologia for Iron Man 2

2010-05-19T12:37:00.001-04:00

If you want to understand the differences between Jon Favreau's Iron Man and its imaginatively titled follow-up, Iron Man 2, you need look no further than the respective historical moments from which each movie was borne. And I'm not talking about the sort of tabloid-news understanding of American politics that results in ham-handed representations of so-called "Tea-Baggers" as somehow equivalent with white supremacists. Like its predecessor, Iron Man 2 is interesting because it evinces a subtle and complex understanding of the particular forces at work in our country and the peculiar leadership challenges faced by those concerned with fixing our broken country.

But this subtlety might also be the biggest flaw of Iron Man 2, in the sense that much of the film's sophistication has been missed by critics and moviegoers. In a genuinely probing—not to mention almost wholly justified—critique of superhero movies, no less a critic than Matt Zoller Seitz credits Favreau's Iron Man franchise with "cool competence" . . . and little else. As Seitz formulates them, superhero movies "[crank] up directors' box office averages and [keep] offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material." The critique is perfectly apt, but I think it fails to register the sort of societal self-examination that Favreau effects through this replication.

Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark is a perfect stand-in for the sort of second-generation tycoon that typifies the deficit of integrity and self-effacement that have been the unfortunate legacy of America's post-World War II prosperity. Stark wants all that is glamorous and awesome about being a titan, without any of the mundane drudgery. Part of this, of course, has to do with the sort of media saturation and commodification of sexuality that is a relatively recent development in American culture. Americans do not want their titans to be mundane any more than the Tony Starks of the world themselves do. But this sort of unbridled vanity is not without its costs, not the least of which is represented by the blurring of the lines between economies of production and value creation, and those derived solely from a desire to get rich.

If it seems like I'm getting a bit doctrinaire, there is a point to it. Iron Man 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off, with Stark basking in the glory of his revelation that he is indeed Iron Man and parlaying the public's fervor into the multi-million dollar monkey-spank that is the Stark Expo. The film's message about hubris and unbridled ambition is obvious, but where things get really interesting is in the weird doubling/opposition of Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts and Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff.

As with the best mainstream comics, Favreau uses an obvious opposition, in this case Pepper's prim elegance against Romanoff's more overt sensuality, to do something surprisingly sophisticated. As Romanoff first enters the film, at this point as Stark Enterprises counsel Natalie Rushman, she projects a dark and dangerous influence over Tony's life. Over Pepper's—and the viewer's—objections, Rushman encourages Tony to give in to each of his self-indulgent whims. The results of this are rather predictable, with Tony self-destructing at his own birthday party, losing an Iron Man suit, as well as the respect of just about everyone in his life.

Had the movie played out predictably, Stark would have realized the error of his ways, rejected the sexual decadence of Rushman/Romanoff, in favor of Pepper's relentless responsibility, and ultimately defeated Ivan Vanko's robot army by tapping into the unique combination of organizational genius, bluff daring and technical wizardry that has pretty much defined his character over the years. But that isn't what happens—at least not exactly. The monkey wrench thrown into the works is at least nominally due to the film's relationship with the overall Marvel universe. The biggest surprise of the entrance of Samuel L. Jackson's entrance as Nick Fury—ignoring for a moment the incongruous casting—is the revelation that Natalie Rushman is actually S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff. Her turn as legal counsel Rushman is simply a cover that allows her to get close to Stark/Iron Man, whom Fury covets for his quasi-covert governmental goon squad.

But setting aside this sort of comics nerd esotericism, it becomes clear that the movie can be read as something of an allegory of the early years of Obama's presidency, with Pepper Potts and Natasha Romanoff representing two seemingly opposed personae that the president has struggled to reconcile. Johansson's luridly sexual Romanoff is the equivalent of Obama as messianic world savior whose very election seemed to suggest that all the world's problems were over, while Paltrow's Pepper smacks of the pragmatic Chicago dealmaker whom everyone refused to see. What becomes clear as the film enters its third act, is that it is necessary to reconcile and harness both of these personae in order to have any hope of dealing with the enormous threat posed by Vanko and his slimy benefactor Hammer. The same can also be said of Obama as president—messianism alone cannot fix the enormous problems America faces, and yet people are bored by problem-solving pragmatism and thus it must be sexed-up a bit to make it more palatable.

If it seems like I am stretching things a bit with this analogy, consider Mickey Rourke's delightfully threatening turn as Ivan Vanko. Vanko is essentially Stark's intellectual equal and yet he is far more dangerous precisely because he is not motivated by a desire for wealth or personal glory. As Vanko sees it, men like Stark and his father placed their own personal gain ahead of the sort of selfless dedication of men like his own father and, in doing so, not only robbed him of his own personal birthright, but ultimately made the world a much less salubrious place. There are many Americans now, misguided though some of them may be, who feel a similar disgust at the sort of unbridled greed and unprincipled ambition that have come rather close to bankrupting the country.

Iron Man was the product of an America in which the greatest threat to our prosperity continued to be the foreign conflicts in which we were involved for increasingly nebulous purposes. What is perhaps most surprising about Iron Man 2 is that it avoids the predictable representation of the industrialist as unalloyed villain. Like its predecessor, Iron Man 2 is sophisticated precisely because it rejects just that sort of easy polemicism that simplifies national problems into neatly categorizable distinctions between Right and Left or Liberal and Conservative, and presents events in terms of a broadly distinguishable struggle between good and evil. And that it does so at the same time as it delightfully entertains is certainly deserving of admiration.

LINKS FOR SERIOUS????????

2010-05-18T20:59:00.002-04:00

-Download Diamond Comics #5. This came out a several weeks ago and has got some cool art from Pete Toms, Benjamin Marra, and others. Published for free by Floating World, but only circulated around Portland. It's funding is maintained by viewers like you so, you know, pay it forward. -j

-Brandon Graham interview at CBR. Reveals that he's close to finishing issue #12 of King City which will be the last issue of King City 2, and also that his next project will be Multiple Warheads. And Brandon Graham is always straight up, "Plus, I'm the kind of asshole who asks about the ends of movies that I haven't seen." Also in Brandon Graham news, his list of "dream" comics from his livejournal is pretty entertaining. Included was James Stokoe's Silver Surfer which is actually partially completed, and apparently he just did for fun one day. -j

-Also, Frank Santoro's Silver Surfer. Love these strange, dull vibrant colors and the overall hazy feel of the image. It's like the comics equivalent of a distorted, kinda electronic cover of a classic pop song.-b

-New Mignola art. -j

-With images of Batman as a hoarder and Lego universes Ulises Farinas' internet game has been pretty tight, but he's just taken it to the next level with his Gotham Go GO GO. It pleases me to no end when webcomics actually use the internet to their advantage, and Go GO GO's eye catching giant middle panel is a perfect example. A panel of Superman with tears streaming from his eyes and his heat vision on the fritz after being mind controlled seals the deal. (via) -j

-Death to the Universe has been a comics blog that's been blowing me away lately. I found it after Matt, the blog's creator, commented over here and really, just wow. Smart, fun comics writing with a good sense of history and dude's feet are always on the ground, which is important. There's a real good thing on Starlin's Warlock up right now.-b

-Paul Pope and Dash Shaw in conversation with Robin from INKSTUDS.-b

-You've probably already seen Animated Albums, but yeah, some dude doing some old-school Gilliam-esque cut-out animation on a computer. I wish dude would pick better albums though.-b

-This "Tips for Freelancers, Artists, and Other Creative Types" is helpful for any creative types out there, making money off their creative type stuff or trying to make money off their creative type stuff.-b

-"M.I.A. and music's newest marketing frontier: the guerilla Web itself" by Gardner is a really interesting take on the web and what I've taken to call anti-memes or web imagery in a post-meme world: "MIA has taken the culture of the Internet's most creative, subversive and zealous hipsters to market herself and wrap her whole brand."-b

-Finally, rest in peace to the great Ronnie James Dio. Our buddy Julian has his thoughts on Dio's death over at Heavy Metal Infinity. Also, Phil Freeman's "A User's Guide To Ronnie James Dio, 1942-2010".-b

The Best of Ariel Pink's Sketchbook (NSFW)

2010-05-13T15:57:00.012-04:00

Scooped from an angelfire website with 18 drawings, I've selected for you, the BEST 10 of AP's sketchbook.

For context, Ariel Pink is a lo-fi, avant garde musician from Los Angeles, California. He's noted as being "weird" or "outsider" and these drawings neither confirm nor deny this. Personally, what I like about these sketchbook drawings is they maintain craft. He didn't play down his ability to draw which is pretty great in the context of a sketchbook. The images where he does use simple lines and shading are hilarious. His drawing ability is so consistent and well-rendered, it's borderline obsessive. I always wished, when I kept a sketchbook, that my drawings would meet both criteria seen here: 1. well drawn 2. interesting but after seeing these, I don't think I can ever doodle again.

10.
This looks like some sort of contraption straight out of a Tim Burton movie but with hidden dicks?

A faceless "psychedelic businessman" is similarly Tim Burton-esque but with less dicks and shards of clothing holding on to the contraption.

I think a couple of these are for mixtapes? This is the first of the two. Ignore the great list of music on the side and just the gross, old man, face saying he's "fucked up and horny" clearly commuicates a possible underlying theme for the tape. Plus, I always want to hear "what was said at the dinner party" and music from MEGAMAN.

More traditionally artsy? It's a haunting show of draping and stretching over stuff that I can't quite make out besides the upside-down bird at the bottom.

Maybe it's a scrapped album cover or single cover, as we can see his name in the upper left corner...but continuing on the theme from number 7; it's as if items are lost in some weird mass of drape-y material.

Old fart, Booty time is amazing.

Whatever this is, I'd like to own it. It seems like another tape cover with his music on it, as I am noticing some familiar song titles. Notice that Peter Schilling, David Bowie, Santana and Isaac Hayes all played a part in the making of this :-)

Hellloooo, Benjamin Marra!!! Testosterone eaters, johnny pump? I need an AP + Benjamin Marra comic immediately.

A child hiding inside various human forms.

!!!!!#1.!!!!!! Not sure I've seen a better sketchbook impression of boredom. Are those neurons coming out of the bottom? So good.

Why Does This Insanely Racist Thing Happen in Spider-Man: Fever?

2010-05-08T20:45:00.008-04:00

Brendan McCarthy's return to comics for the first time in a while is delight, and it's a kind of smarmy, contrarian comics nerd's wet-dream--a superhero comic in a defiantly throwback style, and also it's bubbling over with tripped-out, next-level art and ideas. Not a superhero comic and not not a superhero comic, you know?

Really, no "diss" on Ditko or nothing, but Spider-Man: Fever is what I wanted Ditko's work to be like before I ever really saw Ditko's work. See, back when those shits were sorta hard to find and I had like my Comics Journal issues and maybe one or two dusty-ass collections from my local, suburban library and that's it, the idea of Ditko (or Kirby or Moebius or even, Frank Miller) bubbled-up into something no artist could never live up to.

Same way, say, descriptions by Scorsese and a single still in some crappy International Cinema book turned Bresson's Pickpocket into something "bigger" than the patient, brooding, kinda erotic crime movie it actually is. Point is, Spider-Man: Fever is something else, it's close to the kind of insanity I drummed-up from other people's descriptions of Ditko's work. That's great!

Spider-Man: Fever also helps me cope with a more recent comics-related disappointment: Mike Allred's steady downward trajectory into suckiness. It's something I've discussed with my fellow writers here and we all confessed to, on some dark, bored night, re-opening those first two volumes of Madman to make sure they were still perfect because well, his work's fumbled from confused, high-concept kinda cool stuff to dopey, too high-concept, digitally-colored pop-art garbage.

McCarthy certainly isn't aping Allred here or anything, but he's stumbled upon a lot of the things that made Allred's work really invigorating: A genuine love of comics, un-ironic chintzy humor, some heady stuff here and there, and a confident but wacky art-style that bounces off in twenty different directions at once.

How awkward but real Spider-Man looks sitting on a windowsill checking to see who's on Letterman. That Spidey tells Vulture, a page later, to "Cut that out!" when dude's sticking his grubby birdy mitts in his eye. That the villain of this is named Albion Crowley. That the whole bug world in issue #2 is so gritty and weird you kinda wanna vomit looking at it. It's just really good and really bizarre. But I almost didn't buy the second issue this week because of this one weird tangent in issue #1. I'll remind you real quick...

Spider-Man and Vulture are fighting and they crash through a window. McCarthy's brilliantly cuts-away from it for two pages of Dr. Strange weirdness and when we return, Vulture's all tied-up in a web and mad and shit. And then, out of the corner of the panel, a speech bubble reads "Hey, thass my phone!".

The next panel reveals a black guy (sideways hat, medallion hanging from his neck, baggy jeans and shirt), the owner of this apartment, and he's really worried because Spider-Man called the cops with his phone, and well, black people are all criminals, so the cops coming would be real bad. It's a weird, bad punchline. A page or so later, you get some more of this unfortunate "urban" patois ("You the guy who wrecked my pad!", "You the guy who brung the cops!") and it's just really, really awful.

First, it's just weird. How, in 2010, a clearly smart knowing guy like McCarthy could write such ridiculous coon-ish dialogue is baffling. Second, it's confusing because the guy's dressed like say, a De La Soul or Souls of Mischief fan from the early 90s, not a thug at all. Third, it's a buffoonish black character dropped into the narrative for some incredibly cheap laughs. This kind of stuff happens in comics all the time, like casual sexism, and it's just sort of jarring and weird and worst of all, innocent. McCarthy clearly doesn't think this is a big deal, right? He finds it humorous or maybe somehow, accurate to real life? What the fuck.

Well, it is a big deal. On the humanist tip, I prefer not to see people and peoples degraded like this. But frankly, more important than the "this is racist and it's bad" argument is that it really kinda derails the whole comic book and makes you look at the piece of art and artist behind it quite differently.

Real quick though, a rant about artists and ideology, so you see where I'm coming from. One of my favorite records of this year is Burzum's Belus and unlike many other metal fans, I don't think the quasi-Neo Nazi, Odinist ideology that fuels Burzum's work is to be ignored or laughed at, but just part of the package. Dude does what he does well and there's something fascinating and in a weird way, sincere, about an all-out racist rattling out these insanely thrilling metal songs. There's no bullshit behind the undeniably bullshit ideology and I can kinda sorta respect that. You know what you're in for and dude goes for it.

With Spider-Man: Fever, McCarthy's not even some insane racist dropping in some quick propaganda, which I can accept that way say, Dave Sim's misogyny or Ditko's Objectivism kinda "works", this is just some dopey white asshole who doesn't even realize he just put some insanely racist shit in his comic book! It's distracting because it's a bummer and it's distracting because it forces you to think about the guy behind the comic, and well, exposes him.

Thankfully, none of this returns in issue two and I guess it's better it was in the first issue and just out of the way than a boner-kill two or three issues in, but really, I just wish it wasn't in there at all.

Live-Blogging Eating Some Jelly Babies

2010-05-07T16:52:00.005-04:00

So, a while back, Monique was in San Francisco and bought me a box of Jelly Babies, something I'm obviously obsessed with because of Doctor Who. I've never had them and only vaguely knew what they were--some kind of gummy treat--and so, I figured I'd finally try them...

4:01 PM: They're a way bigger than you'd expect and they have this like, white, dusty residue on them. They're also British so my guess is they will taste really awful.

4:02 PM: I had to get a knife to open the package. It's one of those bullshit-ass packages that's kind of what cereal's in and it's caked in this white dust.

4:03 PM: Flashbacks to being like five years old and trying some weird-ass food I've never had before and already anticipating gagging or something.

4:04 PM: They're greasy and shiny, and kinda desiccated feeling, like a big bug that's been dead in the basement for a while. When you bite into them it's like all the air pushes out of them or something. Weird for sure, but not bad. This one was a brown-orange. I have no idea what it tastes like.

4:05 PM: Tried a black/purple one and it was vaguely berry-like. I don't think I'll ever get used to the way they just sorta crumble and crunch up and melt in your mouth...but not in a sexy, delightful M & Ms "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" way at all.

4:06 PM: Looking at the ingredients: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Water, Gelatin, Citric Acid, Artificial Flavors, Corn Starch, Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1. Kinda explains this dry sugary taste...there's no preservatives!

4:07 PM: Fucked-up story: My grandmother told me how they used to sell these chocolate-dipped gummy baby things at the corner candy store when she was growing up (I'm remembering this story no doubt because what she described were closer to Jelly Babies than say, Gummy as we know it) and they were sold in the candy shop as "Little Nigger Babies". Yep.

4:07 PM: Second go around on the black/purple ones, which are much closer to a turd brown really. These sorta hurt the back of my throat. The brown-orange ones are better.

4:08 PM: These brown/green ones are maybe the best. Vaguely Lime. Closer to Lime-scented floor cleaner than Lime but they work. Also: They're less babies than like some weird disproportioned man-baby. Jelly Man-Babies. Jelly Mongoloid Man-Baby Babies.

4:08 PM: I totally couldn't snack on these for too long, which is a good thing. 3-5 of them is good enough. Maybe that's why the Doctor's always trying to pawn them off on other people, he's got too many!

4:10 PM: Really can't get over the consistency, this dusty, crumbly, berry-flavored gelatin shit but it kinda rules too...no stomach aches, no OD-ing on sweetness, just like vaguely tasty, kinda drab sweets.

Monday Links

2010-05-03T17:21:00.003-04:00

-A few months ago, we were all pretty psyched about this documentary simply titled Babies. Well, here's the best review ever of Babies, coming to a theater near you very soon. You'll kill yourself from cuteness when it's over.

-Tom Ewing's "Poptimist" column this month is about the comic book, Phonogram, and surprise surprise, it's better than most real comics criticism. Flashbacks to Tom writing about Final Crisis and Secret Invasion awhile back.

-Nathan Williams, aka WAVVES, sometimes reviews video games for The Fader. Today, he dropped a review of Heavy Rain:

"Heavy Rain is unlike any other game I’ve ever played before. It’s a serious interactive movie and every action you make dictates how your personal story/Heavy Rain experience turns out. It starts a little slow, which makes room for the plot to actually set itself up, and at first all the menial tasks you have to do (rock a baby to sleep, grab dishes for your wife, play with your son) seem kind of boring. But that also sets up exactly how to control your character’s actions, which will be important later on when you’re fighting or in other high-stress situations, such as chopping off your own fingers with a rusty butcher knife. (Without context that won’t make much sense and I don’t want to give anything away so fuck an explanation, just play it and find out for yourself!)

Really, the driving element of Heavy Rain is the story (DUUUUH)—there are four characters and four possible endings, with the plotline based mostly around the lengths a father will go to to save his son. The actual story line is a little flat at points, falling somewhere between Saw II and Seven, but the objective is to eventually just see how it all turns out, like a movie. It’s pretty long for a movie, though, and for a video game it’s pretty short. It’s probably around six or so hours to beat? It took me two days, so it’s a pretty quick run. My girlfriend didn’t even mind watching me play it, because Heavy Rain connects with whomever is watching or playing. Minus a couple small plot holes, this game is a total banger and comes highly recommended accompanied with orange juice and a blunt."

-BEAT ELECTRIC is an awesome 80s R & B/Boogie/Disco blog I've been stealing a lot of music from lately.

-The new Future Islands album, In Evening Air comes out tomorrow, but some awesome motherfucker already scored one of the tracks to Dragon's Lair!

One More Thing About Kick-Ass...

2010-04-23T01:49:00.005-04:00

Armond White of New York Press has a very interesting review of Kick-Ass that doubles as a review for Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video. White's more often than not, all over the place these days, but when he's on, he's on, and his review breaks down a lot of the issues with Kick-Ass but also comics, especially of the "gritty" and "cynical" sort, that we on this little blog often try to break down this cogently.

It's a good piece of Popular Culture criticism, taking Kick-Ass and Lady Gaga seriously, but ultimately, taking them more seriously than they're ready to be taken, and as a result, just kind of schooling both phenomenons as part of the same misreading Post-Modernism continuum. What I mean by that is this ability to bend this way and that without ever leaning properly on either side of any fucking equations, so it's just a big mess of back-patting irony and cynicism, wrapped in an ultimately pretty conventional little present. To mix metaphors: To have one's cake and eat it too, as old people like to say. And because White's essentially an outsider to Kick-Ass, he views Millar and Romita's simultaneous comic/movie writing as very cynical, it isn't just normal comics biz bullshit.

The duel writing/creation is an insult to the comics form because it's just using comics as a means to a bigger end (a big Hollywood movie, that they keep claiming is technically an "independent"), even as it hinged all its success on doing stuff in comics that you couldn't usually get away with in movies, precisely so that they could go to some financiers and show them how a super-violent comic with a little girl saying "Cunt" indeed has an big audience. That the comic book owes much of its style to Apatow and post-Apatow dirty-joke/heart-of-gold movies, just make this whole franchise disappear further up its own asshole.

The best part of White's review though is the way he's clearly disgusted by both Kick-Ass and Lady Gaga's "Telephone" video, but more disgusted by Kick-Ass because shit man, at least "Telephone" just goes for it! At least Gaga's mini-trashterpiece is weird and stupid and ugly and uncomfortable and insane. Kick-Ass, as Sammy pointed out, is just another superhero movies masquerading as "this ain't just another superhero movie" which is a special kind of loathsome.

Carl Macek, the Original Multimedia Mash-Up Genius.

2010-04-20T12:56:00.008-04:00

Robotech guru Carl Macek's death has once again brought up the "debate" about Robotech. Eulogies gave Macek credit for basically invigorating the Anime medium in the United States, but also spent time on the "controversial" nature of his Robotech series. Namely, that in "creating" Robotech, Macek forged together three Japanese series (The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA), re-edited them, and added dialogue, reduced certain characters, and lots of other stuff.

The "controversy" stems from the comic/sci-fi/anime nerd concerns about "purity" or whatever--that Macek essentially bastardized a bunch of original Japanese shows to recreate his American phenomenon. Often, the "defense" of Macek's pillaging simply repeats Harmony Gold's explanation that they needed a show that could run every day--like Transformers did--and any of the three series that eventually made Robotech didn't have enough episodes and so, they had to be combined. This may have been the "business" decision behind the idea, but whether it was there from the start or a really awesome byproduct of a business decision, what Macek did to create Robotech was much more than a pragmatic television scheduling decision, Like so much popular art, there's a mix of art and commerce and a little bit of "smuggling" involved.

Macek grabbed from these shows, and then, tweaked the plots and characters however he saw fit and made something that was, yes, better than its parts. If you're aware of the weird, twisty-turny construction of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, what Macek did is similar: He retro-fitted a bunch of stuff to fit his own interests, obsessions, and dramatic expectations. I'm sure I'm not saying anything mind-blowing here, but because literary critics are smarter than comics critics, they find what Malory did really exciting and interesting and not offensive or just plain wrong or whatever. For chrissakes, Malory raped a nun and his reputation in his respected field gets discussed with fewer caveats than Macek's.

Perhaps, I've just got the tragic death of Gang Starr's Guru on my mind (take four minutes to listen to this please) but the weird view of Macek's legacy--he's at best responsible for opening the doors for anime but not really respected for Robotech, he's at worst a hack and an opportunist--and the objection to Macek's artistic compiling seems rooted in the out-dated anger with musical "sampling".

Issues with "sampling" shoot from plenty of different angles, but they all funnel into I think, a fear of something, anything, everything, being unstable. From that Led Zeppelin song you love to all your precious fucking Japanese cartoons. Comics fans--like rock fans, the main opponents of sampling--are deeply traditionalist and so, there's a concern with origins and propriety. How does Macek's reconfiguration of these other series negatively affect the original series? This is made even more complicated when you realize Macek took the time to reissue, remaster, and translate all the series' he "stole" from.

I prefer to think of Macek as a master sampler and mash-up artist. That because he was this producer guy, he had access to the materials that now, twenty-five years later, every tween or grumbly old bored retired weirdo can also access. In short, he created a lasting, meaningful, "mash-up" called Robotech and it was this insane, generations-spanning, deeply-moving space opera, not say, some DragonballZ clips edited to Linkin Park--which you know, has a purpose too.

MONDAY LINKS TEAM UP

2010-04-19T19:04:00.001-04:00

-Pretty good interview with Mike Mignola over at Newsarama. He talks about the "End Game" coming up for Hellboy which is just crazy to think about. For me, Hellboy is in with any other superhero that basically lives forever and for Mignola to be talking about the death of Hellboy is really weird for me to wrap my head around. -j

-Woah, check out this blog of old Jodorowsky comic strips! It's from a year or so ago, but I got hipped to it thanks to this tip on on THE FADER, who go it from this guy who even translates some of them!-b

-Brandon sent me a text that his store, which I think resides at the nexus point where all awesome media converges, got in a used copy of the Metabarons RPG today. That got me doing some research and I discovered this great review by Jeremy Buxman who has never read a Metabaron comic in his life. The game rates pretty favorably getting a 5 on style and 3 on substance. His big gripe is that you need to read the comics to get a fuller understanding of the universe. What Jeremy does not realize is that Jodorowsky does not give a fuck about universe-building and the comics have little to no clues about what goes on in the Metabaron/Incal universe. -j

-Forgot to add this to last week's post, but Tom Breihan, whose Tumblr happens to be named after that Rancid song about fighting with Wolverine, had a review of the Lennon/McCartney episode of American Idol in which he inexplicably, provides you a list of contestants and their "X-Men equivalents".-b

- Marvel announced Friday that Brian Clevinger (8-bit theatre, Atomic Robo) and Brian Churilla (The Anchor) are re-making/re-imagining the 1991 classic Infinity Gauntlet called Avengers & The Infinity Gauntlet. There's been a decent amount of Infinity Gauntlet talk at Marvel recently, the story being included in the Fantastic Four and Lockjaw & The Pet Avengers series. While I love as much Infinity Gauntlet I can get, and the creative team seems to be pretty solid, it seems like this might be a case of too much of a good thing. Marvel's announcement tries to make Avengers & The Infinity Gauntlet seem new on it's own right so it's not a simple re-hash of the Starlin/Perez/Lim classic, but "new" details like having Doctor Doom a member of the Avengers is still a swipe from the original. -j

-I just wanted to comment on MTV's "Splash Page" feature Adapt This! where some suggested comics adaptations are broken-down in a super-literal, way too obvious way. Though this week's Red Rocket 7 directed by Cameron Crowe is pretty spot-on, but only because like Mike Allred, Cameron Crowe is a sentimental, rock music obsessed tool.-b

-Pretty cool Wizard of Oz and celebrity zombie fighting miniatures over at Super Punch blog. Obvious Best: Terminator. Personal favorite: Snake Plisskin. WTF: John McClain.

-Also, Comics for Pervs was updated again: Some cool Sophie Crumb stuff.-b

-This Friday, if you're anywhere near Greensboro, NC, you should totally come to this Huntsville hip-hop showcase at Guilford college. Also, the next day, Future Islands and Miami thrash weirdos Acidosis are also playing. And it's fucking FREE!-b

Kick-Ass the Movie: "With no power comes no responsibility."

2010-04-16T00:00:00.002-04:00

I only made it four issues into the comic Kick-Ass, it was a little too x-treme for my liking: The kind of ultra violence that children get excited about, but becomes old news once you’ve looked at spaceghetto a couple of times. It’s just a little too crazy with over-the-top blood and guts and snarky, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, and it moves out of the "shocking" territory and steps into "this is silly but not in a good way" territory. John Romita Jr.’s art is an ill-fit, all the sprays of blood and the prostitutes and gangsters are too cartoony for a story that is supposed to be “real” and gritty.

The comic tries to comment on comics and vigilantism--it's but one more cynical superhero deconstruction--while also presenting a relatively interesting, at least initially, what if: What if the people of New York City got behind a guy in a green and yellow suit who walks down the street fighting crime and saving kittens? What if it inspired copycats and became a social networking phenomenon? Basically, a comic book world, so citizens believe in super heroes as an every day thing the way the population in Marvel and DC comics do, but tempered by reality. Or "reality". Specifically, Mark Millar's view of the world which is ugly, confused, and pretty boring really.

Kick-Ass the movie, at least, does a better job of selling you on a boy who could do this. He's a normal kid who's mom is dead and who jerks off a lot, he isn't popular but isn't unpopular--he just exists. He's the reality of most comics readers, they aren't fat losers or these annoying fucks who are loud and say "Huzzah", he's just an escapist of sorts who has found something to bond with friends over.

Becoming Kick-Ass is a decision less fueled by his getting mugged everyday, and more from a lack of anything better to do. "Why hasn't anyone ever tried to be a super hero before?" he asks--a valid question even in real life that can't really be answered. When you're under age with no ambition, anything you get excited about is worth at least giving a shot, so he becomes a hero. This is more organic than the comic which muddles Golden-Age comics tropes even as it tries to shit on them.

Where Romita Jr.’s art fails to make the violence--well--violent, the live action punches and gunshots pierce, they hit and are wet and brutal. This being a movie, with real people, not drawings, the reality of a skinny kid turned crimefighter is even more apparent. Every blow is felt and you get a little nauseous when Kick-Ass is left bloodied and dying. Kick-Ass goes to the E.R, living shit beat out of him, nerve-endings broken, gets steel plates inserted to save his life. Looking at his X-rayed body, he exclaims "I look like Wolverine!"...and this is where the story of the movie loses me.

Bullet dodging and roof jumping aside, Kick-Ass is supposed to be a movie about a regular dude who puts on a suit and plays super hero. He isn't supposed to have powers or abilities, he's a regular guy with billy clubs. Slowly Kick-Ass becomes a "super" hero, and the whole point of the "With no power comes no responsibility" quote is null. He can't feel pain, so therefore he can push himself, he ends up with a gattling guns and a jet-pack, "Hallelujah" playing in the background as he saves the day to fly off into the sunset.

Dave Lizewski, the boy who becomes Kick-Ass, is essentially not a character, he's just who Kick-Ass is when he isn't in the suit. I don't mean this in a Batman way where Batman is the man and Bruce Wayne is the mask, it's that you never care enough about Dave. This is especially strange because what made the first two issues of the comic work were those injections of teenage angst and sad, reality. That's all gone. You're just waiting for Kick-Ass to hit someone in the face. The love story is, as in almost every big blockbuster, just a requirement that essentially slows down the story line. The process of taking down the big baddies is put on hold while Kick-Ass gets the girl in not an awkward high school way, but as a confident man.

What really saves the movie is the lack of CG and great acting. Nicholas Cage steals your attention in his scenes, being the loving and psychotic father while out of the suit and spouting his lines in true 60's Adam West dialect while in it, and completely scary in this "Batman with a gun and no conscience" kind of way. Chloe Moretz's Hit-Girl cuts people in half and says "cunt" like she means it, you only know she's an 11 year old girl because you can see her. Although it doesn't have a message or a moral in the end, it's sorta like comics where you just accept it as pure entertainment, not really scared of all the people who are going to hate it, and only working for the people that will love it.

In the end, just like every other person who's seen it, I think Kick-Ass kicked ass (har har) but that's unfortunately, all it does.

King City #7 - A New Story is Born

2010-04-15T11:59:00.005-04:00

Since finally picking up the new-NEW issue of Brandon Graham's peerless King City late yesterday afternoon, I've been struggling to derive the best analogy for how this opening gambit in the series's second volume relates to what came before. The best I'm able to come up with, and it's imperfect, though it works, is Don Quixote. I don't mean to suggest that there is anything particularly quixotic about the doings of Joe and company. But, as with the second volume of Cervantes's novel, everything in issue 7 feels sadder and more serious than what came before.

Brandon touches upon this difference in his review. As he points out, you still have all the gags and puns and other funny moments that almost as much as anything else identify Graham's work. But once we come out of the blinding sun of Joe's flashback to The Farm, events, feelings and relationships are imbued with a darkness that exceeds anything we've seen so far. Joe's work is infinitely more serious, more real and he executes it with a level of cool nonchalance that suggests he's crossed a line. Pete, too, is so consumed with his role in the apparent white slavery of the fish-girl that he cannot interact with his friend in a normal way.

But there's something else going on in King City that complicates the dread seriousness of events. Sex has always burbled right at the surface of Graham's comics. But in issue 7 we're getting beyond the exaggerated tits and asses that adorn Graham's stories. Here we are inundated with images specifically associated with conception and birth.

This meditation on procreation begins in Joe's flashback to his time at The Farm. As Mudd leads Joe away from his exercises toward El Cat-Cienda, we see a woman identified as Miriam—the actual name of the virginal mother of Jesus—emerging from a decidedly vaginal opening, into the "Big Big World," bearing the barely post-natal Earthling in her hands, as if delivering him through some process of immaculate conception.

Then, as the narrative proper gets under way, we have a succession of seemingly whimsical images of conception and birth. This of course begins with Joe's sly, obstetrical entry into the No-Tell Killaforya through the inauspiciously identified "Garbage Shoot." Then, as Joe and Earthling pull off the "old none two" trick against the 4-eyed ninja, we are told that three blocks away a woman's egg has split into twin embryos, which, as the illustration indicates, happens precisely at the moment of conception.

Of course, all this could be typical Brandon Graham playfulness, but the preponderance of imagery relating to conception and birth adds particular significance to the sexual tryst between Joe and Beebay at the end of the issue. As Joe recognizes, there is something weird and potentially dangerous about this handsomely endowed woman. But while it is one thing to be paid in sex for killing 'bad guys,' it is another thing altogether to conceive a child with the woman pulling the strings. It's entirely possible, indeed, quite likely, that this has more to do with my own imagination than what is going to happen as Graham's opus progresses, but if so, it's no less diverting to consider. Oh the places this story can go.

King City #7 (the new-new one)

2010-04-13T22:18:00.010-04:00

And so, King City #7, the first "new" issue for owners of the TOKYOPop digest volume, came out last week and it's a weird one. It basically "answers" a few questions I don't think readers were asking--what's the deal with the cats and the Catmasters? Who's that chick with the ass?--and casually avoids the obvious pressing ones--what about Joe and ex-gf Anna? How'd that play out?--which is kinda perverse but ultimately, a really cool way to kick the series back into gear for the nerdz that've been waiting a couple years now for the story to keep going.

Thing is, this is King City and Brandon Graham, so you're in good hands. I don't anticipate any bullshit or typical monthly comic book avoidance in revealing how it went down with Anna. It'll probably bubble out of the middle of an upcoming issue as a rainy, sad-sack flashback--like their last kiss ("why didn't you try harder?") did in issue #4-- and just be totally devastating. Even without any info on what transpired between that Lovecraftian beast by ways of KAWS battle at the end of issue #6 and the beginning of #7, it's clear something happened. As a whole, the issue's darker.

It starts with the battle with the 4-Eyed Ninja and Joe's retrieval of the four brains. Joe does the cat/Catmaster thing and viciously splits the Ninja in half--cartoony innards revealed--and slices the top of The Girl with Four Brains' head and then, promptly tosses the bodies out the window. There's something shockingly efficient about it all and it contrasts with the thieving goofball Joe that we've seen before. It's unsettling but really cool and necessary: Joe's no longer a bit separate from the crumby, scummy, awesome city he left a few years back. Now, he's part of the criminal element in a very real way.

That Joe leaves the scene of his crime/theft to meet up with Pete, still reeling from giving up that weird mermaid chick, adds a weird dimension to Joe's all-business attitude and Pete's, after-the-fact concern. Graham's setting up some really cool character arcs, where Joe, Pete, and presumably others, mature or learn that the world's hard/weird/kinda fucked, but do it via mermaid girls handed over to some creeps and the death of four-brained chick and four-eyed ninja.

Strangely (and quite brilliantly too), Graham moves us closer to Joe and his emotions--it didn't hurt the series, but Joe could feel a bit 2-D compared to the others in early issues--when Joe seems his most distant. He's no longer a symbol with some problems and a confused past tacked-on, he's a real person and he sometimes does shitty stuff. The whole, just-starting sub-plot with Joe and Beebay (the mystery girl/ass girl) and their sexual relationship reveals a side of Joe we hadn't considered: He's a regular-ass dude.

Before this point, Joe's been a guy still totally in-love with his ex, Anna. He's probably still that guy, but Graham never allowed readers to see around the corner of his longing--how it was wrong or selfish or well, anything but longing--and you're almost disappointed in Joe for getting with Beebay because it's real. You also totally understand why he did. Just look at this panel:
Point is, Joe is doing something sketchy and dumb--and potentially dangerous--and we know he knows better. Worse--Joe knows he knows better. His interior monologue, floating around a medium close-up of Joe's confused face--love how he's looking to the left, too embarrassed by his actions to look the reader in the face--reveals a thinking, complex side of the character we've not previously seen: "Sometimes I feel I'm her employee that she pays in sex. That's bad. Makes me feel like I've got strings on my wrists..."And that's all we get from this issue. None of this seems even remotely close to figuring itself out, and in that sense, we're very much in it; too wrapped up in drama and emotions to make sense of it, just like Joe.

At the same time, it's perhaps the best "single issue" (or group of chapters) Graham's done yet. Though it's full of stuff that for the time being, is not quite tied together, #7 remains a deeply satisfying read. It's full of the usual little rewards and jokes you get in Graham's work, and look, I didn't count or anything, but it may actually have more of those, but it also has a strange sense of unease and "stuff's fucked" feeling to it. As I said, it's darker, more violent, more sexual, than previous issues. That final image, Joe placing mystery girl Beebay's card in his pocket is ambiguous, but something's urgent about it, some weird something or other's passed between them and we'll have to wait to see how it plays out. There'll be cute cats and puns and big-asses too though, don't worry.

MONDAY LINKS TEAM UP

2010-04-12T22:35:00.000-04:00

-The Silver Age throwback trend continues with a new Barry Allen Flash series coming out this week. The preview looks good starting with a full page of Central City and calling it "the city always on the run". It's always a good look to start a comic, or entire series in this case, with a big beautiful establishing shot. I really like creative ways to reboot characters without having their entire origins retold. It reminds me of how Thor rebooted and how well that series turned out. -j

- If you're a comics fan chances are you've stared at a few maps in your day. Maps have all the essential ingredients of comics so, when comics and maps overlap it's a pretty glorious thing. I've personally spent more time staring at maps of Asgard or Old Man Logan's distopian USA imaging all the different events in each region than I have reading entire issues of comics. The Comic Book Cartography blog seems like an instant classic even though it just started up this month. Be sure to check out maps of Krypton, Kamandi's world, and Titan among many other great posts. (via)-j

-You ever wonder if you're not smart enough to get a joke?-s

-The Zombie's Hand is currently in the running over at Zuda, the story reads like an old Tales From the Crypt, scary but funny and weird but with visual narration that the original EC Comics lacked. The first eight pages are up but the next 8 only get published if it gets enough votes, so go vote! -s

- Mike Mignola has a new website selling some original art and limited edition art books. Dream purchases: Hellboy in Egypt, Wolverine & Cable, or any of these. Also, who knew he was on twitter? Only 147 followers, and 4 updates since Feb.(via) -j

-This July, Chris Claremont's X-Men: Ragazze In Fuga is coming out under retarded name "X-Women". Illustrated by legendary Italian "erotic" comics artist Milo Manara, the long awaited story is finally being released in America, hopefully it won't be like Captain America: White or a thousand other series that never actually reach shelves. -s

-ANOTHER BRANDON GRAHAM LJ POST!

- A.W.K. interview with Marvel! He reveals he is a big Spider-man fan which makes perfect sense to me. I really wish this was unedited and more about comics. -j

Kick-Ass the Movie: "I'm going to make you a comics reader right now"

2010-04-09T00:52:00.001-04:00

The Kick-Ass movie is very different from its comic book predecessor. While both film and comic deal with comics' emerging place in culture, they take severely different routes and end up in totally separate places. The comic portrays nearly every character as pathetic, denouncing fanboys as losers with no life (as if it were tailor-made for hip, comics reading Complex magazine readers).

Strangely, the movie's the opposite: It's excited by comics and presents a more, well-rounded vision of comics fandom, grabbing in equal parts, the fan-boy stupidity and genuine wonder of comics. The character of Big Daddy is the perfect example of how Kick-Ass the comic and movie diverge. The comic has Big Daddy as a comics collector and accountant gone off the deep end, due to his humdrum suburban life with his wife and kid. Big Daddy tells everyone he is an ex-cop and keeps a secret briefcase of expensive comics that fund his vigilante operation. Look, I get it, collectors are sort of this dark side of comics, but they're also an increasingly marginalized subculture. He's as simple and one-sided as every other character in the comic: An irresponsible loser and failure.

The film's Big Daddy, Nicholas Cage, is all those things the comics version wishes he was, but not really any less pathetic. He's a cop out for revenge, but the movie changes his connection to comics from collector to a fan and amateur participant. He draws sketches of the crime family he is hunting--his origin is told via self drawn comic--and his suit is just Batman. Big Daddy's instantly a hero because of his crime fighting efficiency and humor, but the movie doesn't quite make it that simple.

Cage's voice while in his super suit is an incredible Adam West impression that makes the character even more weird and pathetic while, adding a really relatable and loving Dad-like quality. He's not entirely loathsome or rather, he's pathetic in a more regular, work-a-day way.

One scene shows Big Daddy putting on eye makeup and fake mustache extensions getting ready for battle. It might not sound like much of a scene, but as Big Daddy looks at himself in the mirror it's less like getting ready for battle and more like putting on the makeup of a costume. Like he's "playing", which of course he is, but Cage pulls the scene and character out of a big pit of Mark Millar snark. The scene is a comment on LARPing or cosplay, with Cage nailing the sad-weird nobility of it all. Think of the mix of mockery and reverence a documentary like Darkon provided its subjects--it's like that.

Kick-Ass the comic conveniently ignores the wonder and imagination of comics, boiling them down to reptile-brain ultra-violence and sad-sack wish fulfillment. Sure, Kick-Ass the movie has plenty of violence and something or other to say about escapism, but it balances it all out with an understanding that comics are awesome.

The high-schoolers of the film are actually excited and energized by comics. Their local comic shop is a hangout that serves coffee, and proudly displays giant posters of Hellboy. At one point, in a scene that maybe best sums up the movie's wonder-filled position on comics, Kick-Ass' buddy, played by Clark Duke, eagerly says to a girl "I'm going to make you a comics reader right now," and as she begins to read, looks over her shoulder reading it with her. It's genuinely moving and presents comics as a unifier, not a thing losers do in their rooms all alone.

MONDAY LINKS TEAM UP

2010-04-05T09:24:00.000-04:00

-I finally got around to reading Girl Comics and it's--not really surprisingly--good. Haters is gunna hate though, and no matter how good this series is, there are going to continue to be people who are mad that it's not "Women Comics" or that She Hulk has big boobs or that there's an energy drink on "her side" of the table. This is something you can give to your daughters and sisters and say "THESE WERE ALL DONE BY GIRLS" and that kind of shit goes a long way. TRUTH: girls sometimes don't know that they can be in a band until they see or hear an all girl band. This book is important, let's all just get on that. -s

-NEW BRANDON GRAHAM LJ POST!

-Whatever is going on with the Inkstuds website is really frustrating. It seems to work for some people fine and others it doesn't load at all. Oh well, it just means my apartment doesn't get cleaned and work doesn't get done because I spend way too long trying to find something other than Inkstuds to stream.-b

-Zelda has never looked so fucking awesome.-k

-Maybe you read this ridiculous Nicolas Sparks interview where he compares himself to the Greek tragedians and disses Cormac McCarthy? If you didn't, do so. Here's the dumb stuff in one big quote:

"There's a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It's a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it's very rare that it works. That's why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It's all drama. I try to generate authentic emotional power...I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing 'whodunit?...A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance. What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms."

I live in North Carolina--Sparks' home-state--and never tire of tales of how big of a prick this guy is, but I also think what Sparks is babbling about has a lot to do with comics. Namely, that Sparks' work isn't mythic or universal and has nothing to do with the stuff he references, but many comics writers have said what Sparks is trying to say, without being douches about it. Comics are often mythic, especially superhero comics, mythic by default even. Sparks' understanding of the mythic, the universal is "this character I created is like lots of people in the real world in the 2000s" which is insanely myopic. But you know, if you're a dopey-ass white guy from North Carolina, that's your universe.

This is especially funny because the Village Voice this week posted "The Eight Tired Themes of Nicolas Sparks Love Stories". Best point from that essay: "Sparks movies are almost completely devoid of classic drama. Conflicts between individuals—or between individuals and society—are nominal and easily resolved. Sparks plots are instead dependent upon circumstance. Characters grapple with external forces (nor'easters, cancer, 9/11), not inner demons or desires."-b

-It may have only moved across the street and a couple of store fronts over, but the new Collectors Corner is everything a comic store should be. It's clean, organized, well stocked and actually enjoyable to be in. The owner Randy will take the time to talk to all of his customers and give them deals, cover price is sorta never what you'll be paying. The new issue wall is always packed with big titles and weird indie stuff and tons of local books, it's like he orders at least 5 of everything. He always has sales going on and purchases so much there's always something new. It's really awesome to see this dude's store evolving, if you're in Baltimore or even Maryland for that matter, you have to check out his store. -s

"You Can't Call this Manga": Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Black Blizzard

2010-04-02T23:56:00.004-04:00

If Yoshihiro Tatsumi had been born at another time and place I think it likely he would have become a filmmaker. It's become sort of a cliché to talk about comics in cinematic terms but Tatsumi's work has more in common with the works of a whole run of filmmakers than they do with any other comics creators. I've long favored a theory in which Tatsumi's most obvious cinematic counterpart is the late, great Shohei Imamura, but this assessment hinges upon being exposed only to the three collections of the manga-ka's short works published by Drawn & Quarterly. Black Blizzard, as they say, changes everything—well, sorta.

Tatsumi's experimental long-form crime comic has a lot in common with the early genre experiments of the French New Wave filmmakers. Films such as Godard's Breathless and especially Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player originate out of a similar admiration for the crime cinema of Hollywood's golden age as well as their respective creators' refusal to blindly accept formal conventions.

Shoot the Piano Player

Black Blizzard

Tatsumi's story of a down-at-the-heels pianist wrongly accused of murder is as much about how narrative is constructed in comics, that peculiar tension between image and text, as it is about the lives of the characters depicted. As he explains in A Drifting Life, Tatsumi in this period was heavily influenced by movies, particularly in the ways in which characters' emotional or psychological states were communicated by formal means: manipulation of light and shadow, the use of visual elements such as fog and even "camera angles" and framing.

From the story's opening pages, Tatsumi's unorthodox choices concerning panel arrangement, which functions more like montage than simple visual narrative, establish the sense of claustrophobia and menace that will dominate the story. It is interesting to consider the visual narrative of Black Blizzard in terms of its claustrophobia because it's a sort of claustrophobia that comes not from confined spaces—indeed, much of the story takes place outdoors, up in the mountains—but rather from enforced intimacy and imminent peril.

Shoot the Piano Player

Black Blizzard

The pianist and aspiring band-leader Susumu Yamaji has been arrested for a murder that he thinks he has committed, though he is unable to recall the details of the crime due to his intoxication at the time it occurred. As he is being transported by train, presumably to stand trial for the crime, he is handcuffed to a hardened criminal, Shinpei Konta, who is also suspected of murder. When their train is derailed by an avalanche, the imposing and intimidating Shinpei decides he would rather run into the raging blizzard than risk going back to prison, leaving Susumu the choice of going along with him or losing one of his precious hands.

This is just the sort of near-cliché conceit that is common to stories of this type, but Tatsumi doesn't just rely on the artificial suspense and sympathy generated by Susumu's unfortunate circumstances. Instead, he exploits the enforced intimacy between the two characters in visual terms, highlighting the claustrophobia of their situation as well as the sense of confusion that comes from the blurring of the physical boundaries between the two characters.

Tatsumi's superb visual expression of this confused claustrophobia is illustrated in a panel early in the story. After the train derails and Shinpei decides he is going to make a run for it into the mountains, he is forced to drag a reluctant Susumu along with him. As the two trudge up the mountain in the pounding blizzard, Susumu falls in the snow, begging Shinpei to allow him to rest for a moment before continuing their escape. Just to make sure that Susumu grasps the urgency of their situation, Shinpei kicks his chain-mate square in the face. Tatsumi's framing of this moment is superb, giving us the scene roughly from Shinpei's point-of-view. But all that we see is Shinpei's massive shoe crowding out half the frame, with Susumu's foreshortened face reeling from the blow in the other half.

In a diary entry dated 23 September 1912, Franz Kafka writes of the composition of his masterful story "The Judgment" over the course of the evening of 22-23 September:

I wrote . . . from ten o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk . . . The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water . . . How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again . . . Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.

There is more than a passing similarity between Kafka's description here and Tatsumi's account of the creation of Black Blizzard over 20 days in 1956 from A Drifting Life. As Tatsumi narrates the scene, "While working on the scenes of extreme cold, Hiroshi felt so involved that he actually shivered. He'd never felt this way before." The experience unsettles the young artist, "So this is the thrill of creation . . . I had no idea." Tatsumi is also similar to Kafka in the nagging feelings of uncertainty he continued to have about his own work, feelings that were only exacerbated in the case of Black Blizzard as a result of the unorthodox techniques used in the story and the equivocal response of his more traditional-minded brother.

Shoot the Piano Player

Black Blizzard

For all that is great about Black Blizzard, particularly when read in the context of the author's mature works from the late-sixties and early-seventies, it is without question an apprentice work. As Tatsumi himself observes to his brother in A Drifting Life, the draftsmanship is at points so sophomoric as to seem almost comical. This is most apparent in the almost laughably idealized Saeko-chan. If the sequence of events portrayed in the author's memoir is to be trusted, Black Blizzard was created by an extremely sexually naïve young man. We are some years yet from the sexually sophisticated women from Tatsumi's later stories.

All the same, Black Blizzard opens up a new facet in the gradually expanding view that American readers have of this still wildly underappreciated artist. To his much lauded mastery of such lurid, social-realist short form works as "Good-Bye," Tatsumi has added a moving and informative autobiographical work of impressive scale and now a formally experimental genre piece that demonstrates the considerable visual acuity that he already possessed at a very young age. One can only hope that there is a lot more where these came from.

Blood, Sweat & Twitter: One Woman Paul Pope fandom? Bitches, please

2010-03-31T08:30:00.006-04:00

Good friend of the blog and semi-committal comics reader Camden had the, what, dumb luck?, no, unique opportunity to see Paul Pope talk about his craft during spring break. So of course we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to have her share with our readers here something of her experience. What her piece here seems to get at it is how Paul Pope has a certain something, a bit of the rock star, almost, about him that sets him apart from other comics artists. What she doesn't mention is how she had to be talked into ditching her dad's girlfriend's middle school musical to go see Paul Pope. She also doesn't mention the octopus drawing she commissioned for me. -d

I had the absolute privilege of seeing Paul Pope speak at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, which is where I live in real life. San Francisco Bay Area, not the Cartoon Art Museum, although the Cartoon Art Museum is a real treat and I do wish I had been less starstruck by His Popeliness to wander around a bit more, as they had some really cool stuff on display.

Now, you must understand where I come, pulphopefully speaking. I have been a fan of Paul Pope for about a year. David gave me a copy of Heavy Liquid to read on a plane. I think I finished it before my plane even left the airport. It was a magical moment for me. Later after I expressed my enjoyment of Heavy Liquid in several exclamation-laced sentences, David handed me 100% which I of course adored with the passion of a thousand burning suns and thus my love for Paul Pope was solidified for all eternity. I love the man and his work and though I have no background whatsoever in illustration or comics, I think his storytelling is phenomenal.

So like any good fangirl after her first fannish epiphany, I googled him, put his blogspot on my Google reader, added him on Flickr and called it a day. Later realizing that his blogspot is one of the least informative sources on all things Pulphope, at least in terms of his actual Goings On, I set up a Google alert which sent me emails every day containing extensive articles about Pope John Paul II and the occasional article casually using Paul Pope’s name in reference to something that invariably had very little to do with him. One time an actual interview with him came up! That was real exciting. Another time MTV referenced his twitter! So I added him to my Twitter feed and promptly forgot about it. Then I cut the alert email, because it was annoying.

This entire process took about thirty minutes, not counting the time I took, one day, to go back, starry-eyed, through his flickr. I merely wanted to make sure I got up-to-date information on whatever he happened to be putting out or where he might be going and signing stuff or what have you, since he is not a man who seems to make many formal appearances and who does not rapidly produce work, at least new comics. I also wanted a peek inside that magnificent brain of his, having so very little knowledge of him. I’m an English major prone to close-reading and obsessive analyzing and the only thing I have ever learned is that too much information is never enough. Twitter, Flickr, and a blog? That’s me not even trying.

Anyway, I received an email from The Cartoon Art Museum the day before the event telling me that the actual Paul Pope would be in MY STATE talking about HIS COMICS and I flipped.

I was disappointed in the talk, sort of. Forty-five minutes of talking (split between Pope and Dr Michael B Johnson talking and an audience Q&A) was never going to be enough for me, and certainly did not satisfy my desire to know more. Nevertheless, I was pleased with what I got. Johnson obviously knows Pope well and had me scrawling down illegible notes in one of my school books regarding Pope’s answers. They covered a fair bit of the artist's history, which I do feel most people could have gotten had they spent more than thirty minutes on the internet looking for tidbits of his life. I was content to learn about this part of his life though, given I’ve heard all of one interview with him. It was an interesting interview to bear witness to, and I enjoyed it, honest. It just wasn’t long enough.

However, they opened the talk with a brief poll of the audience. Who here is involved with the creation of comics (writing, drawing, etc)? At least half the audience. Who here is involved with projects around comics (apparently this means movies)? The other half of the audience. Even the surly-looking bro in the front row was an artist. I sat in my corner of the room, clutching my stupid books and thinking great, here we go, an entire talk about the industry, something I care very little about except in the context of how the industry affects the art which in Paul Pope’s case, as I learned that evening, is very little for everything between THB and Batman Year 100, and then again after the publication of Batman 100. (At this point in his career, the man is basically unstoppable. And he knows it.) But maybe there’ll be something of interest?

No. Take a crowd of mostly young and hip artists and comics dudes who are precisely the age group to which the iPhone is marketed and the first Q&A is a question about what brushes Pope uses. Um, what? He’s answered that question like a million times on twitter, dude. Or at least once and I’m sure that question has come up before. He suffered a few other questions about his art – do you thumbnail, what kind of paper do you use, what kind of ink do you use, what would you change about your art if you could start from the beginning – before I finally managed to steel myself.

I raised my hand in a sea of seemingly informed Paul Pope fans and I inquired politely as to what the fuck Shakedown actually is and what is he doing there and oh my god Paul Pope and burlesque how perfect etc, and a man sitting near me asked, “what burlesque are you talking about?”

WHAT?

Apparently the rest of the crowd looked fairly mystified as well and a quick explanation was in order. It is not, Paul the Illustrious said, him doing burlesque. (“Oh damn,” said half the crowd sadly, including me.) It is a show that he helped to organize with his girlfriend who is a burlesque artist. I was moved to tears, he said, at a burlesque show I went to, and I wanted to give back to this community that inspired me.

YOU’RE SO GREAT OH MY GOD I said in my head. The Q&A session moved on while I hung back, shocked – shocked! – at the ignorance of these young hip comics peeps around me. Dude next to me had a website for his comics. This other guy used ebay to buy Pulphope swag. Clearly an internet savvy crowd, as anyone over the age of two is wont to be. And yet they’d never heard of the Shakedown shows? Were they stupid? Did they just not pay attention? Was everyone here a pretender and I alone was the only true Paul Pope fangirl? Was I, in fact, the only Paul Pope stalker in the room?

Impossible. I’ve never even read all of THB. I read like half an issue once and got distracted by pasta. But Shakedown is all over his blog and his twitter and check out sheer amount of scans and photos of his art for Shakedown on his flickr. His enthusiasm for Shakedown, whatever it may be, is impossible to miss even if you visit his blog a mere once a month.

So what gives, dudes? A twenty-one year old with no independent interest in comics outside of Kate Beaton should not be more informed than you, actual comics creators with decades of knowledge, on the goings-and-comings of Paul Pope. Everyone who attended the event – and there were quite a few, standing room only – was clearly a fan. So what’s with the ignorance? Is it willful? That stupid misled fan desire to keep the creative separate from the man? But Paul Pope himself talked about “skingrafting [his] identity” onto the character of Batman in Batman Year 100 and anyone with eyes knows that it is utterly impossible to get away from Paul Pope in Paul Pope’s work. Furthermore, Paul Pope produces too little work that is so immediately difficult to get hold of that it strikes me as utterly stupid not to devote a little time and energy into keeping up with him. Particularly in something that is so obviously important and interesting and exciting to him.

Plus, it’s burlesque. Paul Pope and burlesque.

So come on, motherfuckers, get it together.

MONDAY LINKS TEAM UP (RETURNS)

2010-03-29T22:08:00.000-04:00

-One of the best record stores in Baltimore dwells in the back of a comic store turned Yu-Gi-Oh tournament space, Celebrated Summer is filled with really awesome hard to find punk and hardcore, some old soul and rap and lots of Japanese rarities. Just check out Tony's--nicest record store owner on Earth--crucial Balzac collection. And you thought comics collecting was tough?-s

-I've been playing a lot of music lately, hence my lack of activity on the blog, and reading a lot of metal blogs. Metal Sucks list of Ten Great Bands That Inadvertently Helped Ruin Metal is pretty infuriating and spot on at the same time. Don't worry, it's comics related, there's a picture of Two-Face. My guess is a "Ten Great Comics That Inadvertently Helped Ruin Comics" list would be similarly fun/infuriating.-s

-All of these "covered covers" are really incredible, it was hard to chose one image to capture them all so I went with Baltimore great Brian Ralph. Some artists do almost exact reproductions of the covers just in their own style while some take every artistic liberty possible. It's got everyone from Johnny Ryan to Tom Neely, some of the pieces are even available for purchase!-s

-Just some really good Pokemon art for those who enjoy that sort of thing. -j

- RASL #7 comes out this week and Jeff Smith posted a preview on his blog. I don't know if anyone else is reading RASL, but you really should be. Issue #6 was great and explained a lot about the RASL universe. Nothing beats universe traveling and existential sadness in my book.-j

-Internets has been buzzing about the Scott Pilgrim movie, but there's also a video game coming out. Internet Legend Paul Robertson--see video above--will be working as art director for the game. With new "old school" side scrolling 2D--while being sorta 3D--games like Megaman 9, The NEW Super Mario Bros., and the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 4, side scrolling is back, this thing's going to be big.-s

Powerful Panels: Stokoe's Orc Stain #2

2010-03-28T23:19:00.002-04:00

Issue 2 of James Stokoe's chunky, tripped-out, does-whatever-it-wants Orc Stain begins with One-Eye and Pointyface, on their way to Scrubtown to give their share of chits to The Norman, a J. Jonah Jameson-like Orc, authority figure and somehow their boss...or something?

Pointyhead quickly dismisses a Nymph--in Stokoe's world, they're blue and pixie-haired and look like they should be in Nylon magazine--and both Orcs jump on these insane, almost bi-pedal, bug-eyed Triceratops and "head North".

Stokoe gives the fantasy-world thrill of creatures racing through some weird, foreign, craggly land two action-packed panels. The first is a kind of low-angle (think of those from-the-floor angles in Citizen Kane, it's that low) image of the creatures' legs kicking-up dust. They're caught mid-extension, legs bent, claws curved. Everything about the panel is slightly off or awkward. Your eyes end up focusing on this stubby, mound of dirty and grass that's a little left of the frame's center because it's the only complete thing in the whole image. The angle is, by conventional standards, "poorly framed"--there's not enough space at the top or bottom--and it's neither a wide or a medium shot...and it's not a close-up either.

All of the things that are "wrong" with the panel though, are why it's so weirdly, subliminally effective. Stokoe basically does a rote action scene in a slightly "off" way and makes it interesting again. That's probably true of Orc Stain as a whole--turning the familiar new by ignoring genre rules and expectations--but it's especially cool here; a blip of odd energy and excitement.

The panel moves, not because it's typically kinetic or possesses some killer visual narrative, but because the energy that it usually takes the interaction of panels to achieve, is done in a one, strangely framed, detail-packed image. You can imagine the panel as a shaky, hand-held camera, doing its best to capture the action, as the ground rumbles, and dust, dirt, and rocks kick-up in the foreground.

The next panel, though framed slightly "better", is on the same shit. Dust and chunks of ground jump around in the background, One-Eye and Pointyhead and their creatures, smooshed into the frame enough that they can be seen, but it's working with the same concept of the panel/"camera" not being able to appropriately capture the action. This panel feels almost like a still from footage of the creatures running, like a freeze-frame that clamps down on chaotic footage and kinda sorta makes it makes sense.

Before, I said these panels possess their own power, that they don't depend or use visual narrative, and though that's true in the sense that they totally work on their own and don't need each another, they are talking to one another. Look at the way Stokoe cleverly switches from the dust and grit in the foreground of the top panel to the dust and grit being in the background of the bottom panel. Also, when the panels are combined, you get a full illustration of the creatures: Their bottom-half and their top-half. Then, there's the contrast between those two action panels and the sedate tall panel on the left, the bored/annoyed One-Eye, totally not interested in what's going.

The sizes of the panels too, on the bottom third of the page, but the overall layout just as well, provide a "narrative" in the sense that there's a movement and trajectory to them. How they're arranged and how that final panel, the front view of the running creatures, is just crammed in there is really fun. One of the coolest things about Stokoe is how he's really trying to give you a fun read, not something you just slurp up and wait a month or two for the next one. Something that rewards you when you stare into it: A comic that's overflowing with images and ideas and jokes and cool little things--like this too-small, totally awesome panel.

I like that this panel doesn't need to be there. That the sequence would be even more terse and like, clever if Stokoe just gave you the top panel of the legs running. From Pointyhead's "We ride north" to a sprawling panel of the creatures well, heading north would be conventionally comic book-like. And it'd give the page a more comforting sense of parallelism. But no--instead, you get this moment stretched-out and made more complicated. One-Eye's mocking "North." and then, the two panels of the creatures that make it less an epic moment (though it still is exciting) and a weird, wobbling, you're totally in-it action sequence. Most people prefer the former, Stokoe prefers the latter. Me too.

Monday Links

2010-03-22T18:10:00.001-04:00

Flying solo this week, so this is shorter and not really a "team-up"...

-New comics this week: The second issue of James Stokoe's mind-blowing Orc Stain. I finally say down and read the second volume of Won Ton Soup earlier in the week and so another release from Stokoe couldn't come at a better time. What's so great about his work is how it looks beautiful so you don't even have to read it, but the story's actually fairly complex and weird and so, you keep coming back to it. A big chunk of his work like Won Ton Soup is almost too much and it's really cool to receive monthly--or bi-monthly I guess--doses. Also: King City #6!

-The other day, Karen basically sat me down and told me to read this Josh Simmons story "Cock Bone" from issue three of the Robin Bougie-curated Sleazy Slice and wow, one of the best, most fucked-up reads ever. Like, it sticks with you and it randomly pops-up in your head days or weeks later. Sean T. Collins' review here pretty much nails it, especially this sentence: "And in the comic's most memorable, haunting effect, it doesn't so much end as give up--rather than actually showing what happens in the last two panels, Simmons superimposes simple caption boxes over the visuals that sum up their hidden contents in one or two words, as though the main character, Simmons, the world couldn't bear to endure the real thing." Word to Atomic Books for having a copy of Sleazy Slice which I promptly bought the day after reading "Cock Bone". Though it's hardly new, I'd like to direct everybody over to Simmons' website and read his unofficial Batman comic which is equally great and disturbing, if less explicit.

-Also, some real cool comics-related stuff added to NETFLIX 'Watch It Now' last week: Meteor Man and Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth! Meteor Man just plain rules and is at the tail-end of the mid-80s, early 90s politically-engaged black comedy boom that's all but nonexistent anymore. Also tons of cameos and small parts by dudes like Big Daddy Kane! The Harlan Ellison doc is pretty good, especially for not idealizing the lovable curmudgeon but also portraying him as this no-bullshit legend. I rewatched it last night and noticed that over the credits, there's a part that says "Harlan Ellison wishes to thank..." and it's followed not by friends or family but basically a cool list of influences. I screen-capped it below:

-Sorry, that's all the comics news I got. DJ Paul of Three-Six Mafia released a mixtape last week that's really good.

-Check out this study on dancing babies!!!.

Joe the Barbarian #3

2010-03-20T22:33:00.004-04:00

Joe the Barbarian #3 feels like the third issue/part/whatever of nearly every Morrison book since All-Star Superman (or really, We3 or something, real talk: When's the last time you thought about or returned to All-Star Superman?), which means it starts to feel half-assed and rickety and a little nonsensical. Namely, Morrison sucks all the emotion out of a story that more than anything, has a lot of emotion and just leaves the meta high-concept conceit and a bunch of genre signifiers. My guess is a lot of other people will consider this the best issue of Joe.

Issue #2 raised the stakes by lowering them: Jagged shifts back to Joe's house made the intense, not-Joe's house scenes of war that much more alarming. In issue #3, the shifts back to "reality" just feel kinda perfunctory and the actual narrative just rolls out explaining a lot, and setting up some big stuff for later issues and nothing more. It's jam-packed with set-ups and exposition like the first issue, but you totally know it. It doesn't yield its own rarefied awards. You can hear the gears turning and the result is a big "meh" feeling. When something approaching an explanation for the whole "Joe's some kind of savior" is revealed with a very cool, single-page, world-less panel and it's just whatever, something is wrong.

And because the issue's not very good, some of the weirder stuff from the previous two issues feels just confusing instead of willfully odd or challenging. A couple of times in #2, Morrison did these really jarring compressions of time. It trimmed the fat and it added a level of like "you're getting a weird fractured version of reality here, stuff's a little off or out of order" to the whole thing. Here, it feels just lazy and pragmatic. The really limp undersea monster chase just kinda farts out--and artist Sean Murphy's trying really hard to sell the action with his art--and then the Pirate dude lets out a "Ya harrr!" and there's a big, beautiful single-page panel of a town. Some time's conflated there, not much, but we go from the sighting of the town to the submarine fully docked. It comes off as "clever" or capital-I interesting because it doesn't seem tied to any kind of meaning and it lacks the intended punch.

Or the just plain "huh?" transition from the dinner/food fight with the fat kid (again, whatever, none of this is interesting) to Joe and Chakk on a cool-looking mountain, Chakk building a memorial for his dead comrades. That scene works on its own as does the impending dread and awesomely Doom Patrol-like of the scene with this weird dudes watching Joe on a screen, but none of it comes together. #3 isn't a terrible issue or a bad comic, and it's not even disappointing enough to write the series off or nothing, it's just kinda whatever...which may be worse than it just turning to shit. Mediocre Morrison--who needs that?

MONDAY LINKS TEAM UP

2010-03-15T10:01:00.000-04:00

-Some GameFAQS for the upcoming Doctor Who for the Wii: Be sure to level up your witty retorts skill. It will come in handy later. Study up on your physics for Level 3 'Actually Plotting a Course Through Time.' Don't forget the red jelly babies fill up health and the blue jelly babies put enemies to sleep! The faster you wave the Wiimote on the Daleks level the faster the Doctor will decide whether it's moral to eradicate an entire race of evil beings or not.-j

-So that Spiderman broadway musical/abortion is apparently gonna happen again or something. They realize Howard Stern already beat them to it, right?-b

-Comics to get this coming Wednesday: Joe the Barbarian #3, Hercules: Fall of an Avenger #1 (art by Cable's Olivetti and written by Pak & Van Lente!), Siege #3 (fuck the "director's cut" of #1 though), and Groo: Hogs of the Horder #4!-b

-For the three people in the world that enjoyed my indulgent Doctor Who week, and/or are interested in this whole "Hypnagogic pop" thing. A very awesome and very makes-you-feel-gross video for James Ferraro's "Headlines (Access Holywood)" from Last American Hero, which you can order here.

-Also noticed the BOOM! reissue of Don Rosa's The Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck is out on Tuesday in hardcover at 25 bucks with "Volume 2" out next week. I was in a Barnes & Noble tonight and saw it already on the shelves so yeah, maybe you can get it early.-b

-Hard-to-find comics Brandon was able to get his hands on this week and read: The Bodyssey by Richard Corben and The One Trick Rip-Off by Paul Pope.

First up, The Bodyssey. Basically, this is Corben in the mid-80s, probably at the height of his powers, devoting all his immense talents towards a joke fantasy comic. It's like if Yngwie Malmsteen followed up Rising Force with songs about farts or something, but it was still just as technically awesome and perfect as the other stuff. Corben just flat-out is the heir to sword-and-sorcery comics, but it's almost like he doesn't care or more perversely, loves using his talents towards a big joke. So the characters comment on how dumb the story is and like, the main character Pilgor fights these weird ball sack monsters called Scrotals and a guy bounces a woman's boobbs around and goes "Look I'm a juggler" and there's lot of perfectly-drawn dicks flopping around.

Paul Pope's early stuff is legendary because it's OOP and remains OOP but it deserves the almost myth behind it because this shit is really, really good. Post-Heavy Liquid I'd say Pope's writing gets weird--his art's always great--but in these early stories they're these wonderful genre tales full of big sincere romance and cool action and a very Hemingway-like sense of "the world's fucked". And I don't just say that because Pope cites Hemingway in the intro to this book, Escapo feels that way too. One Trick Rip-Off doesn't have an ending-type ending, it just kinda floats away, and there's way more time spent on Indian food and end-of-the-world romance than crime, but that's how it should be.-b

-Pretty much everyone who cares about comics was annoyed at this "The 10 Most Important Gay Moments in Comic Book History" because it didn't include stuff like Dykes to Watch Out For or Howard Cruse's boring books but you know, the list was "important" moments and shit that happens in a big stupid mainstream superhero book is always gonna be more important than the stuff the happens in a book whose audience is already gay or gay-friendly. Sorry. Also the site is called "Ranker" and so, it makes dumb lists so we argue about it. In the blogging "industry" we cynically call posts like Ranker's "DIGG bait". Even though no one uses Digg anymore.-b

This is really great!-b

Rick Geary's Housebound

2010-03-11T22:46:00.012-05:00

Rick Geary is easily one of the most underrated and over-looked creators in comics. His series Treasury of Victorian Murder and now Treasury of XXth Century Murder contain some of the most well crafted and innovative comics around. While they do make the year-end lists, he still seems somehow slept-on. Part of this may have to do with his inability to fit into narrow categories. Although his Treasury series has obviously serious content, his visual style is closer to something out of a comic strip. His website even lists him as a cartoonist and illustrator, and I think it’s this perception that helps him get overlooked on the grand comics landscape.

Housebound collects some of Geary’s early works from National Lampoon, Epic Illustrated, and some self published mini-comics. They are short, most are a single page, and they are far more personal than reading his other works. His Treasury series is so well researched that it can often take a hyper-objective tone, like an outsider carefully observing an event from all angles and perspectives, but in Housebound, many of the short comics seem to be events from Geary’s life.

Geary was born in 1946 and raised in the Midwest, and much of Housebound deals with life in the region and with the social climate of the 60s. Reading Housebound has the effect of reading a comics diary throughout the years, watching his style and composition improve, but also just more of an opinionated slant. Instead of the objective third person narrator, there is a main character and a theme or point to the stories that they are pushing. It isn't buried behind objectivity like in the Treasury series. Not to say that this objectivity is bad, it's what helps make Treasury unique and truly creepy, but it's nice to see his personality really shine through in these tales. As is common with personal stories, early works, and short comics, they sometimes fall flat, suffering from a lack of a real narrative core and ending up acting like quirky ruminations and nothing more.
There are still plenty of stories that give us the Geary we know and love. “Communal Life”(1,2,3) is a particularly good diary story where Geary tells about living with twenty-one other people and how things slowly devolved from a community to him isolated in his room. He gets a piece of cake for his birthday, which he shares with the house while saving a piece for himself. Geary draws it carefully wrapped in tinfoil with a wordless post-it emphasizing the betrayal you’ve probably already guessed at. The story doesn’t quite fall into this obvious trap though, because the main part of the story is him that night at a Peace Rally where he is abandoned by his peers. He mans his post holding his sign, getting berated by passer-bys, and no one comes to relieve him. The cake, eaten by one of his housemates, is just a coda in the larger comment on his generation that has the guise of ideals and community, but in the end is ultimately selfish.
Geary’s genius comes from his straightforward but complex storytelling like in “Communal Life,” but also from his panel transitions and imagination. “Let’s Get Organized”, “The Age of Condos”, and “American Motels” are the origins of his panel work showing various items or views from the titled categories. “America Motels” shows various motels from 1978, but only a certain part like an ashtray and lamp or five towels stacked on top of each other in the bathroom. Later he works these items and specific scenery into larger works providing for really interesting transitions that also add to the story. On the back cover Alan Moore describes it as, “a world seen in glimpses and remembered in fragments, where days or months or years may elapse between panels.” He's not afraid at all to put you out of your comfort zone and to use a panel to show something that might be weird or take you a minute or two to figure out exactly what's going on.
His imagination shines through in “Our New Dad”(1,2,3,4) and “In search of Dr. Einstein’s Brain." The former has a robot become the family's new father in a sort of typical sci-fi story, but his drawings, like one where they put a replica of the father's head on the robot, make it weird and hilarious to see --picture Short Circuit with a human head. "Einstein's Brain" has the same sort of imagination where a scientist tracks down pieces of Einstein's brain only to find a piece secretly powering an entire town. It's the premise itself, brain's apparatus, and the list of the things it powers--everything from commerce and industry to civic beauty and entertainment-- that make reading it actually exciting. We've talked about comics' ability to capture this sense of wonder about the world on this blog before, and how it's what differentiates comics from a lot of other mediums. Geary has it in spades, and it's definitely what makes his comics in a league of their own.

MONDAY LINKS TEAM UP

2010-03-08T06:07:00.000-05:00

-"The Smuttiest French Novel Ever Written, Still Shocking 50 Years Later" by Sasha Watson for Slate: I guess it's cool that somewhere, anywhere's reviewing Crepax's Story of O, even if it's a whole bunch of months after the release date and barely reviews the graphic novel and just kinda gives you a rather weak narrative of Story of O's publication history. But there's one sentence, I'd really take issue with: " But the images, which can be merely voyeuristic in the absence of Aury's layered writing, do not quite get at the crux of the novel." As if the only thing an adaptation can do is closely resemble that which its adapting? This is especially moronic because Crepax's adaptations are almost like their own form of literary criticism or something, where he's messing with and confounding the original, not so much making a typical adaptation. I get the feeling the author of this piece knows nothing about Crepax.-b

-Independent comics publishers during the 80's were popping up left and right and just like punk bands or rap record labels, there was too much shit going on to really know what was good or bad. One of the comic's companies that did have success however, was Mirage Studios, best known for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What most people don't know though is that they published a ton of other weird books, nearly all of which are listed here. If you're looking for some new a White Box Hero to check out, go dig through some dollars bins for Grunts!-s

-NEW BRANDON GRAHAM LJ ENTRY!

If you scan the timeline in the Hellboy Companion, there's a quick reference to Hellboy befriending some Mexican wrestlers and getting really drunk with them. 1956, May-October, Palenque, Mexico: "Hellboy's "lost weekend." He teams with three Mexican wrestler brothers to fight monsters and drink. After six months, B.P.R.D. agents are sent to bring him home." The opposite page has a cool Mignola drawing of Hellboy with a Luchador. ANYWAYZ--so this is becoming a comic finally! Drawn by Corben! Comes out in May.-b

-Also, what the hell is iMAGE Comics doing? Here is their website's listing for the comics that come out this week. Elephantmen #24 comes out this week, not #26, and well, we're still waiting on Orc Stain #2. The site's been like this forever and it's just sort of amazing how half-assed it is.-b

-Jerry Lawler Wrestling Art: Swiped from a link from another article on Robot6. Pretty self-explanatory.-b

--Awesome Bendis/Fraction Interview You Probably Read Already: Also stolen from Robot6 and lots of other places, but really, two guys who really take their craft seriously talking about it is endlessly fascinating.-b

House of the Devil directed by Ti West. Watched this last night and highly recommend it. It'll freak you the fuck out, but it's also just this well-made, solid movie. Though it isn't always employed, Horror is really the only genre that's just like, bare-bones cinematic and direct. Where your basic film grammar and tricks like omitted information, creeping atmosphere, etc. still really work and don't come off as well, manipulative or bullshit. House of the Devil just really ratchets up the tension that comes from these tricks until you're kinda going insane watching it. Lots of critics say the "pay-off" doesn't work and well, that isn't the point, but it does work. Really really well. Don't want to ruin anything about this so I'll just stop typing. Rent it.-b

The Invincible Iron Man: Stark Disassembled

2010-03-05T00:04:00.002-05:00

I mean this in the best way possible: The Invincible Iron Man: Stark Disassembled is pretty up its own ass. The first issue was pretty much all prologue, pages of pages of Tony Stark just explaining, it's totally wrapped up in continuity type stuff, and it's got those completely insane comic book sequence of events thing where say, Tony Stark's computerized body is jumpstarted by Thor striking the Captain American shield with his hammer creating electricity or something. In the end, it's basically a story arc hurtling towards retconning the character.

But it works. Every goofy Marvel's character entrance or exit was thrilling because at any moment it could've gotten stupid and even when it did get stupid it was the good kind of stupid, where writer Matt Fraction just thought, "fuck it" and went there. There hasn't been this kind of devotion to the Marvel Universe and blatant disregard for it since say, Old Man Logan (or to go back a bit further, Civil War). The difference is, "Stark Disassembled" wobbles but it never falls down and each issue got better, not worse. Still, it shares Mark Millar's understanding that comics always gotta be fun. And emotional.

At the heart of Fraction's Invincible Iron Man twenty-four issues ago, was Tony Stark's painfully sincere--too sincere really--attempt to not be such a douche. Sounds like most aware Iron Man comics since well forever, but a lot of it, this time around, is filtered through a weirder, sympathetic but kinda ambivalent perspective on Stark. He's not the lovable playboy and he's not a jerk readers just kinda roll their eyes at, he's somewhere in between. And he's also a genius. Fraction understands how important that is, the complex, jerky genius part.

We don't like the word "genius" anymore because it's divisive and elitist. A decade or two of little league where everybody gets a trophy has us too comfortable with the idea that everybody's special. Fraction's hip to this but he knows it's a little bullshit and really stifling and so, he makes the comic book less about Tony Stark the genius and more about Tony Stark the genius who is also a prick and maybe more of a prick because he's a genius? The tension of the comic, that sorta palpable discomfort you get reading it, comes not from Stark as conflicted individual, but just how much bullshit he can make his friends and employees fucking deal with before they give up.

The answer is a whole lot. But for good reason--Stark is a genius, remember? In its original context--the first part of a cool-looking Iron Man storyline--Stark's almost issue-long monologue was just obnoxious. But as each issue came along, I realized, that's the point. It's made clear in Pepper's angry, scribbled, half-finished note to Tony in issue #21: "When is it my time? When do I stop living to support your life and start living mine?" Again, this isn't all that different from other comics, but Pepper is less a weak female or whatever, and more a self-aware person, who can't help but be pissed. "I'm throwing a tantrum and I know it." she writes a few lines before the "Why me?" portion of her letter.

Notice there's not a lot of comment on action or plot here because there actually isn't that much in "Stark: Disassembled". A lot of stuff happens, but violence and fighting are kinda besides the point. The exciting stuff is seeing how all the pieces are put together: Thor and Captain American showing up, Doctor Strange showing up, not the threat of The Ghost but how he'll be defeated. It's a comic book, Fraction seems to quietly remind readers, nothing's really at stake here. So you get your perfunctory violence and thrills and nick-of-time saves and it's fun, but there's also plenty of raw, complex emotions. People mad at Stark for his actions of the past, but concerned about him still. Stark, in his weird subconscious dreamworld confronting his actions of the past, most violently in #24, via a weird blood-filled palace with his parents--an odd, half-symbolic representation of "the Stark Legacy".

This is comic book stuff yeah, but take it out of the comics realm, say, this was the next Iron Man movie and it'd be a fucking head-trip (where's the conflict? the resolution? the conventional love interest?) but that's a good thing. Fraction isn't so much "reinventing" or deconstructing his hero, which is sorta what every comic book does these days if it isn't totally towing the party line, but shifting how stuff plays out just a bit. He's using every bloated, event-ish aspect of contemporary superhero comics and turning it just enough that it means something again. But what does it all build-up to? A clever way to make Civil War something that never happened. This is both frustrating and pretty awesome. For once, I'm psyched to see where a mainline superhero comic is gonna go next.

Pokemon Size Comparison Chart

2010-03-04T13:36:00.008-05:00

Threw this together today for some kids who were interested/arguing about Pokemon sizes. I saw a size chart a while ago in some book, but couldn't find one on the internet. The size of Pokemon in the games is also kind of nebulous. You catch Dialga and it's the same size as Torterra in battle. I don't watch any of the movies or shows so I had no real idea their sizes compared to each other.

The heights are all based on the ones listed on Pokemon.Marriland.com. One block is equal to one foot, so you're probably about as tall as the top of Snorlax's head, unless you're a kid then you're probably closer to Lucario. I edited some sizes for the sake of their image. Snorlax is about a foot shorter than listed because he's lounging, and Groudon is shorter because he's hunched over.

MONDAY LINKS TEAM-UP

2010-02-28T22:34:00.001-05:00

- A couple weeks ago Hasbro released their 2010 toy line. We were all wowed by Tony Starch, but one toy slipped through the cracks. The toy was a new take on an old favorite: Check out Biggus Helmetus Galactus.-j

-So, last week on the Howard Stern show, the story about the Action Comics selling for a whole lot of money segued into a classic, bad Stern childhood reminisce in which he told a story about how one day he got home from school and his parents had given all his comics to some other kid down the street. What was interesting is how Stern mentioned his cousin Jack Adler, a DC Comics cover artist and colorist, as the source of many of his comics. Adler was one of the many worker-bee, artistan-like comics artists who understood that balance of efficiency and clarity and the perfect amount of stylization. Check out this cover; it both looks like plenty of pulp you've seen before and has some perfect design/illustration in it too.-b

-Mouse Guard: Fall is going into it's third printing and author David Petersen talks about it in a couple of interviews with Flames Rising and Crave Online. In an interesting section on the Flames Rising interview, Petersen talks about what goes into making his Mouse Guard RPG. Everything from how much a mouse can carry to what it takes to becomes a Guard. In the Crave Online interview, he talks about 11 pages of new Mouse Guard he's putting out for free comic book day on May 1st. Definitely getting me excited for his upcoming Legends of the Guard and Black Axe due out later this year. -j

-Fantagraphics put up this really sparse, really simple teaser for the upcoming Jacques Tardi trade It Was the War of the Trenches but no one's watching it! 35 views?! In a way this is better than some "preview" scans, you just kinda grab these glimpses of the art and story. Can't wait until April.-b

-The biggest shlockmeister in the world Gene Simmons' son Nick has a comic that no one really reads, that is, except for fans of Bleach. Tracing pictures and stealing direct dialogue and plot points goes beyond inspiration and into, you know, plagiarism. The internets has the whole story. Can you imagine his father, the most full of himself man on Earth, having to deal with this? At least it'll make Family Jewels actually interesting. -s

-With all the talk of dream super hero movies this week, let's talk about a real one. Woody Harrelson plays Defendor, a man down on his luck but making an attempt to change the world. Sorta like Batman, sorta like the Maxx, I can't believe I didn't write about Harrelson as Batman.-s

-So, Jim from The Office might be Captain America. All I have to say is..."if you thought out dream comic book movies were ridiculous...". No really, this is good in theory but bad in execution because John whateverhisnameiz is one of those 2000s actor who is always in-quotes and smug and like, uneasy in his roles, so he won't sell anything. We'll get this like frumpy dumpy embarrassed Captain America and man...FUNK DAT!-b

-We are all familiar with Wookiepedia, the best source of Star Wars information on the net, but what about Banthapedia, the Non-Canon Star Wars Wiki? Ever wanted to know Luke Skywalker's death toll? The names of the Jawa Football League teams? It's got it all. -s

The Best Comic Book Movie of 2009 Was Not an Adaptation

2010-02-28T14:28:00.000-05:00

What shall the history books read?
—Col. Hans Landa, "The Jew Hunter"

If you're concerned about spoilers, you probably shouldn't read this post, though if by this time you don't know what happens at the end of Inglourious Basterds, you probably don't particularly care. When I watched Quentin Tarantino's Nazi slaughter-fest for the first time, I can remember feeling a sense of displacement upon seeing members of the Basterds gun down Hitler and Goebbels inside a Jewish-owned Paris cinema during the premier of Stolz der Nation. Here was this movie dealing with subject matter that has become all-too familiar and yet presenting the events in a way in which they did not happen. It felt almost obscene, or sacrilegious—not that I objected, per se; it was more akin to the feeling you get when someone standing next to you says something dreadfully offensive.

In the 21st century, we've come to a point where we practically fetishize the notion of historical accuracy in stories that depict events from the past. The process of writing a novel or screenplay has come more to resemble that of composing a dissertation, for all the research that's required. But this slavish submission to historicity is based on the flawed assumption that fidelity to historical detail somehow brings us closer to events as they occurred, when in fact the very idea of historical accuracy is itself a fiction.

Quentin Tarantino has a clear sense of the ways in which history and fantasy interact in storytelling. With Inglourious Basterds, he has taken the sacred cow of historical subject matter, and told a story that is at once rigorously researched and yet plays fast and loose with the ordering of events as they read in history books. Tarantino understands that historical detail sets a mood and creates a setting in which fictional characters play out fictional scenarios, which may or may not resemble events you may have read about in a history class.

As anyone who's ever read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay can tell you, comics were used during World War II as a means of exorcising the anguish and aggression that people felt over events on the world stage. They were about fantasy, rather than history. It was an avenue for writers and artists, many of whom were Jews, many of those having been displaced by the rise of the Third Reich, to envision scenarios in which heroic men with semitic features and preternatural abilities could quite literally kick the shit out of Hitler and his goons. I doubt very seriously that a single comic book from this period envisioned Hitler holed up in his Berlin bunker in 1945, eventually shooting himself as the end drew near. That's not a particularly satisfying scenario, either from a narrative or moral perspective.

And I would argue that the collective want of satisfaction that we feel over the manner of Hitler's demise has something to do with the surfeit of movies and books grappling with this material in recent years. However widely these stories have varied in their particulars, the critical events have been treated as somehow sacrosanct, perpetuating the sense of historical injustice. It took a gutsy writer like Tarantino, borrowing some of comics' native editorial brio, to reappropriate the historical record, giving us an end that satisfies our human desire for vengeance in a hail of bullets and righteous Jewish anger and finally allowing us to let go of that particularly unsavory part of the past.

Of course this discussion of the recasting of historical events ignores the equally salient question of period detail in historical narrative. Ironically, this is the sort of issue that tends to set off the pompous fulminations of armchair critics. But there is a difference between those details which demonstrate the fastidiousness of the artist and very little else and those which have a qualitative effect on the story as a whole. While it might be perfectly diverting to discuss the relative accuracy of the depiction of Countess Sophia Tolstoya riding about her family's estate in a landau, rather than a troika in The Last Station, such details are ultimately superfluous.

On the same token, the languages spoken by characters in a movie about World War II are anything but superfluous. When you think about it, it's really remarkable how many 'serious' films dealing with this period—historical movies in general, for that matter—simply convert all of the languages spoken by the various combatants into English; it's downright scandalous. Tarantino's choice to have each of the characters speak the appropriate language or languages reveals a level of verisimilitude and sophistication that is simply absent from more traditionally respectable films.

And that's just it: Inglourious Basterds delivers an impressive measure of sophistication and truth, all smuggled in—to borrow a concept from Brandon—under a thick veneer of pulp-adventure bombast. This subtly beguiling mix of whimsy and sophistication is precisely what drew me to comics in the first place. It is largely unique to the medium precisely because pulling it off requires a level of risk-taking that is untenable to most novelists and filmmakers. Simply put, it's the reason why a movie that was never a comic to begin with turned out to be the best comic book film of 2009.

Comic Adaptation Week: Clint Eastwood's Old Man Logan

2010-02-26T20:00:00.002-05:00

Millar and McNiven’s Old Man Logan isn’t about the animal Wolverine, it’s about the man Logan. Leaving his past behind him, Logan becomes a pacifist in a world where the villains have won, until his landlords--the Hulk’s inbred children--threaten to evict him if he can’t come up with his rent. The now blind Avenger Hawkeye offers Logan enough money that he’ll never need to work again in exchange for playing bodyguard on a nationwide road trip, delivering mysterious goods to the rebel party. Even though Logan has left his brawling ways in the past, the money is too good, so he agrees.

Although it has its moments of complete badassery, it’s not a comic about how a tough, aging Wolverine slashes his way through the country. OML is about being old and tired and just wanting to quietly live out the rest of your years, but something is preventing you from doing just that. It’s about being a good person because it’s who you are, even though you may not like it.

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino plays with similar themes, the 80 year old Eastwood stars as um, an 80 year old man, war-worn, full of good old American racial hate, but also, you know, a good heart. Eastwood’s portrayal of a man who’s lost it all and is just waiting for his time to end struck me as strange, the man you knew for, “You’ve gotta ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?” spends his time just working on his car and garden?

It felt like giving up, but then I realized it’s not giving up, it’s starting again and having the opportunity to really be who you’ve never been able to. By also directing the film, Eastwood would be able to add that sense of grizzled heroism from the movies that he's become known for, revealing the motivations behind a mean old man's actions without forcing pity out of the audience. Eastwood's ability to portray an older man who isn't helpless, but obviously somewhat frail and sick, is what an old Wolverine would need. There also aren't a lot of old men who know they could kick your ass and that's important too.

Comic Adaptation Week: Jean Renoir's Doom Patrol

2010-02-26T14:39:00.000-05:00

One could be forgiven for concluding that my suggestion of a film adaptation of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol by Jean Renoir is little more than a self-indulgent lark. What could the French master of poetic realism possibly have in common with Morrison's madcap masterpiece? But critics and casual moviegoers tend to forget that Renoir had a career outside of his justly famous French films of the 1930s. In his early career, Renoir experimented heavily with filmmaking forms and effects and many of his films of the 1920s have more in common with Doom Patrol at its most surrealistic than, say, Grand Illusion.

1927's Charleston Parade (Sur un air de charleston) is bizarre mash of scifi and flapper culture, which imagines a post-apocalyptic 2028 in which Africa is the center of civilization and Europe is a dark terra incognita. In Renoir's jazz age retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl," La petite marchande d'allumettes (1928), an inappositely lusty Catherine Hessling--Renoir's first wife--descends into a phantasmagoric dream world, in which the inhabitants of a toyshop window come to life.

But as much as these early experimental works establish a visual, stylistic connection between these seemingly disparate artistic poles, it is the human stuff that first made me think Renoir could do this material justice. In Morrison's incarnation of the book, Doom Patrol is only tertiarily about superheros. What's really at the heart of this group of misfits is precisely their misfit status--they are quite literally the only people that will accept each other. Renoir's celebrated movies of the 1930s, particularly Grand Illusion, but also The Rules of the Game, tread similar territory. The ensemble casts of these films are populated with just the sort of people who were facing increasing hostility in the politically charged France of the 1930s: Jews, foreigners, homosexuals. The theme that pops up again and again in these movies, regardless of the subject matter, is that the boundaries that we use to separate people are wholly arbitrary. It was as though he had been engaged in trying to convince a Europe that he knew was about to destroy itself that it didn't really need to happen.

Perhaps even more striking is the similarity between the ways that both Morrison and Renoir have expressed the paradoxical impossible possibility of love. In the scene from Doom Patrol from which the above panel was culled, Cliff is pouring out his heart to Jane about the difficulty of living without a body. A big part of this is his reminiscence of the things that he used to be able to do and FEEL, particularly racing, that are now forever closed off to him. The corresponding scene from The Rules of the Game plays out almost identically, even down to the rarefied setting. Octave, played by Renoir himself, is reminiscing to his friend Christine about his younger days as a musician with her father, a famous Austrian conductor. As he puts it in the film, he misses the sound of the audience and the feeling of performance and feels that now that he does not perform, he lives only as a parasite. In The Rules of the Game as in Doom Patrol, the scene culminates with the woman confessing her love for the broken man. But again in both cases, it's an impossible love, in Doom Patrol because Cliff doesn't have a body and in The Rules of the Game because Christine is married to the Marquis de la Cheyniest, piling on a class division to the already problematic societal mores concerning marriage.

Finally, Doom Patrol was ultimately a vehicle for Grant Morrison to wield his satiric sabre against any number of social and cultural sacred cows. Benevolent Horatian though he may have been, Renoir was ultimately a satirist who created stories that allow us to love the targets of his mockery.

Comic Adaptation Week: Michael Mann's Batman

2010-02-26T02:59:00.000-05:00

When the first ten minutes of The Dark Knight made their way onto the internet and it was sorta just a straight rip of the bank robbery in Heat, it sorta justified my thinking that a Michael Mann-helmed Batman movie would be perfect. It wouldn't gross as much money as Nolan's and it'd be way more polarizing but it would be a better better for sure. Where most of our ideas have been rejections of Hollywood's dark variation on the comic book hero, Michael Mann's a director who could bring that kind of hyper-modern, brooding to Batman and make it work.

His Batman would be an adaptation of the Loeb/Sale trilogy--Long Halloween, Dark Victory, and yes, Catwoman: When In Rome. For Mann, that Catwoman tale would be just as important, as there's always this contrasting focus in his films on women. Catwoman/Selena plays a prominent part in Dark Victory and her absence is felt by Batman/Bruce (think of the romantic longing in Thief or Miami Vice or Public Enemies) and Mann could easily weave Selena's time in Rome into a rather epic story of Gotham city. All Mann movies have these kind of weird, "why is this in here?" tangents to them, and this one would provide greater characterization to Bruce's relationship to the women in his life--something every Batman movie's failed to do.

Mann is a Chicago director and though Nolan kinda already based his Gotham on Chicago, Mann is also an internationalist, and could provide a great deal more sensitivity to the portrayal of the fictional city. Think of how low-rent Mann made Chicago look in Thief, or how epic Los Angeles appears in Heat, or how smoothly he translates between the glitz of Miami and the near-third-world-ness of its trailer parks--it's the kind of all-over-the-place, multi-layered urban life, one that bleeds into one another quite easily, that Mann excels at portraying.

Most importantly though would be Mann's ability to inject some real character and feeling into the Batman character. There's too much pseudo-stoic, gruff talk in the Batman movies. Batman can't talk like Bruce Wayne, I got it, but that it always comes out like a guy doing a tough-guy voice is ridiculous. One of the best aspects of Mann's movies is his ability to understand the roles people, especially men, play and the way that person's "reality" seeps through to their "character" in one way or another. Nearly every Mann character's already doing the Batman thing, they all talk like ridiculous hard-asses, but when it comes to the drama, the real acting, when they've been betrayed or fucked-over or had their heart broken, he allows them to subtly shift, not do a 180, and it's all the more affecting because you see and hear the cracks in the armor. Obviously, Colin Farrell in wounded Sonny Crockett mode would be Batman.

Comic Adaptation Week: George Clooney as Nick Fury

2010-02-25T13:17:00.000-05:00

A blight on uncreative comic artists is drawing in celebrities instead of a new face, as found in Bendis’ Secret War and Ennis’ The Boys. When Nick Fury, Sergeant of the Howling Commandos and Cold War secret agent, was introduced in Marvel’s Ultimate comics series, Samuel L. Jackson’s likeness was used. In recent years, Jackson has been cast almost exclusively as the angry Black man, birthed in Pulp Fiction but defined in almost all his roles thereafter, now to the point that he's a kind of ironic, internet meme, like "It's a trap" or something. Not good.

Samuel L. Jackson has now been cast as Nick Fury in Marvel films, beginning with a secret scene after the credits in Iron Man. The overlook of the importance of Fury’s character in the Marvel Universe, even the movie MU, by casting directors ready to snag a big name for the character will effect the coming Marvel films, especially as the leader of the World's Greatest Heroes in the upcoming Avengers film. You need someone who’s brooding while being charming, and more versatile than, you know, either Jules or Mace Windu. Also, save for that aforementioned comic-nerd internet contingent, who even cares about Samuel L. Jackson anymore?

George Clooney’s sense of style and casual seriousness capture the essence of Nick Fury. An almost James Bondian character, Fury would just as soon shoot you in the head from a mile away as he’d take your girlfriend. While guns and explosions are a part of who and what Fury is, he’s also a secretive person with the world on his shoulders. Clooney’s ability to portray grace under pressure, along with a slight self-effacing streak important in big-budget superhero movies, would do the character a lot of good. In his role as Danny Ocean in Ocean’s Eleven, he never has to raise his voice to be a man understood, or respected. You don't question him because he is legend, only Clooney could portray him as a man as great as his myth. It helps that he looks exactly like the original Nick Fury.

Comic Adaptation Week: Samuel Fuller's Ode to Kirihito

2010-02-25T10:36:00.000-05:00

The affinities between Hollywood B-movie master Samuel Fuller and Osama "God of Manga" Tezuka are so rich and varied that I want to kick myself for not seeing the connection prior to considering them for this week of dream adaptations. In both cases you have an artist who utilized popular, 'low-culture' forms in order to tell onerously plotted stories, heavy on melodrama and bathos, which stretch the reader/viewer's notions of plausibility. If all of that sounds like a bad combination to you, you're beginning to get a sense of the genius of these two consummate artists.

It is difficult to state simply why Fuller's films and Tezuka's comics are amongst the best in their respective mediums, but it has a lot to do with the genuine moral complexity that underlies the surface simplicity of the stories. Ode to Kirihito is perhaps the most novelistic comic that I've ever read--and I'm talking about novels in that wonderfully prolix 19th century sense of the form. Tezuka has created a world teeming with vainglorious scoundrels and greedy villains, in which the only virtuous figures are also broken almost beyond repair.

Fuller's movies also teem with such benevolently cracked figures. Consider The Naked Kiss's Kelly, a prostitute who finds her way to the charming small town of Grantville and who wakes up the morning after servicing her first customer, looks at herself in the mirror and realizes she can't do this forever. So what does she do, but get a job helping handicapped children in the local hospital. You can't make this shit up (at least I can't). But there is a lot of Kelly in Ode to Kirihito's Reika, the traveling circus performer whose great stunt involves curling herself up in a tight ball and allowing herself to be dipped in tempura batter and deep-fried. Both Kelly and Reika are deeply disturbed and yet ultimately possess hearts of gold.

In fact, their hearts are so golden that one's initial reaction is to sneer at the apparent simplicity of the moral architecture in these artists' stories. But that simplicity is deceptive; look deep into the best of Tezuka's comics or Fuller's films and you'll find in both a realism that is jarring in the face of the deep humanism of their respective creators. Both Tezuka and Fuller were profoundly affected by war--Fuller joined the infantry in World War II and Tezuka came of age during and immediately after that war--and the works of both reveal a deep understanding of the complex implications of armed conflict in the post-industrial age.

Ultimately, though, I think Fuller would be the only filmmaker capable of bringing Tezuka's opus to the screen because he's perhaps the only other storyteller I know of who understands that precise balance between the almost gothic absurdity of plot and relentlessly driven pacing that make Tezuka's long works such bewilderingly wonderful reads. It's that mix of the bizarre and the compulsive, the brutal and the life-affirming that makes Tezuka and Fuller such enduring classics.

Comic Adaptation Week: Werner Herzog's Gardens of Aedena

2010-02-24T23:02:00.009-05:00

Gardens of Aedena begins in the future, with the basically sexless characters Atan and Stel. It's the kind of future we're used to seeing: metal spheres, ugly machinery, weird skull caps, etc. The story slowly moves to something else altogether--the titular gardens--which are something more natural, but no less mysterious and harsh. When Atan and Stel are dropped in the garden, the story turns to a realization of their human condition within the context of their foreign selves.

This is where Herzog would bring his fierce intelligence, and unromantic view of human nature to the story, a kind of futuristic, Teutonic Adam and Eve redux. I picture him really emphasizing the sexuality of the story--the fierce emotions--as well as the wonder of Moebius' naturalistic future and kinda cutting to the chase in his own way, removing some of the weird, towards-the-end "action" of the book, but retaining Moebius' "sitting around and chilling" tone. Think of all the purposeful downtime in Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo.

But more importantly, Herzog is qualified to take on a Moebius comic is because he wouldn’t cut corners when it came to visual representation…and I’m not talking computer graphics. He would travel all over the world to find the perfect wonderfully natural locations and he wouldn’t skimp on the eventual nudity or even the SPACE--which I would like to imagine would be elaborate, naturalistic sets. This is the guy who recently shot a movie in Antarctica. Who took a whole filmmaking team to Peru for Aguirre. Who visited am erupting volcano for La Soufrière. Who really did pull a boat over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo. He'd go any and everywhere to recreate Moebius' imaginative worlds.

It would also be great to see Herzog pick up a comic book adaptation because even though he has never done it before, I feel like he would really understand adapting it, while respecting the already in place visual representation. He has an appreciation of making things as real and as fantastic as they need to be, often shown in his admittedly, embellished documentary style. What he calls "ecstatic truth"--an apt way of describing the goals of Moebius' work too.

Comic Adaptation Week: The Duplass Brothers' Boys Club

2010-02-24T21:06:00.000-05:00

The Duplass Brothers make movies about bros, plain and simple. But they make really knowing, really hilarious, damned subtle movies about bros. Weirdly moving but not sentimental in the least, they're the anti-Apatow. Their series of shorts--especially This is John--and their debut feature, The Puffy Chair are all about the weird ways, goofy white guys connect and don't connect, express themselves and don't express themselves and all that. And their follow-up, Baghead is a one-joke idea stretched into a feature until the joke is maybe that it's a half-baked one-joke stretched into a feature...and then it makes sense. It's weird.

Though how exactly Matt Furie's loveable Boys Club characters, Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe--all of them, these weird hard-to-identify animal creatures--would translate to real-life (CGI? Puppets? Stop-Motion? Big dumb costumes?) isn't something I can even imagine, The Duplass Brothers could get the silly, touching, absurdist interactions of Boys Club just right. The same way Furie's in part, parodying the gag-strips like Garfield or whatever, the Duplass' mock the navel-gazing, dialogue-heavy, indies of the 90s, by doing the same thing, just with a more knowing, self-mocking tone.

And they fill their movies with reality. As in, there's acting in The Puffy Chair, points where it's awkward to watch and the characters are crying and yelling so loud it kinda blows out the mics or seemingly scares the cameraman a bit, so the camera shakes unexpectedly. Sure it's funny, but all the farting, pooping, and throwing-up in Boys Club is the same kind of rough version of something that's usually smoothed-out and clean-looking. Or like, think of those totally tripped-out gag strips where the joke is just that it's the horrifying acid-freak-out? Kinda the same thing as those Puffy Chair moments where it gets unexpectedly heavy.

Issue 3 of Boys Club also reveals the possibility for something beyond one-page jokes for the comic and it's similar in style to the Duplass' ability to balance a really simple concept (two dudes pick up a chair they bough from eBay, a guy with a bag on his head is really scary) with plenty of character-defining tangents. Imagine issue 3 of Boys Club punctuated by the weirdo jokes of the first two issues, played relatively straight and you've got an awesome adaptation.

Comic Adaptation Week: Mickey Rourke as Thor

2010-02-24T15:56:00.000-05:00

Until recently, I thought Thor was the worst superhero ever. Stan Lee straight-up picking something from Norse mythology, sending it through the Jack Kirby thought machine and, wings on your helmet and you've got a new superhero. Recently though, especially because of the incredible work of Straczynski and Coipel’s Thor series, my opinion has been turned around and in turn, made me reevaluate my knee-jerk response to Lee and Kirby’s Thor.

Most comics fans still have this idealistic view of the character as a ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ boy-scout, but the film version would have to be closer in style to the Thor one shots Ages of Thunder and Reign in Blood. These one-shots get back to what Thor was in the original myths: a warrior. He didn’t mind killing because that’s what happens in battle. The movie would translate to Thor trudging through muddy mountains battling Frost Giants to some really intense metal. Think of the rather slept-on movie Severed Ways without all the contemplative nonsense--or less of it--and a whole lot more big-budget battle scenes.

This is where Mickey Rourke comes in. Rourke has proven himself in his long career to be capable of handling physically demanding roles, and his recent "return" as Randy “The Ram” in The Wrestler proves he can not only still hack it, but use his aging body and physicality for the good of the film. Thor doesn’t have to be this beautiful dude as long as he has a fighting spirit and intensity. Rourke has shown time and time again that he can play a hard-ass, but always one a little more interesting, maybe even charismatic. Combine that with the noblility and toughness of his performance as Randy, Rourke would make for a really thrilling performance as a Frost Giant-battling Thor. Of course, Rourke brings his acting chops to the table well, always, making potential interactions with Odin, Loki, and Sif realistic and engaging.

Honorable Mentions:
Triple H
AJ Hawk of the Green Bay Packers

Comic Adaptation Week: Darren Aronofsky's Silver Surfer: Requiem

2010-02-23T21:16:00.002-05:00

Darren Aronofsky has gone from turning a movie script into a comic, so it really shouldn’t be too hard to reverse the process. His tone is a perfect match for a character who at his heart is contemplative, truth-seeking, and at least a little depressed: Max in Pi, Tom in The Fountain, Randy "The Ram" in The Wrestler. The slow, ponderous pacing of his movies and his ability to juggle intense real life moments with crazy metaphorical events and images make him ideal to direct a Silver Surfer movie.

The Surfer’s original comic series was the home of more than one philosophical monologue pontificating his place within the cosmos. Straczynski and Ribic’s Silver Surfer: Requiem has many of the Surfer’s original philosophic elements, only it ups the tragic aspect of the Surfer even more than usual. The whole series focuses on a dying Silver Surfer as he and others come to terms with his eventual death. A scene with the Surfer and Spiderman would be perfect if portrayed in the same style as in Aronofsky's The Wrestler; grand, and epic, but brutally realistic at the same time.

The Fountain deals with similar sorts of themes: life, death, and literally, the cosmos. One of the three storylines of The Fountain is a man floating through space with a tree in a bubble. There are scenes of a silhouette doing Tai Chi in front of a star field and like the one shown above where Hugh Jackman’s character meditates through the cosmos. It’s easy to picture the Silver Surfer flying through a similar backdrop as his silver shell slowly blackens.

The Surfer’s final act in Requiem (not For a Dream) is to give everyone on his planet a small portion of himself and his power. It’s the same circle of life idea as in The Fountain as all of the storylines combine into one another and the Tree of Life dies and is reborn. The power unleashed from the nebula in this scene makes me believe that his action sequences, what little there are in Requiem would be exciting. It’s clear Aronofsky could make every scene of Silver Surfer: Requiem come alive, while still being true to it's ponderous, philosophic nature.

Comic Adaptation Week: Nicolas Cage as Dr. Strange

2010-02-23T12:42:00.012-05:00

When Robert Downey Jr. played the alcoholic hero Tony Stark/Iron Man, it changed who could play a superhero and how a superhero could be played in a big, comic book movie. Downey brought eccentricity to superhero movies. He didn't play a stoic or a bad-ass or a cocky motherfucker (or more accurately, just a cocky motherfucker), but a person who takes on not a role or persona, but a larger cloak of responsibility. This is, of course, what super hero comics are to comics readers but not the general public: Humane stories dipped in superhero stuff.

Nicolas Cage, certainly an eccentric actor, but also a comic book fan and comic creator himself, would be able to put the stoner perfect world of 60s Ditko into the contemporary world, without the ironic tinge that most would undoubtedly employ. Cage understands his place in the world of Hollywood better than most. He plays serious sad guys in movies like Weatherman with the same sincerity that he presents in movies like Con Air, where he plays a weird not-so-tough not-so-sexy tough ass sexy dude, and even in weird stuff like The Wickerman. Instead of becoming these characters, he becomes who those characters see themselves as, like when ten year old boys draw themselves with sunglasses and chain wallets. He's painfully sincere. Always. This understanding of the character he's becoming has been what's allowed him to present them in a way most people would over look, exaggerations that define his roles.

Ditko-Era Dr. Strange is all about weird eccentricities like these; garrulous spells and exaggerated hand motions. Cage's ability to be completely aware of who and what he is while still putting on a "show" would be perfect for Dr. Strange. His serious but goofy demeanor would award Dr. Strange the respect he deserves--other actors would try to create an aura of mysticism that would be too mannered and thought-out. Strange is Sorcerer Supereme, whoever acted these incantations out would have to not only believe them, but would have to be able to say them as naturally as he walks. Cage could do this.

Comic Adaptation Week: The Maximortal by Ethan and Joel Coen

2010-02-23T09:00:00.003-05:00

I suppose in the interest of full disclosure I should admit that unlike many of my contemporaries, I am not an unreserved admirer of the movies of Ethan and Joel Coen. Be that as it may, the Coens represent perhaps the most widely recognizable body of work within a certain creative instinct unique to what one might call postmodernity. That is to say that the Coens partake in a revisionist assessment of American culture that is rooted in the stories that have helped to define us for generations and whose method involves a modified recapitulation of that storytelling tradition.

The same creative instinct behind the peculiar marriage of Homeric myth and a notion originating in a Preston Sturges screwball comedy provides the underpinning to Rick Veitch's The Maximortal. Veitch's superhero deconstruction performs the seemingly paradoxical task of celebrating the origins and tradition of the comics that perhaps more than any other popular art form symbolized the American century while shining a light on the dark human forces that are behind our fetishization of superhuman heroes.

But what really makes the Coens the perfect creative team to bring The Maximortal to the cinema is the pair's sharp eye for character. Just about any Coen brothers' film is a veritable menagerie of human grotesquerie, from No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh to The Big Lebowski's, well, Big Lebowski, to just about anyone and everyone in Fargo. Not only do the Coens have a knack for creating these lovable monstrosities on the page, but they've also been blessed with the abitity to find the perfect talent to embody them. Casting the Coens' adaptation of The Maximortal would be as simple as calling up the names from their stable of regulars (and one not-so-regular): Frances Mcdormand and Steve Buscemi as George and Meryl Winston; John Turturro as Jerry Spiegel; and who else but Javier Bardem as El Guano.

It is actually somewhat surprising that the Coens have yet to try their hand at a comic book movie. The hard-boiled crime novels that have provided the basis for so many of their screenplays are part of the same pulp tradition. A filmmaking team with the Coens' singular eye for visual detail, coupled with their peculiar mix of lowbrow convention and high concept theoretical nuance would be the perfect fit for bringing Veitch's perverse American epic to a wider audience. Now if only they can contract Eminem for the lead . . .

Comic Adaptation Week: Wes Anderson's Batman: Snow

2010-02-22T23:08:00.000-05:00

Though Wes Anderson wouldn't make a very good Spider-Man film, he's an ideal director to make a comic book movie. Especially one free of the slathered-on pathos and darkness that's taken over every comic book blockbuster. The genius of Anderson's work is the way he breaks apart the "quirk", the fragile, perfectly-designed production he's known for and exposes something that feels extra-real, that really hits hard, because it's wrapped in artificiality.

Kinda like a comic book--this "juvenile", rather rote format that when done right, is all the more powerful because it isn't "supposed" to get serious or be all tragic and stuff. Imagine the awesome production design of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy or the Adam West Batman show, tongue removed from cheek and focused on serious, down-to-earth concerns.

A Wes Anderson version of Batman: Snow would be perfect. The central theme of a singular focused individual whose kind of a jerk but ultimately sympathetic is already there, as is the multi-ethnic group of weirdos right there with the hero, as is the mix of deep empathy and just-as-deep irony. It's a strange approach to character in Batman: Snow--but Jesse already told you that--and Anderson is one of the few directors who I think, would really get it. Who could run you alongside of a destructive but sincere nutbar and show his ever-so-slight shift towards self-awareness.

Anderson's empathy, his Renoir-influenced "Everyone has their reasons" approach to character would be perfect for Mr. Freeze too, who just can't be a disturbed guy with a messed-up background who went "bad"--like say, Penguin in Batman Returns--but a character viewers really need to understand. And of course--the production design! The world of white snow and bright primary colors and weird, Seth Fisher-isms are totally in the Anderson wheelhouse.